Vaught has been written by Doctor Murray and Rothbard.
If you had to recommend one thing for people to read, what
would it be? And what is the lesson from this
book or essay from Murray Rothbard that you'd like to
communicate to as many people as we could?
Sure. So there's a lot.
Yeah, man. I mean, there's a lot of, I've
heard a lot of different people who recommend this book first or
this book first or or whatever. I'm maybe I'm biased 'cause this
is how I did it, But so I I so I found Ron Paul and during the
Giuliani moment, which was in 2007, Then I got obsessed with
like Googling him and looking him up.
And I found Tom Woods and Peter Schiff.
And so I started reading all of their books and watching all of
their videos and just like, obsessing over it.
And it was it wasn't. It was probably like at least a
year or two till I started reading Rothbart.
I just had heard Tom Woods mention Rothbart so many times
as like he's the guy that eventually I was like I got to
read this Murray Rothbart guy and I heard Tom Woods.
I think I'm trying to remember back.
I think it was that Tom Wood said to read these two essays.
I can't remember if that's right.
But the first two essays that I ever read, pamphlets, essays,
something the 1st 2 ones I ever read were Anatomy of the State
and War, Peace and the State. And those are the two that I
recommend to start with, because it's just like to me, when I I
read those two, it was like it was game over.
Like there was I was really interested in this thing and had
been interested in this thing for a while.
But once I read those two essays now it was like, there's no
going back. Like I'm I'm here now.
And Anatomy of the State is just like, I truly understood the
nature of the state after reading that.
And war, peace in the state. I truly understood the nature of
war after that and nothing can it's it's almost like one of
these things that once you learn it you can't unlearn it And so
that's what I would recommend to people but there are other you
know there are other things that other people recommend more you
know Rothbart has like some some some economic like technical
writing that he's done that I I've also enjoyed.
I mean, I've read, man, Economy and State, and I did get a lot
out of that. And I know that, like,
economists will be like, that's the one you got to read.
But man, there's some, there's some Murray Rothbard writing
that just punches you in the stomach.
Like you just, I remember reading his stuff once.
I started getting obsessed with him.
Or you start like reading this stuff and I'd be reading it
alone in my studio apartment in Brooklyn, NY, where I was living
at like 3:00 in the morning. Because I'm a weird person.
And I was just like doing stand up comedy and then coming home
to read Rothbard essays that I had printed out because I
couldn't because I couldn't like afford books and shit.
But I remember just, like, reading stuff and putting it
down and almost like, looking around this apartment with no
one in it. Like, as if I was looking at
someone else. Be like, yo, dude, did you hear
what he just said? But, like the Do you hate the
state piece? Egalitarianism as a revolt
against nature, left right in the prospects for liberty?
Just like all of these pieces were just so powerful.
So just like like if you're really interested in these
ideas, you read that stuff and you're just like, yo, I'm never
gonna look at anything the same after this.
And so if you had to give the audience the bullet points for
anatomy in the state and war, peace in the state, what would
those bullet points be? OK.
So bullet points for anatomy of the state would be basically
it's, it's like what is the state Is the question, right.
And so you'd say this, what is the state?
What is the the state For the example, what is the federal
government in Washington, DC? And he would say like, OK, well,
it's not the people. It's not just like everybody is
the government. The government is us.
That's ridiculous. If you believe that, then you'd
have to be believe that 6,000,000 Jews committed suicide
in Nazi Germany, right, If they are the government, right.
So clearly some people are or that, you know, black people
enslave themselves in the 18, early, 18, late 17, early 1800s
or I guess all 17 and early 1800s, you you know.
So that's obviously not the case.
The government isn't like the hills and the land.
The government isn't your uncle and everyone you love.
It's not America. That's not what the government
is. And So what is the government?
And the government is a small group of people, a concentrated
group of people who have the legal authority to initiate
violence against the entire population.
And they're essentially a gang that completely won.
And he kind of goes through that, that It's like if if
imagine a gang moved in and tried to take over a block.
Well, now imagine they were more successful and they took over a
neighborhood. Well, now imagine they were more
successful and they took over a country.
What would it look like? The government?
That's what it would look like. They are the state that's and
and there's a lot more to that he gets into like the role of
intellectuals and the the idea of the state constraining itself
and all of that. But I think that's essentially
the the argument. And then in war peace in the
state, basically it the the argument is like, OK, if if
someone aggressed against you, then you have a legitimate moral
right to recoup that aggression or something like that.
So if person A violates the rights of person B, then they
have a right to to go see about person A or, you know, recoup
what they did. But if Person C, who had nothing
to do with anything, is just their rights are violated in
that process, then obviously that's completely wrong because
they had nothing to do with that And that war, by the very nature
of war, it means innocent people being destroyed over something
they had nothing to do with. And and he breaks it down so
much more brilliantly than that. But to me, that's like kind of
the essence of it that you go there's no, there's kind of no
case where it's ever justified to just destroy the lives of
people who didn't do anything. So no matter what, no matter
what Saddam Hussein, this isn't in the essay, but this is just
me extrapolating from it. No matter what Saddam Hussein
did, you have no right to just incinerate Iraqi children over
that 'cause they were they, they didn't do anything to anybody.
And so that's essentially I I think the crux of the argument.
What do you think is the greatest intellectual
contribution of Rothbard student Hans Hermann Hapa?
I think his his greatest. You know, a lot of people will
will point to, you know, Democracy, The God That Failed,
which is his, his most popular book, and a lot of the the kind
of moving libertarianism into a culturally rightist direction.
I think there's a lot of value in a lot of that stuff.
But I, to me his biggest intellectual contribution.
And by the way, A Theory of Capitalism and Socialism is just
a phenomenal book, phenomenal book.
No matter how much you've read about like Socialism versus
Capitalism, if you haven't read that book, you're like, it's
it's got some whole new angles and new insights that you have
to you have to check out. But to me, Argumentation Ethics
is the that's the one, that's the one.
And I, you know, OK so for people who don't know what
Argumentation Ethics is, I've talked about it several times on
the show but basically it's OK. So in the in the same way that
Mises kind of like would would make his line of of
argumentation and and Rothbard also did this in several of of
his works he does this thing where he basically starts with
like an A priority truth and then logically deduces things
step by step from that. And anyway I I don't want to get
like too like heady for anyone if if you don't know what the
the the terms mean. It's not like that complicated
and and a priori truth just means like something you can
logically deduce. You know like something
something that you don't get from empirical evidence you just
get from thinking about it and realizing that that's true.
And so something like an A priori truth would be that two
objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.
Right. So that's an A priori truth.
You you don't. We can all understand that and
just know it's true. We don't have to go start
testing it out. Like you don't have to go around
and be like let me see if I can just force 2 objects together in
the same space and they're well, didn't work that time, didn't
work that we can logically understand that this is never
going to work right. And so Mises starts his great
peace, Human action, but by the a priori truth that human beings
act with the intention for certain outcomes.
And what what Hapa does is he starts argumentation, ethics out
with people argue. And basically where he goes from
that is he, he has this beautiful, like string of
logical arguments that if you argue at all, you have, if you
argue and you're not a libertarian, you're
contradicting yourself at some point.
And so, so basically what what it is, is that.
And look, I'll say this, there are people who have tried to
poke holes in the logic of this and maybe they have
successfully. I I know Bob Murphy has has had
some things to say about this. And so I'm not even arguing that
this is a perfect proof. If I'm being completely honest,
it's some of when people get into the arguments about whether
he was completely right or wrong about this, it's it stretches me
to the limits of my intellectual capacity.
Like, you know, you know, sometimes when you, you feel
that you ever listen to, like an astrophysicist talk about
something really deep and you're like, I'm almost ready to tap
out. Like, I think this might just be
too, you know, I was listening to not an astrophysicist, but
just a physicist talking about like subatomic particles
recently. You you want to really have your
mind blown, listen to some of that.
Like, this is crazy, Keith, I'll get back to hapa in a second, I
promise. But have you seen.
OK, so this is a thing that's real, that's completely accepted
amongst physicists, that subatomic particles move
differently when they're being observed first, when they're not
being observed. Did you know that?
Have you heard that before? I am not familiar with that
thesis. This is how it can be falsified,
but that isn't. No, no, no.
OK. So this is what's crazy is that
they have a whole way of falsifying it, is that they can
watch how subatomic particles move and kind of track how
they're moving, and then they can measure that they move
different when they're being observed versus when they're not
being observed at. Now that that blows my fucking
mind. That is insane.
But when I'm when I'm listening to a physicist explain how they
know that I'm like, this has stretched me to, I'm at my
limit. I I am not smart enough to
understand this. OK, so anyway, so I I'm not
claiming that argumentation ethics is a perfect proof.
But there is something so beautiful about the idea that
I'm like, you know, there's really something to this.
And basically what it is, is he goes, OK, look, human beings
argue, and once you argue with someone, like any type of
argument, a political argument, it could be a, a, any, any other
type of argument. But as soon as you're arguing
with someone and you're trying, you're trying to win the
argument. There are things that you are
implicitly accepting when you do that.
And #1 what you're accepting is that you prefer non violence to
violence. You, you, you prefer to persuade
this person then to just like, force them, 'cause if you
preferred violence, you would just, you wouldn't argue with
them. You would just try to beat them
over the head and and force them to accept your point of view.
And then OK, there's other things you're accepting when
you're arguing. You're accepting that I own my
argument and like, I own my mind and you own your mind because
I'm presenting an argument from my mind and you I'm.
I'm trying to persuade your mind.
And then from that, you know, and there's all these steps that
he goes through and you real and and that it's like, look the
what we're all accepting when we do this is that we prefer peace
and and norms that allow for conflict resolution rather than
all at war. And then if you realize that I
own myself and you own yourself, and you realize that we prefer
to not have conflict, first having conflict.
Well, then who? Hey, who should have control
over you? I mean, if you have control over
you, there's no conflict. But if someone else has control
over you that you don't like, then there's a conflict there.
And so we prefer we already agreed that we prefer not to
have this conflict over having this conflict.
And OK, now also we're going to need property in order to live.
In order to live, we're going to have to have some, you know, if
there's scarce means, excuse me, if there's scarce resources and
there could be a conflict over who gets these resources, Well,
we've already agreed that we prefer a peaceful resolution to
this over a violent resolution to this.
So then there'd have to be some type of property rights where
things are assigned to one person and not to another
person. And that's the best way to to
resolve a conflict. And OK, how do we do that?
What's the most just way to do that?
And he takes it all the way through to be like this perfect
libertarian argument where like is once you start arguing with
someone, you're almost conceding so much of what libertarians
believe in. And I just think it's the most
brilliant thing I've ever heard in my life.
And then I I I would say so that's number one.
And then like a close #2 is that I think Hapa woke a lot of
libertarians up to the idea that the the, the there's this
natural tendency that a lot of libertarians have that is like,
hey, we believe in the Non aggression Principle and
therefore if someone's not, you know, initiating violence
against a peaceful person, we shouldn't have anything to say
about what they do. And Hans, Hans Herman Hapa did a
lot to really to say no. In fact, we can have lots of
opinions about what that person's doing.
And in fact, in a private property based society, in in a
true private law, free free society, the property owner gets
to dictate what the rules are. And those rules in many cases
might be much harsher than what we have under government
control. And you can see this, I mean,
particularly today, I think this lesson is so valuable where
you're like, oh, you know, if somebody almost has this kind of
juvenile interpretation of what libertarianism is, which you see
a lot of times when I talked, like I was just talking to
Dinesh D'souza the other day and I talked to like some of these
kind of like more right wing guys.
And. And you can see where they'll
go. Yeah.
Well, libertarians say this and you're like, no, that's not what
we're saying at all, where it's like, look, let's just say a lot
of libertarians have this idea that it's like, hey, if you're
not doing anything, you know, that violates the non Aggression
Principle. You can do whatever you want to
do, which is like, OK, kind of that's kind of true.
But let me ask you this where, what's more loosey, goosey, the
streets of San Francisco or my house.
You know what I mean? Like, on the streets of San
Francisco, some homeless guy can just be shooting up heroin.
But in my house, if you try to do that, I will shoot you,
right? So actually, libertarianism can
be a thing where it's actually much stricter and and much more
like, no, you're not going to do that thing, even though you
could technically say that's not violating the Non Aggression
Principle or something like that.
It's like, yeah, well, on my property it is.
And Hans Herman Hapa has done a better job than anyone of like
smacking libertarians in the face with that reality.