Johan Dewitt: Proto-Public Choice Theorist?

0:00Let you know how I came across this topic. Well, I came across this topic in the late 80s, when France was approaching the second, you know, the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. On the news, people were always saying how France had been the first country in the world to have liberty and freedom and democracy. And then every now and then you'd hear somebody saying, no, no, no, it was England. It was the glorious revolution a hundred years before that. So I got curious and I started looking into who was the first country to have capitalism and democracy and liberty and all the great things that we all love. And well, before I gave up, before I gave up looking, because if you start looking into that, you start getting lost with the Phoenicians.

0:49So should we look at the Greeks, should we, you know, before I gave up I found myself of having found an area that interests me, and I kept looking into the area, even if I had given up uncertainty and absolute in history. So I came, in the process though, I came across, I remember that I had studied the United Provinces of Holland, and I was like, well, what are the United Provinces of Holland? That sounds fairly Republican, that doesn't sound very monarchical. And in looking into the subject, well, eventually I wrote a paper in college, a small five-page paper. And one of the sources that I used was this book by Fyodor de la Courte and Johan de Weid.

1:37And I'll pass it around if you want to look at it. And then here in Oberon I wrote a longer paper specifically on the ideas that are in this book and that's what my lecture will come from mostly. Let's see, some historical background that might be pertinent and the historical background might be a little biased by my personal background. As you know, I'm from Spain, and well, around the late 1400s, the issue of marriage politics was very much involved between the different kings, and it came to being that different monarchs married off so that Charles V of Germany would end up having the rule of Spain, The German Empire and some provinces that included the Dutch provinces.

2:44Charles V was a Dutch person, he felt Dutch, he had Dutch culture, but he became the King of Spain. And interestingly enough, when he moved to Spain, he tried to increase taxes on Spain. And well, the Spaniards rebelled. These rebellions take place in the 1520s. And when I look into this, I kind of like thinking about these rebellions as early French revolutions that failed. So the nobility and the bourgeoisie of Spain rebelled against a new king that wanted to impose taxes on them, asking for permission. So we have a Dutch king that came to Spain, but we failed. In any case, Charles V's son, Philip II, he He became a Spaniard by education, and by the end of the century, he was the king of Spain and he ruled over the Dutch provinces, and his rule of these provinces, since he wasn't a local, didn't seem such a good idea anymore, and he wanted to do the same thing that his daddy had done in Spain, he wanted to increase taxes on the Dutch provinces,

3:56And he tried to do so, and this time the Dutch people could stand up to a Spanish king, something that we Spaniards had failed to do 70 years earlier. So in 1579, the Dutch provinces, seven of them declared independence, and of course a lot of issues get mixed into this. These provinces were 50% Calvinist, political leadership was Protestant, and the King of In 1579, they declared independence. In 1584, they came up with their own constitution, which they called the Union of Utrecht, and all that this constitution was, it set up, you might call it a confederacy, across seven provinces of the United Provinces of Holland.

4:52So, starting from the bottom of society, each city in Holland was ruled by a committee of the local merchants and the local nobles. And these committees could send representatives that would form what got called the states of a province, and these states would rule this province. And then each of these provinces, each of these states would send some delegates to what got called the States General of the United Provinces of Holland. But in theory these states generals could only rule by common agreement of all the parties, of all the provinces, and they only had power over the fence, over the conduct of the war against Spain, which lasted for 70, 80 years.

5:44So, in the meantime, that was the official set up. And they got around, through horse trading they got an unanimous agreement. And so far so Republican, what happened however, is that along this Republican framework, For some reason, Dutch nationalism had coalesced around a dynastic figure, the Princes of Orange. And these republics had decided to create a figure of the stat holder, which is the holder of the state, something like that, which by tradition came into the, fell upon the House of Orange Line. And these stat holders could have this role and over time they ended up having the right to appoint everyone. So the way that the city councils and the provinces got its members wasn't through any type of of Democratic Election, it was either through appointment from the state holder or from self-selection. When one member died, all the members of the committee would say, well, we need a new businessman to take up this place. So the lines were a bit messy. And

7:17throughout the war, the figure of the state holder as leader of the armies also started to Accumulate More and More Power. And that's the basic framework on which these writings take place. So, let's see. What can I tell you? If you are wondering, why should we care about these people? Is there any authority that tells us that your handiwork matters? Well, you can find him in two footnotes in Joseph Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis, if you care.

8:03And Schumpeter in the footnotes defines the Whits idea as a quasi-system, which to him means that, well, if you know the way that the history of economic analysis works, he doesn't describe the economic ideas that different people had at different times. describes the different additions to ideas. So he says that the ideas of these people are very interesting, but they don't add economic analysis. So that book is according to Schumpeter should have a great place in a book about the history of economic policy, but it serves only a couple of footnotes in his own book. So Schumpeter saw some value in the policy recommendations that they put forward. And about my title, public choice, well I will say that throughout the book, this author is grounded on the, these ideas are grounded on the Tradition of Natural Liberty, and as a matter of fact, also according to Schumpeter, one of the first lights of natural liberty and of natural rights, if you don't go back

9:29to Aristotle, is Hugo Grasius, which is Dutch, and who wrote the basis of what is today international law, it seems. So also this book we see in that tradition, but in that tradition of natural rights and natural liberty, you get the idea that self-interest might be a good thing, but in reading his book you see things that resemble public choice. Self-interest is a good thing if it takes place within the boundaries of your natural is a bad thing if it's taken outside of the boundaries of natural rights. In practice, self-interest is a good thing if it works through markets.

10:19Self-interest is a bad thing if you have the political process taking things away from people. And we'll see how that works. And, well, since the point of my lecture is not really to convince you that he's right or he's wrong because he doesn't have arguments, he has policy recommendations, and the point is to say that, look, there were people way back when that held these ideas, I have distributed a bunch of handouts so we can work through some of those quotations. For instance, in number one, it reads, Holland's interest consists in the freedom of all its inhabitants.

11:10The highest perfection of a political society is that the commonality be left in as great a natural liberty for seeking the welfare of their souls and bodies and for the improvement of their states as possible. A power of using their natural rights and properties for their own safety will create an earthly paradise. So, you know, these ideas have been around for a long time, and his ideas about natural liberty and natural rights do not involve economics only or do not involve social liberties only. They, as a true libertarian, we want to call him that, they encompass basically everything in society. So in quote number two, and this is a very old translation so some of the English is a little patchy, but it says, the welfare of the inhabitants of Holland cannot be acquired nor kept but by liberty, the toleration of all religions, a free bargain right for all strangers, foreigners to move in with us and to follow all their traits and occupations wherever without trouble or molestation from their fellow inhabitants

12:19in respect to any societies, companies, halls, guilds or corporations. And a lot of those things mean monopolies in the context. And in connection with the political theme, all the things before mentioned are not sufficient unless the courts of justice and laws can be constituted and executed Another interesting thing about this time period, which I haven't gotten to that yet, but the time period precisely that we will be studying is 1650-1675, is how many historical figures that we all have heard of.

13:08We all have heard of, lived at this time. Maybe you can pick some quarter of a century where you don't know who the king of France was, where you don't know who the king of that country was. In this period of time, we all know everyone. It seems to have been a time period in which everything was happening. Charles I is decapitated in 1649. Cranwell rules from 1649 to 1660, which coincides precisely with this time. Louis XIV is King of France. At the beginning of the period, Masarin is in power. At the end of the period, Louis XIV will rule alone. And all these figures interact continuously and have a great impact on the life of the Dutch Republic.

14:01When, let's see, I guess I should skip some stuff, even though I'm not going to have any time. Well, I introduced you already to the conflict between the monarchical and the republican aspects of the republic. Well, this process went through some ups and downs and in 1650 the process seemed to have come to an end. The monarchical forces had completely defeated the republican forces. And this happens with William II of Orange. And he has put in jail basically every person that wanted to open his mouth.

14:53Everything is set great for the future, but in something that when Ritz about this period happens very often, he suddenly dies. He has everything, he dies of the smallpox. And his son, William III, is still in his mother's womb. So, this will give the opportunity for 23 years to have, this will give an opportunity to Republican forces to try to have a Republican form of government, and this is what we will have between 1650 and 1673, and as you might guess, the period comes to an end when William and takes over the range of things. But at the same time that Holland was a republic, England was a republic, and Cranwell forces Holland to sign a law saying, we will never have an orange as our ruler again. So Holland does it. And then Cranwell dies and his son So, Charles II, who had been living in Holland, becomes the King of England, and so, whereas England and Holland were great bodies because they were republics, now they are great enemies.

16:21And the same thing happens with France, and also at this period, everybody wants to eliminate of the Republic, and Charles II of England will be the uncle of William III, so everything is deeply interconnected, so let's see, once I have said that, let's try to see how other There are ways in which public choice appears in his writings, and, well, it's just not too hard to find public choice written all over the book, because, let's see, in quote Quote number six, you can read, it is contrary, the quote number seven, yet will not the court teach who govern in their state neglect to seek themselves and to fill their coffers within war and peace, the public is not regarded but for the sake of private interest.

17:37In other places we can read, it is very evident that most men naturally are inclined by all imaginable industry to advance their interests without regard to hand, seal, oath or even eternity itself. If you can read it in even more partisan terms elsewhere in the book, you can read monarchs These books have neither religion nor honor, just interest.

18:20The book attempts to be, at the same time, general and specific for the case of Holland. for the case of Holland. So the attack is in every form concentrated government, but particularized in the case of Holland often. Also in reading Dr. Rick Land's book on mercantilism, One realizes that, well, at the time period, they didn't have income taxes, they didn't have sales taxes, efficient forms of taxation were less available.

19:10So if the government wanted revenues, it had to get revenues through all kinds of ways. And normally the way that it did it was through granting monopolies for different type of activities. What happened in Holland, though, as we saw, there was a very decentralized power structure and the state holder had some powers but wasn't an absolute ruler. So the state holder found that he didn't have the power to give grants, to give monopolies. He couldn't raise revenue in that way. So what will end up happening is that the state holder needs to look for other ways to raise revenue. And, interestingly enough, the way that they would find to raise revenue is war.

19:58The war that takes place between 1579 and for 70 years against Spain.

20:12So the war ends 1650 when the... No, the war ends a little before that. About the time it came? The war ends a little before that, and we'll see later that the war didn't need to last as long as it lasted, at least according to DAX traders. So, for this author, it's clear that the continuation of the Spanish war was clearly a matter of self-interest for the monarch. In quote number eight, you can read, This Netherland is provinces within perpetual war, and the reason of it is very evident.

21:02The interest of such a lord is often different from that of the common people. have they very many persons that depend on them, and are of great power on the government that it goes on. So basically, through the pretense that there's a war that needs to be fought, the state holder that doesn't have the right to grant monopolies and then obtain revenues will convince all the provinces to give it taxes to fight the war and we'll say, we'll continually say this war is very important, we need revenues here to fight, to obtain this territory, so on and so forth. All throughout the book you have continuous attacks on the venality of dynastic kings that want more territory and the argument is almost made are probably completely made, that they don't want the territory for glory, they want the territory because in obtaining the funds to fight that war, they obtain funds that they can divert for their own court and so on and so forth.

22:17And when they have funds and they pay soldiers and they pay courtiers, all the courtiers and all the soldiers become interest groups that will lobby society or the person with the and the Power to Repraise Taxes for the Continuation of the War. That's in quote number nine. You can read, officers, courtiers, idle gentry and soldiery knowing that under the worst government they used to fare best, they cry out for monarchical government for their private interests to the very heavens. Those bloodsuckers of the state and indeed of mankind dare to speak of republics with the utmost contempt because they know and actually elsewhere throughout the book there are comments about how in republics you have freedom of speech and you can have the opinions that you want and it's almost like a Weimar Germany argument.

23:14In republics everybody has the right to talk against the republic and we have to live with it because we value freedom. Freedom. In monarchies, no value that has any common sense will speak against the monarchy, because if they do, they either will get grants taken away from them or simply they will be put in jail or killed. And well, in Quote Number 10, simply we are told, I won't bother to read it. Well, actually, it's kind of interesting. In Quote Number 10, the patriotism of the The Prince of Orange is almost attacked because it says that it makes sense for him to covenant with the enemy of this state for a particular profit to obtain as much as he possibly could.

24:01So it's in his interest to continue wars. So even though it seems that Holland had been winning the war for much longer than, I mean, Holland had been winning the war for many of the last years of the war and seems that Spain was actually imploring for peace, offering all kinds of peace deals, saying, look, we'll give you this, we'll give you that, and as it says in quote number 11, those offers were as often rejected by the deputies of the Generality at the instigation of the Prince of Orange, and in the room our taxes were continually increased. So it looks like the monarchical forces in Holland were a party of war that used its It's patronage to gain the allegiance of different sectors of society.

24:55And if you look into the details of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, well, I should explain that the United Provinces of the Netherlands were made up of seven provinces, with Holland being the largest, and providing 60% of the revenues. But they only had technically one vote in the common government. Obviously they probably had more influence and some influence related to their size, but legally they only had one vote. So if you can obtain 60% of the revenues from one party and you want to have tax revenues and you want the political process to pass those tax increases, it seems rather simple to try to convince the other six provinces to increase taxes and have the province of Holland, which was the trading province that did the most trade zones and so forth, the other six provinces were mostly rural. If you channel funds from taxation on the province of Holland to the other provinces, you will continuously get votes in favor of higher taxes. As a matter of fact, it got to ridiculous levels. As you can see in quote number 12,

26:13and the six other provinces remained in default of payment without being compelled to bring in their promised proportions, because our Captain General had rather by such favours give the other provinces at his devotion, and especially the deputies of the General Army, that by them he might be able perpetually to overvote the province of Holland and make them dance to his pie. So basically what the dynastic rulers were doing is they were getting the political process to increase taxes on the province of Holland, nobody else was paying those taxes, and taxes were being diverted there and everybody was happy, except the province of Holland, obviously. I think I don't need to explain that this, the writer, the author is from Holland. That's probably clear to everyone. Let's see. There are all kinds of details of how public choice is going to apply in quote number 14. It presents how tax farming took place. Is everybody familiar with the idea of tax farming? Well, it seems that it became, it was perfected into an art

27:27form. And it was perfected into an art form in a way that profited the state the most because the right to farm taxes, well, people had to bid for it. So, obviously, people had to pay the government for that right. So, the government was getting the most. It didn't even have to have its own tax agency to rely on entrepreneurs to tax people. Are they taxing land or business or...? I don't know. It's somewhere in there. There are all kinds of numbers. It's amazing how much was written on... I guess it's Europe.

28:14If you want to research this topic, you can take any detour and start looking more deeply into William II, William III. I mean, this is just the prime minister for 23 years. and there's unbelievable amounts written, at least four or five biographies there that we have in the library. So that's pretty amazing. Let's see. So in any case we saw that in 1650 William II died, the smallpox. So there's a chance for a republican government. One can look into it and taxes fall and they start to pay the debt and all kinds of policies that favor trade get put into place. But curiously enough, well, the army starts to be taking care of a little less, and well, given that everyone around you is dynastic power interested in military expansion, those high ideals might have proved to not be such a good idea, and by 1672, well, Holland has to fight several wars, and in 1672, the French and the English These both at the same time attack Holland, and in the process of doing so, well, a mob

29:48will kill the GWT, and William III will be installed as that holder, and the Midnight Summer Stream comes to an end. Let's see if I can tell you. So England and France invade? They invade, and in the process of the invasion, everybody starts saying that the grid is awful, that if we were led by a monarch, this wouldn't happen to us. And he becomes, he is killed by a mob, and if you're into gruesome reading, I can entertain I skipped stuff here and there. Well, this starts where they have already been killed.

30:43The barters continued to shoot into the dead men, cheered on by the crowd of about a thousand. This is about the killing, obviously. Those who looked on with horror heads still. The The corpuses were next dragged to the scaffold and hung by the feet. What was not planned was what followed. In the crowd had been not only burgers, but also the rubble. For them, the mere killing was not enough. They ran to the scaffold as soon as the civic guards began the desecration and violation of the dangling corpuses. They shaved the bodies bare, cut off parts, including the genitals, slaved the bodies is open and pull out to the hearts and entrails, as if they were slaughtered cattle, the parts were speared and quails, and then it says there is no parallel to this cannibalism in all of that's history, and another interesting detail is I explain how the political leader, So far I've been talking about Republican and Monarchical elements. The Republican elements were for freedom of trade, so on and so forth, equality before the law, but they weren't for

32:00democracy necessarily. As a matter of fact, they despised the rabble, as it says in the book, and the rabble despised them. So, as a matter of fact, the majority of the people The majority of the people were in favor of the Prince. The majority of the people saw the Prince as the defender against these rulers. So it's somewhat hard to place ourselves in this spectrum of what was going on at the time. If you are for free enterprise and for intellectual freedom, you probably would find yourself sitting with the Republicans.

32:45But at the same time, the picture is somewhat mixed. Wasn't this period of the Republican government, wasn't that a period of tremendous prosperity? It was, mostly because people went into dying in wars, yeah, and it was a period of prosperity. And so, well, the GWT, at some point in the book, it goes into what would be the ideal form of government, monarchical government, has negative points because of these tendencies to concentrate power and to try to rent six and so forth, and he presents a few arguments to give theoretical backing to this.

33:39Thus, for instance, he says in 16, we shall always find it true in all countries governed by a few aristocratic rulers and provided with but few unrequited animal magistrates that a great person obtaining their, any power in the government or militia will easily draw to its party all rulers and magistrates by the most considerable and profitable offices and benefits which it can offer. Hence, the fewer people that are in government, the easier it is to bribe them. So along those lines, he will advocate having large assemblies holding power, and this also is aligned with Eklund's analysis in his Mercantilism book, because 17 is hard to read, but basically What it says in 17 is that if you have an assembly with a lot of members, then it's harder to get, to bribe that assembly. The larger an assembly, the more costly it is to commit bribery, the less bribery, the efficient optimal quantity of bribery will go down so we will be better off. Same thing takes place in the courts of justice. Monarchical justice

35:03had few judges. Republican justice adds to the number of judges so that it's harder to bribe them. That's in quotes 18 and 19. In 19 it says about monarchical justice, they They publicly sell justice and none that are wrong, they're complained.

35:36Let's see about monopolies. Well, he has a, he covers basically all the arguments that we have against monopoly. I guess I should try to wrap it up quickly, but.

35:511921, private or peculiar profit is the chief foundation, though it always goes under the notion of a general advantage society, of all those restrictions and burdens imposed on the citizens by corporations and guilds, which serve to no other end but to keep good people out of their cities, and in the meantime to give the members of such corporations, unions, whatever you want to call it, a lasting opportunity of being enraged by their fellow inhabitants. of Selling Their Goods and Manufactures More Expensive to Their Neighbors. So you know, the basic analysis is already there, and the way that it worked at the time is if you wanted to sell certain products in a city, you had to leave within the city.

36:39It was illegal for you to move into the city. Well, the grid is against all that. In quotes number 23, and I guess I'll try to run through in case you are ever interested in reading this on your own. I'll just tell you what Question number three is about the issue of whether regulation of the quality of products is good or whether quality will arise on its own if the market is left alone.

37:26And in 23 and 24, by another author, you basically see that they already realized at the time that the purpose of regulation for quality is to keep away entry and further, I don't know how much it goes on today with the FDA, but at the time in 24 in the case of England, if you had a seal of quality for a product, it basically became a tax because you could basically purchase those seals of quality without that meaning anything about the product. And actually, in doing this research, I run across an English person complaining about England saying, how are we so inefficient in England? This regulation of quality works so great in the Dutch Republic. The products are of such high quality. We're trying to impose quality to government, and it's not working. I mean, what are we doing wrong?

38:26The other detail that reminds me is the origin of the word mercantilism seems to have, at root, when people refer to mercantilists, they were referring to the Dutch merchants that basically operate on the regime of free markets. And when Franz and Colbert realized that the Dutch Republic was such a great mercantilist In this nation, Colbert decides that he is going to beat him at mercantilism and he is going to get the state to help in doing so. So that's how the word mercantilism becomes neglected. Originally, mercantilism means merchant. And so mercantilism is a policy to attack mercantilism?

39:12after Colbert, even though Colbert probably didn't mention, who knows. In quote number 25, basically, this is interesting, it is certainly known that this country cannot prosper by means of those that are most industrious and ingenious and that such patents or grants monopolies do not produce the most ablest merchants, but on the other hand, because to the grantees, think that they need not fear others who are much more ingenious and industrious than themselves, sell less than their profits, therefore the certain gains they reap become dull, slow, inactive, and less inquisitive. So if you have, monopoly has dynamic effects.

39:59People start innovating less and less. Code No. 26 takes it to the ultimate. It gives an example of fishing in Greenland was monopolized. The company wasn't making profits. It was closed down. It was obviously not a profitable monopoly. And then people started going on their own, privately, and it turns out that Greenland is a great place to fish. So they're still hoping monopolies. They are so bad that they might become this model on their own. Let's see. Throughout the paper, one of the lines in my paper was that Smith said this, Schumpeter tells us, other people said those things before. So at some point I was comparing Smith with him and if one reads Smith, Smith seems to argue that charters and monopolies This might have been not so bad an idea, but they became corrupted.

41:05Well, the way that I contrast it is that the wit will have none of that. Charters are not something that may become corrupted, but rather an instrument through which the monarch's self-interest is furthering violation of everyone else's natural rights and liberty. And if anybody is interested, I think I could find the line in truth later. I want to always include those. Quote number 31 talks about the right for everyone to live where they want and to practice the professions that they might want.

41:52And this is best for everyone. And I don't know if it's in any of these quotes, but he's basically in favor of international freedom of movement of labor. He says that this will benefit society, obviously it will benefit the trading class that would hire workers. And in number 32, he makes an argument about a backward slope in supply of labor. Let's We see that for want of strangers, foreigners in this country, the peasants must give such great yearly and day wages to the servants, that they can scarcely live but with great toil themselves, and the servants live rather in too great a plenty. So if you allow foreigners to move in, we will not have this problem. So, you know, wages need to reach an international and Equilibrium or something like that.

42:53Quote number 33 is about incentives. For he that sits idle in Holland must expect to get nothing but certain and speedy poverty. But he that ventures may gain and sometimes find out and meet with a good fishery manufacturer merchandise of traffic. And so it goes on. Quote number 34 recognizes that freedom of labor, somebody will get hurt, and though this, the entry of foreigners, will be ever detrimental to some old inhabitants who could have all the profits and berate others of it, and under one pretext or other exclude them from their trade. It is notorious that old people, who to the prejudice of the common good, will exclude others, and for that end would have some peculiar favor from the rulers, beyond the rest, are very pernicious and mischievous inhabitants.

43:45So, rent seeking is bad. Well, I could go on. He basically presents all the same arguments for international trade. So I shall open for questions. Did Groucho come to court? A bit far. Let's see. I have Groucho's book is from 1633. Where he had his little maps, but it was in his time. I don't know. There's a book that's about everyone that influenced, as I explained, the way that the political process worked is, was through co-optation.

44:46When somebody died, each ruling committee would pick someone else. These people got chosen from some families. So the debate was, do we have one prince, or do we have all these families ruling? Nobody was advocating more democracy. So one guy outside those families wrote this book, and he was advocating greater democracy. This book came into the hands of the GWT, and the GWT toned down the parts that he didn't like, changed things here and there. But in any case, these are basically not figures in economic thinking, and they had these ideas. They didn't come up with them. So these are probably the beliefs that everybody held in Holland at the time, in the merchant class.

45:32In the merchant class. Smith was this primary teacher in Carmar, and I thought it was, there was a connection between Barofius and Carmar, did Barofius ever live in England? I don't know, but at the time everybody traveled extensively, like this guy, he, I mean, he He got his law degree, and then his dad sent him traveling around Europe for two years to become culture. So he basically met all his enemies personally when he was in his early 20s. And then later on in life, well, he has memories about all his enemies that he would eventually fight.

46:19He met Louis XIV when Louis XIV was a little kid, and Louis XIV would eventually cause So, where was I going? I get lost. Anyhow, he traveled extensively, so it seems that everybody did. I mean, not everybody, but the culture of people traveled extensively. According to Schumpeter, Smith's ideas of natural liberty have many sources. Some of Some of them could be those of Sir George the Child and Davenand and Paul X. Venn. Paul X. Venn is a guy from Sweden, so, you know, the intellectual community was far more international, but it seems to be today, interestingly enough.

47:18What would you like the book to be about?

47:48I mean, as you might have noticed in the quotes, the government is bad because the government is bad, which if you think that the government is bad, then you agree, but he hasn't put forward any solid arguments why the government is bad. It's a book of persuasion, it's not in a Book Theory. Was it, was it the case that the, the original author was, couldn't publish it? The, the way that, the, the original published, the original author was a nobody. I mean, he was a textile person, but he couldn't publish it. So, the book ran into the great's hands and he was like, oh, this is interesting. So, some way or another, he basically got copyright rights and the right to, well intellectual property rights are interesting I guess. I guess at the time if somebody got your book they could copy it and you couldn't get royalties.

48:59So there was no point in publishing a book if you weren't going to make any money off of it. So what he got out of the grid was a patent for the book. You know all these These monopolies are weird. It turns out that this type of monopoly might be good. If somebody sees your book and it doesn't have your patent, then you can go to jail because you didn't prison, because you didn't pay your due property rights to the guy that wrote it, if transaction A lot of the quotes that you gave out indicate that these fellows were certainly classical liberals, natural rights theorists, pretty good economists.

49:53But in terms of the title of the talk, was there any concentration on the political aspects of the republican system in terms of the voting between provinces? Did they concentrate on that or was that just... Well, I didn't expect to talk so much about history and background in my talk. I mean, there's a lot more here, but without giving you the background, nothing makes sense. So I needed to give you the background. So it goes into more detail. I could have spoken much more on how it works. And the basic idea is that a concentrated form of government, since everybody...

50:44The point is everybody seeks his own self-interest. We need to create a form of government where the interests of the ruler are tied to the interests of society. So we need a government by the traders and a government with many traders so that they cannot be bribed. And if you have a government by a single individual, that single individual is going to find it profitable to bribe everyone and to seek patronage and to have and to limit everybody's labor through these taxes and patronage. So he certainly had the, as you quote mentioned, he certainly had the unifying force of, or the organizing force of self-interest. I mean, but the idea is that, the key idea is self-interest is not good, self-interest within natural rights is good, self-interest outside of natural rights is not good.

51:43There's not one quote, basically, about military service. What a topic, dear to your heart. Yeah, the military service was voluntary, curiously enough. Somebody tried to do it compulsory once, but it didn't work. So everybody got, we as soldiers, we got paid. Let's see. Well, there's one quote where it is basically said that, I mean, it's basically the Declaration of Independence a few hundred years earlier, is that nobody can tell you, you may die far from me. And they misuse that. The government cannot do that. And if they misuse that, then you have the right to rebel against it, against your government.

52:47It's pretty powerful stuff. I wish I could find it. Is there someone? Well, that's okay, because we're all in time, right? I hope you enjoyed it. Yes, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you very much.