The Market for Security | Robert P. Murphy

welcome everyone let me before I begin this lecture let me clarify for in cases some people were asking I hope the images that display the fact that this is not like the securities market all right so we're not talking about financial issues here so their headaches before I had these things on in previous years actually one guy heard that got up and left but so this is about the private production of legal opinions and military defense and police services so before I jump into this someone had asked me to give reading suggestions and I said I would put it in the PowerPoint I forgot to so let me sort of I'll forget if I don't do it right now so if you want to I'm gonna go through this and it's a standalone lecture of course but if I'm wet your appetite you want to read more on this stuff so here's a few references so Murray Rothbard for a new Liberty it's a book Hans hapa the private production of defense it's a long essay my book chaos theory it's a little pamphlet David Friedman has a utilitarian approach which it's it's obviously not a natural rights approach like rothbard gives but if you're gonna dive into anarcho-capitalism you should know how Friedman does it so David Friedman's book the machinery of freedom and then Bruce a lot of these things are just more like theoretical like armchair economists thinking through the logic of how this stuff would work Bruce Benson's book to serve and protect you know he's an economist but he works in a lot of historical stuff too so you can really get to see historical illustrations of the principles he's talking about so those things are great places to start if you want to learn more about this all right so let me motivate this talk by saying I think a lot of people who are interested in Austrian economics start reading people like Murray Rothbard they see that he oh my gosh this guy's an anarchist I can remember when I was young and I got four new Liberty I was a libertarian at the time but I was not an anarcho-capitalist that I'm even think I knew that such things existed and I was reading it and I remember remarking to my parents like oh my gosh this guy wants to get of all taxes haha and I thought that was kind of funny like what a nutjob right because we need taxes but the reason it was not of course that I you know as we all know taxation is theft right there's there's some memes if you if you haven't gotten that drilled home but so why didn't I why wasn't I an anarchist at the time it was because I thought well you need to have certain services that it would just society would collapse there would be rampant crime and or outside armies from neighboring states would come in and just you know run roughshod over you if you had your cute little libertarian society with no taxing and no none of these services right so that's I think the function of talking about this stuff is that most people they can agree on the non-aggression principle and say something oh yeah it'd be nice if in practice that could happen we would like everything to be voluntary in terms of just mutual agreed exchange of property titles but come on there's these cases like this where that just won't work right so that's the the whole of this tries to fill its so I'm gonna do a lot of let's say utilitarian reasoning in here that so I'm not gonna for the rest of this lecture say anything in terms about principles I'm just gonna try to show you using standard economic principles what would happen if you want to think of this late if we privatize these markets so before I talk about that let me clarify something some people were confused when my pamphlet chaos theory came out and then simultaneously I was writing the articles for Lew Rockwell talking about pacifism so I personally am a pacifist in the Christian tradition and so some people were confusing how can you be writing these essays about you know private production of tanks and surface-to-air missiles when you're a pacifist and I I don't see why that should confuse anybody by the same token a libertarian can say hey in a free society heroin use would not be a crime you wouldn't grab people and throw them in a cage for using heroin oh and by the way I don't use heroin myself you know most people would not say what kind of libertarian are you you know so if you go to porcfest some people might say that but here that's not that's not happens we're the middle of the rotors here so by the same token then when it comes to this stuff you and your own personal value scale could be a pacifist or somebody who says you know I would only use violence under the most extremely narrow circumstances like someone is in my house but I wouldn't want them to be companies doing that systematically that's a perfectly coherent position and you might say I personally would never contribute to companies at you know had armed employees that went around doing law enforcement but as an economist I am going to say that I think right now with the way consumers are in preferences there would be healthy markets in these things just like if they legalize drugs right now I am quite confident that next Thursday people would be buying and selling heroin all right even though I personally wouldn't want to do that and I would teach my son not to do that and so on okay I'm gonna spend most of this lecture talking about private law and some of you might be surprised and thinking oh that's nothing the real issue is you know how do we keep Communist China from taking over and invading us but actually that's a pretty straightforward problem in my mind that's just really an issue of privatization and just knowing how do markets work more effectively than status top-down regulations if we know central planning doesn't work in general it's not surprising to say that military defense is easier for the private sector to provide it just takes a little bit of thought as to you know what who's paying for it and that kind of thing but once you solve that it's not really an issue whereas private law like the determination of just property titles that is admittedly a pretty tricky problem right so Iran for example was a very staunch advocate of what you might call the Nightwatchman state the limited government where and if you read like the founding fathers and that kind of stuff thomas paine things like that that nature in that tradition it's great stuff and allows people really bold writers and passionate about liberty but and they said the function of government or even somebody like Basti I would say the function of government is just to protect you know property rights and that's why in bass the odds view if the government started then engaging in legalized plunder you're taking from some people and giving to others that was horrific because now the state is doing that which it's supposed to be prohibiting or preventing alright but still that whole train of thought they're thinking that there is a legitimate function of government to protect property rights and so and one of the arguments for that is just to say conceptually well there's got to be a monopoly agency defining the property rights and then we start from there and then of course yeah we have voluntary exchanges and if somebody tries to break the rules this agency swoops in and punishes them and we agree that's all that agency should be doing and otherwise its statism but come on doesn't that need to be there so uh admittedly that is a harder conceptual problem to get around so that's what I'm gonna spend most the time on this lecture talking about so first the way to warn this up is I want to just break you out of the habit of thinking like that a lot of the arguments that would sound very plausible in the context of well surely you need this monopoly system put its you this way you might say how could there be a rule of law if there are multiple legal systems right that doesn't seem to make any sense or how could it be that everybody's bounded the same laws if you're saying there's competition in the legal system it that seems kind of crazy but it's it's not crazy in other contexts so let me just show you some everyday examples where that sort of objection would be silly and then hopefully you can see why maybe this idea of having private legal opinions and the development of privately produced law actually isn't a contradiction after all so one example would be science right there are certainly there's a lot of order in science there's a lot of rules if you will whether you're talking about what do we think the laws of nature are or even what are the rules of scientific procedures right that there's clearly ways of doing things if you found out that some researchers faked their data and he said well what do you guys do when you fudge the numbers of what your microscope reading said and they said well yeah but we really have a strong hunch that we're right and we didn't want to confuse people by putting in these erroneous readings most people would look a stance at that and so but that's not really written anywhere like how do we know that that's not the right thing to do and so in economics we do that all the time right no we don't come on Austrians don't do that so that's that's that's a principle that we all sort of adhere to in the community of scientists would recognize pretty strongly there would be a consensus among the scientists that if somebody's faking data and then you know setting it to peer-reviewed journals and lying about what they found they would reject that even though strictly speaking for all we know their theory is right in the the established theory that they're trying to overturn is wrong nonetheless we kind of know that's not the mechanism by which we're gonna let the truth filter to the surface you know that that's not a good way to proceed so again did anybody run experiments on that right did we ever run a test and say let's have a hundred scientists over here and hundred over here and these ones are gonna submit bogus results and these ones and then we're gonna checked in three hundred years from now and see which group has more accurate laws you don't even bother going down that path we just know at the outset that we're not gonna do that that's crazy all right so what I'm saying is there's order in science there's no government agency that's in charge of physics right so a lot of the arguments people use for why you need to have the government in charge of saying who owns what pieces of property would be crazy if you apply it to science and in fact sometimes they were applied to science can we hold the questions the end just because we're otherwise I'm gonna get off-track all right so in the Soviet Union they did try to do stuff like that that the government did hit pull it aside signs and of course that didn't work out very well now you might say okay science isn't a great example because that there's objective laws of nature that would that scientists are trying to find if we talk about physics and chemistry and so on astronomy the Stars are doing what they're doing and yeah there's a certain pattern of rules we can follow to try to figure out how to predict their behavior whereas when we're talking about the legal system pertaining to humans that's a little bit more conventional based on custom and in convention it's not set in stone the way the laws of nature are so even they're not necessarily people who have a natural law framework would say no there really is a natural set of rules pertaining to interpersonal behavior and that private judges discover those things using reason and other mechanisms and so the analogy with physics is pretty strong but let's say you're not a natural rights person okay what about the dictionary so certainly how language is used in what definitions mean or what would what words mean what their definitions are that also is certainly produced by humans and that's very conventional right if you go read Shakespeare that's different English than what is considered grammatically correct or what's the common usage today yet you can still identify it as English right so there are rules of grammar there's rules of language there's definitions that clearly are human generated they're not given to us by nature but yet they evolve over time and yet at any given moment it is a fact of the matter in most cases to say hey is this sentence grammatical you couldn't just say all it's all arbitrary there's no fact of the matter there are some borderline cases where the expert might disagree but there are clear-cut cases you know you say hey I done gone to the store yesterday that's not a grammatical sentence alright so that sort of thing where's in some cases like what do you say who or whom and there's things where I could get a little tricky but there are cases where clearly yet that's a non grammatical sentence the experts would all agree and so on or definitions to say what do we mean by the word up yupi if someone says all that means going towards the floor that's just flat-out wrong and so notice there how that how does that happen so there are rules at any given moment even though humans interacting with each other somehow create that changing evolving set of language rules and things like dictionaries and grammar style guides what do they do is does the publisher of the dictionary do they get to define words not really what they're doing is codifying what the definitions are in terms of the community's usage if the dictionary came out and under up it said moving towards the ground it's not that everybody would say holy cow I didn't realize that I've been going through my whole life they can up man going this way no they would say who's the idiot that published this dictionary if they kept doing that that company would go out of business and some other company would come in and publish better dictionaries that better serve their customers and it was more profitable to make dictionaries that had definitions that conforms to the actual fact of the matter instead of them making up stuff okay so even something that clearly there's a sense in which old language is just whatever humans say it is that you know that's true but that doesn't mean therefore there's no rules pertaining to language and that experts couldn't really decide in a dispute you know one person says I think this is grammatical someone else's know this is and the exports could be called in and render opinions on it right so notice that so that analogy with the spoken language is pretty good to solve a lot of the big-picture problems about what would it mean if there was a private legal system where there's general rules that can be applied in certain cases and there's certain like test cases to illustrate the rule in certain hard circumstances where the experts will all agree yep this is how you'd use it here and then there's gonna be ambiguous cases where maybe two of those principles conflict and it's not obvious what's the grammatical thing and the experts might even disagree so you see that kind of stuff in the law all the time if there's a tough case where there's different principles different legal precedents and some judges might say I think you know this the defendant is innocent here and the other person should be acquitted and the other person says no I think the person should be convicted their opinions might differ okay so that analogy holds well but again you wouldn't be even though they're very similar nobody says the government has to be in charge of the English language otherwise wouldn't be able to communicate with each other just be Anarchy people would be blood and everybody will be using different definitions and how could anything get done nobody even thinks of that because that would be so palpably absurd in fact one of the arguments for why the English language is so much more robust and has been used by other people as opposed something like the French language one of the arguments was because English was more cosmopolitan and there wasn't an attempt to control it just absorbs things from other languages whereas in France my limited understanding is they are more protective of the purity of the French language and they try to control it and so that leads to a downfall okay you might say all right well with dictionaries and so on okay fine you don't need a government in charge of that but that's because nothing's really at stake that was just an arbitrary convention we all have to agree that up means this way and not that way otherwise that serves no purpose words have to have a meaning to serve their purpose but you know when it comes to legal titles and so on that's there's a lot at stake there there's money involved or whatever and so there the the niceness of how we can all agree on what's grammatical or not that falls away because if a sentence is a grammatical or not nothing's really at stake but there isn't a law and that's why we need the state to be there to ensure well you could apply that to something like units of measurement that if someone people sign a contract and say oh I promise to sell you 30 chickens in exchange for 10 ounces of copper there might be disputes over a contract like that but nobody is going to be able to plausibly oh wait a minute when you said 30 you thought I meant 3 times 10 no I meant what you mean by 2 sorry I should've clarified but you know that's what I meant nobody would even think of saying it 30 means 30 and if somebody tried to use some weird you know idiosyncratic usage of the term 30 everybody else would laugh at the person and at the very least would never do business with him again all right and by the same token if somebody said oh when you said ounces you you meant the ounces that everybody else hasn't might no I meant a different thing again that would be laughed I was it laughed out of court right literally alright so you see what I'm saying that when it comes to something like these definitions where a lot could be at stake nobody would bother trying to challenge a contract on this basis something if you get that that we wouldn't need to worry in a free society that people wouldn't be able to sign contracts and trust that they would be fairly enforced and it would all be arbitrary just whoever has the most guns wins because somebody might say I have 20 tanks and to me this is what a leader is that that really wouldn't last that lead everybody would know what a leader was what regardless how many tanks the other person had then I'm saying just extend that by the same token then if the con titles somebody clearly built a house you know used materials that were clearly his rightful property and then someone else comes along and says no I reject the property titles in this region and according to my rival theory and definitions of usage this house is mine everybody would know that person was just making it up so maybe he'd get away with it because he had 20 tanks but nobody would think well yeah how can we really say in a case like it would be crystal clear who was in the right and who was in the wrong just like if somebody said Oh for me kilogram has a very special meaning that would be absurd right I do feel finally about kilograms but still okay so let's work just with a concrete example it'll help you see it so TV thief I'm in my I'm pulling into my house we're in a free society it's amazing my house is gigantic all I do is uh I work two hours a week and I have this huge house because that's how productive labor is without the state in the way so I'm coming home and and I see somebody running out of my house with a TV all right and then I go and I said I see and it runs down and I I just know it's the kid that lives down the street from me right why he has to steal my TV and his free society I don't know maybe he's doing it as a prank or something to dare from his friends because he has 50 TVs himself but he's still on his TV I get into my house and I'm sure it's him so in one sense according to like standard libertarian theory and again if you read Roth bards also I should knock the ethics of Liberty is a good one if you want to see this spelled out like in terms of the legal code but the four new Liberty is more about like the practicality of the markets the ethics of Liberty is a long discussion of what should the law be in a free society okay but coming back to this so Rothbard would say I have the right the moral right to go and get my TV back right did that kid aggressed against me by stealing my television said I can go march into his house take his TV and in fact take one of his TVs also because it's like I I'm allowed in Rothbard's theory in this this is controversial I don't mean controversial like everybody's really scandalized by I just mean not everybody agrees with this point but his perspective was that you are in libertarian theory reciprocity you're allowed to aggress against somebody who initiate against you in the same degree so if somebody comes up and steals your TV and then you see them next Tuesday you can't just go shoot him in the head because that's right that because that's a you know disproportionate response you did more of aggression to him than he had done to you but technically you get to take your TV back and then if you want you can take his TV because that's what he did to you right so it's Rothbard's called it the two teeth for a tooth principle alright so I would have the legal right or it started like the moral libertarian right to do that let's say if we believed in the rights theory is developed by Rothbard in that tradition but would it be a wise thing for me to do if the next day in broad daylight I just walk down the street and the neighbors see me going you know knocking on the door and this kid opens door nyquil just tackle them and go in there and walk out with a TV the neighbors might say what are you doing Bob right so that doesn't look good it doesn't matter what I have the right to do that and so what I would want to do is first of all get some reputable person to come in and render an opinion on the status of the law to say yes this person stole Murphy's television set and owes restitution right so that it's not me just engaging in vigilante justice there's some person that does it and that to me that's the function of private judges in a free society that they don't they sit back and they need customers people come to them and say I have a dispute with one of my you know somebody else in the society here we can't resolve it ourselves so in reality of course I might go confront the kid and say give me my TV back and then he's gonna say what team we talking about right so assuming that all happened and so I said okay you don't make me do this but I'm gonna have to call in the big guns right so then I call in a judge he has been coming to this for several years now and it just now occurred to me this time why don't I use the judge I don't I don't know why but so anyway he comes in and so I present it to him and he renders the opinion and says you have the evidence available to me now you could say what if he's biased right I mean I've been on the guy show of course he's gonna be favorable to me so there would be in any given time with certain kinds of disputes there would be judges who specialized in that area of the law all right and that's another thing to realize why would a private justice system be so much better than the state version right now right now you're assigned to judges you know who have jurisdiction or whatever over over this issue but it's possible to even both people in the case would prefer there's someone else to render the opinion okay so that's how crazy it is so there would be judges so ideally what would happen is it would be sort of like arbitration is now in our current society so this stuff isn't completely science fiction you there are arbitrators right now that both parties agree we're gonna bind ourselves by this person's decision and if if you haven't interacted much that might sound crazy to you like wait a minute wouldn't wouldn't the party like if couples getting divorced wouldn't the the guy want to always go to the arbitrator who's always favorable to the men and wouldn't the woman want to do the opposite what most okay yeah they would but then I can't agree on that and so there would be a market for our bird traders who actually were fair and and balanced and that they you know they would decide cases on the basis of the evidence and not because of preconceptions and so that what what is the virtue that judges would have they would be judicious okay if they were female judges they'd be the fairest maidens in the land okay that they would be people who were known to be fair and reputable not taking bribes under the table and so on and giving a fair opinion remember going back to the dictionary analogy or the weights and measures because the legal system in this society would be known right and the judges would come in they wouldn't be just arbitrarily inventing stuff it would be like if somebody wrote a sentence and said I think this is grammatical in the editor of the newspaper said no I don't think it is and then they went to some disinterested judge to render an opinion that's what would be happening here so in this example I could say to the kid and to all my neighbors look at here's a list of twenty people in our area who all specialize in property crime I'm willing to take our case to any one of them I have my surveillance video that shows him leaving the TV in his house has the serial number you know scratched off that's kind of suspicious isn't it like because I have the receipt from Best Buy shown that's but that would have been my TV I have all this evidence you know he has no good alibi right so I can I'm happy to go to any of these impartial judges we have a reputation for making fair rulings and what if he says no no I'm just gonna go to my cousin that's the only person that would look bad all right and so give and take maybe I go and get the opinion given by several places or one place and if the kid doesn't show up that just looks bad the community and so now I have the ability I have the law on my side right barring this kid going to some other judge and presenting alternative evidence and then that judge might say oh wait a minute I think there was a mistake in the previous ruling because that judge didn't have access you know that this kid just showed me he had a plane ticket and he was in Minneapolis that day so he couldn't have done it right there could be stuff like that right so there are things might overturn previous decisions just like in today's world that can happen but assuming that doesn't happen the presumption is going to be at this point that I'm in the right net kid took my television set so again I probably would not personally go in there and break the kids door down and grab it even though the legal code probably would at this point allow me to do that and the neighbors wouldn't think anything of it for various reasons because you know the kid could be bigger than me probably not I could probably take him but you know it's what I'm risk-averse but you st. Joe there would be people who would be professionals at going and retrieving stolen property all right that's Tom DiLorenzo in case you can't tell on the back there right I just found this thing where he was like that so they're okay he's gonna come from this side all right I was looking through in previous of years it was better I had Geeta Halston when you guys know he is he was a much better law enforcement agent to come in but he hasn't been here so I don't know some of you would know him I'm looking through the roster st. is there anybody this year that's tough no that really wasn't Tommy Lorenz was the best we could do all right okay so again the point is there would be company now this is critical the legal people issuing rulings determining what does the law say in this case are totally distinct from the enforcers all right and I think that's one of the problems with conventional in real quick casual criticisms of the possibility of private law enforcement is people just say oh well gee one company would get really big and they'd have the most agents and stuff and they would just rule in their favor and go around that's that's kind of missing the point that's that's not how it would happen there'd be division of labor and there'd be no reason to suppose that the people issuing the legal opinions would be working for the same company as the other people right the people enforcing the decisions those are distinct tasks and there's no reason to expect that they would be the same also so when you see that notice there's going to be competition over here that it's not just gonna be Tom DiLorenzo enforcement firm and yeah he occasionally cracked skulls and then he does you know he goes in to get the TV back in the kids there hey get out of here you jerk and by the way Hamilton was awesome and you know it right that could happen but how many future people are gonna call his agency to go retrieve a television set even if he's exonerated like even if there's some principle that we'll know if in the pursuit of retrieving stolen property you meet resistance and the agents felt their life was in danger they're allowed to shoot the dog and they're allowed to do you know all the stuff that people defend cops with today when they when things like that happen even if he's exonerated in this case future people are not gonna go to his company to enforce a legal ruling right that's just bad PR they might even feel bad too about you know some people just don't like kids getting their heads cracked right so that kind of won't hit it's bad for business to have stuff like they have but the reason now the police get away with so much stuff is because people think well I can choose between allowing the police to occasionally kill people while they bring them into custody and then we see some of these horrible things on video but what are we supposed to do not have police so they're falsely assuming the choice is between having police who are by often violent and using unnecessary force versus having complete anarchy in the pejorative sense and that's not the trade-off there needs to be if the government had a monopoly on the production of food or let's say restaurants and so every restaurant was literally run by the state and then people would get food poisoning all the time and prices would be really high and quality would be low and there wouldn't be much variety and every time somebody was going and vomiting and because you know I'm really sick of the state they should do a better job and so maybe it's all next time you're hungry you're not gonna call them hahaha right which is what how people argue when it comes to the police right oh I like to see what happens it's like I was talking to Tom about this he gave me permission to use this analogy so he moved and had a very bad experience with his moving company right and so he was putting the company up and there were people who were pushing back a little single Jew Tom why didn't she do some research before whatever just being really obnoxious as libertarians online tend to be but nobody said watch Tom the next time you got to move all the stuff out of your house I guess you're not gonna call a moving company oh that would have been the stupidest thing to say of course they meant call a different moving company nobody thought that this particular company and his procedures was the be-all end-all and you had to either accept that or not have moving companies ever and so again it's that police's monopoly that causes the public to argue like this whereas if there were competition and the Acme police agency you know kills Freddie gray or whatever then that company would go out of business I wouldn't people wouldn't be thinking well that means that neighborhood now has no law enforcement it would just be know that that company was had bad policies they need have better training or whatever the thing is and they would quickly go out of business if they're constantly doing things like that that enrage the community okay would there be prisons in a free society so here I happen to think that over time if we didn't have the modern state apparatus a lot of what we consider to be just crime that's out there and so people are worried oh we need the states protect us and I want there to be prisons and police because I walk down the street and I'm afraid and look at all these hot these homicides and muggings and I think a lot of that is caused by the existence of the state so obvious example is the drug war if they got rid the drug war a lot of conventional other crimes would I think go down but beyond that just minimum wage laws right there's a lot of teenagers who ought to be in productive work and instead they can't get a job because of the minimum wage and they go to they're mandated to go to a government school but they're not learning anything or they might even be attacked by gang members depending on how bad the area is so a lot of things like that and you know I know I sound like a granola-eating left winger but I think there's a lot of these so-called root causes of crime that would be taken away if you had a genuinely free society so it's not as with other areas it's not just that oh the state's not helping on this one issue when it tries to reduce crime the state through all of its various policies actively exacerbates that very thing and then it comes in to save us so I do think that a lot of what we think right now oh we need to have all these prisons to lock up all these violent people I think a lot of that would disappear on its own if you got rid of the state and all the other stuff it does beyond that I am also very open to the argument that prison itself that or at least the way it's run right now in the current system ultimately causes more crime or at least causes more like hardcore crime let's say that what happens now some people get arrested like on a minor drug offense or something they go to prison where they're thrown in with like hardcore criminals and horrible things might happen to them while they're in there or they might think they might hear stories about yet you don't happen to that guy down you know down there in that cell block down there you better join a gang in here to protect yourself right so just the mentality of what happens in prison and you come out of there it's not like okay now I learned my lesson and I've been reformed and I'm gonna be a productive member of society a lot of times what happened you while you were in prison screws you up even further and that's why rates of recidivism are so high so again if you're doing a blanket choice between sin are we gonna have this huge prison system or not and just have like monetary fines if I had to choose I would say just go with the fines but I don't get to make that choice in a free society I think people would be concerned about certain types of violent criminals and so I think there would be certainly in the beginning you could say well what if we switch to Roth Bardeen anarchism tomorrow well they probably do it on a weekend let's say Monday then right so let's say they do it next week all that stuff that I said about the root causes of crime and whatever kids not having skills not having job experience making money from being drug dealers where violence is rewarded and that kind of stuff that wouldn't all go away instantly so you could say it might take time to transition to a society where you really don't need a lot of prison space because that's just so unheard of but nonetheless what happens if you're in a society where there are a lot of people who don't obey property rights like let's assume the property rights are understood generally but there's people walking around with guns and whatever they just don't care alright so how would that work I this is my own vision here so I'm not up til now I think I've been summarizing a lot of distilling what is pretty standard stuff but here this is something that is more which is what I've been talking about on this topic I think there would be prisons but they would be like hotels or way seas of of Refuge and so the idea is because the problem is to say at what point is libertarians are we allowed to just send a group of people in like a van and grab somebody and put them in there and then take them to a cage and hold them there that's a very scary proposition to say when are we allowed to do that to somebody particularly if the person didn't you know what if a guy's just walking around pointing guns at people but doesn't actually shoot him yet like what can we do that guys it's not it's not clear if you're just reasoning in terms of Rights theory but to me I think the way we solve it is just say look in a free society every plot of land every parcel is owned by somebody right there's not just public land everything is owned by private owners perhaps collectively in a sense like it's a corporation or something and so let's say there's somebody who is you know we think committed a violent crime somewhere else and came over it doesn't matter whether you know the procedures were correct or if we're pretty sure all the property owners are pretty sure this person is dangerous they can say get off my land right so they're not saying you have to go in a cage somewhere they're just saying I don't want you on my property you have the right to do that to anybody in a truly free society and so if the person really is a heinous criminal or we have reason to believe that or so forth everybody could be saying this you can't go into this mall but then you can't be on the sidewalk and you can't go buy food at the grocery store nobody's gonna rent you an apartment so on and so on so you're an outcast and so in that kind of environment you could imagine institutions being set up that say hey you know you're a convicted serial killer or whatever you can come in here alright you will give you reference you can live here we're gonna search you and you're gonna sign an agreement abiding by our rules and so on but you can come live here and we have employees to monitor you and things but it's a comfortable living we don't have sadistic guards because if we did you would go to one of our competitors right so these oases are probably wouldnt call themselves prisons because that's not a nice term they're trying to attract customers the people that are social pariahs and that aren't welcomed anywhere else they can go there alright so I'm going through this really quickly of course you can read chaos theories where I develop this more but so it's like a hotel but it's kinda like a hotel California you know you might agree that that once you go in there you can't leave so that they would be clear with you upfront they would say you're agreeing to come onto our property we're gonna search you make sure you know you don't have any weapons on you or anything and we're gonna charge you room and board but you know let's say there's some guy who's an architect but he's really violent like he comes home from the bar one time and sees his wife with somebody else goes nuts but he's got a lot of skills it's crazy in the modern system where he would be taken and go put in a cage and make license plates or something or go you know crack rocks open that doesn't help anybody that doesn't reform him that doesn't bring his wife back whereas they could say something like this yeah you're very productive but you're not you can't be mixing with the general population here you're too violent so ya work here we'll give you a workstation whatever and we're gonna charge you thirty thousand dollars a year to monitor you and everything like that but you can still work and so forth and if the judge ruled that he owed the estate of his wife you know they're her family a million dollars for that homicide he can be working towards paying that off so I think restitution would play a pretty big role in this kind of society whereas right now if you go kill somebody the what happens is this state comes and punishes you literally it's you know the state of New York versus you know John Jones or something if you killed somebody in New York State and so it's it's very what the victim's family is just knowing oh he's in a cage now whew and that's I mean it's terms of keeping them off the streets okay but it's more of a sadistic thing of the government punishing somebody so both in terms of actual justice about giving restitution to the true victims or their heirs I think this system makes a lot more sense okay running on time here so let me speed up what about military defense so again I think once you understand how could private property rights be defined and enforced domestically as it were against just common petty criminals if you could imagine that system being in place then worrying about well what happens if there's some neighboring state that's gonna roll in with tanks and bombers and stuff how do we stop them it's not like Tom DiLorenzo hands gonna catch the nuclear bomb he probably could but let's not put them up to it right how is that gonna happen well he ran it so now I'm back to this is pretty standard libertarian stuff where is that like I said that my thing with prisons is more something my own attempt to solve that so now this is pretty standard you could have insurance companies filling the gap all right so if you own the people who own the skyscrapers in Manhattan that's very valuable property they have insurance policies in case of fire damage right if there's a big fire that totally ruins that building you want to be indemnified for that it could be hundreds of millions of dollars of loss is there the owners don't want to just roll the dice all the time they want to have insurance in place by the same token if there's no state purporting to protect us with their army and navy and so forth the people on the free society aren't stupid they know as much as we do right now that well gee if we're really rich and productive and we have no means of defending ourselves some state might come in and steal everything or enslave us so what are we going to do so I think the owners of skyscrapers would take out large insurance policies saying if this building is seized by foreign armies or you know bombed or whatever the insurance company indemnifies us and the insurance company could be off-site some people have said well if the enemy takes over then isn't the insurance company but if it could be an insurance company in California if New York gets invaded that company still you know is gonna owe money to the people who might not be living in New York also and then okay now that we have these big insurance policies what does the insurance company why'd it was just gonna sit there and say well I hope nobody ever invades us know they can take steps to reduce the chance that that will happen so just like right now if you have a good driving record your auto insurance premiums are lower if you install you know smoke alarms and and fire extinguishers and you have all kinds of things like that your premium for fire insurance might be lower and so by the same token the insurance companies who are indemnify or who are on the hook saying if a foreign army comes in and takes over this city we owe all these owners these buildings you know billions of dollars what are they gonna do they're gonna do things like hire people that you don't have service to air missiles they're gonna train some troops to be able to repel invasions they might put mines out in the water they might have a small Navy patrolling they might have a lot of it they have a lot of surveillance they might have even foreign intelligence you know people abroad just to try to stay abreast of developments to give a heads-up like say hey I think about six months from now it's conceivable they're gonna send an aircraft carrier so you better start getting ready for that things like that the difference is they would always be respecting property rights okay and again with the time constraints here I can't really develop it but that is a crucial element so these companies would be respecting the property rights so they couldn't draft massive armies right that's what would mean that wouldn't be possible they wouldn't be financially feasible they couldn't pay millions of people today this huge standing army that would cost too much right they couldn't let's say an invasion was coming in if they wanted to strategically blow up some bridges to slow the invaders they would have to compensate the bridge owners they could just blow stuff up and then say well hey there's a war on we can do what we want it's our job to defend the region no they that's the the owners of the bridges could take could file suit against the defense agencies and say that was my property they blew it up all right so the defense agency might do it like thinking we have to do it but then they would still have to compensate the people right so you might some status might say oh that's gonna tie the hands of the military good that's what's supposed to right that's what property rights do you don't want a firm able to expend vast resources with no check on its behavior it's the same thing with military defense just like it is with Apple production you wouldn't say well no apples are really important so if they need to the Apple producers should be able to just cease large areas of farmland and plant more apple trees that wouldn't me not because there's other competing values by the same token you don't just want the people running the defense agencies to be able to do whatever they want that you have to conserve property the scarce resources and so in chaos theory for example I walk through and just show you more specifically how things might get allocated very quickly I think what would happen is insurance companies would post bounties they might sit like and say you're being invaded they might say hey for every enemy tank you take out will pay you $20,000 well they wouldn't be using dollars will pay twenty thousand Rothbart's right which is a certain exchange for good weight of gold okay and so then there could be mercenary groups who ever compete so it's not even like there would be like six big defense agencies and they would handle everything no there could be all kinds there could be snipers there could be all kinds of stuff people just using surface-to-air missiles doing things but again they would have to respect property rights that they couldn't just blow stuff up that was their own you know neighbors stuff they would be repelling the enemy invasion and maybe so that they would have to run a calculation if they made more in bounties than they had to compensate in case seeing there's collateral damage okay okay that as long as it's profitable so you see how that logic trickles through and if you understand why central planning doesn't work in conventional areas it's the same logic when it comes to military defense that central planners we've got a certain amount of snipers at our disposal service to air missiles tanks should we have more tanks and fewer planes or vice versa who knows that's like saying you know should the Soviet Union have had more coal production and and less diapers being produced that's not a question you can answer technologically you need to have market prices to answer it by the same token should we put more of our defense into snipers or more into putting landmines down for the tanks that are coming in we don't know that our you are you can't just ask a bunch of military experts you would need market prices generated by insurance companies running calculations saying how valuable are these buildings and so on alright so that's how I've just given you a taste of how you would bring in market forces that we know work so well in other contexts into something like this all right I got just a few minutes here of course I'll stick around for questions after let me just run through some common objections wouldn't the Mafia become the government so number one the Mafia is way cooler than the government alright so and so yeah they are cooler but also they're much better behaved right you go watch the guy for them yeah they're ruthless but they don't go and just start taking money from thousands of people and then insult them by saying we're doing this as a favor to you right I mean people know when their get crossed by them that you know that they you could largely avoid dealing with the Mafia I'll put it they Chi that way I'm not in every single case I'm not saying they were purely voluntary of course not but the point is that if that were that's the argument all I could just say is that would be better than what we have now in this story right you'd have to make an argument no the Mafia would turn into the government which again is silly it's saying well no the Mafia would just turn the government right now and we admit that the government right now is worse than the Mafia and so let's just keep the government right now that doesn't make any sense at least let's have the Mafia and have it be cool for ten years before they turn into the current government beyond that though all the areas where the Mafia specializes in right now are heavily regulated by the state what's the Mafia in like prostitution drugs gambling things like that so all areas that are heavily regulated when you have free and open competition reputable business people rise to the top not gangsters okay so this it's not just that this misses the mark it's exactly wrong the reason the mafia has as much power as it has right now is because of the state okay let me just do this last one wooden warlords takeover waltz our block I have an essay at mises.org with this title the best thing about it is that picture but my words aren't bad either Walter blocks while the block says that he thinks this is one of the best libertarian essays ever written or something like that maybe he's the best the libertarian test he's ever written by Bob Murphy that that's what he said so here let me just make the point very quickly the last point here my argument was to say look at I'm not guaranteeing you that if we stay at a free society and had these institutions in place like I just sketched for you that a thousand years from now there's still gonna be free of course the people might just become corrupt they might be all become status internally they might get conquered by some outside force the argument is always one of other things equal a free society is more likely to repel foreigners than a status Society right its people so how could you repel Nazi Germany well France didn't repel Nazi Germany either nobody ever points to that it says up I guess statism doesn't work when it comes in defense right even though that's an example of a status country failing to defend itself so that's not the issue the issue is just how do you best mobilize your resources and so with this the the type of population that would need to exist so that these competing institutions would fail to keep it safe if you had democratic elections they would elect status right so it's not that you solve this problem by having a government in place you just make it that much worse so yeah the people might not keep their freedom they might lose it and become enslaved to a tyrant but at least if you start out with the guns distributed among a hundred agencies it would there has to be consolidation if instead you take all the guns and give it to one agency and said now we're gonna have an election you better behave yourself or else we're gonna be really upset you know we're gonna vote really hard next time the it's that that's not as big a check as having the guns distribute a bunch of Hmong community agencies okay we're out of time thanks everybody you

Channel: misesmedia

Views: 8,052

Rating: 4.888545 out of 5

Keywords: Market, Private, Security, Robert Murphy, Anarchy, Anarchism, Freedom, Property, Peace, Rothbard

Id: gphKVhnwREc

Length: 46min 30sec (2790 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 30 2016