Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard

0:00I'm getting ready for the final episode of the History of Political Philosophy with Dr. David Gordon. But before we finish here today, I'd like to introduce to you the founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, President Lew Rockwell. Thank you, Mark. Before we get started, I just want to thank the two generous donors who made this conference possible this week, Mr. Steve Berger and Mr. Ken Garshina. These are two of the small but very effective group, the Austrian hedge fund managers, both stars on Wall Street. Ken came to us because he'd been a student of Walter Block's at Holy Cross College. Steve Berger because of his readings in Austrian economics and we thank them very much for making this Gordon seminar possible.

0:57And I want to take this opportunity to present to David, David if you want to come up here. Each year the Mises Institute presents the Murray and Rothbard Medal of Freedom and David is the recipient this year. This was established by Mr. George W. Connell. George was a civil engineer graduate of Purdue who worked all over the world in Libya, in Saudi Arabia, in California and Texas and England and had a great devotion to the principles of freedom and shortly before his death in 2004 he asked us to establish an annual Rothbard prize to be given to a scholar or a public intellectual for a lifetime of achievement for the ideals of liberty and the tradition of Murray Rothbard and we're very delighted to give this to David this year.

1:48It's a beautiful medal with Murray's picture on it. It also includes a $20 gold piece from the days when the American government hadn't been entirely corrupted. And, of course, David could tell many stories about David. People who have been at this seminar and watched it on the internet already know that there can't be too many people who could give ten lectures of this sort without a note. When I had the privilege of going through Murray Rothbard's office in Las Vegas after his death, one of the letters I came upon was from the mid-1970s. Murray had been to a Liberty Fund conference and he was writing someone about it and I talked a little bit about the conference, but he said the most extraordinary and wonderful thing that happened to him at the conference was that he met the closest thing to a universal genius that he'd ever met in his life and it was this young man, David Gorton, and of course they became very close. I always

2:42think that even aside from David's intellectual achievements, when I would see the two of them together, especially when I would see Murray's face after seeing David and not having seen him for a while, that it was really the look of a father upon a son. I think David was in many ways Murray's son as well as his intellectual collaborator and heir and just One of the many things David has done, this most wonderful, essential Rothbard, and David of course has much else to do. He's done much, and David, it's a great honor to present you this medal. Come on up here. Thanks very much, Lew. I'm very grateful to you and the Mises Institute for your support over the years and for this great honor. It was a complete surprise to me. In fact, I'm So surprised I won't be able to give the final lecture.

3:56I'm going to talk today about Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard. Robert Nozick lived from 1938 to 2002. graduated from Columbia and then attended Princeton. His main teachers in philosophy department were Carl Hemphill, the philosopher of science, Hilary Putnam was then at Princeton also a philosopher of science and the specialist in Greek philosophy, Gregory Blasto. Since Since it's the last lecture, it will allow me to tell one story that Nozick told me.

4:42When he was in the class of Hilary Putnam, Putnam had on the final exam, one of the questions was, write your own question and answer it. So Nozick's question was, write your own question and answer it, and the answer was, write your After he graduated from Princeton, he studied at Oxford for a while, and then he became professor at Harvard, where he taught, I think, from the mid-1960s, with a couple years interruption at Rockefeller University down to his death. I think he was, at the time, one of the youngest persons ever to get tenure at Harvard. I think he got it around age 30.

5:48Nozick was extraordinarily fast in argument. His specialty was counter-arguments. Any position In fact, Thomas Nagel, who was a very close friend of Nozick's for a long time till he wrote a review of Anarchy State Utopia that offended Nozick, said about him, it was in the eulogy he wrote, he gave at Nozick's funeral, he said, Nozick could destroy any position when he himself came up with, so he knew when he would write something he would have to stop giving arguments at some point because he knew he couldn't come up with anything that he himself would be unable to demolish. Now, he wrote not only on political philosophy in Anarchy, State and Utopia, but he had a very wide range of interests. He wrote philosophical Explanations, which came out in 1981, and he wrote other works that examine life and nature rationality, and then his last book was Invariances. He also has a collection of his essays called Socratic Puzzles. I'm going to be confining my remarks entirely

7:16to his most famous work in political philosophy, Anarchy, State and Utopia. After he wrote the book, which is his libertarian work, he, for a while, abandoned libertarianism. The most anti-libertarian remarks he made are in the book The Examined Life, but toward By the end of his life, he came back to a somewhat libertarian position. He told me that his own position was, he felt he was fairly close to Hayek's position. He didn't think he had deviated. He said, if you consider that libertarian view, then he thought he qualified as libertarian. He said, well, people usually are willing to classify Hayek as libertarian.

8:12at least in the classical liberal tradition. So he didn't think that the fact that he had at one time held a more radical view should disqualify him from being called a libertarian. There are a whole lot of things, topics one could talk about in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, but I just want to, I'll just mention a few things. First, I want to say something about His classification of theories of distribution and the famous Wilt Chamberlain example that arises out of that classification, because the reason I want to say something about this is that people confuse very often, he sometimes talks about end state principles of distribution, Nozick first distinguished two kinds of theories of distribution, theories that say how wealth or any other good should be distributed.

9:32One is one view in which the only thing that matters is a certain structure of the distribution. Supposing we have, let's say, there are five people and we want, say, a particular, let's say a single good with five people, And we have the good distributed this way, so we have three people get one unit, two people get two units of the good. Now, on this kind of view, which is an, he calls an End-State View, all that matters is that you have this distribution, doesn't of course have to be this particular one, but all that matters is structure, a certain structure of the distribution is instantiated. So it doesn't matter who the people are in the distribution, As long as you have the range this way, then the principal is satisfied.

10:43You can have current time slice, this is under this, you have current time slice where what matters is what the situation is, say, at the present moment, you say, well, you want the distribution to be this way now, so then you could have variations of other end states that aren't current time slice that would depend, say, you want a certain pattern to be, a certain arrangement to be realized in the future. We could see the diff, to get an example of this, suppose you take, which is not, this would not be an end state theory, Suppose you take a, you accept the Marxist view, which I'll later be talking about in No Six Reasons to Reject, the Marxists say that workers are exploited under capitalism.

11:49So suppose somebody was like this end state view and he said, well, let's say this under of Capitalism, this is the actual, this turns out to be the actual distribution, say the workers are these, you have two capitalists, so they get twice as much, and this comes about because the workers are exploited. A Marxist, someone who thought that was a bad thing, wouldn't be satisfied if the support of the end state theory said, well look, since These workers are getting exploited, all that we're saying is that these people are getting more rather than these people, but in your view it would be just the same pattern with other people in the better position, but it would be the same arrangement.

12:46So the markets would say, you know, it matters which people are in which positions, but the So one of the end state theories say, no, all that counts is a particular arrangement, is all that's required for the correct distribution. So you have these end state theories. Now these are opposed to historical theories. Now in historical theory, the distribution doesn't just depend on this particular arrangement. It depends how you got to the particular arrangement that you're holding is just. So say in libertarian theory, any libertarian who knows himself would hold, say your just This arrangement is one that depends on who is a legitimate owner of a property and that depends on how the property was acquired in the past by particular people.

13:52So you see, in the historical theory, it's not just a matter of a particular state of affairs at one time, it depends on what's happened in the past. Now, here's where the part that I think people get confused. Within the historical theory, there are two kinds of historical theory. One is patterned and the other is non-patterned. So the confusion is people think that the pattern is the same as the end state, but remember, the end state is the non-historical view, patterned and non-patterned are variants of the historical view. Now, the patterned view would say what the correct distribution now is depends on some fact, some dimension, natural dimension of people at a particular time in the past.

15:01For example, suppose somebody said wealth or income should be distributed according to how much people in the past benefited consumers, then that's a particular dimension, how much in the past people benefited consumers, that determines the present distribution. So by knowing certain information, certain characteristics of people in the past, we can then determine the present distribution. Now there are also some examples, suppose you say everyone should get equal incomes,

16:18and the advantage of a lease well-off. So if you have any, you would say at a particular time, you'd say, what are the, what are the distribution? And you say, are these any inequalities to the advantage of a lease well-off? If they're not, then you change matters so they become, so that it fits this principle. But you could also say in the theory that Nozick favors non-pattern principle because it just says if you're the legitimate owner of something, you can pass it on to anyone you want or exchange it with anybody you want, so there isn't any way of taking the distribution at one time and then saying, well, there's some characteristic of that distribution which enables us to sort of map onto that and get The New Distribution Now you might be able to say, sort of, come up with some tricky way of fitting the non-pattern view and say you could come up with some, say that there's really a pattern there, somehow,

17:27but it isn't really the same as a pattern because it's just saying whatever happens, anything the just owners come up with is all right. You could rig up some sort of pattern just when you see what they do, but you couldn't in advance come up with some sort of way of going from what the libertarian owners do to get to what the distribution should be in some future time. You just have to say whatever they come up with is all right. I think we can see what a non-pattern view, I haven't explained it too well, but I can see more if we look at the famous Wilt Chamberlain an example. What Nozick imagines is, well, let's start off with some sort of distribution, say, that some supporter of egalitarianism favors. Let's suppose we start off, we say everyone has an equal income. Then he says, well, each person has been assigned a certain So he says supposing Wilt Chamberlain, for those of you who are too young to remember he was a famous basketball player,

18:47suppose he says he'll play basketball and he sets up a game and he charges people 25 cents admission to see him play basketball. Ball. And it turns out everybody else is interested in seeing him play, so it turns out because of that, he gets $250,000, which means much more than anybody else get. In those days when he wrote in 1974, that was an enormous salary. I imagine it still would be if you adjusted for inflation. I take it even if you don't adjust for inflation. Alright, so Nozick says, well, could the egalitarian object to this? He would say, you start off with everybody having equal amount, you've given everybody his proper share, everybody has just given up a quarter of his own money and the result is a situation where Wilt Chamberlain now has $250,000, so the supporter of the pattern principle would say, well, we then have to take the money away from Chamberlain, redistribute it so everybody has an equal amount of money, but then Nozick said, well, look, then you're saying that a person can't

20:14even spend 25 cents of money that you yourself say is his legitimate share as he wants, because Everybody, remembering the example, is voluntarily paid 25 cents to see Chamberlain play basketball. So I say, if you want to maintain a pattern, if you want some sort of distribution of this kind where what people get depends on some natural dimension of what they got at some point in the past, you say they should be all equal, so you then say, well, what are the deviations from that? So you're now having to correct that. He says that will require constant interferences with liberty. So his point, which applies very much to Rawls' theory, is that pattern theories of justice, pattern theories of distribution are very hard to to Maintain, and I think this is a very important insight.

21:21I want to turn now to another topic in Anarchy State Utopia, the famous first part, where, as you know, in libertarian theory, there are two views among libertarians. Some say a minimal state, so-called night watchman state, is justifiable, and then others such as Murray Rothbard say, no, even protection and justice should be provided by competing agencies on the free market. So Nozick was the foremost defender of the minimal state view. I want to say something about his arguments for that in the first part of the book.

22:11This is, unfortunately, his argument, to get his argument, involves saying a little bit about his chapter on risk, which is the most difficult chapter in the whole book. This is, it's really, as I mentioned, he had a labyrinthine mind, and this is the most labyrinthine of all the chapters in the book. He's not one writer who will just set out his argument very clearly. He'll say something and then you have to look at, say, one sentence that he said somewhere else and try to figure out how he's fit things all in.

22:57Of course, the days when one could call him up and ask him were much easier to handle Nozick's argument against the anarchists was this. He said, well, let's start with the situation that libertarian anarchists support, where we start off with each person has libertarian natural rights, and he's free to protect himself, and he's free to do whatever he wants to do. and protect other people. If there are violations of rights, he can punish rights violators or hire people to do that, so just as libertarian anarchists want.

23:48So what he wants to do is say, well, from this starting point, he can show by a series of steps that you can derive a minimal state. By a state, he means an agency that has a de facto or close to monopoly on the use of force in the society. Say, you would have, just like the United States, the government is the final arbiter There may be circumstances in which the state will allow private people to exercise force in themselves, but the state claims the right to supervise anyone else's use of force, plus a state will provide protective services, if necessary, without cost to everybody.

24:55We won't have a situation, say, in a situation, say, where everybody bought protective services, even if it was, say, everybody favored the same agency, all bought protection from that agency, that wouldn't be a state on Nozick's Construal because it would just be something like everybody's buying from one firm, say, just as it turns out everybody buys this car from a single firm, If you had a firm, everybody likes the cars that this firm puts out, that wouldn't mean convert the car agency into a socialist firm. It would still be a private firm, but it would just be everybody buys from that firm.

25:42So if you had just one protection agency, but everybody bought that, voluntarily bought The protection from that, that wouldn't be a Nozickian state. So Nozick thinks he can show that a minimal state will arise from the starting point by a series of steps, none of which violates libertarian rights. Now this isn't enough because you could imagine, let's say each of you voluntarily gives me all your money. You all decide you like my lectures or you want me to hurry up and finish, so to get me to do this, you give me all your money.

26:27That's, I think, a very good idea, but it's probably not, from your point of view, a good thing to do. So you wouldn't be violating any of your rights or anybody else's rights if you did that, but there'd be no reason to do it. So it isn't enough for Nozick to say there's a series of steps that everybody can take that don't violate anybody's rights and will result in a minimal state, starting from a state of libertarian anarchy. He has to show that each step will be to the advantage of people to take in that state. There's a complication in the final step that I'll get to when I reach that point, but he claims he can do that.

27:18He can show, starting from libertarian anarchy, he can show how to get to the state. What he imagines, he says, well, we will start off with people who form protection agencies, policies, just, as I say, just the way Murray Rothbard favors, just the way any libertarian anarchist would. I should mention that he says in the preface to Anarchy State Utopia, it was a long conversation with Murray Rothbard that got him interested in individualist anarchism. So you could take part one of the book to be in effect an explanation why I am not a of Rothbardian, that's what Nozick is doing there. So, you have been competing private protection agencies. Now, Nozick assumes that, say, supposing one agency gets more customers, he assumes that agencies will generally be stronger the more customers they get. So, Once you get, say, there's some sort of imbalance, some agency has significantly more customers than another, people will tend to shift from the other agencies to that one because you

28:43want to be in an agency that, if there's any disputes, will win the disputes. Nozick's imagining that if, say, two agencies come into conflict and they can't settle the The Theory of Money and State The Theory of Money and State

29:24isn't telling the other agencies you can't defend people, try to attract clients or compete with us. It will win disputes if other agencies choose to fight with it, but that doesn't stop these other agencies from existing. Also, it isn't providing protective services to anyone, if necessary without cost, it's just providing services to people who agree to pay for its services. So what Nozick is going to go on is to say he can show from that situation where you If you have a dominant agency, the dominant agency will be able to turn itself into a minimal state and it will do so in a way that not only doesn't violate anyone's libertarian rights, but it will be to the advantage, everyone, it will be to the advantage of people in that dominant agency to get into the minimal state.

30:35They'll find it in their interest to do so. Now, before I get to Nozick's argument for that, I think there's a problem for the argument, as I've so far presented it. Remember, what he's saying is that because of this process where the larger agency will win out over smaller agencies, once an agency gets significantly more money, the larger agency will win out over smaller agencies, once an agency gets significantly more money, the larger is larger, there'll be a tendency for people to go to that agency until you get a dominant agency. So he's saying, unlike the standard case, there's no natural tendency toward monopoly on the free market. The size of a firm relative to other firms, how many firms are in the industry, just depends on particular economic conditions of the industry. There's no natural tendency to monopoly. Nozick fully accepted that point about economics, but he thought With protection services, it's different because one agency's strength is another's weakness.

31:44So you have this snowballing effect will take place. So what I think is the problem with this is his argument might work too well in this sense. And if he's right, then not only will the people in one agency get to be dominant over the other, it would seem like people would, or almost all people would leave that agency and join the monopoly agency. For his argument to work, there have to be a significant number of people outside the Dominated Agency, because as you'll see, his argument depends on saying that the dominant agency can restrict the other agencies in certain ways and then it has to compensate its clients by providing them with low-cost or free protection services. So if it doesn't do that because everybody's in the dominant agency, then it isn't meeting the second criterion that Nozick has set out for of the State, because say everybody, almost everybody joins a monopoly agency and they're paying for its services, they're not meeting the criteria Nozick has set up where the agency

33:02is providing low cost or no charge protection services for people who are at least some people in the society. So Nozick seems to have an arbitrary stopping point. He's saying, well, here's the reason people will get into the, leave their protection agencies and get into the dominant agency, but this process will stop at a certain point that enables the rest of my argument to go through. And he doesn't say why there would be this stopping point. All right, but let's put this aside. So we now have, if he's right, there's a dominant agency and various other agencies who are independent, who people are in those agencies they're protecting themselves. If they're in a dispute with the dominant agency, then they'll lose, but still they're operating. Possibly they're people who don't, independent Now we get to the difficult chapter, which is the one on risk. Nozick says, what happens, let's imagine a situation where a client of a dominant agency commits some crime, or is charged with some crime, or is charged with some crime,

34:40and Crime against the client of one of the non-dominant agencies. So the non-dominant agency puts the client of the dominant agency on trial and then imposes some punishment. So you might think, well, that isn't a problem because if it turns out, let's say the client then goes to his dominant agency and they decide he's not guilty, then the dominant agency can simply say the other agency should pay compensation to the client for putting him on trial and saying wrongly in their view holding that he was guilty.

35:27So why is there a particular problem here? Why would this lead to any difficulty for the independent agency? They might not like having to pay compensation, but they're still in existence, they're still operating. Now Nozick thinks, though, supposing there are certain kinds of penalty that they could He said impose like, say, the death penalty or putting people in prison for a long time. He said if people who might be on trial, they might be afraid if, let's say, this non-dominant agency used what the first agency thought was risky decision procedure, procedures they thought had an undue risk of imposing these bad penalties on them. This would make them afraid. People would say, oh, well, what if I'm arrested by this agency, then they might decide to put me on trial where, say, you only need 6 out of 12 jurors for a guilty And then I might be, they might subject me to execution, so even if, I'd be really afraid of this, so they're imposing this risky decision procedure on me.

37:03So you might say, well, couldn't you then sort of say if they impose such a procedure, And you say, well, the dominant agencies can say, don't carry out the sentence till we have a chance to look at it, and then you can just, if it turns out we disagree, then you can just compensate our client for the getting him afraid, so you can still have compensation there, you're still paying, you can still have, the non-dominant agency can still put its Use whatever procedures it wants, it just has to compensate people that it's put under this risk if they're found not guilty by the dominant agency.

37:55So Nozick said, no, this won't work. You see how he thinks of all sorts of complications, because he said if people know that an agency will impose risky decision procedures, then even people who were never arrested for any crime will be afraid because they'll be afraid that if they are arrested, they will be subject to non-risky decision procedure. So they'll be afraid and they will never be compensated because remember they're not arrested for anything, so the agency hasn't done anything to them. It's just the fear that if they were arrested and subject to these risky decision procedures, they would be, get these bad penalties that makes them afraid.

38:46So there is uncompensated for fear here and Nozick thinks as a result of this, the dominant Agency can tell the other agencies, you can't impose risky decision procedures that we contend are risky on our clients. Now, suppose it does that, it says you can't impose these procedures because you'll be generating this kind of fear, you're unable to compensate our clients for this because Because even if you find them guilty and we disagree and find them not guilty, you won't be compensating the ones, the clients of our clients who were made afraid and who didn't do anything that you didn't put on trial and arrest.

39:41So it can tell the agencies, you can't use risky decision procedures. Yet one more complication. When we're imagining these agencies use risky decision procedures, they're not doing anything that's intrinsically wrong. They're not violating rights because it isn't that they're using decision procedures that everybody realizes are wrong, that would wrong that would be unfair or inequitable to use. It isn't say, we're deciding whether clients are guilty by reading tea leaves. It's say they just have a different view of what proper procedures are from that of the dominant agency.

40:32So, the Nozick Hold, if the agency prohibits them from using procedures, then these risky procedures is really putting the clients of that agency at a disadvantage because then they can't protect themselves in the way that they think best, in the way that they think is suitable. They think these procedures are all right, but they can't use them. Remember, the first agency can prohibit them because according to its own view of risky procedures, these procedures are too risky, but it has to recognize the clients of the non-dominant agency find these procedures acceptable.

41:19So nobody said, well, if it prohibits them, then it has to offer them, those people, the and independence who are disadvantaged and not being able to protect themselves, has to offer them compensation and the compensation is that they get either low-cost or no-cost protection services from the dominant agency, so it's kind of an odd sort of compensation is that if instead of being able to get protection from the agency you want, you receive protection from the agency you don't want. Now you do have the right to refuse and say, well, I want to get, say, compensation and money instead, but Nozick thinks very few people will want to do that because then they won't be able to protect themselves in the way that they want. So Nozick thinks, well, if this is right, then what's going is right, then what's going to happen? You'll have not only an agency that will be able to be dominant in the sense that no agency can challenge it, but it is able to supervise the use of force by all the other agencies. These other agencies are still able to protect clients so long as they don't have disputes with the dominant agency, but

42:51This, Nozick says, well, any state should be willing to do this, any state should be willing to let people settle disputes among themselves, as they wish. Plus, not only is it supervising the use of force, though, but it has to provide protection services for those who it's disadvantaged by prohibiting using the risky decision procedures that agency. So it's met, according to Nozick, these two criteria for the state. So we have then, first, the ultra-minimal state, you have the dominant agency, is prohibiting other agencies from using risky decision procedures on its clients. Then it's required immediately morally to transform itself into the minimal state, the state that is providing The protection services at non-market prices are free to the clients. It's disadvantaged.

43:59So according to Nozick then, it's a minimal state. We've shown, we've drawn the rabbit out of the hat. We've shown how you get from libertarian anarchy to minimal state without violating any libertarian rights. and in a way that shows how people operate each step as people be acting in their interests. I don't find this derivation very plausible because first of all it would first apply only to cases where there are very severe penalties, such as hanging or long imprisonment.

44:48It's hard to think of anything other than death penalty, which could apply because even if, say, you were sentenced to long imprisonment, you would know that your agency can review the case. Maybe you'd still be afraid because you think your agency, I mean, if your agency confirmed by its own procedures, you really couldn't object much, although maybe you'd still be feeling the extra fear then, but it would apply then only to a few cases, you couldn't say, how could you say, prohibit the non-dominant agencies from acting in all sorts of other crimes, so long as it doesn't apply these penalties, and then couldn't it also always refuse to apply the risky decision procedures to clients or the dominant agencies.

45:36Why would the other agencies have to put so much emphasis on these particular decision procedures that's arousing the dominant agency to act? And then, is it very likely that most people will think they're going to be seized and arrested anyway? I mean, suppose there's some agency, say, that uses six-man juries, so you think if somebody's arrested for murder, you'll have not a chance, if you're innocent, you'll have more of a chance of being wrongly found guilty than you would with a normal 12-person unanimous jury.

46:21Is that going to make people really fearful, given that most people or very few people were ever arrested for murder? It seems like he knows that he's just taken one very small possibility and somehow elevated it into something extraordinarily serious, it seems like, much ado about very little. So supposing he does get, supposing though his argument works, as I'm sure he would have granted his argument works, then what happens if, say you have, in addition to the dominant agency, suppose you have a second agency that's the second most powerful, couldn't It used the same sort of argument as Nozick had to prohibit clients of the third agency from imposing risky decision procedures on its client. So then if it did that, then it would be exercising state-like function. So it would be, seems odd to say, you could say there's a state in existence if the dominant agency isn't the only one who can prohibit and other people from using risky decision procedures in the way Nozick won.

47:46But now I want to turn to the second person in my lecture, Murray Rothbard, who's the writer who's most influenced my own thinking in politics and political theory. Murray Rothbard is the one who, I think, is the one who has the most plausible position of any of the philosophers I mentioned. Rothbard lived from 1926 to 1995. He was a PhD in economic history from Columbia University, where he studied under Joseph Dorfman and then he had it he worked for the William Volcker Fund where he wrote reviews and reports on an amazing variety of scholarly subjects he had an extraordinary range of command of sources and books on all sorts of things not only economics but history Philosophy, Political Science, anything you mention he knew a great deal about. He taught at Brooklyn Polytechnic and then at the University of Nevada Las Vegas until his death in 1995.

49:21Unfortunately, I can't recommend any good secondary literature on Rothbard. I want to talk in particular about Rothbard's main book on political theory, The Ethics of Liberty, which was originally published in 1982, and it's since been reissued and published by the Mises Institute, or available through the Mises Institute, I should say. In this book, there are an enormous number of insights. It would be easy to give different lectures on various topics. I've just selected a few. Now, one that I want to start with is one point where I think Rothbard makes a decisive advance from Nozick. Nozick isn't really clear on this issue. I think he probably had the correct view, but Rothbard is the clearest on this, and his precursor in the people I've talked about before is really Immanuel Kant on this particular point, and the point is this, in the Lockean tradition that Nozick was in of how property is acquired, individuals can acquire property by mixing their labor with land, they come to acquire it, Locke said that the earth is given to

51:05to Everyone in Common. So everyone starts off with, you start off with common ownership and then you ask, how do people go from common ownership to individual ownership? Now, in Rothbard's view, I don't claim he was the first to say this, but as I say, Kant has this also, and I mentioned in other arguments, very clear in Rothbard's system that this This is the case, you start off with property as being unowned, you say, no one has any claim to land until people do something to acquire it. Now, we say Nozick is a bit unclear on this, we have to distinguish what the situation that Rothbard is describing, unowned property from this situation.

52:00Suppose we say in the situation before people start acquiring land, let's say you just have people living on the earth, no one has appropriated any land yet. We could say, we could imagine this system, people are free to use whatever exists as they like, but they can't prevent other people from using this also. I don't mean to imagine a Hobbesian state of affairs where you have the right to take what you want in the sense you're under no obligation not to, but anyone else is free to take it from you if you can.

52:45I imagine a situation where, say, if I come across an oasis in the desert, I'm free to take water from it, but I can't, say I've had my water and I walk away, I can't say, Okay, this is my oasis now, so you can't use it in ordinary property. When you acquire property, you have the right to exclude others from the use of the property. That's the whole point of ownership. So I'm imagining, say, a system of common use where somebody else can't push you away Say, while you're drinking water, but you can't stop them from also taking water.

53:41We could see a situation somewhat like this, checking out books in a public library, say, you can use the books, but you can't prevent other people from using them also. I'll say when you return them, then other people are free to take them out. You can't say, this is my book, you can use it only if I say so. So this is a very different system from one where you say, you start off land as unknown, people are free to acquire it. Now the reason I think Nozick doesn't say explicitly he's starting off with a common use rule, but he has, he spends a a great deal of time on provisos to the Lockean labor mixture. He says, well, maybe you should say, besides being able to acquire land by doing something to it, like mixing your labor under certain conditions, you also have to make sure that no one is made worse off by These provisos make a great deal of sense if you start with the common use system, because

55:03then when you appropriate land, you're depriving people of something, you're saying those people no longer have a liberty, which they did before, namely abusing that when they wanted, provided nobody else was using. Now, even if you're not using some item that you appropriate, no one else can use it without your permission. So, there's been a loss there. So, it makes much more sense to talk about, are there qualifications, are there provisos to add to initial appropriation if you favor that system. But on Rothbard's view, you say, you start off, no one owns any land, so it makes more There's more sense to say that you don't have to meet any provisos other than appropriate, you just have to appropriate the land because you're not depriving anyone of some liberty that he had before. It isn't that the other person had he got there before you could have appropriated land so he's losing something there, but he isn't losing any liberty to to use any unused object that he wants, even one that someone else had used first.

56:27So this, I think, is a decisive advantage of Rothbard over Nozick. Nozick is, I think, could get out of possibly saying that he favors the common use system. We could say, well, the provisers are just because we can't specify fully what the correct principle of appropriation is, but it's very, rather hazy what he meant. So Rothbard, I think, is much clearer here. As I mentioned, Kant also had the same view. Kant said we start with the surface of the earth and then people are free to appropriate parts of it.

57:16We have to do so in a way where their acts of appropriation become possible, they can all be realized together, but in Kant's view you don't have to, all you have to do to appropriate something is to come to possess it, you don't have to meet any provisos. Now, if you take matters in Rothbard's, if you take Rothbard's view of property, here I'm not just talking about this particular point, but his whole view of property, then I think you can see that the problem of distribution, as Rawls has put it, really doesn't arise at all, because Rawls is saying, well, we're starting off with a group of people in a society and we're asking, how should we distribute all the land, say, all the territory that this is, the group is resident in, like we're imagining, say, the people of the United States are all getting together and saying, how should we distribute the land in the U.S.? What should be the rules governing the distribution of property? In Rothbard's system, there's no

58:41question of distribution in that sense at all. And he starts all, I think you can see this in one of the very important chapters, I think the sixth chapter, called A Crusoe So social philosophy, and he imagines a single person, Robinson Crusoe, who's on an island by himself, so he says, well, couldn't Crusoe just appropriate the island to his own use and build things, make, grow food, build tools, and clearly they would all be his. Now we could imagine people on different islands, different Robinson Crusoe, they all have the same name of course, but they'd be appropriating land on their own areas and we could imagine these people becoming aware of one another and then engaging in trade, they'd each be the exchanging items that they made for others that they might like better.

59:50So Rothbard said, well, could anybody object to that? We say each one is the owner of his island, his or her island, and then people are engaging in voluntary exchange. So isn't this perfectly all right? We couldn't have a Rawlsian come in and say, oh, you can't do that. You have to meet certain criteria of exchange. You have to exchange. Some islands might have more resources on them than others, so it's unfair that you're able to benefit more from this island than the other islands.

1:00:38Rothbard says, isn't it quite clear that people could, would be the proprietors of their own island, could exchange freely the way they wanted? And I should say, if you look at Rawls' book, A Law of Peoples, I didn't talk about that this morning lecture on Rawls, but Rawls himself says that people in different countries don't have to, you don't have to apply the difference principle between countries. He thinks it's all right for one country to have a higher standard of living than another. He said even if one country has more natural resources than another, he doesn't think this is grounds for redistribution. So here he himself is rather Rothbardian.

1:01:24He just doesn't apply that within society. But now Rothbard says, well, supposing we imagine instead of having each person on a on a separate island, we have the people are all on the same territory and each one is appropriated property. Why can't they do that? What's wrong with that? Why did the fact they're all in the same territory mean that there's some special problem of distribution of the kind Rawls favors? I think if you look at matters in this Rothbardian way, you can You can see that the whole Rawlsian way of looking at distribution dissolves.

1:02:09There is no separate process of distribution at all. You just have individuals who legitimately acquire property, and then those individuals are free to trade or give gifts as they wish. That's all there is to it. In Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard doesn't confine himself to what happens in a libertarian, once we have a libertarian system, or problems of libertarian theory. He's also concerned with another topic that we've discussed a great deal in these lectures, mainly the nature of ethics, how do we know what is right, what's good, we've seen different theories such as Aristotle's, we've had the Lockean theory, Hobbes' theory, we've seen various approaches. Rothbard was very much in the Aristotelian natural law tradition, much like Aristotle and St. Thomas were one writers he thought very highly of.

1:03:34He thought though that there had been an important modification in correct natural law views Mises applied to political philosophy beginning especially with Locke and other individualist philosophers that was better than, there is an improvement on Aristotle and Aquinas. I remember in the lecture on Aristotle I mentioned there was a problem in that Aristotle first discusses how each person can lead a good life, that each person has a nature and our purpose is to realize our nature, mainly reason, fully exercising itself, so he has a whole count of how we do that.

1:04:34But then he also starts talking about the polis, which is the complete community of which people live well. And sometimes he says that people are just parts of the polis. The polis is superior to people. I suggested, following Fred Miller, that there's a way of taking Aristotle in a more individualist way. He isn't saying that people are completely subordinate to the polis. But, on the other hand, he does have these passages that suggest that it's not completely individualist. There's some sort of common good that's different from the goods of each particular individual. And as a result, the people in the policy are subject, even in his ideal city state, they're subject to quite a bit of central, of control by the ruling authorities.

1:06:05and there's all sorts of disputes in his theory on just what the relation is between the common good and the individual good. So Rothbard thought that it's important to eliminate the notion of the common good from natural law theory, If you're taking the common good to be something apart from the good of the individuals who are in the society. So all you have in his version of natural law is each individual is trying to achieve the best life for him or herself. yourself, and the society in which they live, where you have the competing protection agencies, is simply a framework in which they can do this.

1:06:56It isn't, there's no entity with a good of its own. In these lectures I've had quite a few critical comments on the Straussian political interpretation of various philosophers where they're all, they say they're all secret atheists. There isn't a Straussian view of Murray Rothbard as far as I know, but I mention Strauss because Here, for once, there's a point at which Rothbard praises Strauss, and he thinks very highly of an argument that Strauss gives in Natural Right and History. The argument is this, one The view that's opposed to the Aristotelian, Thomistic natural law position that Rothbard favors is one that says ethics is completely subjective, people, ethical terms just express persons' preferences.

1:08:14If I say something is good, either it's just equivalent to a statement that I like that thing, or I'm not stating I like it, but just I'm expressing a like for it. These are, of course, theories of the kind held by logical positivists, such as A.J. Ayer and Charles Stevenson. There is no truth in ethics, just people have different preferences. Now one argument that Leo Strauss used against that view, one that Rothbard accepted, is there are terms that we use in ordinary language that have clear criteria for use, but nevertheless Using these terms involves some judgment of something being good or bad.

1:09:15Suppose, for example, that I say, someone is a coward. Well, that is a statement. It isn't just an expression of... I'm not just expressing some sort of liking or disliking that I could do as I like. I like orange juice. You can't really say, well, you're wrong about that. Just, well, I like orange juice. If you don't, you're not disagreeing with me. You just have a different preference. You don't like orange juice. Here, if I say, someone's a coward, then you might say, no, he isn't at all. And say, he wasn't really fleeing in battle. He misunderstood what was going on.

1:10:02If I was wrong, I couldn't just say, well, I just say he's a coward, that's all there is to it. There are criteria for the correct and incorrect use of the concept. Nevertheless, if I've said someone is a coward, I've certainly expressed... I've said the person has a bad trait. So, just using the term necessary, it entails that I've also made a judgment of value, so there isn't, in using this term, there isn't, as David Hume famously said, a split or dichotomy between the fact, namely, the person, say, has fled in the face of the enemy, and the value judgment, I'm free to make the value judgment or not, as I like it.

1:10:57The two are inextricably combined. Just saying, using the terms, involves one in value judgments as well. So, on Strauss's view, which Rothbard accepted, then just using our ordinary language brings value judgments with it. and how values are not, as this view says, purely subjective. Strauss anticipated a famous argument, this very influential analytic philosophy, that Philippa Foote used and other writers used this also, exactly the same kind of argument.

1:11:49Ludwig von Mises didn't accept the argument. He replied to Strauss, and his reply anticipated the reply that R.M. Heer, remember I mentioned him in the, is responding to Roth, gave to, gave to Philippa Foote. So the Strauss-Mises exchange anticipated this analytical philosophy exchange between foot and hair. I should say also, just passing, I understand Mises and Strauss really didn't like each other personally. They met at a conference on relativism where this issue was discussed and they didn't get along at all.

1:12:37I think Mises, Murray Rothbard told me, Mises remarked of Strauss, he said, in Germany was nothing but a high school teacher. So Rothbard then, as I say, defended a natural law view and he thought this was one argument, the very good argument to refute ethical subjectivism. He also, in defending natural law of view, he disagreed with the views of his own great teacher in economics, Ludwig von Mises. Mises thought one could get around the whole problem of nature of ethics and still defend the free Market, and the way Mises did this, he said, well, we can show that interferences with the free market will fail from the point of view of the ones who want to interfere with the market themselves.

1:13:49So we don't have to make, have any appeal to natural law, Mises didn't accept natural law, we don't have to appeal to any controversial value judge, we just say to the person, say, Well, you want to achieve certain goals and the measures you propose won't get you where you want. Remember, it's just like one of the hypothetical imperative that I was talking about in the Kant lecture. If you want this, you should do that, so Mises is saying you won't get what you want by doing what you're saying. So it's just, it's not making value judgment to say that you shouldn't be a socialist or or interventionist, it means, right, it's just sort of an imperative, there's a sort of a principle no one could rationally refuse that you should adopt suitable means to the ends you want, then that's all that's needed, according to Mises, to argue for the free market.

1:14:46For example, suppose the government says there isn't enough cheap housing available for poor people, so the government passes a rent control law. That's an example, incidentally, there's an interesting story that I'm not going to go The government says we want to have more housing available to poor people, so we have rent control.

1:15:34But what's going to happen, once you have rent control, then landlords won't be very anxious to put rental property on the market or they'll withdraw, they won't keep apartments in good repair. They'll tend to withdraw apartments from the market. So the result will be that there are fewer apartments available for the poor, so you won't be getting what the people who favor rent control won't be getting what they want. Mises goes on to argue, well, then there they can try to cope with that by more intervention, and then that will fail also.

1:16:20So they'll either have to, they could stay where they are if they want, but then they'd just be in a situation where they're not getting what they want. So they could either try to have more, even more intervention, it'll fail, or they'll have to go back to the free market. Then also we are as well, if they try to apply, just socialize everything, then his famous calculation argument shows that can't possibly work. They won't be able to have a developed economy producing a wide variety of goods under socialism, so that won't work. So Mises said, look, you don't have to have any special natural law arguments or any other kind of special arguments to defend capitalism. You can just use these value-free arguments to say, these measures won't get you what you want.

1:17:15Rothbard doesn't reject these arguments, quite the contrary, he thinks there's a great deal to them. He certainly thinks Mises is right that interventionism fails or socialism won't work. He himself has given the same points in his own books. But he says it isn't sufficient, using these arguments doesn't suffice to defend the market. It won't get rid of all the opponents because let's say someone favors rent control. He could say, well, what I'm aiming for is just cheap apartments for a particular group of people and I'll make sure by the legislation that they get access to the low-cost apartments.

1:18:07So I don't care if other people aren't able to get apartments at a low rent, or if those people, as a result of the measures I want, other people, or more people can't get apartments than before. I don't care about the effects of other people's long as the ones I want get something. So if somebody took that view, then Mises' argument wouldn't work against him, because they wouldn't have the goal that Mises is attributing to them. Mises is certainly right that certain goals can't be achieved by intervention, but he hasn't shown that all interventionists have to have those particular goals.

1:18:56They might have other goals that can be achieved. So we can't, although Mises' arguments are extremely important, part of the case for the free market, they don't do the full job. I just want to conclude with one other, I think very good, excellent insight in the book that Rothbard has, Because he discusses the unanimity criteria, you remember I mentioned this briefly this morning where it was a case where I said where probably Rawls would seem to have to oppose a situation where everybody is better off by a certain distribution of wealth and no one worse off because he would have to say some distribution where some people were poorer is closer to the difference principle, the one where, say, these other people are better off, because it's closer to equality.

1:20:05So, Rothbard doesn't reject the unanimity criteria. In this sense, he doesn't say, well, suppose some change makes some people better off, doesn't make anyone worse off. How is this established? Suppose everybody approves the change, then it's all right. He doesn't say, no, that's wrong. Even if everybody approves a certain change, we shouldn't do it. But he says this is not, you can't use this as the basis of a correct or a real full political ethics. He thinks that James Buchanan, not the president before Lincoln, but the famous economist, is guilty of this point.

1:21:00At this point, Buchanan and his colleague, Gordon Tullock, try to justify measures by using the unanimity criterion. Then they say, well, since you can't have unanimity, then they try to say, well, you have practical unanimity, come close to that. So you come as close as you can to that, and that's really a key part of their whole system. So Rothbard said, well, what's the big problem with doing social philosophy in this way, relying on the unanimity criteria? It privileges the status quo, the existing state of affairs. I mean, supposing, let's say, you start off with a system of slavery. Slavery, some people, or slaves, you could say, well, should we free the slaves?

1:21:56You couldn't do so on the grounds of the unimity criteria because the owners wouldn't be made better off, they wouldn't like the change. So freeing slaves doesn't meet the unimity criteria. But certainly we would say you should do it, the slaves are being deprived of their natural rights. So Rothbard said you can't, as you can in other people who favor modern welfare economics, do away with natural rights. You need this for correct political ethics. and in this I think he was entirely right. So I think I'll now end. Any questions?

1:23:07The question was, do either Nozick or Rothbard talk about how an individual's anarchist society would respond to external threats, and it was suggested that in response to such threats, a society would need a unified form of defense, that an and Individualist Anarchist system wouldn't work. Well, so far as I know, Nozick didn't write on foreign policy issues. He did have views about foreign policy. I think he probably would have agreed with you on the point. He didn't. Rothbard did write on foreign policy Defense Issues, he didn't agree with you, he claimed that the free market or system protection agency could adequately defend against other agencies, against external threats.

1:24:18I think if you want to pursue this further, there are two very good anthologies, one's One is edited by Hans Hoppe and another by Ed Stringham, in which this issue is very much discussed, but the details on how the individualist anarchist system would do this, I don't think I can go into now, but in general I would say, if you say, if we think in general The market is more efficient than the government in providing services. It's not clear why defense should be an exception. If you need some kind of unification, as you suggest, to defend against, say, some massive external threat, what would prevent the relevant agencies from making agreements to have unified defense measure, it's not an area that's something not the defense policy is not something I specialize in, so I can't give you any more detailed answer. Matthew?

1:26:18But so many people in the 20th century thought in those terms. Could it be that if you see private association, the logic moving toward competitive minimalist states, that people could end up identifying with competing bureaucracies as defenders of freedom?

1:26:48and private protection agencies. Is this at all like the situation, say, in the Cold War, where you had competing blocks of nation, some, say, one would claim to represent freedom, and there would be opposition of different bureaucracies, and we suggested this is, I think, right, this was not a very desirable state of affairs. Affairs. Well, you remember both in Nozick and in Rothbard, we're assuming everybody accepts basically libertarian law code. You don't have competing agencies in the sense, say, that some support libertarian rights and there are others who say are totalitarian or who have completely different views of rights.

1:27:42You do have a problem with what, if you had such an agency that would be considered an outlaw agency and then there's a question of how to deal with that. But in the system that Nozick is setting up, you wouldn't have such a phenomenon. That's not the way you set up the hypothesis. You do have, this he goes into in part three of Energy, State, Utopia on Utopia, you do have people who have communities with different conceptions of life, they're within the framework of a minimal state, you would have separate communities where people would each be pursuing and different views of the good life, but none of these would be violating anyone's right through acting as these bureaucratic blocks that you call attention to.

1:28:37Dan? You mentioned Rothbard's risk of getting essentialism as a method for performing natural law bearing and risk of getting it. I'm wondering if you think his chapter on emotional punishment is consistent with that method or if he changes years closer to war on the most deontological justification for punishment as a response to property rights violations. The question was, I talked about Rothbard's Aristotelian essentialism. Is this view consistent with what Rothbard says in his book?

1:29:31and is this view consistent with what Rothbard says in his chapter on proportional punishment that perhaps the view there is one more ontological theory that rather than stress what the natural tendencies would be, there he's relying on other considerations. Well, it's certainly true that Rothbard's views in that chapter are different from Aristotle's. Remember, Aristotle's view was correct, justice was you restore the situation as best you can to what it was before the crime was committed.

1:30:20And in fact, Fred Miller, when he discusses this, has a footnote citing, say, Randy Barnett That had a similar view, you know, Randy Barnett's view, you don't have anything beyond making the person who's committed the crime give back what he's given. But whether this means that you couldn't have an Aristotelian theory on the basis for Rothbard's views, I don't know. You see, when you talk about natural tendencies in the Aristotelian sense, you're not talking about what it's likely people are going to do. You would be saying what is most in accord with reason exercised to its fullest. And then to make your point, you would have to show that this is incompatible with the desert-based view that Rothbard has, or maybe he would have to show that it's compatible with the Aristotelian view. He doesn't really give any, try to derive the view from any view, Aristotelian view of essence. He does discuss it independently, but I think that leaves the question.

1:31:40On behalf of Lew Rockwell of the Mises Institute, I want to thank you for being here this week. I want to thank our audience who's visited us on the web. These lectures will be archived in the media archives of Mises.org. Board, and once again I'd like to thank Steve Berger and Ken Garshina for sponsoring this event and our production crew and staff for taking such good care of us this week and most especially to Dr. David Gordon to thank him and to congratulate him on his work here this week. Thank you very much.