Authors Forum: Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State

0:00So good morning everybody, it's good to be back again. The title of my book is meant to be subtle so that people don't know what they're going to get. It's kind of sneaking up on people. I actually wanted to write this book about three years ago and proposed it to the publisher and then I got distracted and I wrote a book on Rothbard instead. And then I proposed it again and eventually it's come around. They've had the manuscript since last September, it'll be out in September here in the USA in July in the UK. This is a major achievement for me in many ways because I think this will be the first book I've ever written and had published that I can actually afford to buy myself. The three questions you really need to have answers for is why did I write it, what's in it and who is it for?

0:51But the answer to those three questions is exactly the same and I'm going to just take a few minutes before that to talk about something else. Let me just show you this. When I proposed this to the publisher, I could hear the sound of bodies falling all over the editorial office, because they weren't quite sure what to make of it, and then they gave it to the art department, and this is what they sent me back, which clearly shows either A, they didn't read the manuscript, or if they did, they didn't understand it. This is a nice kid. I think he's going off to a football game. I'm not exactly sure what he's doing. So then we had a conversation, and they sent me this. Well, I like that. It's nice, it's colourful. I have no idea what it means.

1:39I have no idea what it's got to do with my book, right? But it's fun. And so the conversation continued, right? So then we got that. It's kind of psychedelic. It brings me back to my days in the 60s when I had long hair and more here than I do now. I still don't know what it means, right? And the conversation continued and then the PhD resistance was this. Somebody is just not getting it, right? That's my one. I finally got tired and I said, this is what I want and they gave it to me. And you know the reason why I love this, not only because it's iconic, look at the guy, look what he's got in his hands.

2:29It's not a submachine gun, it's not a Molotov cocktail, it's two shopping bags, right? That says everything I want to say loud and clear, a guy with two shopping bags in his hand standing up against a tank, right? That says it. That's what I got. I won. Okay. You guys are actually responsible for this book, so you have to take the blame. Many of the elements in it I've given here at talks at the Mises Institute, and in the acknowledgement section I thank Joseph Salerno and the Austrian Scholars' Conference for inviting me to give the papers over the years and allowing me to inflict them on you.

3:15and also, I also say that it's possibly the only place on this planet where I can be made to feel insufficiently radical. The only place where I can be outflanked. So, okay, well, sorry, let's get to the business end, okay? Alright, here we are. Okay, so it's $25 if you wait until September here. It's $14.95 in the UK. You can pre-order it on Amazon. You can pre-order it actually on the book depository. If you don't know about the book depository, you should, because A, they give free delivery anywhere in the world, and they also give a 25% discount, even now. I mean, hey, my book has been remade even before it's been published, which is a rare accomplishment. Okay, so let me just explain why I wrote this book.

4:08There is only one reason for writing this book, laziness. Sheer bone laziness, right? And the reason is, I've been teaching an undergraduate course in this for now for four years and a postgraduate course for three years. And I've got to the stage where I feel I've said the same thing about 20 million times. So I've written the book, and now when they ask me the question, I'll say, read the book. Preferably buy the book and then read the book, but at least read the book, okay? So I don't have to keep repeating myself ad nauseum. I also wrote it because there's a sort of bloody mind that's streaking me and I like annoying people and I thought this would really annoy a lot of people and indeed it has. I took a lot of care in this book to try and make it readable by everybody. I mean, one of the problems of being in academia is that But you learn a strange sort of exotic dialect that nobody understands, right? And without

5:07even knowing it, you sort of speak in this very strange language that your colleagues pretend they understand, but probably don't, but certainly nobody else in the universe understands. So I've run this by all sorts of people. Even my wife, Godlover, read this book from start to finish and said, but she is married to me, so she has to say these things that she liked it and so on. I got various people. I gave it to a guy whose profession is a journalist and who writes every day for the paper. He's the Irish correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and he read it from cover to cover. So I've really tried to make it accessible, if you like, to normal human beings. You obviously don't come into that category. Sorry. You're an expert. The very fact that you're here, you don't in a sense need this book, but it's written for a special audience. So let me explain why The chapters of the book, what I tried to do, I mean, you can't do everything in a small

6:01book of this size, and I wanted to publish, if you like, by mainstream publisher continuum so that people who would normally be inoculated against publications of this sort might in fact be exposed to it and catch the disease, right? And so the first chapter, apart from the introduction, called Death and Taxes is, if you like, is is an account of the criminal history of the state, its birth in shame and ignominy, and it's continuing in that fashion throughout the ages, and I had a lot of fun writing this chapter. The only problem with writing this chapter is it's much shorter than I really wanted it to be. The chapter, if I was allowed to continue, would have been about 200 pages long, but I had to content myself with about 30 or 40 pages. I came across, of course, many people who agreed with me on this, but I tried to pull, if you like, in evidence from areas where it wouldn't normally come.

6:48The historian, the historian, who has a paper where he talks about the state making as a form of protection racket. I couldn't put it better myself. So that's in there. All sorts of good stuff in there. Now the whole point of the book, if you like, really comes from my teaching this course and being met by buts. But, but, but, but. And so this is a preemptive strike intended to undermine, to tunnel underneath, to sap underneath and to explode the butts so that the students are left literally with nothing to say except I surrender. So I have fun attacking this and I try, I don't do everything in this book, I mean I'm not concerned with whether or not libertarian anarchism can supply roads and railroads and all of that sort of thing.

7:33All of that's important and a lot of interesting work has been done. Really when it comes right down to it, the key issue is whether or not law, order and security can be provided in this way. Because if you can answer yes to that question, then all of the rest, if you like, fall into Chapter 5 is an attempt to try and describe how law originates from the bottom up. I try to show how this actually happens and why you don't need top-down, why real law, the Hayekian law versus legislation, from the bottom up and I tried to show how this actually happens and why you don't need top-down, why real law, I mean the Hayekian law versus legislation, how all of this kind of comes about and then finally a direct frontal assault on the state in the final chapter 6 where I argue that its claims to legitimacy, because that's when it comes right down to it, I discovered from talking to the students, when you push in and that's what they

8:30Well, yeah, okay, maybe they are taking your money, but in the end, it's right that they should do so, and they're entitled to do so, and you voted for them, and all of the rest of the nonsense that we're all familiar with, so it's a direct frontal assault on that in the most categorical way that I could come up with. So, I had a lot of fun writing this. I hope that whoever reads it has a lot of fun reading it. I have to say, I'm very gratified. So there have been two pre-publication reviews, one from Huerta de Soto in Madrid and one from Dr. Thomas Woods here, Dr. Thomas Woods, who said very nice things which goes to show you that bribery always pays.

9:16Can I read it from here, just a second? Well anyway, you know you can read it yourself, I don't need to read it, it's sort of embarrassing. I'd like to believe it's true, modestly forbids me from thinking it is. I'm really gratified by what they had to say, and I hope it actually serves the purpose for which it's intended. So it's really intended for, if you're like normal readers, anybody of any particular age, but if you're like middle to upper level undergraduates, maybe even beginning graduate students, anybody who hasn't, if you like, shut their mind to thinking about these things, or failing that, if you just wanted to annoy somebody, you could also give it to them, okay? It's not the end of the conversation, certainly not, and there are lots of questions that are not answered and not raised in here, and it couldn't be in the compass of a small book like this, but it should be a conversation starter.

10:04And I have discovered over the time that I've been doing this that it actually works. So let me just finish by giving you a couple of sort of testimonials like you used to do in the old advertising days. I'm just going to read these rather than show you. So I would like to pretend, by the way, that I get lots and lots of these letters all the time. The answer is, I don't, but you do get them occasionally, and it's the kind of thing that just when you're about to despair, or when you're tempted to kill students with your bare hands, okay, makes you realize that teaching is a vocation and that you were right to go into it in the first place. So I had a conversation with a postgraduate student and she wrote and said, I note a thanks for widely surpassing all my expectations of meeting you and participating so generously in my research, but above all for inspiring and captivating me with the depth and breadth of who you are.

10:51Much of what you said is still hopping and weaving away its way around my head while I'm continuously distracted from my own work by Murray Rothbard and by rooting out Robert Nozick from my college days. This person came to me and our conversation had nothing to do with this essentially except that I insisted on dragging it around to it. So in the end, that's what happened. Okay, an undergraduate wrote to me a handwritten five page letter about three months after he graduated and said the following, I think the most enriching lectures I attended during my time at University College Dublin was your anarchy law and the state series.

11:37I found the material interesting and provocative, but also profoundly relevant to me and what I want to do. The material you presented did lend itself to debate, but the class would never have been as lively without the way you accepted criticism and encouraged contributions from the floor. It was the class I looked forward to most because, and this is what I really find interesting, because it was liberating. And finally, from a postgraduate student who fought me all the way, sometimes in sort of sullen resentment while he was there, and he says, I wrote to me, he said, I'm an old student of yours and I'm just writing to say I really enjoyed your interview with Jeffrey I came into your class a dedicated Marxist and had been active with the Socialist Party for years. It goes without saying that I put up my mental walls to the vast majority of stuff you taught in the class. However, your style of putting out awkward questions scratched

12:38the surface of doubts I had been having about my thinking, especially the more anthropomorphic In the process of investigating the natural aspect of libertarian thinking, I went further and further into the consequentialist arguments. To this day, I am not overly convinced by Rothbard's natural law justification of libertarianism if tax is theft. I still don't intuitively care very much. However, my readings of Mises and Hayek were devastating to my way of thinking. The economic student, the role of price in providing information, Hayek, and the only means of economic calculation, Mises, was blatantly obvious to me when so clearly explained. It's amazing how anti-socialist thinkers of all whose have not yet made that a consistent critique of socialism. If they had, I fear my days as a Marxist would have been very much numbered.

13:26This is not to show just how wonderful I am, though obviously it does that. My wife always says to me, please don't make remarks like that, people take them seriously. It's just to show that even with the most unpromising material, and however unpromising your audience here in the United States might be, you don't know how easy you have it compared to what I have to deal with. You can plant the seed, truth will out, magna is the very test and prevail a bit, truth is great and it shall prevail. Okay, so just keep the faith and buy the book.