Defending the Undefendable

0:00I'm delighted to be here. It's an honor and a privilege. I've been associated with the Mises Institute since its beginning in 1982. I've been a friend of Murray Rothbard since about 1965. I'm one of the people here. I've been asked to speak about my book, Defending the Undefendable, which is available for free, so you don't have to buy it. But I can autograph it if you don't buy it. So that's one of the advantages of paper. I have to disagree with my friend and colleague, Doug French, who said that university is a slumber party. It is, but there's a lot more to it. It's also a dedication institution to Marxism and feminism and multiculturalism and a lot of crap, and I'm sure he would agree with this. There's a lot of slumbering, and then there's a lot of Marxism, and the combination is not the greatest.

0:55I would like to start off with a commercial announcement for my school, Loyola University, New Orleans. There are these freebies out on the table there. If you have a young person who's in high school or in college and might be interested in transferring to my school, please consider doing so. One of the benefits to me is it would be wonderful to get some students who I don't have to convince that capitalism isn't greedy and exploitative and horrible and sexist and racist and piggery and all that, whereas most of my students, that's the way I get them and it takes me a year or so to work them into freedom isn't all bad and then maybe by the junior year freedom is good and so it would be nice to start with better students. From your point of view, my school, all four of my colleagues or all three of my other Other colleagues in the economics department are all Austro-libertarians. Dan D'Amico, who is a former student of mine at Loyola, is now a regular on Judge Napolitano's show.

1:56Bill Barnett is the person I consider the foremost macroeconomist in the Austrian tradition. John Lavendis, another colleague of mine, has made great contributions. That's the economics department, all four Austro-libertarians. We also have Stuart Wood, who is a former student of Israel Kirzner. We have Nick Capaldi who teaches business ethics and is a libertarian and a David Hume scholar. And we've got maybe another half dozen people who are free enterprises which is very rare in a school which has about 200 professors. Most schools with 200 professors have zero Austro-libertarians. People have never heard of Mises or Rothbard. Many schools have one or two. We've got maybe a dozen professors. Now if you're worried that you won't get Marxist Feminist Stuff, don't worry, we've got plenty of that too.

2:46You take a sociology course or a religion course or a literature course and you'll be up to here with multiculturalism and feminism and other irrationalities. So if you have children, grandchildren, or if some of your students are in college, please consider transferring to us. Okay, what I want to do is go over some of the chapters in this book and also read you the chapters from my forthcoming sequel to this book, Defending the Undefendable, it'll be called, I don't know, Defending the Undefendable 2 or something like that. Let me first read off the chapters in this book. Well, before I do that, let me say what libertarianism is and why this book is libertarian and not just weird, but weird and libertarian.

3:35Libertarianism, as far as I'm concerned, is predicated on two things. One is the non-aggression principle. Keep your myths to yourself. You can do anything you damn well please. Just keep your myths to yourself, unless you have the permission of other people. So voluntary, say don't massacre them is okay. It's compatible with libertarian law. But if you don't have people's permission, keep your myths off of them and their property. The other side of the coin is property rights. If I grab someone's shirt, a Mises shirt, am I a thief or not? Well it all depends upon who owns the shirt. If that person who's got the t-shirt stole it from me yesterday, well then I'm the good guy and he's the bad guy. So property rights are very important to determine who is the aggressor and who is the victim.

4:25And the libertarian view on this is pretty much based on homesteading, the Lockean Rothbardian and Hoppean Theory of Homesteading, and the Nozickian notion, Robert Nozick, of legitimate title transfer, namely any voluntary act would be a legitimate title transfer, for example, a barter or sale or gifts or gambling or things like that. So that's libertarianism in the two-minute version. The non-aggression axiom, non-aggression principle, and private property rights. So what is libertarian law? in law is just the fulfillment of these two principles. Murder, rape, theft, fraud, all those things would be prohibited, but anything else, anything else would be allowed.

5:14So what this book, Defending the Undefendable, does is try to elucidate this, try to expand on this, try to explain this by taking cases of activities that are not prescribed by libertarianism and that are compatible with libertarianism and yet are against the law or are universally hated. And I go further, I don't say just that these things are legitimate, I say that it's heroic to do these things, that I'll be listing in a minute, because if it's compatible with libertarian law and it's hated by masses of people and it's prohibited, and you still insist on doing it, you still insist on living liberty, if I can use that phrase, well then you're heroic. Look, right now it's okay to wear a striped tie, even though it's not a very good tie, but, you know, aesthetics apart.

6:01This is a legal activity. But suppose that the government, in its infinite wisdom, decided that wearing blue striped ties was illicit and punishable by a jail sentence. And I still insisted on wearing this stupid tie. Then not only would I be acting compatibly with libertarianism, but there would be an element of heroism in me for doing this in contradiction to what the government is saying. Okay, so I'm now going to read the list of chapters in this book and also the chapters in the forthcoming book and see if you can catch me in an error. See if any of these chapters do not contradict what I just said. See if all these chapters indeed are compatible with libertarianism and are either illegal or are hated by various members of the public.

6:50Okay, so in this book, I've got it under headings, under sexual. The prostitute, the pimp and the male chauvinist pig. The first two are illegal, except in Nevada, except for Las Vegas, where prostitution is legal. And the male chauvinist pig is hated by all good feminists. On the medical, the drug pusher and the drug addict. Now here, what I'm doing is not saying that we should use these things, just that we shouldn't prohibit them. There's a distinction between urging the use of and urging the legalization of. I certainly don't favor the use of these things, but I do favor the legalization. Under free speech, I've got the blackmailer, the slanderer, the libeler, the denier of academic freedom, the advertiser, and the person who yells far in a crowded theater.

7:36One of my favorites. Under outlaw, I've got the gypsy cab driver, the ticket scalper and the dishonest cop, that is the dishonest cop who won't put you in jail for victimless crimes, not the one who will let you get away with murder and rape. Under financial, I've got the non-government counterfeiter, the miser, the inheritor, the money lender, the non-contributory charity, which is compatible with libertarianism. Under business and trade, the curmudgeon, the slumlord, the ghetto merchant, the speculator, the importer, the middleman, the profiteer. Under ecology, the strip miner, the litterer and the wastemaker, and under labor, the fat capitalist pig employer, another of my favorites, the scab, the rate buster, and the employer of child labor. Okay, so that's for the published book, and now a quick rundown of the chapters in this subsequent book.

8:25And then what I'll do is discuss some of the high points or the low points, if you want to put it that way, and try to defend some of the chapters that are more interesting than others. Under trade here, for the new book, I've got the multinational enterprise of the smuggler, the oil manufacturer, the nuclear provider, and the corporate raider. Under labor, I've got the hatchet man, the home worker, the picket line crosser, the daycare provider, and the automator. Medical, the smoker, the human organ merchant, and the breast milk substitute purveyor. Under sex, topless and public, publicist marriage, and burning bed. Under discriminators, I've got the sexist, the peeping tom, the aegis, the homophobe and the stereotyper.

9:11Under business, the war toy manufacturer, the colorizer, that is the person who colorizes old black and white movies, the baby seller, the heritage building destroyer, and politically incorrect, the bad Samaritan, not the good Samaritan, but the bad Samaritan, the duelist, the executioner, the dwarf thrower and the intellectual property denier. I see I got a reaction from the dwarf thrower, so let me start in with that one. Thanks for the reaction. I paid them five bucks to do that. You could have done a little better, but it was okay. The dwarf thrower is a person who takes a dwarf and throws him. Or you go to a bowling alley and you roll the dwarf down the bowling alley and you see how many pins he can knock down.

9:59Now this is seen as, you know, obscene, that it's a violation of rights and aesthetic sensibilities and this and that, but if the dwarfs are willing to do this, and they get paid pretty heavily to do this, and the thrower and the throwee are both willing to do it, well then it's a capitalist act between consenting adults. And if people get off doing this, well, who am I to say no? It shouldn't be illegal. And yet it is illegal and in many jurisdictions and it's hated and revolved by all good thinking progressives and therefore it's part and parcel of this book. Plus I have a cartoon for it, that was the key. I don't like to brag but the cartoons are great in this book. I'm not bragging because I didn't draw them and one of the reviewers of this book, the Sunday The London Times Literary Supplement was unkind enough to say that the only good thing about the book was the cartoons.

11:00So the first book had about 25 cartoons and this guy, Rodriguez, a brilliant cartoonist, did 100 cartoons. So at that rate, I've got three more subsequent volumes to fill up because I've got 75 more cartoons and at the rate of 25 per book, I've got three more books going. So in the next little while, I'm going to leave off writing all these articles and contributing to the Mises web and, well, maybe I'll still do that, and to lewrockwell.com, which by the way, the traffic is just burgeoning and burgeoning and you'd be amazed if you compared the Mises Institute electronic traffic with some of the other people and maybe Doug later can elaborate on that. Okay, so I've now given you the ballpark, the figures, let me go into two or three or I'm going to go through four or five of these episodes to justify what I'm saying and give some specifics and that'll be pretty much my half hour.

12:01Okay, I think the first one I'll talk about is the blackmailer. Now, blackmail is against the law, but we have to distinguish blackmail from extortion. In both blackmail and extortion, what happens is that you make a threat against somebody and you also make a demand. You make a threat and a demand. And the demand is usually for money but it could be for sexual services or something like that, but it's a threat and a demand. The difference between blackmail and extortion is that in extortion the threat is an illicit threat. The threat is, I'll kill you if you don't give me money, or I'll Burn your house down, or I'll kidnap your child, or something like that. If you don't give me money, that's extortion, and that would be absolutely prohibited by the libertarian code.

12:54But under blackmail, the threat is not to violate the non-aggression principle, rather the threat is to gossip. If you don't give me money, I'm going to tell people that you take a bath with a rubber ducky. And you do take a bath with a rubber ducky, and I've got a picture of you taking a bath with a rubber ducky. and people won't play with you if this picture gets out, so give me a hundred bucks. That's blackmail. Should that be illegal? No, because I'm not violating the non-aggression principle. It's sort of like I got the blinders on. I got the non-aggression principle and I'm just trying to get the implications of it and one of the implications is that blackmail should be legal. By the way, Murray Rothbard has got like one sentence on blackmail and man economy and state and that's where I got this from and I got a lot of my stuff from Murray. I owe Murray a great intellectual debt as anyone can see who reads my stuff and his stuff

13:53he stole a lot of ideas from me it's true he published them twenty years before I ever heard of them but we're not going to go into that. He stole a lot of ideas from me okay so that's the blackmailer and just as we wouldn't put people in jail for gossiping, gossiping is a free The next one is the slanderer or the libeler. One is in speech and one is in writing. And I now slander you. I say that you're a rotten kid, or you're a commie, or Doug is a lesbian, and, you know, you're going to go to jail for threatening to do it.

14:41Yuri is a child molester and, you know, I just keep going on and saying nasty things about people. And the idea here is that what I've done is akin to stealing. Your reputation is probably more important than your coat. Companies are sold with goodwill, where the price of the company is way more than the price of the physical objects because of goodwill. Well, goodwill is just reputation. So, if I start saying that various people here are misfits in various ways, total lies, whatever, I'm ruining their reputation and people say that I'm stealing their reputation. And therefore, it violates the non-aggression principle because I'm taking your property rights away. However, a moment's thought will convince you, I hope, it's convinced me, that you don't own your reputation paradoxically.

15:33Because what does your reputation consist of? The reputation consists of the thoughts of other people. Can you own the thoughts of other people? No. Therefore, paradoxically, you can't own your reputation. The other paradox is that you work hard to create your reputation by dealing fairly with other people, and you can profit from it, but you still don't own it. So if you don't own it and I take it away from you, I haven't taken anything away from you that you own. Therefore, I'm not a thief. Another paradox is that if we got rid of the libel laws, and in Britain the libel laws are really crazy. You know, there you have to prove that you're innocent, and rather than they have to prove you're guilty. It's just horrendous. Paradoxically, reputations would be safer in a full free market of ideas institution, because right now you go to the newspapers, or you go to the web, or whatever, And there are houses for sale, and there are cars for sale, and houses for rent, and cars for rent, and jobs opening, and there are personals, you know, I want to meet a lady, yack, yack, yack.

16:41Well, now there might be libel columns. You know, Joe is bigot, he's a libertarian, which would be a horrible thing. And no longer would a mere allegation suffice to ruin a reputation. because the charges would come thick and fast. Everybody be libeling everybody. Right now, you know, if I say that Doug is a lesbian, well, where the smoke, there's fire, who knows? Let's check him out in the men's room, whatever. It's unclear. But if everyone was doing this, a mere allegation would be just silly. Now, you'd have to have some evidence. So paradoxically, again, paradox upon paradox upon paradox, Reputations would be safer, not more at risk.

17:29Another one is the person who yells far in a crowded theater. Now, free speech, there really is no free speech rights, more private property rights. You can say anything you want in your own house or with your own writing, but there is one exception and that is you can't make a threat. It's not really free speech to say that if you don't give me money I'm going to shoot you, or to threaten I'm going to kill you. That would be the one illegitimate thing, because the non-aggression principle is not only against force or initiation of force, but also the threat thereof, because often the threat will do fine. I'm holding a gun on you and I say, give me a hundred bucks or I shoot you. I don't have to actually shoot you, you're going to give me that money. So the non-aggression principle, if you understand it fully and correctly, it's the force, the initiation of force or the threat thereof.

18:20So, apart from that, people start saying, well, you know, we have to have exceptions for free speech, like right now there's this guy who's burning a Koran, a minister in Florida, and he's engaging in hate speech against Muslims and this and that, and also he pickets, what is it, funerals for army people who are dying, and he says, you know, the reason they're dying is God hates homosexuals, or something like that. Well, does he have a right to do that? People say, well, you know, free speech rights aren't absolute. There are always exceptions. For example, you can't yell far in a crowd theater. That's a famous one from one of the Supreme Court judges. And therefore, we have to take this guy's free speech rights away, too. Now, I have no love for this guy. I think he's a little weird.

19:08But does he have a right to say what he wants to say on his own property with his own megaphone? in his own house or in his own church, I say yes. So I have to ask myself, well, is it ever legitimate to yell for anocratic theater? And I came up with a case. Now, most sadomasochists believe in whipping each other or waterboarding each other. I'm not really sure. I'm not into that as much as I could be, but that's my understanding. But suppose there was an S&M group that didn't believe in waterboarding or whipping or hanging or choking or suffocating, Suffocating. But what they believed in is yelling far in a crowded theater and then rushing to the exit and getting crushed. Well, you know, you perverts who haven't tried it, don't knock it until you've tried it. Maybe you'll enjoy it, who knows. Do they have a right to do it? Of course they do, if it's a clearly SM theater. Now in the ordinary

20:02theater the reason you can't do that is because you have an implicit contract with the movie owner who either writes it on the back of the ticket or it's implicit, you know, sit there, shut up and watch the movie and laugh at the appropriate times and don't laugh and don't stand up and don't wear a big hat and don't be an annoyance to the other patrons. And certainly don't yell fire in the crowded theater unless there's a fire, which is a different issue. So the point is that I've come up with one case where it would be legitimate to do it so therefore it can't be per se a violation of rights and therefore we shouldn't allow and allow it to be an entering wedge in undermining freedom of speech. Okay, another one, here's an interesting one. This is the only one that's really been subjected to withering criticism in the academic journals.

20:50This is the non-government counterfeiter. Now, let me just go into money a little bit. Why do we have money? The reason we have money is to facilitate trade. If we had barter, and I had a chicken and I wanted a pickle, it would be very hard for me to find a pickle-owning chicken-wonner. It's called the double coincidence of once, and if you say that fast, you get all mixed up. And it would be very hard for him to find a chicken-owning pickle-wonner, or a pickle-owning chicken-wonner, I don't know. So what we do instead of making a barter to overcome the double coincidence of once, what we do is we, I trade my chicken in for something that I know everyone will use, and if everyone won't use it, they know that everyone else will use it, and they can use it to facilitate trade.

21:37Something like salt. Especially before refrigeration, everyone used salt to, you know, preserve meat and stuff like that. So I take the chicken and I trade it for salt, and then I take the salt and I buy a pickle. And it's true I had to go through two exchanges rather than one, direct exchange, I have indirect exchange, but it's much more efficient, much more effective, because the odds of me finding someone who's got what I want and wants what I've got is very tough. Okay, so salt is now a money. All money is, is a facilitator of trade. And we've seen that salt works. But then there was the sort of a competition, well, which things will be the best money, the best trade intermediaries? Would bananas do it? Not really, because they get rotten after a day or two. Would diamonds do it? No, because you can't make change in them, because if you break one in half, the value of it is, I think, one-eighth, the two smallest

22:34stones. Would platinum be good? Maybe it's too hard to break up. Gold and silver won run out in the competition of monies. So Austro-libertarians favor the gold standard, which doesn't really mean we favor gold per se, it just means we favor whatever the free enterprise system comes up with, but in history it always came up with gold, so we sort of favor gold as a shorthand for free market money. Okay, so now we get the Fed. Doug talked about Murray's book about the Fed and banking and stuff, and what happened in effect was that the government The government counterfeited money. It counterfeited gold money. Gold was legitimate money. Nixon stopped the gold window in 71. FDR, another favorite president of ours, got us off the gold standard in the 30s.

23:24And now we have this fiat currency. And what I'm saying in effect is that this fiat currency is counterfeit. It's not really a legitimate money. It's a counterfeit of market money. Now, ordinarily, if I were to engage in counterfeiting, that would be very bad. That would be like stealing something. But if I'm counterfeiting counterfeit money, you working with me here? Do I have a right to do that? Is that a violation of libertarian rights? And in this book, I say it's not, and yet I've got three people who I admire very much. Laura Davidson, who is an excellent macroeconomist, although she does it totally as a hobby, she's an airline pilot, but that doesn't stop her, she's published very good stuff on money and macroeconomics in scholarly journals, she's got no credentials, but she's a brilliant woman.

24:20Bob Murphy, who I revere, who is a magnificent macroeconomist, and also Matt McKay, a young man from Poland who just got his PhD. The three of them ganged up on me and wrote blistering attacks on me that I'm really misunderstanding libertarian theory. And then I replied, this is all in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, a professional journal. So if you're interested in that, email me and I'll give you all the URLs for that and you can take it from there. I think they're all wrong. I replied to them, but who knows? The debate is ongoing. And I think the benefit of this debate is some of these issues are tricky. And the only way to really get at it is to get people who are sort of in the camp, they're not accusing me of being greedy or a capitalist pig or anything like that.

25:10They're all buddies of mine. But they say that I made a mistake on this or that and I say they did. Okay, let me talk about one or two things in the new one. The homophobe. I hate gays. I don't, actually, but let's suppose I did. I'm a hater. I hate everyone. I'm not tolerant. I just hate everyone. You know, the Archie Bunker series, there was this guy, George Jefferson, who had a spin-off of his show, Black Guy. Nobody seems to have seen it. Okay, some people have. And George Jefferson's schtick was being mean. So his wife one day said, George, stop being so mean, be nice. So George starts smiling and goes like this.

25:59And for about two minutes he's smiling. He said, I tried it, I don't like it. And he went back to being mean. But he didn't violate rights. So is he a hero? Yeah, he's a hero. He's a hater, and we've got this stuff about hate speech nowadays, you know, like if you commit assault and battery against this person, you're just guilty of assault and battery. If you committed assault and battery about that person, you're guilty of hate crime, which seems a little silly to punish you for what's in your mind. Surely you should punish the person for, you know, what he did. So my claim is that merely sitting there and hating and going, I hate, that's not a violation of liberty, and it's illegal now, and it's hated by all of our friends on the left, so the hell with those people. We can now stand up for hate. Hate is great. Maybe the next t-shirt will be, I'm a great hater or something like that, to illustrate the logical implications

26:57of what we're all about, what libertarian law is all about. Let me do just one last one, the executioner. This is the death penalty. I favor, well, what should be the right punishment for murder? Well, the way I analyze murder, what murder is is the theft of a life. I'm going to pick on Doug again because he's my buddy. He won't be too angry at me and he's sitting right there. Suppose I murder Doug. What I did is I took his life. I stole his life. Well, surely any libertarian punishment theory worthy of The first thing that I must be made to do is to give back that life that I stole from him. Unfortunately, we don't have this Nozickian machine where you put us both in the chamber, Doug's dead body and my live body, and you flip the switch and the life goes out of me and into him.

27:48But if we had that machine, wouldn't that be the essence of justice? To force me kicking and screaming into that machine, and then you transfer my life back into Doug, And now Doug comes out alive and I come out dead? That would be justice. I mean, that would be the essence of justice. There could be nothing more just than to take the life of the live murderer and give it to the dead victim and let the dead victim walk away live and let the live murderer go to the grave. Unfortunately, we don't have that machine. You know, Doug talks about, I don't know why I'm picking on him all the time, but he talks about technology. One of these days maybe we'll have that machine. And if we do, libertarians would say use it. But we don't. So what we have to do is the next best thing. The next best thing is to give my life to Doug's future wife or his heirs. And what she can do is

28:42enslave me or publicly execute me for money. Maybe put it on Google and you'd see more For money, who knows about that? I don't know. But the point I'm trying to do is to justify the executioner. Now, the executioner is illegal in many states. I think Illinois just banned execution and many other states ban it. People say, well, executions don't really reduce the murder rate. And what they do is they compare states that have the death penalty with ones that don't. But if you compare the states that execute versus the ones that don't Well, I'm just about out of time, so let me once again urge you to consider coming to Loyola. The other professors in my department are even better than me. I'm kidding, I'm the best one. I'm the prettiest, also. But they're very, very good. And they're very, very good. And they're very, very good. And they're very, very good. And they're very, very good. And they're very, very good. And they're very, very good.

29:46And if you're interested, come see me and talk to me about transferring or coming to my school. Thanks for your attention.