Defending the Undefendable | Walter Block

I'm going to be discussing my two books defending the undefendable defending the undefendable one and appending the undefendable two but first let me tell you a little story about how I came to write this one what happened I was doing my PhD dissertation at Columbia on rent control and most of it was on math and stat and I am very bored by math and stat so I had to keep pushing there was a war in Vietnam going on and my choice was either do my dissertation and stay in school or go and shoot some people and be shot by them I decided to stay in New York and do my dissertation but I had to give myself a reward so every time I finished doing one more set of equations I promised myself I would take one whole day off and I could do anything I wanted and what I decided to do is to write something I'm a nerd you know so you know that's that's my pleasure to write stuff and I would write on I don't know to pick somebody out of the out of my table of contents the speculator or the fat capitalist big employer or maybe the blackmailer and then I'd go back to my dissertation and then I'd have another week off or a day off in another week and I'd write another article and by the time I finished my dissertation I had about 30 articles floating around and I put them together and that's this book so I'm very grateful for my PhD dissertation boring as hell but at least it created or helped me create this so what I'm going to do is read the table of contents of each of these two books and then maybe talk about one or two of the issues and as I read them off write down which issue that you would like me to talk about so that I can talk about the ones you want okay so in the first book here are the chapters under sex the prostitute the pimp and the male chauvinist pig on the medical the drug pusher in the drug addict on the free-speech the blackmailer slanderer libel ER denier of academic freedom advertiser and one of my favorites the person who yells fire in a crowded theater then under outlaw there's the gypsy cab driver the ticket scalper and the dishonest cop this honest cop on the financial it's the non-government counterfeiter the miser inheritor moneylender and non contributor to charity Iran would like that one I guess under business and trade the common slumlord ghetto merchants speculator importer middleman and profiteer on through ecology the strip miner litterer and waste maker and under labor the fact capitalist Pig employer the scab the rate Buster and the employer of child labor by the way this book came out in nineteen seventy six my dissertation was finished in 72 so it took me takes a while to get a publisher when you're starting out took me a while I want to read what Hayek wrote about this and when I saw this letter I asked different people to write a blurb for the book and when I read this I thought Hayek was drunk here's what Hayek said looking through defending the unattainable made me feel that I was once more exposed to the shock therapy by which more than fifty years ago the late Ludwig von Mises converted me to a consistent free-market position in other words he's compared anamnesis I was just a young punk kid not that I'm any Mises now but you know that was ridiculous I was like in my late 20s and I really thought he was a little drunk on this later on what happened is I got a hold of his book the Road to Serfdom and I wrote a blistering attack on it because I thought he was selling out on principle and in that I said I hate to be like the what is it the the dog that bites you know that's not the person who bites the dog sorry bite the hands of feed you thank you I'm getting senile I'm I'm losing it here you can see pretty soon I'll be drooling so the people in the first row you better we've got to watch out for the drool biting the hand that feeds you I felt sort of awkward in criticizing a guy who fed me this magnificent blurb and then I realized that a good professor a good scholar is after the truth and if you don't have it and one of your students or followers as I am of Hayek I mean I revere him as an Austrian economist I think that as a libertarian he's a little not as good as he should be but I think that that's the ideal that we professors want to get to the truth with a capital T if possible and if we don't and if one of you students can set us straight that's good we shouldn't resent it we should glorify that my talk on Friday on Murray Rothbard I will be talking about Murray in this regard and how he reaches the highest levels of just this sort of a thing of welcoming criticism from his followers okay so that's the the first book the second book this one came out in what year 2013 so it's a long time between 76 and 2013 I've now got defending the the undefendable 3 and I'm sort of halfway through it but I keep getting distracted I'm like the girl who can't say no you know people ask me to do this and I say oh yeah that's fun and I'll do that and so one of these years I'll come out with defending 3 and if anyone has suggestions for what's not on these lists that need to be defended please send me stuff get my email and say hey hey you should include this person in defending free okay so here's defending - under trade multinational enterprise er the smuggler British Petroleum nuclear energy and the corporate raider under labor the hatchet men the home worker the picket line cross of the day care provider and the Automator under medical the smoker the human organ merchant that's the person who buys and sells use body parts the breast milk substitute purveyor on the sex topless in public polygamous marriage and the burning bed that's about wife abuse where the wife kills the abusive husband the discriminators the sexist the peeping tom the ages the homophobe and the stereotype ER these are all people who discriminate and by the way two books have come out and on the basis of defending undefendable one of them is called the case for discrimination and the other on a topic in this book is legalizing blackmail so I'll talk about a little bit about discrimination and and blackmail when I get to doing chapters here so on the discrimination sex is peeping Oh sexist peeping tom ages homophobe and stereotype er in defending 3:00 I'm thinking of having people who discriminate against those who have too few hair follicles on the business the war toy manufacturer the colorizer the baby seller baby seller buying and selling babies david gordon will appreciate that one and the heritage building destroyer and their politically incorrect the bad samaritan not the good samaritan the dualist person who duels fight stools the executioner the dwarf thrower those are people who throw dwarfs like bowling you know you throw a trough and try to throw them through a basket whatever and the intellectual property denier okay so what i'm gonna do now is i'm going to take one chapter from this book and that is blackmail and one chapter from this book namely discrimination and start off with those two and then maybe pick one or two others from each book and then hold it open to the audience where you can choose other chapters or pretty much anything else you want to ask me or discuss okay so under blackmail what's going on with blackmail now you'd think blackmail is a very bad thing and very bad things should be prohibited by law but libertarianism doesn't prohibit all bad things libertarianism is a theory of what law should be and what it says is you can do anything you damn well please just do not initiate violence against other people or their property so the question is does blackmail constitute an initiation or a threat thereof of violence against someone else and my answer no it doesn't you have to distinguish between blackmail and extortion in blackmail what I'm gonna do is threaten to become a gossip I'm gonna go to you and say AHA I saw you out with somebody else you're a married person and you're out with somebody else who's not your spouse and I'm gonna tell your spouse unless you give me a thousand bucks that's what blackmail is it's the threat to become a gossip but is gossip per se a violation of rights no right I mean the only violation of Rights is murder and rape and theft or the threat thereof and to threaten to become a gossip is not to threaten to use violence now extortion is very different and usually they're conflated and in the literature they use this synonyms for each other which is improper because they're very different in extortion what you're threatening is if you don't give me money I'll kidnap your kids or I'll shoot you or something like that so blackmail it's not nice but then again libertarianism is not a theory of niceness or nice hood it's a theory of we should prohibit things that have uninvited border crossings or trespass but you're not trespassing on anyone else's property look at least the black male has the decency to come to you and say give me money and I'll shut up whereas if you're in the hands of a gossip it's game over the gossip is games just babble so if you're gonna put people in jail for blackmailing you should put them in jail even more for being a gossip and yet that's silly gossip is a good thing gossip keeps people on the straight and narrow gossip is a way of a non legal way of making people behave better than they might otherwise be because you were always afraid someone will gossip yak yak yak so this is the case in favor not of blackmail but in favor of legalizing blackmail and then there's a difference look I favor legalizing prostitution I don't favor prostitution I have a daughter I have a sister I have a wife I wouldn't want any of them to be a prostitute I don't go to prostitutes III don't think prostitution is a good thing I think that a much better way of relating male and female or male in female and female because you have prostitution all over the place is through love and kindness and and being friends but should you go to jail for this no because it doesn't violate the non-aggression principle and prostitution doesn't and nor does blackmail what happened was the University of Pennsylvania Law Review had a big thick essay not a an issue of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and what it consisted of was a whole bunch of very very famous people arguing as to why black male should be legal and illegal why black male should be illegal and half of and there are very famous people I think there was I don't know I can pick out some of the authors here some of them are very famous libertarians Richard Posner for example is one of them and I think Epstein is another one Richard Epstein Nozick a whole bunch of people and they split some of them said it was they ontological that's why black male should be illegal and some of them said no no no it's it's based on utilitarianism namely blackmail is so bad that we have to prohibit it not a one of them said here's the case for legalizing blackmail and yet I had written several articles and I wasn't invited to that so I Murray Rothbard used to say hatred is my muse you know you read something you say no no I'm gonna get them for this if it's the last thing I do so this what this whole book is it's mainly a critique of all of those people who contributed articles to the University of Pennsylvania Law Review saying that black males should be illegal and here's why and they diverged as to why it should be but not on one of whom made the case that it should be legal so I this whole book is just filled with my ranting and raving against those guys and some of them are very very I read off names that are famous within libertarian circles the others very famous within legal circles so that's that book and that's the the blackmail topic okay the next one is discrimination now remember libertarianism says you've got to keep your mitts to yourself you can't grab other people or their property does that mean that you can't refuse to deal with other people based on their race or their sex or how many hair follicles they have or how tall they are how short they are or or how old they are any sort of discrimination know you can discriminate til the cows come home now it might not be nice but if if you discriminate you're not violating their rights because they have no right that you should deal with them now Murray Rothbard has another rule and his rule is people specialize in what they're horrible in for example Milton Friedman is sound as a bell on minimum wage on free trade on rent control on on occupational license right I mean he's really really good on those things and what does he specialize in money queries horrible in and and educational vouchers where he's horrible happily there were two people for whom Murray's law of people specialized in what they're horrible in doesn't work and that's Thomas Sol and Walter Williams now Thomas hall and Walter Williams are war mongers so from a libertarian point of view they're not really kosher they're not really part of our gang but they hardly ever talk about it what do they talk about they talk about discrimination now you might think that racial discrimination is really a bad thing and it hurts people and what Walter and Thomas do is come up with article after article book after book showing that discrimination is innocuous mainly what I'm trying to do now is soften you up because the usual feeling when you hear about racial or sexual or any kind of discrimination is oh my god that's disgusting it ought to be prohibited by law because the victims of it are really hurt and what Walter and Thomas say is no no they're not really and what I say in in this book about discrimination is that they're not really hurt so let me give you some examples let's take the case of the Jim Crow laws where the black people had a ride in the back of the bus and there was some famous case where some women refused to give up a black woman refused to give up her seat to a white man and there was a big lawsuit about that the question is why doesn't some of the bus company start up and say black people you can ride in the front you can ride in the back we don't care where you ride just you know come on to our bus see the the the solution the recipe for discrimination is competition so the question is why didn't some other company whether started by a black person or a white person just somebody who discriminates in favor of green namely green as in money because this profits to be made because if black people had told you can't ride in the front of the bus you have to go to the back of the bus they're gonna be missed and they would be ripe for being a customer of this new bus company so why didn't it why didn't some other bus companies thought up in the Jim Crow South in the 1930s or the early 1940s the reason is because in order this thought of a bus company you had to get permission from the very people who were espousing Jim Crow legislation in the first place so competition is the solution for this discrimination but they didn't allow competition so of course it's gonna hurt black people but if somebody else could open up a bus company and presumably all black people would go to that one and some white people because the that's the next bus well then then the whole thing would go away take another case suppose black people and white people have an equal productivity and some of them do and let's say they reach productivity is $10 an hour and due to discrimination black people only make $7 an hour well what are you gonna do if you want to maximize profits I know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna offer 701 I'll make $2.99 pure profit and if somebody else will say 702 and someone else will say 703 and where will it be where will it be bid up to 210 dollars namely the discrimination is perilous and and it probably wouldn't even go to seven or seven oh one or seven oh two because market forces of competition would would see to it that this didn't occur okay I've done a little bit on discrimination I've done a little bit on blackmail let me pick one more from this book and one more from that book and then I'll open it up for discussion and people hopefully will ask about other chapters and I'll try to respond to them so which one shall I pick here let me see personally yells for in a crowded theater that's one of my favorites and justice holmes was saying that you know free speech is all well and good but they have to be limits you just can't say anything you damn well please and by the way I agree with that I don't think that all speech acts are legitimate there are certain speech acts which should be prohibited by law namely if you don't give me money I'm gonna kill you namely a threat it's just the speech at but I think that that should be prohibited by law it has to be some sort of clear and present danger for example in a play of some character says if you don't give me money I'm gonna kill you that's okay or in the present context I just said those words but you all know I'm not gonna kill you I mean that's just silly I'm doing a philosophical examination here but if I if it was you know close in a dark alley and you were afraid and I said that and you shot me it would be legitimate defense whereas right now if you shot me for saying that it wouldn't be so there has to be some sort of rule of reason here but still I'm not an absolutist absolutist on free speech because an absolutist on free speech would say you say anything you want okay back to Justice Holmes who said well we have to have limitations on free speech because otherwise people will yell fire in a crowded theater we can't have that well what's the libertarian answer as I see it what is the this chapter in this book all about it says look why can't you yell fire in a crowded theater because you're violating the contract but suppose you had a theater where they wanted to do that shouldn't consenting adults be allowed to yell fire in a crowded theater and then rush together I mean if they all agree to it one of my articles talks about this thing called murder Park what's murder park it's a stadium where the walls a 20 foot thick and everybody is issued a pistol with six bullets and told that you can shoot anyone else but wait when the the bell rings at 50 minutes of piauí everybody has to stop we card out the dead bodies we give more ammunition to all the new people and then you start in again for another 50 minutes is this a violation of Rights no if there are consenting adults now look I'm not I'm not favoring this sort of a thing and I don't think anything like this exists but you know theoretically if if people you know people want to commit suicide in weird ways god bless them so to speak I mean I'm a devout atheist so I have to say that with quotation marks but murder pork and and yelling for in a crowded theater are on a par namely the reason you not allowed to yell fire in a crowded theater unless there's a fire is because in the contract there's an implicit contract that if they don't put it on the back of the little ticket they give you they probably have it on the wall somewhere namely whenever you go to a movie that the first five minutes of behave yourself shut off your cell phone you know don't be a pain in the neck to anyone else don't yell fire in a crowded theater so that's why you not supposed to be yelling for in a crowded theater not because it has anything to do with free speech and then what Justice Holmes said is well since you can't yell fire in a crowded theater you can't do this you can't do that and little by little the rights of free speech or truncated okay let me pick one from from this book let me see which one I shall pick the executioner the death penalty what I'm now doing is defending the death penalty for murder now a lot of people say that we shouldn't have the death penalty death penalty is medieval it's it's obnoxious it's no good and also on a pragmatic utilitarian point of view it doesn't really reduce the murder rate both of these claims are wrong I claim let me do the pragmatic or utilitarian first what happened was a whole bunch of people economists did Econometrica studies and they divided the 50 states into those states that have the death penalty in those states that didn't have the death penalty trying to hold constant other things like age of the population because a younger age would have more murderers I mean if the average age is 17 you'd have fewer murders than if the average age is 30 and they would try to control four other independent variables in their Econometrica equations and then they found no correlation between the death penalty and the murder rate so they said death penalty doesn't help reduce the murder rate and that's one argument against the death penalty but then we had a very wise econometrician a guy who graduated the year or two ahead of me in at Columbia and Isaac Ehrlich was his name and he did it a very different way he didn't correlate death penalty States versus non death-penalty States but rather he correlated execution States versus non execution States in other words there are some states like California as it happened was a death penalty state in the sense that death penalty was on the books but they never executed anyone so he said let's forget about whether it's a death penalty state or a non death penalty state let's look at whether they actually execute anyone or not and then he correlated executions with the murder rate and he found a very very sophisticated correlations which suggests that the execution not the death penalty status but executions actually reduce the murder rate because you know people feel sorry for a guy on death row that he's going to be killed but what about all the people that are innocent people that are killed by murderers you have to take into both into account if you want to be a humanist okay so much for the pragmatic or the utilitarian now let's talk about the day ontological or the philosophical or the the rights-based okay so here's the situation what's your name William I kill William and now the question is is it justified have I given up my right to life or right not to be killed anyway there's no right to life but right not to be killed and my claim is so here's the situation with death here we have before and after and here's the murderer and here's the victim and before the murderer I'm going to give a smiley face since he's alive and the victim I'm going to give an unhappy face because he's dead okay so the murderer kills the victim now suppose we had a machine a magic machine of the sort that Nozick is always inventing that if you flip the switch what happens is you take the life out of the live murderer and you stick the life force the life into the dead victim and out they come after you flick this switch and now the murderer is unhappy because he's dead and now the victim is now Riaan live in' anyway i'm now dead and you're william you went back now alive not just the zombie but you're actually alive would we have a right to use this machine and the answer is yeah darn tootin right because what I did to him is I stole his life I I realize I'm being a little poetic here you can't really steal a life you can't grab it but work with me here I stole his life and the first thing that libertarian punishment theory says is you got to return it look if I stole his peepee and they caught me surely they would make me disgorge the TV I stole from him and give it back to him now the libertarian theory the way I see it would be a little bit more draconian than that because if Boyd's it is from a pragmatic point of view if all we imposed on me is the obligation to give him back his TV I'll just keep on stealing because you know I don't get caught all the time and when I get caught all I have to do is give back what I stole so the second tooth in the this two teeth for a to theory is I have to give him one of my TVs of equal value and if I don't have one then I have to get in the amount of money because that you know I have to do the law has to do on to me what I did on to him so now I'm giving him two TVs and the third one is costs of capture if after stealing his TV I went right to the police station I said hey you know I stole his TV I'm sorry here here's his TV back well then there were no costs of capture but if dirty rat that I am after I stole his TV I then hid and and you guys had to come look for me well who's gonna pay for all those costs me and fourth when I stole his TV I scared him his feeling of security has been undermined so what are we gonna compensate him for that go like this boo no we have to make them me I'm the thief here we have to make me play Russian roulette with the number of chambers and a number of bullets proportional to how badly I stole or how badly I scared him so that would be my view of libertarian punishment theory which is pretty draconian you wouldn't have too much theft if we libertarians got in there and and dealt with criminals but the very but but the very first thing is you have to get back with you stole well I killed him I have to give back what I stole from him his life so execution is justified and it and it has good benefits okay I've now done what I said I would do I talked I gave a list of the chapters here I showed two books that came out of this out of these things here there was only one little chapter on each here the the entire book is sort of a discussion of what I only discussed in a chapter of ten pages or so and I developed it into a book of two or three hundred pages okay so now I would like to call on people to ask about another chapter that I didn't cover yes sir in the front can hear the bad Samaritan well we all know what the Good Samaritan is Good Samaritan you see somebody on the side of the road who's hurt and you stop and you help them the bad Samaritan is someone who goes by and doesn't help and doesn't have to go like that to the victim but just doesn't help there are now good Samaritan laws on the books where if you go by somebody in an accident and you don't stop to help you can be in violation of law and be considered a criminal so what I'm saying is you don't have to do that also in this chapter take the following case you're drowning and I've got a rope or a rope with a little thing to save you a life preserver and and I say I'll flip you the life to serve you if you promise to become my slave forever am i justified in doing that it's a market transaction if you don't like the market you know what do they say if you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen if you can't stand this sort of weird thing get out of libertarianism or realize you're being income libertarianism I tell you if I were drowning and and my choice was either drown or be your slave I'd rather be your slave at least I'm alive so it's a little harsh and it would be nice if the guy with the life preserver and the rope just tossed it in and be a good guy be a good Samaritan but suppose he wasn't a good Samaritan is he in violation of libertarian law No so that would be the the burden of that chapter yes sir the miser well there are two different chapters one is the miser and one is the non contributor to charity because a miser could contribute to charity he just now my favorite miser is um Scrooge McDuck Scrooge man yeah yeah Jesus she's with me on Scrooge here and what Scrooge does is he gets into his money bin and he swims in it and he throws it up and it falls down on him that goes ahead you know so so he's a miser well Mises I hated the the the Keynesian hate misers the worst thing you can be is a miser or if you stick money under your mattress instead of spending it and the whole idea of redistribution from rich to poor from the Keynesian sees that the rich have a low marginal propensity to consume they save a lot and the poor will spend it all in spending as good for the Keynesian stock for the Austrians well is what the miser does is it a violation of libertarian principle that's those are the eyeglasses I use for everything namely of anything I ask is it a per se violation of property rights or rights to person and and saving money and putting in a money bin and and swimming in it is not so it's legitimate and it should be legal but I try to do more than say it's legal I try to soften up my readers by saying not only is it illegal or rather not only should it be legal but it also has benefit as benefits what happens when the miser socks away a million dollars prices fall compared to what they would have been otherwise had he been spending it the prices would have been bit up a little bit so if prices fall then our money is worth more so the miser is actually a benefactor to all of us the miser is helping all of us by making our cash balances it's called the cash balance effect namely what you do is you take money divided by a price index and the price index Falls because the miser is spending less money therefore the the fraction money divided by the price index the denominator Falls so the fraction rises in value so alimony is worth more so we want to Pat Mises on the back we want to have ticker tape parades for them we want to you know write oh friendly letter to your friendly miser and say thanks miser yeah you know man you know you're helping us you're making our dollars worth more so instead of denigrating these poor misunderstood misers we ought to you know uh can in Marana on our shoulders and say thank you okay now the non contributor to charity which is a separate chapter in this book look I think it's a nice idea to give charity its virtuous people are poor they're suffering and we're pretty well-to-do people a middle class here or upper-middle class or whatever or some of us are very wealthy it's a nice virtuous thing to do but that's not the eyeglasses through which I'm looking at this I'm looking at it through the libertarian non-aggression principle suppose you don't contribute to charity are you in violation of what the law should be and the answer is no now I'm land takes this through a degree that I wouldn't go as far as namely for her charity is almost a negative a bad thing not quite but almost whereas for libertarians you know we don't koala baturin we're indifferent to that look what's the libertarian view on whether chess or checkers is more libertarian or whether vanilla or chocolate ice cream is more libertarian the answer is it's irrelevant to libertarianism they're libertarianism is a theory of what is just law it's not a theory of all of life now a lot of people have a theory of all of life we don't as libertarians quality batarians we're only talking about what the law should be and what's legal and what's illegal or what should be legal and what should be illegal okay another chapter yes sir peeping tom okay now here we talk about the rights of privacy is there a right of privacy and from the libertarian point of view right now I'm looking at all of you people new people are looking at me you're violating my privacy you dirty rotten kids no I'm violating your privacy there is no right to privacy they're only rights the private property now if what I do is I sneak into your house I'm guilty of trespass so so you don't have a right to privacy you have a right to private property these if we really had a right to privacy we couldn't look at each other and in this chapter what I do is I list every detective in fiction in electro columns and all those guys if there truly were a right to privacy then the profession of being a detective would be illegal so do you really want to say that the detectives who look up things and try to follow people to see if they're behaving themselves I think one of the members of our group here is detective and what he does is he's not here in the audience I won't out him but what he does he works for an insurance company and for the insurance company there are people that make a claim oh my leg hurts this you know I can't do that and what he does is he follows him around and he finds out that they're engaging in a marathon and he takes a picture of them running in the marathon and then he brings advance in the insurance company and the insurance company says to the claimant hey you know you say you can't hardly walk what are you doing running a marathon well the detective violated the privacy of the claimant the the false claim of injury physical injury so they get money from the insurance company so if you really believe in the right of privacy we shouldn't have detectives now none of this has anything to do with NSA because people will say well then the government can monitor all of our speeches all of our cell phones all of everything we do know the government can't do anything the government can't do squat because the government according to libertarian theory of non-aggression is a violator so it's it's an illicit institution plus they trespass they force various computer companies to give them information against their will so I'm not coming out in favor of government eavesdropping or anything like that private eavesdropping is different provided that they don't violate property rights through trespass yes profiteering Murray Rothbard had something there was a calendar a little bit Aryan calendar people everyone's want to put it out of libertarian calendar and they have all libertarians on the picture and then they have a little saying underneath and Murray's saying in one of these calendars was a man's contribution to society is proportional to the amount of profits he makes that's not exactly the words he used but that was the gist of it the more profits you make the more you help people see the way the Marxist see it is it's a sort of a fixed pie and if I get more you have to get less no it's almost the opposite if I'm making more profit then I am doing a much better service look suppose I invented the cure for cancer and I charge ten thousand a pill would I make a lot of profit you're darn tootin I'd make a lot of profit would I be doing a great service for a lot of people who are desperate yes now suppose I make a better rubber band my rubber band is better than the actual rubber bands don't ask me in what way rubber bands will I make a profit yeah well I make a vast amount of profit No namely I'm in making rubber band profits I'm making a contribution to society we need rubber bands we need better rubber bands than the ones we now have and I make a modest amount of profit so the point is the more profits I make in the market that is the better more contribution I'm making to society now of course if the way I make profits is not through giving a better product at a lower price but rather through crony capitalism or what the public choice people called rent-seeking I don't like the phrase rent-seeking business what's wrong with rinth I mean there's economic rent and then there's renting a car or a house and they use the word rent it depicts something pretty despicable namely going through the government and getting a law passed such that you can have imports that compete with you or something like that getting a favor from government now if that's the source of your profits and all bets are off I'm not defending that kind of profiteering by the way why don't we have wage earrings I mean those guys in the NBA and the NFL you know how much money they're making wages I mean 10 million 20 million for the best players why is there no word wage earring namely getting too high a wage well they did that with Michael Milken Michael Milken made four hundred million a year as a wage and then actually people were saying that that wage was too high but somehow wage hearing hasn't caught on because wages are okay which is silly I mean profits wages rents interest rates it's all the same for libertarians but for our friends on the left somehow profit is evil but look every time we do anything we make a profit or at least we try to make a profit what's your name young lady sorry Dierdre Dierdre Alexandra she brought that shirt the very nice white top and she paid 30 bucks how much did she value it at $30 on a penny at least maybe 50 bucks so she dirty rat she is made a profit of $20 off of the seller on the other hand the seller valued that shirt after he had the 3,000 of them that at a at a dollar because he's trying to get rid of him so he made a profit off of her of $19 so they each exploited each other know they each helped each other there was a mutual benefit they each profited off of each other and a profit here is someone who gets our real big profit like if she valued that shirt at five thousand then she made of forty nine hundred and eighty dollar profit so there's nothing wrong with profits if it comes from the free marketplace guy in the red shirt this honest cop okay what's going on with dishonest cop why do I like the dishonest cop it's all a matter of comparison well that's not true I was gonna say it's all a matter of comparison you know I favored Trump over Hillary because I think he's less more mongering even though he's despicable in many ways but she's even more despicable mainly because I think World War three is a very bad thing it could ruin your whole day and I think that Hillary is more warmongering English than Trump by the way I favored I'm a man Obama against McCain Inouye I thought McCain was going to drop a nuclear bomb on whoever and and and Obama seemed more peaceful I mean the domestic policy is a horrible but war is more important than economics in my view as Murray Rothbard and Bob Higgs are forever demonstrating to us okay suppose we have an illegal law or rather in a legitimate law and the illegitimate law is if you smoke marijuana you go to jail and now a cop catches me I'm smoking marijuana and he catches me an honest cop will put me in jail then we want an honest cop no we want a dishonest cop now the goodness and here we have a hierarchy the best dishonest cop would say block is smoking marijuana doing somewhere else where I can't see you or you know do it so that I can't catch you because if I see you and my sergeant looks over my shoulder he's gonna wonder why I'm not arresting you that would be the best thing that's the dishonest cop that we want someone who overlooks an illicit law or take the law of runaway slaves in 1862 if you caught a runaway slave you're supposed to return the slave to to the rightful owner but you know we think that slavery coercive slavery that is is illegitimate and we want a dishonest cop who won't return an innocent slave to the master well it's the same thing with with marijuana so the best dishonest cop would be someone who just looks the other way but suppose he says okay block look if if I hold you in it's going to be five years in jail and a fine of five thousand give me a hundred bucks and I'll let you go well which do I prefer five years in jail and five thousand or 100 bucks obviously I prefer a hundred bucks so that would be a little lower level he's not a nice guy who's letting me go but you know even it's just a hundred bucks so that dishonest cop is not as good as this one but it's pretty better than the honest cop so it's that sort of a thing if there's an illegal law or a law that's contrary to libertarianism like you can't smoke marijuana now by the way I don't favor smoking marijuana I personally don't indulge I can understand medical uh you know it helps people with golf coma and maybe cancer but I'm not into recreational drugs personally it's just my personal thing I wouldn't want my children or my grandchildren to do that I wouldn't want you to people to do that I don't think it's a good idea but that's not the libertarian issue the libertarian issue is is it a per se violation of a proper law and and it's it's not you've already had a shot yeah Tom have the idea I get that a libertarian theory steal something give it back well the murderer basically steals a light from the other so there was some way to suck the life force of the murderer out and return it to the victim but given that we human we don't have this machine and just executing the criminal does not result in transferring his life force to the other person now what we have is two dead people it just seems like addictiveness no one is cut up if I ran what I would do is to get out because if you ask a difficult question you know then but obviously I'm I'm just teasing here in the chapter I do say that I can't through the whole chapter what I do say is since we don't have the machine well you see what I'm trying to say is we can imagine the machine and if we can imagine the machine then De Anza logically there's nothing wrong with execution but back to the real world we don't have the machine well now who owns the life of the murderer the heirs of the murderer may the heir of the murderer let's say I killed William and he's got a wife and kids and he was their support and now his wife owns me and I say she can do with me whatever she wants one possibility is make me work at hard labor for the rest of my life fine another one is to execute me and charge admission for a public execution with tens of thousands of people and make a lot of money does she have a right to do that I say yes because my life is forfeit as shown by the machine so it's not just that we'll have two dead people now obviously when the government does it you know government shmumberman but the point is my life is forfeit his wife or sister or a mother or whoever it is he's not married whoever his heir is is now the owner of my life to do with which as she will one of the things she could do is execute me and make money on it because you know the breadwinner is now gone so I I have that in the rest of the chapter yes Murray Rothbard shirt Oh accidental yeah see suppose I it was an accident and it's a tort it's not a crime there's no mens rea oh look if I put a dent in your car with my car by accident remember I gave you the four parts of libertarian punishment theory now only the first part applies I would have to make good the dent in your car or I broke your TV I sort of shoved it with my elbow it fell on the floor I have to give you my TV but there's no second TV there's no cost of search there's no Russian Roulette there's no nothing but suppose I'm cleaning my gun by accident and I shoot I'll pick William again I don't want to get everyone mad at me I'm cleaning I'm cleaning my gun and I shoot him well now only the first of the four teeth of libertarianism applies but still his wife is bereft of his services I owe a life the tough one is suppose my baby two-year-old baby somehow I dropped the gun in his crib N and he shot will him well does the baby oh the life no I Oh the life because I'm the guardian of the baby so this would be sort of more complicated issues but the point is there are only two two choices it's it's me or his wife and kids who is more deserving of my life when I killed him by accident so that's a that's a harder harder one to get through but I think that's where the the law of libertarianism leads us roger am i over time oh I'm sorry thanks for your attention you

Channel: misesmedia

Views: 14,076

Rating: 4.7647057 out of 5

Keywords: Walter Block, Undefendable, Economics

Id: glA3KYEiyu8

Length: 51min 49sec (3109 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 02 2016