14 – The Leviathan Has No Clothes

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain mistakes.

Dennis: Today I have my first guest on the podcast. His name is Logan Chipkin. Logan is a freelance writer and ghostwriter in Philadelphia, and he is an expert on what is called anarcho-capitalism, also known as voluntarism. We talk about this concept, which he describes as the recognition that all services governments provide could be provided cheaper and better by the free market, and that the government is morally illegitimate. We also cover some of the work on coercion that can be found on the Taking Children Seriously homepage, and we explore some of the effects coercion has on society and individuals.

We relate the study of economics to the study of epistemology, and therefore AGI. We apply Popper’s criterion of democracy. We discuss the American government’s response to the pandemic, and we briefly touch on David Deutsch’s constructor theory as well. Logan’s previous publications can be found at www.loganchipkin.com, and he can be found on Twitter at @ChipkinLogan. We had some audio issues, so it sounds a bit like Logan is on speakerphone, but I encourage you to ignore that as much as possible. Talking to Logan was fun, and I learned a lot, and I hope you do too. Enjoy.

Okay, welcome, Logan, to the podcast.

Logan: Dennis, thanks for having me.

Dennis: It’s great to have you. Let’s jump right in with anarcho-capitalism. Now, when I hear the word anarchy, I usually think of the far left, and I usually think of left-wing extremists who want to abolish the alleged class war through violent redistribution. And I think of things like the ones that are happening in Seattle right now. But I doubt that’s what you mean when you use the term anarchy. So what do you mean by it?

Logan: Yeah, it’s funny. It’s a little bit of almost bad branding on the part of anarcho-capitalists, because you could really just replace the phrase anarcho-capitalism with voluntarism or radical libertarianism, if you like, and they’re all synonymous. Now, when people say anarcho-capitalist, as you say, to people who haven’t necessarily read all the books or seen the lectures or whatever, it can sound almost like left-wing nihilism. But really, that’s not what it is. If you just think of, again, voluntarism, that’s much more in line with what I mean by anarcho-capitalist.

So anarcho-capitalism is just the political philosophy that states that that all products and services that are currently provided or could ever be provided by the monopoly of the government can be more efficiently provided by voluntary organizations, and also that all coercive institutions, such as the government, are morally illegitimate. So in short, anarcho-capitalism states that a stateless society is more productive and more efficient than one with a government, all else being equal, and also that the government is morally illegitimate.

Dennis: Got it. Now, I saw a photo on Twitter the other day, a meme that I thought was very fitting for this occasion, where somebody posted this photo, this graphic, where it basically shows different tiers of the different government models. So you have communism at the very top, then you have socialism below that, conservatives below that, then something called minarchism, which I wasn’t familiar with.

Logan: Minarchism.

Dennis: Minarchism. And then at the very bottom, you have voluntaryism.

And so I find it interesting because it basically, the graphic, and I’ll add it to the show notes for people to check out. The graphic shows an obviously violent government. This person who represents the government has these vampire teeth and a guy standing behind him with a gun in his hands and some fire. And so the communists, it says, they want to provide everything from housing, energy, clothing, universal health care, retirement insurance, education, up and up to police and the military and so forth, whereas, say, conservatives, according to this graphic, only want to provide retirement, some limited health care, education, and unemployment insurance, say. But the voluntaryists, they say they don’t want to provide any of that because providing any of that is based on violent acquisition of wealth from peaceful people. Am I understanding that correctly?

Logan: Yes, a couple minor notes. First of all, I think there’s actually a fairly broad range of opinion within conservatives on what the government should provide. I have heard some conservatives say retirement should also be privatized completely, but more or less that graph sounds accurate. And then a slight semantic note, it’s written as voluntaryist, but I always take out the Y because it sounds awkward. So when I say voluntarist, that is equivalent to what you say is voluntaryist. And then, yes. And then regards to the violent acquisition, I would just call it theft. But yes, you put it very euphemistically.

Dennis: Got it. So basically, I think what the graphic, the underlying idea is that a communist and a socialist government and even something like conservative government, but a communist and a socialist government in particular, are based on theft from the people. But we should grant, though, that this is not a dictionary definition. I think the dictionary definition would say socialism is a political system where the government owns the means of production. But it sounds to me, and I wonder if you would agree with this, it sounds to me that this is kind of a very, very rosy description of what is required to get to that state.

Logan: Absolutely. So, you know, with all of these political conversations, you end up with sort of varying definitions, changing the meaning of words. So, yes, before you introduce the graph to this conversation, if you had asked me to define socialism, I would have said it’s just the government owning the means of production.

But yes, to your point, it’s not so much that they own it, but so much that they have a coercive monopoly over the means of production. And they acquired or they stole those means of production, generally speaking, or at least the wealth to own them in the first place. They stole that from voluntary, peaceful individuals.

Dennis: Right.

Logan: So, yes, underlying all government power to do anything, at least the governments as we know them now, is that they are, as your graph showed, vampiric, or as I would say, they’re parasitic on productive, peaceful growth of wealth in private individuals.

Dennis: Right. So, I mean, usually I think when I would, I’m willing to grant that socialists and Marxists, most of them are good people, or at least they start out with very good intentions. So, you know, they have these very great-sounding ideas, like everyone should get their fair share, everyone should eat, sorry, everyone should have enough to eat, everyone, nobody should be poor, everyone should only have to work as much as they can. These all sound great, but I think there are some deep misconceptions that are kind of smuggled in there, for example, when they say everyone should get their fair share.

Actually, it reminds me of a movie I just watched the other day. It’s called The Platform. It’s on Netflix for anyone who’s interested in it. And the premise of the movie was there’s this, I’m guessing it’s a high-rise or something, and there’s people stuck in the high-rise, and there’s two people on every level. And it’s kind of like a tunnel but vertical.

And so on every platform, these two people, they just live there. There’s two beds, and then from the very top, what’s kind of lowered through all the levels is a buffet. And so the very top level gets to eat first, then the second level gets to eat the remains, and so forth. So I think there’s like hundreds of levels, and so after level 50 or something, there’s usually nothing left. And so the, the message from the movie was kind of, oh, you know, if only the people at the top ate only their fair share, the rest of us would have enough to eat. And I sort of get the idea that Marxists think this way about the economy. But that’s not right, is it?

Logan: Yeah, I completely agree. So the fallacy there, as you were hinting at, is basically that wealth is a fixed pie. So in this case, the wealth more or less amounts to the amount of food that can be consumed. And this is a point I hammer home when I’m having these types of conversations with people sometimes, is just getting them to understand that wealth is not a fixed pie and that it is capable of growing or shrinking in principle.

And that really, once you understand that concept, it has the potential to radically transform how you think about politics in the first place. Because a lot of left-wing or socialist or Marxist analysis basically stems from the fact that if only we can move things around, and they don’t even necessarily recognize that that part involves coercion, but let’s put that aside. If only we can sort of rejigger society, things will be more balanced, fairer, as you say, and better distributed so that everyone will be happy, satisfied, fulfilled, et cetera.

But again, it’s important, as Thomas Sowell writes about, wealth is not the default state of man, as it were. Mankind was born into utter poverty in the African savannah, I think it was. And so, you know, poverty is the default state. And so to look around and see poverty and to say, that’s not fair while these other people are rich. The question is, well, how did those people get rich? And how can we get everyone to rise to that level of wealth and then beyond?

Dennis: Right. And it’s, it seems to me that the, the fixed pie misconception of wealth, that is the picture. That is the only picture in which people can get this feeling that rich people owe them something because the rich people took a bigger piece of the pie and therefore poorer people have less. But like you said, that’s not in reality what’s, what’s happened. Rich people created their pies themselves. They didn’t take anything away from anyone. They actually created something anew that wasn’t there before. And the default state, like you said, is there is no pie at all, basically.

Logan: Yes. And I will say sometimes the leftists have a point when they say something like when they complain about, let’s say, cronyism, by which they mean rich people basically co-opting the government to their own purposes. And then it is at the expense of everyone else, because then it’s actually when you get the government involved, because it’s coercive, it’s a negative pie. So there they do have a point, but they confuse the concepts of government and capitalism and society as a whole.

So I think there are a lot of fallacies in the modern, at least in an American context, I’ll just say, the modern sort of left-wing view of society and economics. But again, sometimes they do hit a good point. For example, Ron Paul and the Tea Party, which was a right-wing movement, from what I remember, they were all against the bailouts because they were against big government getting involved. And I didn’t see, maybe I’m wrong, but I didn’t see a lot of left-wingers sort of give them credit for that because the lefties were also against the bailouts.

But I think for the left, they view the government as inevitable and that therefore those bailouts should go to poor people instead or something like that. Again, it’s almost hard for me to put myself in the fixed pie mentality now that it’s been so many years of being sort of an Austrian economic freakazoid. But again, I think, as you say, it’s the fixed pie mentality that we need to overcome to solve a lot of these problems in our conversations.

Dennis: Yes, I agree. And there’s one more thing I want to say about the fixed pie misconception as it relates to some of David Deutsch’s ideas about progress, because there is this Marxist ideal that everyone should get what they need, right? So I forget the exact phrasing, but everyone according to their abilities and to everyone according to their needs. But that paints this picture that there is a fixed finite set of needs that everyone has.

And this violates this Deutschian notion that everyone can make infinite progress. So everyone inherently has an infinity of needs and wants. So you’re never done. Like, it’s not like once somebody has food and housing, then they’re perfectly happy and they don’t aspire to get anything else. They still need stuff. So this strikes me as the fixed pie, but applied to what it is that people need and that there’s some sort of upper limit to that, which I don’t think can exist.

Logan: I’m reading a really good book right now about sort of the history of a lot of these ideas. And Marx basically thought that there were deterministic laws that would explain the trajectories of cultures and societies. And Popper criticized this very famously, and that basically it was inevitable that whatever, there would be a class warfare, and then we would have communism. And then actually, in principle, Marx is kind of an anarchist as well, because he said the state would wither away once we no longer needed it.

But yes, it certainly contradicts a lot of these Deutschian notions, for example, that history is inherently unpredictable, that even though humanity and people and everything else conforms to the laws of physics, the growth of knowledge is inherently unpredictable.

Dennis: Right, exactly. Now, you mentioned Austrian economics there as a keyword just now. What is Austrian economics?

Logan: So Austrian economics is our best theory in economics. So hopefully one day it won’t be Austrian economics, it’ll just be called economics. But alas, there are many competing theories, which I suppose is a good thing, at least for the sake of critical conversation. But basically, it is the edifice of knowledge around how people act, given that they are constrained by the fact that, for example, if you act to do one thing, you cannot act to do another thing.

And basically, it all stems from what’s called the action axiom, which asserts that man acts purposefully. Now, when I say man, just to be clear, and most Austrians don’t say it like this, but we’re Deutschians, we’re among Deutschian friends now, so I can say it. It’s really about people. So Austrian economics, insofar as it applies to humans, it would also apply to AGIs, it would apply to any aliens, anyone capable of creating explanatory knowledge.

So the action axiom, again, states that people act purposefully. And then basically the entire edifice of Austrian economics follows, is deducible from that principle. And some of the statements that follow seem fairly trivial, but others are much more profound. So, for example, you get things like the economic calculation problem, which is extremely famous and is actually one of the arguments that Ludwig von Mises created, which should have at least basically destroyed any notions of socialism on sight. And, you know, here we are 100 or so years later, and it still hasn’t.

And it also, from the action axiom, follows things like the business cycle theory of Austrian economics, which basically is the idea that the boom-bust cycle, if you’re familiar with that, that the vast majority of boom-bust cycles occur because there’s more credit in the economy than there is actual money that backs it up in reserves of banks. So I’m just throwing out a bunch of little examples to tell you that from this simple axiom, you get an entire body of sound theory. And I’ll just stop there, because there are a lot of different directions we could take that in.

Dennis: Now, when you say the action axiom, I don’t think I fully follow yet. You said something about people can only do one thing at a time.

Logan: So the action axiom states that man acts purposefully. So, for example, when you get up in the morning, if you go for a walk, you are employing means, namely your body, your clothing, etc., to achieve a particular end, namely that walk. So you employ means to achieve an end. So that’s already something that’s not so trivial.

And, and also because you’re using your body to complete the walk, you’re not using your body to do something else, let’s say ride a bike or go to the grocery store. And it also implies that because you acted purposefully, you value going for a walk more than anything else you could have done with those scarce resources, and that because you’re employing those scarce resources, someone else cannot simultaneously employ those scarce resources. So that’s how it gets into private property rights a little bit.

Dennis: Yeah, I was going to say, couldn’t socialists use that and say, see, that is why property is theft, because you’re using these resources and that’s why somebody else can’t use them?

Logan: Well, when the socialist says theft, that implies that someone else has a right to your body. So now we have to ask ourselves, well, how do we determine who has rights to which resources?

Dennis: Right. Okay. So they basically smuggle in the tacit assumption that somebody else has the right to those resources, not you.

Logan: Exactly, exactly. And by the way, I think it’s fitting that you said smuggle because I don’t think they want that so explicit. But yes, in other words, whenever anyone says someone has a right to anything, it means they have a right to control those scarce resources to be employed to their particular ends. So the moral question in any political philosophy is who has the right to what resources and why? Who has the right to control what resources to their particular ends and why?

Dennis: And how do you answer that?

Logan: So are you familiar with argumentation ethics?

Dennis: No, go right ahead.

Logan: Okay, so argumentation ethics is basically the argument proposed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who is Murray Rothbard’s protégé, and Murray Rothbard was Ludwig von Mises’ protégé. And he basically says, in order to determine who has what property rights, notice what you’re assuming in the very argument of the conversation of who has a right to what. In other words, I’m talking to you, Dennis. I’m assuming that I own my body and whatever scarce resources I need in order to convince you of my argument. And also, I’m assuming that you own your body and whatever resources you need in order to hear my argument. So just in the very act of arguing over property rights, I’m presuming a private property norm.

Dennis: So basically, this is the thing where you smuggle in, in argumentation ethics, you’re not supposed to smuggle in some tacit assumptions. You have to state the axioms clearly. Am I understanding that correctly?

Logan: You’re stating the axioms that you are presupposing by the very fact that you’re arguing in the first place. Yes, you’re stating them explicitly.

Dennis: So according to the principle, somebody who’s talking about property would need to explicitly state what he means by property, and, and that he assumes that it exists and that you have it and that he has it and so forth.

Logan: Well, he doesn’t have to, but the point is anyone, like, if someone’s up there arguing for communism, he is implicitly, the fact that he is employing his body and whatever, a microphone, whatever, to, to speak his message, he is presuming that he owns his body. In other words, if I went to try to stop him from spreading his message, presumably he would resist, thus implying that he thinks he has a right to his body rather than me having a right to his body.

So the argumentation ethics is one way of tackling the issue of why the libertarian private property ethic is the most consistent one. The other one is just to consider the alternatives and realize that they all fall apart. So the alternative to basically you own your body and whatever scarce resources that you homestead before anyone else, to use John Locke’s phrase, to mix your labor with the land, the alternative would be, okay, some future person has the right to whatever you’ve homesteaded.

But that would just mean, first of all, it’s arbitrary. So in other words, do we wait for all future comers? Because that means civilization would collapse. If all future comers have a right to whatever you, Dennis, have homesteaded or have created or whatever, or your body, then no one could do anything.

Right. So that can’t work. And then the alternative would be just one person arbitrarily after you has a right, but that means you’re a slave. And again, that’s arbitrary. It’s easy to vary, to use a Deutschian phrase.

Dennis: When we speak of voluntaryism, what does society look like? I mean, you said before there would be no government and people would simply interact voluntarily. Now, I would imagine that upon hearing this for the first time, most people’s alarms would go off and they’d go, this couldn’t possibly work. You have to have a government for some things. But I think you disagree with that.

Logan: Yeah, the first thing I would say is for which things?

Dennis: Right. Okay, so let’s say I think it is widely accepted to a greater extent in Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States that, for example, health care is something that the government needs to provide because, so they say, a free market doesn’t create the right incentives for, a free market cannot automatically provide this, or not as well as a government could.

Logan: So it’s important to remember that governments are composed of fallible people, just like the free market is. So the question is really, in general, how do prices fall in principle and how does quality of any service or product rise over time? That’s always what we have to, because again, it goes back to the fact that wealth was, in other words, thousands of years ago, there was even no such thing as health insurance or health care to begin with. So why did those things emerge in the first place? Because people wanted to solve problems.

So to say that, okay, therefore there should be a group of people who steal wealth in order to provide this one particular service, in other words, if they can do that, if the government can provide health care and health insurance better than voluntary counterparts, why stop there? I mean, people need shoes, too, and food. Why doesn’t the government just provide all these things if they can do it better than free market counterparts?

And finally, this is a point that I think people don’t often appreciate, is that, who was it who said, you always have to remember the seen versus the unseen. I think this was Frédéric Bastiat. Basically, even if the government somehow provided health care for people, which, by the way, will always be inferior to what free people could provide, but even when they do that, they are employing scarce resources or wealth to do so. And we just don’t know what that wealth would have been directed towards had the government not stolen in the first place. In other words, it’s not obvious that everyone necessarily values health care all at the—primarily over the other things they want to achieve in life.

So wealth, ironically, at any point in time, wealth is finite. But in the long run, wealth can potentially grow to infinity. And a lot of sort of economic creationist types or left-wing types and even sometimes conservatives, they seem to think almost the opposite, that wealth can’t grow in the long run. But at the same time, there’s no concept of tradeoffs in the here and now.

Dennis: So, yeah, you raise several important points there, I think. The first one I want to address is you said that, you know, if the government allegedly is so great at providing health care, why don’t they also provide clothing and why don’t they also provide food? Well, a Marxist would agree. They would say, yeah, the government should provide that.

Logan: So what shouldn’t the government provide and why?

Dennis: I would imagine the Marxist would say there’s nothing the government shouldn’t provide. Everything should be controlled and they would think that that’s a good idea.

Logan: So how would the government know what quantity of each service and good the government should provide? How does the government determine that? Because the government also deals in a world of scarcity. So the government has stolen a bunch of wealth. Well, I guess the first thing I would ask the Marxists is, how did the government acquire all this wealth in the first place? Like, what is the source of that wealth? But let’s put that aside.

Okay, the government has taken all of these resources from free people, and now the government’s in charge. No one’s allowed to compete with the government, and now the government has all the resources required to provide healthcare, clothes, and food for people. Okay, how does the government determine then what quantity and what quality of each of those services to provide to which people? Because all individual people will have different desires for all of these things.

Dennis: Right. So I’m guessing what you’re alluding to here is that the free market has mechanisms of determining that and the government does not.

Logan: I’m sort of hinting at the economic calculation problem, yes. But to be honest, as I worked my way towards that argument, I realized there were all those other problems that I just skipped over. But I guess when it comes to arguing with an economic creationist, you do sort of have to take it one step at a time. But to go back now, shouldn’t it give the economic creationist pause to say, like, in other words, I think a lot of this also boils down to people just don’t recognize the nature of the government.

And this is very much a Murray Rothbard idea, which is you have to recognize that all governments acquire revenue coercively, meaning they’re stealing it from other people. Now, I understand people say that sounds extreme, whatever. How can you say taxation is theft, blah, blah, blah. But just look at what it is. People own resources, and the government, individuals in the government, take the resources away from them at the threat of violence, in other words, coercively.

So one question you could ask a Marxist is, how did those people, create that wealth in the first place? And if the, if the Marxist says, well, they just had it, like, they, then they’re just creationists. Then they think wealth is just a given, and it can, and it’s just there. But, but the truth is it has to be created over time.

Dennis: Right. So let’s clarify what you mean by economic creationism, then.

Logan: Sure. Yeah, I basically just mean an economic creationist, roughly speaking, thinks that wealth and also the spontaneous order of society is in fact not spontaneous, but requires a top-down ruler in order to organize society. So an economic creationist, in other words, thinks that without a government, there would be complete chaos in the streets, or maybe there wouldn’t even be streets, and that there wouldn’t be any rules, which is also false, and that poor people would starve to death and rich people would just plunder everyone else and companies would take over and society would collapse, basically.

So I analogize it to biological creationism, because many of the arguments are perfectly analogous. Basically, a biological creationist cannot fathom that the spontaneous order we see in the biosphere is in fact the result of variation and selection over many, many generations.

Similarly, the spontaneous order we see in economics at all stages of the economy are just the result of individuals acting locally in their own life, in their own environment, responding to incentives, pursuing goals, acting in their own self-interest, and out of that emerges a collective, spontaneous, unplanned order. And in fact, when you try to impose a top-down order, you end up creating more problems than you solve.

Dennis: Right. So this reminds me of Popper’s criticism of Lamarckism and also Deutsch’s criticism of creationism, because, so, Lamarckism is the idea that complex adaptations can arise through disuse and use of adaptations that were already there beforehand. So, for example, giraffes grow longer necks because a giraffe’s ancestors stretched their necks a little bit to get to the leaves that were on branches that were higher up. And so this is an acquired characteristic that giraffes allegedly acquired during their lifetime, and then this is a change that they pass on to their offspring. But the problem with that idea is that there must have already been knowledge in the giraffe that allowed it to stretch its neck.

So then where does that knowledge come from? So Lamarckism just kicks the can down the road. It doesn’t explain the thing that it set out to explain. It doesn’t, it doesn’t actually explain the appearance of design in the biosphere, because it itself relies on, design to already have existed in the biosphere. So, what Deutsch then does is he likens this to creationism. There’s really not that much of a difference, because creationism likewise denies knowledge creation, because it says that all the knowledge that was created was created by a designer without answering where the knowledge in that designer came from. So both kind of just kick the can down the road.

And correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds to me like economic creationism is just the same. And this relates to the fixed pie misconception too, maybe, where you say, well, the wealth was somehow already there. We don’t have to explain how it’s created. But the correct explanation for how it is created would be evolution. Because wealth, as I understand it, is a result of knowledge creation. You can’t create wealth without creating knowledge first. And knowledge is only created through evolution. And if you try to impose regulations on evolution, the thing will either perform worse or it will break apart. Am I understanding that correctly?

Logan: Yes, that’s definitely right. And you’re right. It is connected to the fixed pie fallacy. And it is connected also to, you sort of touched on this, the very concept of governmental regulations. And I have another example, so don’t let me forget. But with respect to regulations, that’s a big one for people. They just can’t fathom that the free market is self-regulating, by which I mean the fact that consumers make free choices, the fact that competition is a great regulator. They just can’t stomach that. And they say, no, there has to be some black box that we call a government that just imposes these fiat regulations, and then we’ll have order.

Whereas the reality is you have things called regulatory capture, which basically increases inequality for those who care about inequality, because you raise the cost to entry in a particular field, and it slows innovation, and just all of these negative effects that the idea that government regulators, and they’re also much more corruptible than their free market counterparts, because it’s much more difficult to be fired when you’re working in government.

But again, it’s just like you throw all these arguments at an economic creationist and they just can’t swallow the fact that, again, it’s really similar. It’s like they can’t swallow the fact that there is no Big Brother in the sky who can solve our problems, just like a biological creationist, and I understand I’m psychologizing a little bit, but they just can’t swallow that you don’t need a designer for all of the design to have evolved in the biosphere.

And to get to my other example that I thought of, an economic creationist, I think, would see it as a good thing if the government passed a law saying you shouldn’t be allowed to racially discriminate or you, whatever it is, you shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate according to sexuality. Or even some of them might, honestly, at this point, given current events, they might be happy with legislation that says you’re not allowed to be prejudiced against people or whatever.

And putting aside whether that’s even morally justified, just economically, you cannot impose a law and then expect everyone’s minds to just change accordingly. It’s kind of the opposite. Like, gay marriage was the opposite. First, the culture evolved. People stopped caring about gay marriage. And then suddenly politicians said, you know what, I’m hip to this gay marriage thing. But that’s only because it benefited them in terms of their political careers. So you can’t just pass a law and have the culture follow suit. Or if it does try to follow suit, it’ll be riddled with conflicts because people don’t have the ideas to which the law corresponds. Does that make sense?

Dennis: It does. It reminds, this, this hypocrisy about gay marriage and politicians reminds me of how Obama reacted to the whole thing, because if I recall correctly, when he was first elected, he was against gay marriage.

Logan: Correct.

Dennis: Because of conservative values that he upheld, which I think is actually fine. I mean, I’m in favor of gay marriage, I don’t care, but I think it’s okay for someone to be against gay marriage too. But he later celebrated gay marriage, so much so that it seemed disingenuous. It seemed like he was trying to pass it off as always having been in favor of it, because he then stood to gain from it politically. Whereas before he stood to gain from denying gays the right to get married.

Logan: Yeah, it’s important to notice that he followed the culture, not the other way around.

Dennis: Right.

Logan: So this is, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe has written about this. One of the constraining forces on government is the culture around them, or the culture of their tax base, basically, because if governments behave in such a way that people don’t like them in a democracy, they’ll be voted out. And even with a monarchy, they face risk of being overthrown. So that’s one of the forces that constrains government, is the culture.

Dennis: Now, you mentioned environmentalism earlier. This strikes me as one of the things where people would say, you know what, this is one of the things that only a government can provide, protection of Mother Nature, say. And corporations simply don’t have an incentive for this long-term looking after our planet. They only want short-term profits at the expense of the environment. This is sort of the, seems to me, the widespread opinion of corporations and entrepreneurs among environmentalists. What would you say to that?

Logan: Yeah, so there are many directions to take this in, and one of them I’ve only fairly recently gotten hip to. I guess I’ll go with that one first, which really is the fact that, this one’s probably the hardest one for environmentalists to swallow, but the environment is not morally significant. People are, and basically that’s it. Maybe animals, but honestly, after reading your excellent book, I’m dubious of even that.

Dennis: Oh, you’re very kind.

Logan: No, it’s true. So that’s one thing. In other words, the environment is just a resource for people to use to fulfill their ends and to become wealthier and more knowledgeable and so forth and to prosper. So that’s one thing. Now, let’s just assume environmentalists will never accept that and have probably already written me off. Fine.

The next thing to realize is, I mean, just empirically, governments pollute far more than private companies do, if you look at the statistics on that. Like, the Soviet Union was a very polluted environment. I think the U.S. government, you’ll have to certainly check me on this, but the U.S., I think, military is far more polluting than many private companies. So that’s sort of the other something people don’t think about, is that just because there’s a problem with the free market, you don’t compare that to utopia. You have to compare it to the real world, earthly, terrestrial, fallible government. So in other words, it’s not enough to say, OK, yes, these companies are polluting. If you want to get the government involved, you have to say, well, how much is the government polluting?

OK, so that’s the second thing. The third thing is if you really want to protect the environment, you want people to become wealthier, not poorer, because the wealthier we become, the longer our time horizon becomes. In other words, the more we’re capable of thinking about the future and future problems. The technical Austrian phrase for this, by the way, is time preference. So you want to lower people’s time preference so that instead of just thinking about short-term profits and so forth, you want to think about longer-term profits. And profits really just means prosperity, but we can talk about that.

OK, so that’s, I think, the third point. The fourth point is a lot of the places where people say are being polluted are precisely those areas where people are not allowed to privatize. So you think of the oceans, you think of the atmosphere. You think of all these places or a lot of these parks that are owned by the government. Wherever it is, it tends to be places where the free market is not allowed to operate in the first place. So I think I’ll stop there, even though I think there are maybe one or two more points. But was that a satisfactory answer?

Dennis: Definitely. You raised several great points, and many of them I hadn’t thought of. One that just struck me just now is that how you said, you know, if somebody owned an ocean, say, or part of an ocean, they would have an incentive to keep it clean because that ocean is of no value to them if it’s dirty and infested.

Now you express some concern that you may lose environmentalists as they’re listening to us. I suppose what we could do in order not to lose them is we could lay out the best case for them, present their argument in such a good way that they would happily sign off on it, and then refute that. Do you think we can try that? Steelman?

Logan: Sure. So, yes. Okay, so their case would be, people are polluting the Earth, which was a pristine place before people ever arrived, and we can look at extinction rates as evidence of that. And therefore we need to minimize our impact on the Earth in order for Earth and its non-people inhabitants to prosper. Does that sound like they would accept that?

Dennis: I think they would agree with that. And one thing I would add is the Earth is a provider in their eyes, and the Earth provides resources that we require for our survival, and it’s all carefully balanced. There’s some sort of natural balance that if we step out of some sort of pre-approved realm, we might, it could get unhinged, and the balance could fall apart. And then we would all die too, including all the animals, because these resources would disappear.

Logan: Right, okay. I mean, I certainly know where you’re going with that. If I may, I would just like to say one thing that I haven’t seen presented to this environmental conversation, which is, okay, from the environmentalist perspective, let’s just say all of that is true. Even they would agree, okay, let’s say all humans died tomorrow, maybe they’re happy about that, maybe they’re not, they would still probably admit that the sun will explode and cause all extinction. Do you think they’d agree to that?

Dennis: It’s, it’s a scientific fact as I, as I know it, so yeah, I think they would have to.

Logan: Well, we know they love science. That’s what I’m saying, so that they would accept that as well.

Dennis: Right, right.

Logan: Okay, given that, what are the only entities on Earth currently that can possibly, in principle, either prevent that from happening, happening, or migrating all the living creatures on Earth now to another, habitat in which they will be safe from the sun’s explosion?

Dennis: Right. Yeah, it’s only people that can do that.

Logan: Right, only people. So what would they say to that?

Dennis: Yeah, it would be very difficult for biological adaptation to arise that could leave the planet Earth.

Logan: Right, exactly. And yet, but, but people can create the explanatory knowledge and the wealth that will be required in order to pull an interstellar Noah’s Ark. Or would they just deny that that’s possible?

Dennis: I don’t think they would deny that it’s possible. They might say, okay, but to get there, you’d have to exploit Earth’s resources so much that you’re defeating the purpose.

Logan: But it’s either that, there’s no utopia, it’s either that or all animals go extinct when the sun explodes.

Dennis: Right. So what I worry is that in the eyes of the environmentalist, we’re all doomed anyway. And I actually don’t know if I’m doing them justice here anymore, if I say it that way. They might disagree with that, but I do get a general, fairly pessimistic sense from environmentalists, sort of progress denial, growth denial, or at least opposition to growth and prosperity, on the grounds that prosperity is theft from the Earth, that kind of idea.

But I think you made an excellent point that it’s only people that could create any knowledge. What I would add to that too is only people can even know what counts as a resource. This isn’t magically provided by the environment. So whether, let’s say, a dry plain is a resource to you depends on your knowledge of how to make fire. It’s either a death sentence, or if you know how to rub sticks together, then it can hold you over for the night. So the Earth doesn’t magically induce resources or knowledge. It’s just raw material. And whether you make something with it or not, that depends on people.

Something else I think environmentalists say is that it’s impossible to have infinite economic growth in a finite system. Is that something you agree with?

Logan: It’s impossible to have infinite economic growth on a finite system. Like the planet Earth as a self-enclosed system. Well, that’s actually a subtler question than it seems. I mean, certainly it’s possible. I mean, again, wealth is open-ended. I think the answer is yes, you can have infinite growth.

Dennis: Yeah, because you can keep innovating.

Logan: But the question is, at some point, will you in principle require resources beyond Earth? I’m actually not sure. My guess is you would still be able to have infinite growth on Earth because you could always end up simulating and becoming artificial intelligence in a digital environment or something like that. But certainly it’s not just the fixed pie that environmentalists conceive of.

Dennis: Right, I agree. Yeah, innovating our way out of it, that seems to me the general answer to that problem. And I agree. I do think that infinite progress is possible, because that resources are finite is just another assumption that they sort of smuggle in, I think. Resources, how many resources you have depends on the knowledge you have of what you can do with them. And then you can go into more innovation, you can recycle, then you can reuse things. So there doesn’t have to be an end to that.

Logan: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I will say the reason why I answered the way I did with only people can prevent extinction in the long run is because, and this is a strategy that my man, Scott Horton, not my man, I’m not friends with him, but he’s a hero of mine, head of the Libertarian Institute. He says, when you’re arguing with people, you don’t want to rob them of their identity.

So I, obviously I agree with almost every, or I think everything you said, but in other words, you don’t want to rob the environmentalist of his or her, goal or end of saving the Earth and its creatures, as it were. So you want to say, okay, I hear you, you want to save all of these creatures that might not even be conscious, but whatever. Okay, the only people, the only entities that can do that are people.

Dennis: Yep. Yeah, exactly. Right. No, I agree. It’s a powerful point to say, I grant what you’re trying to do, but by your own logic, if that’s what you want to achieve, you have to elevate the status of people from a virus to benefactor.

Logan: Exactly. Exactly.

Dennis: Now, in a voluntarist society, again, I think that this breaks with many people’s intuition, just having grown up in a non-voluntarist society or largely non-voluntarist society. Actually, before I get to that, here’s a question for you. How voluntarist is our society right now? It’s not completely non-voluntarist, is it?

Logan: Yeah, that’s a great question. And fortunately for—well, fortunately because peace is good, but also fortunately for my argument, I get to say to people in the West, you already live like an anarcho-capitalist. Or I usually say you already live like a libertarian. I’m just saying let’s take those principles and universalize them. So yeah, to your point, in Western societies, we pretty much, for the most part, already live with the non-aggression principle and private property rights, at least as implicit knowledge in the back of our minds, as it were.

So if I come over and I say, let’s go to dinner, and we get dinner, and I say, hey, let’s, dine and dash, so let’s leave without paying, you would say, no, the, we basically, traded with the restaurant, saying we’ll eat your food and in return we’ll pay for it, so no, Logan, that’s immoral, how could you do that? You know what I mean? So we’ve already internalized these concepts that Austrian economics and private, private property ethics makes explicit. So that’s the good news. So I get to say that to people.

Now, that’s not true everywhere in the world. So you have what’s called anarcho-tyranny, which is basically just non-governmental, but still significant enough to be labeled as tyrannical forces in certain cultures. So, well, I shouldn’t give examples because I don’t know enough, but certainly the non-aggression principle is not universally respected in a lot of other societies. Now, also, we have private criminals in the West, so thieves, rapists, murderers, and so forth, but we recognize them as such and regard them as such, which is a very good thing. Although I don’t think we should necessarily be throwing them in cages, but that’s a whole other discussion.

So yeah, so that’s the good news and that’s the optimistic note. So in other words, have you ever heard the argument? I forget which of the sort of, there were the four horsemen of the new atheist movement. One of them would always make the argument, I forget which, saying he would argue with a priest or whatever and say, look, we’re both atheists with respect to a thousand gods. I just take it one god further. You can make a very similar argument with libertarianism, saying, look, we’re all libertarians when it comes to our private lives. I just take it one organization further and say, no, this organization does not get to live according to special principles. They also are just people and so should acquire revenue as the rest of us do, namely voluntarily and creatively.

Dennis: Right. I think that might have been either Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins. I forget. But yeah, it’s a great argument. But then if you live in a voluntary society, so by definition, you don’t have a government, who writes the law? What does it even mean to have a law if you don’t have a government?

Logan: Sure. So first of all, there still could be governments or at least institutions that act as governments in some capacity. They would just be voluntarily paid for. But even just saying that already raises the, you start to realize just how creative people can be when solving problems, when you don’t have the threat of violence in your back pocket. So there are all sorts of formations, and many things have been written about this.

For example, you could live in a community in which you agree to live there in the residential area, let’s say, and when you sign as a contract to live there, you accept certain parts of the package, which might include a set of laws that you have to abide by, or else here are the consequences. Alternatively, there would be, let’s say, private courts and private security agencies that you could hire that themselves have contracts between them. There are basically, there’s an infinite number of arrangements.

And by the way, I think the distinction between laws and rules might not survive in a voluntary society, because we already live according to nongovernmental rules. For example, to go back to the restaurant, there are all sorts, like when you go into a restaurant, it might have a sign that says no flip-flops, for example. So you walk in with flip-flops, they own the restaurant, so they have a right to tell you, you have to leave because you’re not respecting the rules here.

Similarly, this, by the way, this connects to the whole freedom of speech argument. There’s no such thing as freedom of speech. All rights are private property rights. We can value speech, but it’s not a right. We have to be very careful about this. So if I come into your house, you might value free speech in the sense of you want to have an open discussion where we can say whatever we want. But maybe I start insulting you or insulting your family or whatever. And you say, hey, Logan, if you do that one more time, you have to leave. And the fact is, if I don’t leave, I’m violating your private property rights.

So I suspect it could be that the very notion of law, and in other words, laws and rules would become unified under some other concept. But yeah, it’s, again, we already have, it’s funny, anytime someone, law is certainly one of sort of the last stops of people who are suspicious of anarchy. But in almost every case, when someone says, but how would X be achieved in an anarcho-capitalist society? It already happens somewhere. So I know I gave sort of a broad answer. I didn’t get into the specifics, but was that satisfactory at all?

Dennis: That’s fine. That’s great. So one thing you and I have spoken about privately is this, because I had my own quibbles where, where violated my intuitions about this topic, when it comes to defending yourself from violence, where currently the government provides the service called the police. Now, if somebody broke into your, in a voluntary society, if somebody broke into your home and tried to steal something, either with you there or you were absent or whatever. In a voluntary society, who would you call?

Logan: So again, there are a number of options. One is that wherever you live, it could already have a defense agency that it hires for services. So for example, when you go to a hotel, who do you call if someone breaks into your room?

Dennis: Right, management.

Logan: Right, exactly. And so there could be that sort of system. We should never discount just personal protection, which, again, I don’t watch real TV anymore, but I remember there would be commercials for home security services. So in other words, there are all these services and literally an infinite number. I know I’m giving that generic answer again, my apologies. But so yeah, you would call either some private agency that the residential area has a relationship with, or maybe you hired your own private security, or you yourself are armed, or you have home security. Yeah, I think those are basically the options I can think of off the top of my head.

By the way, it’s important to realize right now the cops are so dysfunctional, right now I mean in America, that from what I’ve seen, some of them are literally standing down as their cities are burning, while others are tyrannizing peaceful people. So again, we have to never compare the voluntarist solution to utopia, but always to what the state provides. And by the way, just another example that I heard recently on the Tom Woods podcast is that in Mexico, the police are so corrupt and inefficient that store owners just went out of their way to hire private alternatives anyway.

So you see this a lot also, that people say, oh, but how would this work in the free market? And then the government comes along, provides something so badly that people turn to private alternatives anyway. So you see this with the court system, for example. So that’s another big block for people, is that, oh, but how would courts work? But the fact is, people often turn to private courts now because the public courts are so inefficient.

Dennis: In other words, there would be a free market incentive for a private security company to protect you from violence because their business depends on it. And if they can’t hire any more, if they can’t get any more clients, they can’t pay their rent.

Logan: Yes. So never, for, always remember the power of reputational value. So, yes, so either if you go live in a residential area, that residential area wants to be known as safe and protective of its residents, for one. And then for the other, from the security agency’s perspective, they want to be known as an agency that not only protects you, but also de-escalates conflict rather than is known to be, as the police are now, unfortunately, kind of known for executing innocent people. So the incentives are almost exactly backwards from the U.S. police, to take a current example.

Dennis: Yeah, and it reminds me of something you told me, I think, which is because the government secures its means by, or secures its resources by violent means, there is no accountability, or much less accountability than if they were competing with everybody else. So if you have a police force that is corrupt, I mean, you could fire some policemen maybe, but it would be very difficult. You have to increase public pressure on them tremendously for that to happen. A government could equally well say, yeah, we’re not going to do anything. Just live with it. I mean, what are you going to do?

Right. Now, in a democratic society, you could maybe sue the government and an independent court could rule that they should make some changes. But in other societies, you just couldn’t do anything about it. Whereas in a voluntary society, police have an incentive not to be corrupt, because if their reputation is damaged as being corrupt, they don’t get any more business. They have to secure their resources in a competitive market. They can’t just steal money from people through taxation like they do now. So somewhat ironically, actually, the people who are protesting police violence now, correctly, I think, who associate with the left, should actually be much more in favor of voluntarist ideas, because private security companies would probably work better than state-owned police.

Logan: Yeah, it’s funny, they almost are. I mean, it’s so funny, sometimes the left, they see the government as such a problem, and occasionally they get to the right solution, which is, let’s just do our own thing, effectively. But then they kind of forget that a minute later and go back to wanting a big government. But yeah, when it comes to the cops, you hear some of them saying defund the police and so forth, and that they want to police themselves. And it’s like, okay, now let’s keep going. How about you can police yourselves and other people are allowed to, compete for your services?

In other words, I think another thing you want to ask creationists is, would it be better if people had more choices or fewer choices? Because with the government, you only have one choice, and it’s not even, even calling it a choice is kind of a misnomer. I mean, you can leave, so there’s that choice, but you don’t have a choice. I mean, just imagine if Microsoft, if you had, if everyone had to buy a computer from, does Microsoft sell computers? I have no idea.

Dennis: They sell operating systems.

Logan: Okay. Let’s say you could only buy operating systems from Microsoft. Do you think the prices would go down or up? And do you think the quality would go up or down? So now just apply that to everything the government provides.

Dennis: Right. Right. Yeah. If you had a choice when it comes to police, the government would have to do a much better job of providing value.

Logan: Absolutely. And on top of that, it’s even worse, because not only are the cops public, but they’re backing public laws, which themselves are in just grotesque violation of the non-aggression principle. So anything from the war on drugs to enforcing all sorts of minimum wage laws and regulations and all this stuff, it’s just atrocious. I mean, the war on drugs in particular, to me, is such a tragedy because it’s just so obviously unnecessary, even to someone who doesn’t necessarily understand economics.

Well, I guess it’s not obvious, but it’s just, it’s another problem. So, for example, you hear people say abolish private prisons and so forth. The problem is not the prisons are private. The problem is that the prisons that are private are backed by public laws.

Dennis: Right. There is unfair advantage, institutionalized advantage.

Logan: Yeah, exactly. And by the way, because the costs are decentralized and distributed, that’s why you get such inefficient and evil laws, such as, anti-drug laws. So in a private society, and by, again, by private I mean anarchistic, I mean voluntarist, these are all synonymous, to live in a society, I mean, you could live in a communal or something that, let’s say, has a strict drug policy. But the truth is, if they are on top, so let’s say that you sign up to live in a residential area that says, we don’t tolerate drug use. Okay, that’s one thing, and, you know, that’s perfectly reasonable.

And then it says, by the way, if we catch you doing drugs, we have a prison system. So we’re going to take you against your will and throw you in a cage. Now, I think that actually would be, in terms of the non-aggression principle, roughly correct, although we could get into, like, punishment under anarcho-capitalism. But it’s so much more, it’s so much costlier to do that rather than just say you get kicked out, that I think anarchic societies would tend towards just kicking you out rather than paying for all this prison and then basically keeping you like an animal and having to feed you and all this very inhumane treatment. You see what I’m saying?

Dennis: Absolutely. There’s that. And there’s also the fact that if you have choices, you would never choose a community to live in that threatens to throw you in a cage if you don’t do exactly what they say. You would prefer other communities. So communities would have an incentive not to throw people in cages for petty crimes.

Logan: Yeah, exactly. They’d go out of business. And by the way, I should say, I’m pretty sure, I haven’t read or thought about this in a while, but there is, like, there’s a lot of theory about, like, proper punishment under libertarian natural law and stuff. And I think actually that even that would violate that. But putting that aside, yeah, to your point, basically everything is in competition under voluntary conditions, even if they’re not necessarily for profit, as it were. Like, even charities are under competition, you know. So to the extent that residential areas are under competition, yeah, the ones that don’t have cages will out-compete those that do, if only because they’re cheaper to run.

Dennis: Now, let’s actually linger on the point of punishment a little bit, because prisons strike me as another one of those areas that people might bring up as problematic in a voluntarist society. So my concern there is, if you have prisons that are private, wouldn’t the prisons then have an incentive to keep their prisoners for as long as possible? So wouldn’t there be pressure to criminalize many things that wouldn’t normally be criminal, and to prosecute heavily petty crimes, say? And so you’d have unreasonably harsh sentences for, you know, petty crimes, because prisons want to keep prisoners for as long as possible.

Logan: I don’t think so, because again, these prisons, and I, it’s funny, because freedom requires diversity, and often the people arguing against everything I’m saying would call me racist. So these prisons have to go in business with places, with things like private police forces and residential areas and commercial sectors and everything else.

So those prisons that eagerly want to take petty criminals and keep them in their cages for a long time, first of all, their costs are going to be higher than other prisons, so they’re going to ask for more money in their contracts. And secondly, they have to deal with people. So the question is, what would people prefer? Do people want to conduct business with other companies who in turn are knowingly putting petty criminals in cages for a long time? I don’t think so.

Dennis: I agree. Now, just to play devil’s advocate, you could have, you know, a wannabe totalitarian guy who does like these kinds of businesses very much. And let’s say he has a lot of money, so he doesn’t mind spending more money on a prison just like that.

Logan: Sure. I think we have those types of people now. They’re called Antifa. So, so this is part of the point, is that there are no anarchists, and by anarchist, I mean anarcho-capitalist, not these people in wherever they are, in Portland or whatever, near and closer to you. There’s, you know, for, for at least a long time, we will have people in society who want power, who want to be criminals, who are evil, who will do bad things. The question is not, how do we get to a place where no one desires any of these? Although, you know, maybe that’s further in the future.

The question is, should we therefore have one organization that acquires its revenue through violence? And the answer is no, if only because, remember, those same people that we’re concerned about could then take over the government, and I would argue have in many instances. So just having this institution that can be taken over by these criminals is not an answer to how do we deal with these criminals. In fact, you don’t want such a power source. Why is that?

Dennis: Because there’s a risk of abuse.

Logan: Exactly. And they could take it over.

Dennis: Right. Okay. Now, one of the, maybe the last quibble, just to play devil’s advocate, is if the free market is important, and we say that having a choice is important, that that is sort of one of the regulating, the self-regulating factors in a free market economy, that people have a choice as to what services they want to choose. What can happen, though, in a free market is monopolies can emerge.

And once you have a monopoly, now I’m way, by the way, this entire conversation, because I don’t know much about economics, I’m way out of my wheelhouse here, but my guess is, or my rough understanding is that once you have a monopoly, first of all, it can, even before you have it, it can freely emerge from a free market society. Maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe this is actually because of government. You can tell me that. But once you have it, it’s notoriously hard to get rid of. And you need someone to step in because it’s very uncomfortable for a free market to have a monopoly. Where am I wrong in these assertions?

Logan: Yeah, so you hit on a lot of the sort of common falsehoods already. So I think your intuitions are rather free market, certainly at this point. But, yeah, so the first thing to notice or to recognize is that the vast majority of government programs benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else when it comes to these quote-unquote monopolies, because there are no such thing, except, although the government is the largest monopoly, but that’s another point.

Whether it’s regulations or subsidies, these are both government policies that benefit big companies at the expense of potential competitors. As I said earlier in the conversation, government regulations just raise the barrier to entry, making it harder for, and by the way, this is why, very often in history you see big companies lobby to the government for regulations. It’s not because out of their, out of the kindness of their heart. It’s because they, it makes it harder for competitors to compete with them. And so then you get more monopolistic tendencies by these big companies, so then they’re able to raise their prices because no one’s going to compete.

And then when it comes to also, yeah, they often get subsidies, and they end up actually, if you look at a lot of companies, so they end up diverting a lot of their resources into politics, unfortunately, rather than investing in their own improvement, because they know that if they can buy off politicians, it benefits them. So that’s one thing.

The other thing is that in order to break up a monopoly, you want the free market, because you want new competition, you want innovation that overtakes them. I mean, just look what happened, you know, from Blockbuster to Netflix to whatever’s happening now. You know, the list is endless, practically, of innovations that take down big companies that people thought would be here forever. So this is kind of a psychological fallacy, that people just get used to what’s happening now, and they can’t, because the future of knowledge is unpredictable, people can’t fathom what’s going to happen in the future.

And finally, I should say, even two things. One is that even if there are no visible competitors of a big company at the moment, their prices are still constrained by the concern that there could arise a competitor. And also, I should say, there’s really no such thing as a free market monopoly, because to the extent that they raise their prices and people still pay, it means it’s still worth it to the consumer.

And then you could say, okay, but what if the company restricts their production, and so they reduce supply, and that in turn raises price. But the point is, remember, at any point in time, there are tradeoffs. So those resources that they restricted will be diverted into other lines of production. So that means there’s more available to people in other products or services.

So the economy is this very malleable, flexible thing, and we always have to remember that it’s very intricately related and interconnected, which is kind of one of the reasons you don’t want a top-down sort of economic creationist machine in the first place, is because it never takes into account all these little intricacies, such as the one I just raised, which I think people don’t recognize often enough, is that when a company restricts the production of its products and services, that means those intermediary goods will be used to create consumer goods in other lines.

Dennis: Yeah, what I’m wondering, though, is, maybe you’ve already said it, and I just haven’t fully digested it yet, but basically what I’m wondering is, couldn’t there, from a, let’s say we’ve achieved this. We now live in a voluntarist society. Of course, it’s not a utopian state, because problems are inevitable, as David Deutsch says. But it’s a better state than it is now, say. Let’s say it was worth it. So everybody voluntarily cooperates. We would probably see rapid wealth creation, rapid progress, say.

Could it ever happen through a glitch in this voluntarist system, that maybe is just inherent in the setup, in the way it works, that you could have a monopoly emerging from it through no fault of anyone in particular? So this doesn’t even have to be some evil corporation. It could just be, you know, maybe it’s a, yeah, maybe it’s inherent in the logic of how markets evolve that something like this can happen. And then once you have such a monopoly, maybe the incentives are set up in such a way that they work against people.

So let’s say, I’m making this up, and so let’s say you, let’s say a company like Microsoft in a voluntary society crystallizes as the monopoly on operating systems. And this is because, say, all the other companies were just bad at, you know, housekeeping, and they, they hemorrhaged money, they all went bankrupt. Microsoft is the only one that’s left, and Microsoft holds all the important patents. They own the entire infrastructure.

Now, you could say, nothing’s stopping anyone else from inventing another operating system. But what if Microsoft owns the infrastructure and owns all the technology you would require to do that? So any computer you would want to buy, you have to buy a Microsoft computer or a computer that runs Microsoft operating system on it, because all the hardware manufacturers are contractually obligated to, to run only Microsoft operating systems. You get what I mean? Like, couldn’t there be, couldn’t a state of monopoly naturally arise out of a voluntarist society?

Logan: Two things. One, how many people are there on Earth? Eight billion?

Dennis: Sure.

Logan: So there are already eight billion monopolies, and civilization hasn’t exploded. That’s the first thing. In other words, we all have a monopoly on whatever we own. Second of all, to your example, if the laws of physics don’t forbid some alternative creation, then we’re fine. In other words, even limiting yourself to operational systems and whatever, that still does not preclude, alternatives to that that aren’t even operating systems. It could be something better.

So in other words, let’s just take your example but make it Coca-Cola instead. But let’s say someone comes along and invents a pill that people prefer, for whatever reason, rather than Coca-Cola, and in fact it supplants not only Coca-Cola but the entire food industry. And then you can make the same argument, like, oh, now the pill, pills have taken over. But you see what I’m saying? You end up just kind of chasing this innovative dragon that can never be stopped so long as people continue to be creative. So it’s not just operating systems competing with operating systems. It’s all products and services competing with all products and services.

Dennis: Got it. So I guess the question would then be, could it ever happen that in a voluntarist free market society, a state emerges in which people are less creative than they would be in a non-voluntary society?

Logan: I mean, culture in some sense is independent of government, by which I mean people can make moral progress or regress morally independent of whether the government shrinks or grows, sure. But that doesn’t answer the question of how big should the institution that is predicated on violence be, and that answer is zero.

Dennis: Yeah, I agree. Yeah, this brings me to the next topic I wanted to go over with you, which is even if, let’s say we grant, to go back to the example of services that are traditionally provided by the government, say health care and police and so forth. Even if, say, it was universally recognized, and we had a good explanation for why indeed it is that a government could provide those services better than a free market ever could, that’s only talking about the outcome. That’s not talking about what you just said, which is the means and the immorality of those means that it takes to get there. Even if you can achieve a better outcome, if you achieve it through theft, you still shouldn’t do it. It’s not right. It’s still the wrong thing to do.

Logan: Yeah, I mean, and also, to go back to the point I made earlier about the seen versus the unseen, if you achieve something by theft, it implies that you’re taking resources that could have gone elsewhere. So it’s still not even clear. I mean, first of all, you can’t coerce your way to a wealthier society. That’s kind of, an Austrian slash constructor-theoretic principle. And so that’s kind of your, the hypothetical you presented is almost like saying, well, if we could go faster than the speed of light, blah, blah, blah. It’s impossible.

Dennis: Yeah.

Logan: So if I constructed a giant government and I saved the child’s life with all of the resources I had, that’s not exactly the whole picture, because we have to resort to counterfactuals. Namely, what would that wealth have done for people had all of the interactions with it been voluntary?

Dennis: Yeah. So I completely, I completely agree with you that it would need to be a counterfactual.

But let’s say, given that the government can provide health care better than the free market can, even if it was given, would you agree that it would still be immoral for the government to do so?

Logan: That definitely breaks my brain a little bit, because I know that it’s praxeologically impossible. Let me think about this. So, but if, so, like, if we could have a totalitarian government and it didn’t ruin people’s lives but made them better than they would be under freedom, I, I guess…

Dennis: Maybe it breaks your brain less if we remove it from government and economics and just ask, because it strikes me as a special case of the more general question: do the ends ever justify the means?

Logan: No, I don’t think so.

Dennis: I agree. Yeah, I agree. So in this particular case, the ends are better health care and the means are theft from peaceful people.

Logan: Yeah, I agree. I don’t think the, even if you can save people from cancer that way, because also now you’ve set the precedent that this government can basically do whatever it wants whenever it wants. So yeah, I agree with you. I just, you know, I can’t get the praxeology out of my head, man.

Dennis: So what is praxeology, by the way?

Logan: Yeah, so praxeology is basically, as I said, it’s the science of people action. I guess I didn’t say that. But Austrian economics is basically the subset of praxeology that applies to all of the most interesting problems in economics. So I use them more or less interchangeably. So praxeology, unfortunately, is a bit technical sounding. So I think when you hear, like, popular commentators talking about this sort of stuff, they’ll usually say Austrian economics. But then when it comes to explaining why they subscribe to the Austrian school rather than, let’s say, the Chicago school or the Marxist school, that’s when probably they’ll start talking about praxeology. So it’s everything you can deduce from the action axiom.

Dennis: Okay. So something that strikes me as curious is that the American left likes to point to Scandinavia as an example of how well socialized economies work, allegedly. Why do you think they point to Scandinavia in particular, and what is your rebuttal?

Logan: Why do they point to Scandinavia in particular? I mean, I don’t know. I’m not really much of a policy wonk, but I imagine there are particular statistics that, you know, cor—, the prosperity of Scandinavians correlates with government policies, something like that, roughly speaking. The answer really goes back to what we started off talking about, which is you have to remember wealth, we started off basically with a wealth level of zero at the dawn of civilization, a little bit more than zero, because animals in principle have some wealth, because they can cause some transformations. And then we created wealth over time. So wealth got larger and larger and larger.

Now, Scandinavia in particular, I think, is one of these countries that had free markets for a long time. And please correct me if I’m wrong, they were not really involved in the world war. So they were accumulating ever more wealth while these other countries were executing each other into less and less prosperity, into more poverty. And so, in other words, you always have to take time into account. And in fact, now I think, from what I remember, there, you have to look at their rate of increase of, prosperity or GDP or whatever, although GDP is very flawed. And so now that’s slowed down since they implemented all these big policies.

So I think, again, the left, they don’t realize that wealth is created, and that they think it’s just there, to be distributed in the best way possible. And then once that happens, there won’t be any of their usual unfalsifiable buzzwords like systemic racism and oppression and white supremacy. These things will all go away once we just rejigger the economy.

Dennis: So it sounds like basically the reason Scandinavia is well off today is because they’re still riding on a wave of prosperity that they created a while ago when they had less government regulation.

Logan: That’s exactly right. And by the way, this brings us to a more general point that might be a little controversial, but it has to do with the way Austrian economics works, which is really that you can never use data to adjudicate between economic theories, which is essentially what they’re trying to do. They’re saying, okay, Scandinavia has such and such governmental policies. They have such and such statistics that we like. Ergo, if we had those policies, we would have those statistics.

But, and really this has to do with the growth of knowledge. You can’t really quantify it in this way. In other words, the example I always use that makes it simple in people’s minds is if the United States government became communist overnight, roughly speaking, our net wealth would be the same as it is today. And yet, very obviously, it would be a lie to say, or it would be misleading to say, America is super wealthy and it’s communist, therefore communism caused this wealth.

Dennis: Right, of course.

Logan: But all analysis of statistics in economics follows that misleading logic. In other words, it’s really impossible to untether cause and effect in this way because of the growth of knowledge.

Dennis: Yeah, and it also reminds me of the fact that the same evidence can be used to support conflicting theories. So what they, what somebody who wants to argue in favor of government regulation, pointing to Scandinavia, would need to provide is a good explanation of why it is that regulation leads to prosperity. They, it’s not enough to just point at data. They would have to provide a good explanation.

But in any case, there still seems to be a distinction, though. If, if we say, okay, we have the United States of America, let’s say, as the one of the least regulated, I don’t even know if that’s true anymore, but let’s, as one of the least regulated, if not the least regulated countries in the world. Then we have something like Europe, or much of Europe, say, that strikes me as more regulated, but not communist, certainly. And most people in Europe, I don’t think, would consider their countries socialist even. And then we have something like Soviet Russia, North Korea, China today, although there’s different flavors among those countries too. But would you agree that it’s still helpful to distinguish between different shades of socialism?

Logan: Yes, I think absolutely. And I think actually some anarcho-capitalists might disagree with me and say that kind of we’re all slaves so long as we’re paying taxes. I mean, yes, I think it’s valuable to distinguish, certainly, because a smaller government is less immoral than a larger government. However, on the other hand, I do think it’s important to drive the point home that the nature of the state is that it is an organization predicated on theft at the point of murder. I do think that’s important. And I think sometimes even people in our circles kind of want to hide that fact or still speak in polite terms. But I think one of the steps towards moving to a more peaceful, prosperous society is to recognize the state for the criminal organization that it is.

Dennis: Right. I agree with you. And that is the thing, that the thing you just said about, you know, really the nature of government, that it is based on institutionalized violence against peaceful people, that is really the thing that nudged me in a more libertarian direction. Or am I using the words correctly here? Is libertarianism and voluntarism, are those the same thing?

Logan: Or, I use them synonymously. There are some so-called left libertarians, or they’re called Beltway libertarians, that would, distinguish between the two. But, I, I hope I don’t corrupt you with my terminology, but I would say they’re synonymous. Some people would say libertarian means, like, more moderate libertarian, but still statist.

Dennis: Okay. So, yeah, I think the, the thing that really brought it home for me was just asking myself what would happen if I didn’t pay taxes. Or maybe I got this somewhere, I don’t remember. But basically what would happen is it would get really uncomfortable really fast. I mean, maybe, I don’t know exactly what would happen, but first, I think, or, I don’t, I know what would happen. I don’t know the exact sequence of events, but maybe first you just get a letter urging you. But then at some point, somebody will show up at your door. And if you still refuse, and I imagine that they’re ready to take you with them against your will. And if you try to run, they will shoot you.

So that is the seriousness of the situation I think we have to confront, is that, yeah, in a sense, we are slaves, because if you don’t do, I mean, we’re not slaves in the sense that we’re forced to work, which is one of the differences perhaps between something like Europe and America versus Soviet Russia. You won’t be forced to work, but if you do work, you have to give some of it up. And if you don’t, we’re going to shoot you, basically.

Logan: Yeah, I very much agree with you that, at least, like, from a strategic perspective, that’s definitely one of the better ways to drive at least the start of a conversation. Because, you know, you get into the Austrian economics, and this is how we deduce this, that, and the other, and equilibrium, and prices, and the socialist calculation problem. Some people just aren’t interested in that. And then you try to do the argumentation ethics, and here’s private property rights, and first homestead rule, blah, blah, blah. Again, that can be a little too heady for people. But if you just say, hey, what happens if you don’t pay your taxes? I have noticed that can jolt people.

But also, fascinatingly, some people will just deny it until the cows come home. So I had a friend, I still have a friend, he’s a good friend of mine. And he just won’t admit it. Like, he knows, but he literally won’t admit it. I say, hey, what happens if you don’t pay your taxes? He goes, they send you a letter. I said, okay, and then what? He’s like, they send you a letter. Okay. And he knows. It’s like you watch them just contort to deny the truth of the situation. And it is fascinating. So, yeah, I think from a strategic perspective, that’s a very good route to go down. It’s just exposing the nature of the state.

Dennis: What I’ve been trying, and I want to get to this topic of coercion, and we’ve touched on it, but I want to zero in on a little bit. The other day, just yesterday, I think, on social media, there was a conversation about, somebody sort of took, weirdly, I think, in a weird way, took the Black Lives Matter movement, and this is a European group on social media, a German group in particular. And they said, well, shouldn’t we also have a movement here? Although there is a sort of offshoot of the Black Lives Matter movement in Europe. But there, this, I think it was a guy who was arguing, shouldn’t there be an Eastern European Lives Matter movement or something? I’m laughing out because I can’t possibly take it seriously.

But again, to try to steelman his argument, I think the best possible way I could phrase it is there is a lot of brain drain happening in Eastern Europe, and societies there suffer because of it, and their economies suffer because of it, because people come to more prosperous economies in Europe. So there seems to be a trend where people are migrating from East to West and within Europe. And so that is one problem. I think it’s a valid problem, that what you do about it is a different story. And I think the other thing they were arguing is that these people make very little money once they get to, say, Germany.

Now, I think there’s the same problem. And so then they suggested we should raise, I forget if they have minimum wage there or if they don’t, but either way, they were saying, you know, if we already have minimum wage, we should raise it for them, for Eastern Europeans in particular, or in general, I don’t know. And if we don’t have it, we should make it a law to have minimum wage. And I started discussing with them, but instead of trying to come right at it and say, I think minimum wage is a bad idea, I’m guessing you agree with me on that, I instead asked them, is anyone forcing Eastern Europeans to leave their home countries to come to Germany and work for little pay?

Of course, the answer is no. Nobody is forcing them to do this. So in other words, they’re coming to another country on their own accord. They agree voluntarily with an employer to receive the pay that they’re going to receive. And they then perform the work voluntarily, and they could leave their employer at any time. So there’s no force involved. So I said, what’s the problem?

Now, I haven’t checked my social media since, so I don’t know if I’ve actually convinced anyone, but I’m hoping that this is, it’s sort of getting at coercion in the other direction. So in the case of taxation, hopefully it opens people’s eyes in the sense of, you don’t pay your taxes, somebody will coerce you and eventually murder you. And in this case, it’s the other way around, is there is no coercion, so there is no problem. Does that make sense?

Logan: Yes. I think the uncomfortable truth that they’re not realizing is that if you want people to make more money, I mean, the other thing is you just want a wealthier society, in other words. But again, this goes to the fact they can’t imagine that wealth increases over time. That’s one thing. And so they think the only way for these people to make more money is if you just force the employers to pay them. But yes.

And then the other thing is, by the Austrian term, is just the demonstrated preference, that the fact that these people are voluntarily immigrating and taking these jobs implies that they’re better off than they would be had they not initiated that chain of events. And then, by the way, I imagine their response to all that will be that you have white privilege and you can’t understand what it’s like to be an immigrant, which I understand is ironic given that you’re an immigrant. But I imagine that’s what they’ll say.

Dennis: Yeah. To try again to steelman their argument, couldn’t they say, well, yes, they came voluntarily and their lives are better for it, but wouldn’t their lives be even better if they made more money?

Logan: Right. So if you make the minimum, if you impose a minimum wage law, you’re just pricing people out of the market whom the employers can’t afford to pay the minimum wage or above. So if someone’s only worth $8 an hour from an employee’s perspective, and the minimum wage law is $9 an hour, the employer just won’t hire them. So you’re just causing unemployment.

Or if the employer does end up hiring you, he’ll end up saving money on other decisions he makes. Like, maybe the environment of the working conditions will be worse than they would be otherwise, because he’ll save money by, let’s say, not putting in an air conditioner, or all sorts of stuff. He’ll go around it. In other words, people respond to these laws in ways that don’t necessarily benefit the intended beneficiaries of said law.

Dennis: Right, right. Yeah, you could relatively easily conceive that if you were to implement such a regulation, they would just hire fewer people, and therefore Eastern Europeans who come to Western Europe are worse off than if they didn’t have that regulation.

Logan: I agree. Yes. And by the way, I forgot this other one. With the minimum wage laws, because you end up with fewer employees, generally speaking, you’ll have less output by the company, which means the supply is lower, which means the price goes up. And who does that hurt the most? Poor people. So once again, with almost every government policy, it ends up hurting poor people the most.

Dennis: Right. Yeah. And again, I should make the same point I made earlier, is even if it were given that, yes, minimum wage led to higher prosperity, say, overall, it would still be wrong to do, because you’re doing it based on coercion, and that’s immoral. You cannot justify, let alone the fact that it leads to a worse outcome, so that makes it even harder for anyone to argue in favor of minimum wage. But even if it led to a good outcome, it would still be bad to force them.

I mean, you could take it to other examples with coercion. Let’s say you have children, and let’s say they’re teenagers, and their friends start smoking. Now, as a parent, you could force your child not to smoke. You could do this in various nefarious ways. You could check their pockets when they come home, you could check their breath, all kinds of ways they could come up with. I would agree with a parent that the child would be better off not smoking, of course, because we know the health effects of smoking. I would still disagree that the parent has any right to coerce their child into not smoking.

Logan: Yeah, and you also end up, because again, it’s not as, it’s never as simple as, now the parent’s just coercing the child and the situation’s over. Now the child might try to go around it. And before you know it, now you have basically a war in the house between the child and the parent rather than a peaceful solution.

Dennis: Right. It hurts the relationship between them. Now the child becomes distrusting of the parent, maybe, and vice versa, possibly. The child now has an incentive to lie. These are all things that we also see reflected in the economy. People still hire, let’s say, so let’s say you had a universal minimum wage, people might still hire someone for less than that minimal wage illegally. And they might do it because both the employer wants to pay less and the employee wants the job but couldn’t get it for the higher price. So they both now have an incentive to do things illegally.

And now you have the threat of the law against them. So they have to do it, you know, sort of under the hood, hope they don’t get detected, but they still want to do it anyway. It’s a very uncomfortable situation for everybody. If you just let people do things what they want to do, even if it’s bad for them, they’re going to figure it out on their own. Or if they don’t, too bad. But it is not everyone else’s job to impose what’s best for everyone.

Logan: Yes. And it’s worth noting that the famous Al Capone came to power precisely around the time when alcohol was made illegal. And even to this day, many of the violent gangs in America make their money through the black markets of whatever’s illegal.

Dennis: Yeah, and I mean, the whole reason, or maybe I should speak less confidently because I’m, again, out of my wheelhouse, but I would imagine the whole reason something like this giant black market for drugs exists in America is because drugs are illegal. I mean, people are going to do what they’re going to do, right? If somebody wants to take crystal meth, he’s going to find a way to do it, and there is a market for it, so he’s going to be able to buy it. The question is, do you want to create conditions in which he can only buy it from some street thug who might shoot him for being a dollar short and who might mix in stuff that kills him, or do you want him to be able to buy this stuff in a safe environment, in a legal environment where he doesn’t have to worry about consequences?

Logan: But this is the economic creationist mindset, is, if I just make this illegal, the problem goes away. Whereas, no, now you have a law, as you said, in addition to all of the black market things that you and I just outlined. Now, also, you’re creating a conflict in which if a cop sees someone with an illegal substance, he may execute him to death. I was redundant just now, but you see what I’m saying? And it’s like you say this and people just, like, and it’s like they don’t see the government. The government has put this magic spell on people where it’s just this invisible force around us. And then at the same time, you have all these people protesting cops for killing people.

Dennis: There is much work to be done.

Really, the thing that helped me understand coercion better was David Deutsch’s and Sarah Fitz-Claridge’s work on it and the Taking Children Seriously homepage. So there is a, I recommend it for everyone to read, in the Taking Children Seriously glossary, there’s an entry on coercion, and it says, quote, coercion is, sorry, coercion is, quote, “the psychological state of enacting one idea or impulse while a conflicting impulse is still active in one’s mind,” end quote.

This strikes me as happening on multiple levels. So what you and I have been talking about, for the most part, is coercion on a societal level. So you have some government body that is a group of people, and they’re coercing everybody else to do something. So you have one group against another. And there’s a conflict of ideas. There’s the government group of people wants money. The other group of people doesn’t want to give it away. And it’s coercion because money is taken. The idea of taking money wins arbitrarily over the idea of keeping the money.

What they could be doing is solving the problem. So what they could be doing is solving the problem in the sense that this conflict goes away and they find some other arrangement that they can all agree to voluntarily, but they don’t do this, or not yet. Hopefully one day in a voluntary society they will. So we can do this on a group level. We can also do this between individuals. So the parent-child example I gave is, I think, an instance of that, where you have a parent’s idea arbitrarily winning over the child’s idea. And I say arbitrarily not in the sense that it doesn’t make sense, because I even agree that it would be better for the child not to smoke. I mean arbitrarily in the sense that the problem was not solved. The conflict still exists, but the idea wins over anyway.

And we can even apply, and I think David Deutsch has done this, you can even apply this principle of coercion to what happens within minds. If you have a conflict within you, you kind of want to, I think David gives this example in one of his conversations with Lulie Tanett, where he goes, you might feel like you want to go to the post office, but then you have this weird feeling that tells you, no, you don’t, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. You can then force yourself to go anyway. And so in that sense, coercion would still apply within a single mind, and you would have been better off. I think one of David’s conjectures here is that this is what makes, or one of the things at least that makes people unhappy, is this coercion inside a single mind.

So the reason I’m saying all this is because I think there’s an interesting, there’s an interesting thing happening, which I touched on in my book briefly, which is there seem to be strict analogies between a depressed mind, in which coercion has sort of taken over, I think that might be the hallmark of depression, and a socialist economy. Because what you have in a socialist economy is coercion on a societal level. And as a result, you have very little problem solving going on, or at least less problem solving than you could have in a voluntarist society.

And when you’re depressed as an individual, it seems to me, given David’s work on this, that you are somehow hindered in your ability to solve problems, because you are coercing yourself or other people are coercing you. I wouldn’t find it surprising even, and I think actually it seems to be known, if I’m not mistaken, that people in socialist countries are less happy than people in Western countries.

Logan: Well, all else being equal, certainly the bigger the government, the more coercion will be present in one’s life. I think all else being equal, that’s certainly true. By the way, the phrase all else being equal, I say that phrase a lot when it comes to economics, because it’s very important. It has to do with counterfactuals. And in Austrian economics, the technical phrase is ceteris paribus, although I might be pronouncing that incorrectly, because I only ever read it.

But this does remind me of something, which is that when we’re talking about an economy, we’re basically talking about the interactions between multiple universal explainers. And then when we’re talking about psychology, we’re talking about the internal dynamics of a single universal explainer. And yet, it seems that these concepts of coercion and creativity and knowledge all apply to both. Now, praxeology and private property rights and all that stuff, I think the buck stops, or at least a lot of the concepts don’t apply to a single mind.

But my point, which is slightly tangential, but you might find this interesting, I could be wrong, but I suspect that a constructor theory of knowledge will illuminate some of the similarities and differences between psychology of a single mind and the dynamics, or the physics, if you like, of an economy. By which I mean a constructor theory of knowledge for a single mind will kind of be like the physics of a single universal explainer. And so psychology will become a branch of physics, maybe. And then a constructor theory of economics of multiple interacting universal explainers will basically be the physics of economics, or just integrating economics into physics.

Dennis: I find that so fascinating. So let’s go down that route. First off, though, what is constructor theory?

Logan: So constructor theory, which was founded by David Deutsch, is a new theory in physics whose fundamental principle is that all of the laws of physics can be expressed in terms of transformations that are possible and transformations that are impossible, and why. And so you’re able to integrate, I mean, it already has solved many problems in many areas, but one thing that pertains to this conversation is you’re able to integrate domains of reality that are about what’s possible and impossible and could not be expressible in terms of the initial conditions of the system and then its deterministic trajectory over time according to some laws of motion, which was the prevailing conception for many other theories in physics.

So, for example, just Newtonian physics, to take a rudimentary example: if I give you the initial velocity and position of a baseball, and I tell you the force I apply to it, then given the initial velocity and position, as I said, along with the equations of motion, given the force I acted on it, you can predict its velocity and position at any future moment in time.

Dennis: Right. And this is just one particular mode of explanation. It doesn’t have to be the only one.

Logan: Exactly. It doesn’t have to be the only one. And in particular, that mode of explanation could not possibly capture what’s going on when you’re dealing in domains in which knowledge is relevant. Because, as we talked about earlier, the growth of knowledge is inherently unpredictable. So you need some other mode of explanation. And it seems that a constructor theory, because it’s about what’s possible and impossible, would be able to capture the regularities that we observe in both a single mind, which is a universal explainer for people, and in an economy, which is just kind of a matrix, if you like.

I don’t know why I use the word matrix, but it’s a system of multiple interacting universal explainers. So the question is, what constraints on the growth of knowledge are possible both within a single mind and in a system in which there are multiple universal explainers interacting? Now, I think the latter will be able to convert a lot of the principles of Austrian economics slash praxeology into the language of constructor theory. And I don’t know much about psychology, so I won’t speak about that.

Dennis: Well, I do want to draw a distinction between psychology and epistemology, because, following Popper, I worry that the psychologists want to find a sort of guaranteed or mechanistic way that the mind works, which they won’t ever find, because that’s not how the mind works. It strikes me as very similar to the quagmire with the different modes, or it’s not a quagmire, just the difference between the different modes of explanation.

What it seems to me the psychologists are looking for is a sort of explanation of the mode of initial conditions and laws of motions for the mind, where what in epistemology we’re looking for is an evolutionary mode of explanation. So you can’t always get from one state of the mind to another state of the mind. There, there are no laws that the mind follows to get reliably from one state to the next. If you could wind the clock back to the beginning of this conversation, it would have unfolded differently. I would have been a communist by the end of the conversation in many other branches of the multiverse. It, there are universes in which I would have successfully convinced you that communism is the way to go. Yes, if you can believe it.

So what would a constructor theory of economics, I think you called it, or praxeology, what would that look like?

Logan: Yeah, so the short answer is I have no idea. But the slightly longer answer is that we already know from, and we didn’t quite get into a lot of the nitty-gritty of Austrian economics slash praxeology. But as I sort of alluded to at the beginning, you can deduce a lot of logical theorems in Austrian economics from the basic action axiom that do constrain what’s possible. So just to take one of the most popular examples, the economic calculation problem is, again, following just from the action axiom, and you’re in a monetary economy, which means we’re trading with money. So I give you an item, you give me money.

The socialist calculation problem is that a single top-down institution like a government, if it owns all of the means of production, or you could think of it as all of the intermediary goods that go into the production of the final consumer goods, okay, if they own all of those, they can’t know the prices of those intermediary goods. And so when they sell those consumer goods into which the intermediary goods go into in the creation of those consumer goods, they have no profit-loss calculation, because the price of an intermediary good, or the intermediary goods that go into the production of a final consumer good, that’s essentially the cost of a consumer good.

So they literally, praxeologically, cannot know if they are making a profit or a loss. And again, a profit just means you’re satisfying consumers, basically, more than you would had you not acted that way. And a loss is that you’re in the wrong line of production, roughly speaking. So then how does the market know these things?

Because, okay, so let’s just use a concrete example. Let me think of a product quickly. Okay, let’s say, let’s say I sell beds, okay? And I sell a bed, and it has a mattress, and it has two pillows. And I have a factory, and the input goods, or the, we’ll call them intermediary goods, are two pillows and a mattress. Yeah, okay. Now, that means I myself, as an entrepreneur, I have to go buy, people who make, I have to buy pillows and a mattress from still other sellers so that I can purchase those things and construct a bed with my factory or whatever.

So I bid for pillows and a mattress, but I’m not the only one bidding for those things. It could be that someone else is bidding for pillows and mattresses to, to make their products, and I don’t even care what they’re trying to make with those items. They could be making, I don’t know, whatever. There’s a kid’s toy, and it involves pillows, let’s say. And then there’s another, someone else is making a house made out of mattresses. So even, this is part of the point, that I don’t even have to know what’s going on in the rest of the economy. The only thing I have to realize is that other people are bidding for these pillows and mattresses. And I’m also bidding for these pillows and mattresses.

And I have some conjecture about how many people are going to buy the completed set of an entire bed at some given quantity. So I’m bidding a particular amount, they’re bidding a particular amount. I end up buying them for a particular price. So the price of these input goods is my cost of doing business, as it were. And then I construct the bed as a whole, and then I sell the bed to consumers. So I sell you, Dennis, the bed, you buy the bed, and that’s your consumer good, because you’re not using it as a way to exchange. You’re buying the bed just to consume it directly, to sleep in it.

Okay? So I purchase the intermediary goods, I construct the consumer good, and then I sell it to you. So the cost at which I purchase the intermediary goods is my price, is my price, is my cost. And then when I sell it to you at a given price, that’s my revenue. So revenue minus cost is my profit. Now, if I make a loss, I have to adjust. And if I make a profit, I’ll keep going, roughly speaking.

But how did I know what my costs were? It’s because I bid for those intermediary goods along with other entrepreneurs who are bidding for them for their own purposes, for their other lines of production. And the entire market economy is like this, with lines of production. And we’re all competing for the purchase from consumers. Okay? And that’s how, that’s how entrepreneurs know if they should keep selling in their line of production, or if they should move to a, shift to a different line of production, or modify their strategy, and so forth. Okay, this is why, for example, well, whatever, I already used an example, I won’t make another one.

Okay, but the point is, if a government owns all of the means of production, all the intermediary goods, all of the pillows, all of the mattresses, everything else as well, they don’t know what their input costs are. So they have no idea if they’re making things at the right quantity.

Dennis: Why do they not know what their input costs are?

Logan: Because there’s no market for them. So prices can’t emerge. This was one of Mises’ famous insights. And I suspect this is a fundamental limitation of knowledge creation.

Dennis: Can you expand on that a little bit?

Logan: Yes. So basically it’s impossible for a single organization to own all of the means of production that can be used, that can be employed in various lines of production to create final consumer goods, and know whether or not they should, whether or not they’re doing it to the consumer satisfaction or not. They can’t know whether they’d be better off by diverting them to other lines of production. And that’s because there’s no one bidding for those products, no one else bidding for them. So there’s no price information.

Dennis: It’s because there’s no prices.

Logan: Yeah. And the reason there’s no prices is because there’s no market of people bidding. So for those intermediary goods. So just like you and I and, like, consumers bid for various goods when we go to the shopping market, and that’s how those prices emerge.

Dennis: Right.

Logan: Similarly, entrepreneurs themselves are bidding for the goods that they use to make their final products. And that difference between, when someone at ShopRite sells you an avocado, they bought the avocado from someone else, and they did whatever to create that avocado, so that’s your cost. It’s revenue minus cost, the revenue of when they sold the avocado to you for you to consume directly, minus whatever it cost when they bid for the avocado from wherever they got it.

Dennis: So to bring this back into epistemological terms, the means of error correction exist in a free market, encoded in prices, and they don’t exist in a sort of communist ultra-state that owns everything, because there are no prices, and so they can’t error correct.

Logan: That’s exactly right, which means eventually, in a system that can’t correct errors, because problems are inevitable, it’s bound to fail sooner. And by fail, we mean, the technical term is retrogress, but we can use a little constructor-theoretic language and say wealth will decrease, which means the set of all transformations that an entity like an economy is capable of causing will go down, necessarily. So I suspect these will be converted from these roughly qualitative Austrian economic statements to more quantitative constructor-theoretic statement about what’s possible and impossible.

Dennis: Got it. Fascinating.

Logan: Yeah, I think what people, this ties in with economic creationism again, what people just need to start wrapping their heads around is you cannot, like you said, coerce wealth into existence. You cannot regulate wealth into existence. You cannot, for the same reason that you cannot, how should I put this? I mean, you can effectively coerce people, but you don’t create any knowledge along the way.

Dennis: So you cannot coerce wealth creation for the same reason that you don’t get your child to stop smoking because you say so. The reason the child stops smoking is because of knowledge the child creates on his own. It’s not that the coercion somehow induces new behavior. And so for the same reason, it’s not like coercion on a state level somehow induces wealth into the economy. It’s just, it can’t be done. The only tool we have to create knowledge in an individual, between individuals, and on the level of society is evolution. And it’s not a guaranteed mode for success, unfortunately. But it’s the only mode we have.

Logan: Yes, I think I read this in an article. In some sense, all of anarcho-capitalism comes down to is that you can’t coerce your way to a better world.

Dennis: Right, right. And basically, all these attempts to coerce either a whole society, or a small group of people within a family, or an individual trying to coerce some ideas within his own mind, they strike me as attempts to change what is a non-deterministic evolutionary mechanism, if you can even call it a mechanism, because it’s not deterministic, a non-deterministic evolutionary logic. They’re trying to bend the paperclip and make it straight and turn that into a deterministic, non-creative, non-evolutionary algorithm.

But once you succeed at that, the subject of the coercion is then broken. I mean, a fully coerced person is not really a person anymore. A person that, like a slave, say, that only works according to what the master does and mechanistically executes those commands is barely a person. A society that only mechanistically follows its ruler’s orders is barely even a society. It’s just a shadow of a society at that point.

So there’s a similarity, I think, there between the modes of explanation, where you say, you know, in constructor theory we have a different mode of explanation from the conventional mode of explanation in physics. It’s the same in economics. We have a different mode of explanation. But it seems to me that socialists, perhaps without realizing it, prefer an old and outdated mode of explanation, the mechanistic and deterministic one, and try to impose it on a system that doesn’t work according to those mechanistic rules.

Logan: Yes, I think that’s well said. And then we can ask, well, why is that the case? I think it’s not an accident that a lot of people who advocate for big government are also, from what I see anyway, kind of inductivists or something like that, or non-critical rationalists, in other words. I think that’s right.

I think they view a lot of it as, they view a lot of society as mechanistic in nature. I think as soon as you even start talking about how, creativity is required to solve problems, not coercion, they just say, but what about the poor people? And it’s like they’re, you know, or what about the white supremacists? I had this conversation the other day with someone. And I think it’s a lot of, it’s very emotion-driven. And until we have a constructor theory of knowledge, I suspect it’ll be very difficult to make headway.

And even then, constructor theory will probably have to solve a problem that scientists immersed in the prevailing conception also want to solve. So we are however long away, but in the meantime, we can certainly have a lot of fun with these ideas and spread what we do know. So I really look forward to… By the way, when I say psychology, I mean not as psychology as we can see, but now, I mean, if there is a constructor theory of knowledge and it ends up explaining a lot of what’s happening in a single person’s mind, I mean, that will be the new psychology. It’ll be a branch of physics.

Dennis: Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah. Now, privately you mentioned to me something interesting that I’ve been grappling with, and I don’t think I fully understand it yet and its ramifications, and that is, you said something along the lines of democracy is not as good as we think it is.

Logan: Oh, we’re going there. Yeah, sure. So the short answer without an explanation is basically that anarcho-capitalism is better than monarchy, which is better than democracy. And I say that because I just want to make it clear, I’m not saying monarchy is ideal. I’m just saying it’s better than democracy, and that freedom is better than both. To expand a little bit on that, I would really recommend your listeners to read Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s book, Democracy: The God That Failed. And he basically makes a few different arguments for just why monarchy is in fact superior to democracy.

And even before we get into these arguments, I do think it’s worth noting that democracy has become a mythological concept in many people’s minds. Like, even you see democratic socialist. Like, they just put the word democratic in front of it and suddenly it’s better, you know? And, I think even now people justify tyranny on the grounds. Like, if you, I’ve had this conversation, you talk to people and say, hey, the government’s doing X, Y, and Z. Don’t you think it’s tyrannical? And he says, oh, but they voted on it, or we voted for them, so it’s okay. So, so it becomes a means by which people justify tyranny.

So that’s one, argument that I think I would have known about even before reading Hoppe’s book. But there are some other not-so-obvious benefits that monarchies have over democracies. So one would be, I guess this relates a little bit to what I just said, but the knowledge of who’s the ruler and who are the ruled is much more obvious in a monarchy than in a democracy. Because in a democracy, suddenly anyone can grab the ring of power, whereas in a monarchy it’s limited. And so suddenly there’s much more incentive to grow the government because you could be a part of it or someone else could be a part of it.

And so the lines get blurred, whereas with a monarchy, it’s very obvious who the rulers are, and so the culture constrains the monarchy in a way that the culture does not constrain the government, you know? So that’s one argument. Feel free to jump in at any point, you know, tell me I’m wrong, or, you know, argue, because I understand what I’m saying now is more heretical than anything else I’ve said today.

Dennis: So how do we explain then, for example, that we do see a strong correlation between democracy and prosperity? I mean, the democratic societies overwhelmingly in our world are, maybe without exception even, are more wealthy than non-democratic societies.

Logan: Yeah. So this goes back to my point about how we can’t use evidence in evaluating economic theories. So in other words, how do you know that these societies are wealthy because of democracy or despite democracy?

Dennis: Ah, sure. I mean, yeah, what you have going in your favor there is that all of the societies that are democratic now used to not be democratic.

Logan: Or at least, or at least the government was much smaller, even if it was democratic.

Dennis: Right.

Logan: Which already sort of, like, gets to the heart of the matter, which is, well, why do we even, I mean, democracy used to be a dirty word, you know. It’s really, it’s become sanctified, I think, in the last maybe 100 years or so, unfortunately. So, okay, so those are some of the arguments.

Now, there are some other ones that are not obvious at all. So, for example, the fact that the line gets blurred between ruled and ruler makes war much worse. So in the age of the monarchs, a lot of the wars, and again, please check me on this, you know, I could be wrong, whatever. The monarchs would fight each other, but they would essentially hire private armies that would fight each other. And citizens, or the ruled people, citizens would literally just, like, sit out and have a picnic and watch the people fight.

Whereas now, because the lines are blurred, unfortunately, war, which is the worst thing governments do, is they execute each other’s innocent people. So whether it’s the U.S. empire bombing innocent people in the Middle East, or the 9/11 attackers attacking the World Trade Center or whatever they attacked, Pearl Harbor, Japan, all this stuff, this is all in a post-democracy world because, again, the lines are blurred. And this didn’t used to happen. It used to be that rulers fought with each other and kept it to each other.

Dennis: But arguably one of the worst atrocities ever happened was the Second World War, which was started by a totalitarian maniac.

Logan: That was right when democracy started.

Dennis: But the, I mean, the mandatory conscription that Hitler had, this was the kind of thing you’re arguing is evil, right? Now, I would imagine that it is much harder to get rid of mandatory conscription when you have a totalitarian like Hitler versus a democratic society like the United States?

Logan: A democratic society like the United States had conscription many times over.

Dennis: Oh, no, no, they do. But wouldn’t it be easier to get rid of it in a democratic society than in a totalitarian society? I mean, what I’m hinting at here is Popper’s criterion of democracy, which says, I mean, the intuitive notion of democracy is people get to vote. But Popper famously said that this, that actually is not the defining criterion of a democratic society. Democracy is when you are able to remove bad policies and bad leaders without bloodshed.

So a bad policy here is mandatory conscription, is coercive and immoral, and so therefore it is bad. Now, in a democracy, the defining attribute of democracy, according to Popper, is that you are able to get rid of that bad policy without bloodshed, whereas in Nazi Germany, you would not have been able to get rid of that bad policy without bloodshed. Now, Nazi Germany was not a monarchy. So maybe you could make a special case for monarchies in particular. But overall, it still strikes me that in a democracy, you have much better means of error correction than you do in a totalitarian society. So I would say that democracy has that going in its favor.

Logan: Certainly, sort of. I mean, even then, you’re still not voting on the policies. You’re voting on the rulers. And even then, people don’t think of them as rulers anymore because they get to vote, which is part of why governments grow so much under democracy rather than under monarchy. I think monarchy is the highest tax was like 8%. And then democracy is now, the income tax is like 40% in some places. Oh, but we get to vote for the next guy who’s going to bring it down to 39%. So it gives us this illusion that we are not being ruled.

And then there’s another counterintuitive argument, that monarchies are superior to democracy in that monarchs have, they’re quasi-owners of the territory. And so they have an incentive to value correctly the future value of the territory, because they’re going to bequeath the territory to their children.

Dennis: Okay.

Logan: This is kind of like what we talked about with the environmentalists. Whereas with democracy, you’re basically temporarily holding this public good. So your incentives are to overvalue the present, which basically means to spend up a storm and do whatever you want while you’re in there, damn the consequences, because you won’t be there anymore, and then to undervalue the future state, because you’re not going to be there anymore. And we see this all the time, whether it’s the Federal Reserve, the deficits, the debt, all this stuff. Just do whatever you want, take all the credit for the, illusory progress that’s happening, and then when the next guy gets in there, if there’s a crash, people don’t know economics, so they’ll just blame that guy.

Dennis: Yeah, there’s definitely a problem of accountability. I agree.

Logan: More so in democracy than in monarchy, is my point, is one of my points.

Dennis: Well, I mean, if I see it in both, I wonder, I mean, if Popper is correct that it’s easier to get rid of bad leaders in a democracy than it is in a monarchy, then the democracy would be better in terms of accountability. However, I could, so I guess what I’m saying is I’m open to the idea that a democracy is bad and that it’s worse than a voluntary society. I’m not sure I agree that a democracy is worse than a monarchy.

Logan: Right. And to be honest, I’m not dogmatically attached to the idea. But I think people don’t, again, I think it comes down to just the mythos around democracy, that people will reject these ideas just because we love democracy so much. And that’s kind of what I’m pushing against. I would really recommend, again, Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s book, Democracy: The God That Failed, and just, you know, see for yourself.

Dennis: Right on. Okay.

Logan: But again, the fundamental arguments are war, distortion of short-term versus long-term prosperity, and blurring between the people, the ruled and the rulers. And I think there’s even another one that I’m forgetting. But those are the basics. And it’s free online at mises.org. And I would really just try your best to put aside any preconceived notions that you might have.

Dennis: Yeah, I think that’s always a good idea, because if you hold any idea in your head as unchangeable, that already defeats the purpose of any creative thought, because now there’s something that’s immutable. You can’t do anything about it. It’s just sort of become an authority in your head. So yeah, even our most cherished beliefs, we should be ready to question.

Logan: I agree. Yeah, I mean, and that’s how I, and just a quick note on this whole conversation, and I think you might agree with this, but I mean, that’s kind of how I became a voluntarist in the first place. And in my opinion, it’s just, it so radically changes your worldview and your understanding of society and history and economics, and, like, everything you thought you knew is kind of upside down. It’s awesome. It’s really an awesome adventure, and I couldn’t recommend it more to your listeners.

Dennis: I agree. I had a similar experience reading David’s The Beginning of Infinity. Just, I mean, I’m still chewing on it, and I’ve read it maybe four or five times by now.

Logan: Right.

Dennis: And I still find new things in it every time. And it’s, I’m a different person now than I was five years ago when I read it, for sure. It’s, it’s, it’s that kind of thing. It just changes so much in your worldview, for the better, I think. You see the mistakes that you used to make. People like to say that people don’t change. I, I disagree. It also violates the notion that we’re all universal explainers, because it, it would mean that there’s some ideas we can’t do anything about.

Logan: Yeah, exactly. That can’t be true. Oh, can I say something about psychology, now that you brought up the idea that we’re universal explainers and stuff like that?

Dennis: Please, go for it.

Logan: Yeah, so, and tell me if I’m wrong, because I’m not that well versed in the psychology literature, but it seems that most of it is kind of, as I said, it’s a branch of history, by which I mean they’re really just recording biases that we have and things like that. But because we’re universal explainers, none of these are fundamental, because we can overcome all of them. So that’s what I mean when I say a constructor theory of knowledge of a single mind, that might get at what’s fundamentally immutable about how a single mind works.

Dennis: Yeah, I see what you mean. Yeah, because when we say we’re universal explainers, we’re not saying we could just do anything. We’re not saying anything goes. We’re just saying a universal explainer could, in principle, explain anything that is explicable. First of all, whether or not he will is totally not guaranteed. That’s a separate question. He absolutely might not, and of course he never will, because there are infinitely many things to explain. But even whether or not he makes any progress at all in that vein is subject to change.

And then, of course, there’s the idea that, I think this has to do at least loosely with the ideas of free will, for example, which ties in closely with the idea of the universal explainer. I think that people think that we don’t have free will, and there’s various arguments for this: that it would lead to an infinite regress is one, that it is just not amenable to the laws of physics is another. But of course we couldn’t, when I think of free will, I don’t think that we could do something that our software doesn’t allow us to do. We couldn’t go against the instructions in our brain.

I think of the brain as a computer and the mind as a piece of software. And like all computers, what a computer does is just stubbornly executes code. We couldn’t somehow command our brain not to do that. So there are still limits to what we can and cannot do. Are those the kinds of things that you’re thinking of constructor theory of knowledge would be about?

Logan: I think almost certainly free will will come into play, yes. And I think actually one of the papers that Chiara Marletto and Deutsch worked on is basically showing how you can have a deterministic theory, but that nevertheless will yield results who the outcome of some experiment will be unpredictable, for example. So I think that’s kind of hinting at what we’re talking about here.

So there’s that, and also just the way knowledge grows. Are there constraints on that? In other words, I mean, here I’m really speculating, but like the quantity of knowledge, could it in principle grow from so many bits or something to an infinite number of bits in a particular time period? You know, something like that. And if the answer is no, that’s impossible. That’s a constraint. No matter how creative we are, we can never make such a leap, you know.

Dennis: Okay. So what is your opinion, I’m curious, on the way America has dealt with the pandemic?

Logan: First of all, if I can be a little pedantic, because this is important, because we got to shake the statism out of you, Dennis. When you say America, I assume you mean the government, not you and me.

Dennis: I do mean the government, yes.

Logan: Okay, so you mean those criminals in Washington, D.C. What do I think of how they handled it? I mean, it’s just typical government. They have no idea what they’re doing. They just, the impulse is to beat everyone down with a club, metaphorically speaking, and just shut society down. And on top of that, people don’t talk about this, they gave trillions of dollars to big companies to bail them out. So talk about inequality.

I mean, again, I’m not someone who cares about inequality per se, but the left has a point when they, like, in other words, the inequality that we see is artificial. Because now you’re going to see a bunch of small businesses go completely under forever, and all these big companies get bailed out by the government artificially. So it’s a huge transfer of wealth from poor people and middle class people to big companies that’s directly from the government.

And they shut down all of society, and it seems like the World Health Organization has no idea what’s happening. It seems like the health officials, behave as if we’re expected to think of them as infallible, priests, which is crazy to me. It just completely removes the freedom of choice to people to make their own risk evaluations of, okay, if I go outside, I might catch a disease, but I’ll take the risk because I need to feed my family. All of those choices are completely removed.

The government just gave a bunch of people 600 bucks or whatever it was. But of course, because of inflation, they’re taking more than they’re giving. I mean, we’re not even going to see the end effects of this for a few months, I think. And on top of that, you can already, I mean, from the little data I’ve read about this, it seems that most of the people that are being affected are already sick or overweight or old.

So we definitely, under voluntary conditions, could have just voluntarily quarantined people who were already at risk, and then the rest of us just lived our lives. But instead you just see, politicians impulsively pass laws to, to make it look like they’re in control, just constraining our choices. That’s all government edicts are, is a, it’s a reduction of choices. That’s it.

Dennis: Right. Yeah. How do you feel about, I mean, I know the answer to this, but how do you feel about mandatory mask laws or regulations?

Logan: Oh, I think it’s completely insane. I mean, first of all, if they were voluntary, you’d still have places that have signs that say, if you come in here, wear a mask. And that I’m perfectly fine with. And then people can make their choices, you know? And I think, frankly, you already, even before the government got involved, you saw a little bit of this here and there. Like, I think the NBA shut down, and you saw some places saying, hey, if you come in, you do have to wear a mask. So this all would have worked out much more efficiently. And again, the key point to remember is, I’m not saying no one would die. That’s very important. You can’t compare freedom to utopia. It’s always voluntary versus the government.

And so now the government’s just saying, honestly, I don’t know enough about the science, to be completely honest, but I just feel, it just feels ineffectual. I’m walking around with this flimsy little mask on. I don’t buy it. It just seems like. And then psychologically, I think it’s putting us in a sheepish state of mind, by which I mean literal sheep, that we just obey orders. We walk around with things that cover our face. And I think it’s psychologically unhealthy.

And by the way, I don’t think it’s an accident that suddenly you have this eruption of rioters. Everyone’s covered in masks. Everyone’s pent up. However, the video gets out of a cop executing a guy, basically putting a foot on his neck. I understand he was on drugs and everything, but still. And then you get all these riots. And then you have the scientists signing, saying this is OK because racism is worse than the disease.

It’s like, are people still buying their crap? This is just a group of modern priests, and we’re expected to obey all of their edicts and not question them, because if we question them, it’s not that we’re heretics anymore, but no, we’re racist. So they just have a new shaming tactic to get us to obey them. Now, to be fair to the government, they would say, well, we’re just trying to protect people, and we don’t want people to get sick. We’re really just trying to do what’s best for them. Everyone has good intentions. I don’t care. The Soviet Union had good intentions. Everyone has good intentions. The question is, what are your actions, and what are their effects on the world?

Dennis: Right. And do you have the right to act in such a way?

Logan: And that gets us back to, you know, private property ethics.

Dennis: Yeah. I mean, what is, what is the, I wonder if I’m the only one about this, what is the feeling you get within when somebody tells you you have to wear a mask? Does that spark a certain reaction from you?

Logan: Yes. It, it sparks a, I, I want to hear an argument. And also, it’s, I’m gonna do it if I want to, not if you make me. Like, I own myself, period, full stop. I don’t even owe you a justification, you know. Absolutely not. Because the second you grant that I owe you a justification, they own you.

Dennis: Right, exactly. It’s, it’s not on whoever is subjected to force to explain the harm. It’s on those who want to subject force to explain what gives them the right to do so.

Logan: Exactly. Exactly. It’s so funny. This is tangentially related. So I was at my parents’ house over the weekend. They live by the shore. And, you know, I’m hanging out with my parents and their friends. And a lot of them were kind of bringing up politics with me sometimes. I’m not quite sure why. But anyway, one of them said, Logan, did you protest in Philly? I live in Philly, and I guess there were protests. And I said, no, I didn’t. He goes, why didn’t you? I said, for the same reason I didn’t make a cheesecake, because I’m not defined by what I don’t do, I’m defined by what I do.

And it’s so funny, because a week before that, he would have said, are you going outside? And if I said yes, he said, you should be inside. So he’s just, like, regurgitating what he hears on the television. The priests tell him what he should think, and then he has to proselytize, and if you don’t agree, of course you’re a bad person. And I’m just not playing that game, like, shame. This is why Austrian economists are so good at understanding the difference between an argument and a non-argument, is because they’re in the lion’s den all day, every day. And so, no, the onus is not on me to explain what I didn’t do or anything like that. And then you give them an answer that they’ve never heard before. And it’s like, all they know is just shame tactic, shame tactic, shame tactic.

Dennis: Yeah, I agree. It’s a weird time right now. And this has become sort of a truism, and everyone says it all the time, but I really mean it. It’s, I, I mean, the, the first instinct I had when the, so I live in, in California, in Cupertino, where you actually see very few people walking around with masks, but they do enforce it in stores. So I think, and it’s not actually the, the stores that came up with this idea. It’s the city government or whatever it is, whatever institutions behind the city of Cupertino, that forces stores to enforce this.

So I agree with you that if a store on their own accord say, hey, we don’t want people to come in if they don’t wear masks, I think that’s fine, because I can just go to another store. Or I can have food delivered or whatever it might be. Before anyone says that’s just because I have privilege or whatever, the poor can’t do this. I actually don’t think so, because those delivery services are very cheap.

But in any case, when I was standing in line to the grocery store, and I had no idea, I don’t watch the news. So I had no idea that there was now such a thing in effect. And so there was a lady at the entrance who was telling me, sorry, you can’t come in if you don’t have a mask. I was like, why? So luckily, there was somebody behind me who was generous enough and just gave me one of his. He had, like, a whole box of them, so he just gave me a spare mask for free, and so I was able to enter.

But I want people to check in with themselves and check in with the feeling they have, or they hopefully have, when somebody tells them what to do. Your first instinct should be, no, explain why. And if you’re not going to explain why, I’m definitely not going to do it. I’m only going to do it because I think it’s a good idea. So I don’t, I don’t think the government should have any say in how to handle the pandemic, because it’s just not the government’s job. I mean, from what we’ve been talking about, the government should have no responsibility whatsoever. But in particular, caring for people’s health seems like a gross overreach, because it imposes on all our civil liberties.

Logan: Can I tell you something?

Dennis: Go ahead.

Logan: I think the reason you find it disturbing that people are not questioning that is because you rightly see the government as our rulers, and they see the government as our leaders.

Dennis: Yeah, that could be the case. So I would grant your point for some people.

Logan: Sure. I mean, we’re generalizing.

Dennis: Sure, of course. I mean, of course, it’s always implied it’s not everyone. But I would probably say what you’re saying might apply. I agree with it, but I think it would apply to fewer people than we might think. They might not even make that distinction. I would imagine that the vast majority of people want to force others to wear masks because they think it’s the right thing to do. Like, Right Thing, capital R, capital T. This is the thing that must be done, and we’re all better off for it. There’s no room for deviation. This must be done. And if anyone questions it, he’s evil, obviously, to them, because he wants people to get sick.

What they’re forgetting is that you can oppose being forced to wear a mask and oppose not wearing a mask. These things are not mutually exclusive, if I’m saying that right. This is a false dichotomy, basically. What they think is, if you oppose being forced to wear a mask, that means you don’t want to wear a mask. No, no, no, it doesn’t mean that. I agree that people should wear masks. It seems to me there’s a good explanation of this. It might be false, but it seems to me that if people wear masks, transmission rate goes down. That makes sense to me. So people should wear masks. But should they be forced to wear a mask? That’s an entirely different question, because, again, you can’t, the ends don’t justify the means. For the same reason you shouldn’t force your child not to smoke, you shouldn’t force people to wear masks. It’s unethical.

Logan: Yeah, I completely agree. And of course, people don’t always understand. I mean, often people on the left don’t understand this difference. Like, should I, should I do? I think in general, bakers should bake cakes for gay people, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s such a big deal. Do I think the government should force them to? Absolutely not. For all the usual economic and moral reasons that we’ve already touched on. Actually, we haven’t even touched on a lot of the economic reasons.

But yes, I totally grant your point. I will say, though, if some government official got on TV tomorrow and said, don’t wear masks, because it turns out masks increase the infection rate or whatever, you’re not allowed to wear masks, I think people would switch gears in a heartbeat. That’s my point, is that people see these people as leaders, as infallible leaders, rather than fallible, immoral, anti-prosperity rulers.

Dennis: Right, right. No, I definitely see your point. And this is the problem also with coercion, is that they leave absolutely no room for the possibility that they’re wrong.

Logan: Correct.

Dennis: And that what they’re doing might be not only insignificant, that might be counterproductive. But we don’t have a way to correct that error, because we’re being forced to do it. Yeah, it’s difficult. In any case, I just want to appeal to people to check in with themselves and hopefully recognize that there is a dissonance in them when somebody tells them what to do. If that dissonance is missing, then others have succeeded in successfully straightening the paperclip. They have succeeded in turning part of that person from an evolutionary, non-deterministic algorithm into a deterministic, mechanistic algorithm. And it’s sad, really.

Logan: By the way, if it’s such a no-brainer that people should wear masks, well, then it should be very easy to just persuade them, right? And so there would be no need for force. This is the argument a lot of libertarians make when it comes to things like welfare. Like, they’ll say to people, hey, if all of, you millions of people want welfare, why bother going through the political machine? Just do it. But this is part of the problem, is, we’re trained through public school that the only progress that’s ever made is through government. Like, they literally have no concept that progress is made outside the government.

It’s really tragic, because it means, this is an example one of my heroes, Dave Smith, uses. Ron Paul, who, I don’t know if you’re familiar with, he was a famous libertarian presidential candidate from the Republican Party a few years ago. He was a doctor for most of his life and delivered babies for, like, a dollar for people who couldn’t afford it. Okay, so, like, a really, objectively, a good thing.

Dennis: Yeah.

Logan: Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is just a politician. He’s never really, like, he got kicked off a commune, apparently. He’s never produced anything in his life. I mean, he made, wrote a book, whatever, you see what I’m saying. But still, because Ron Paul opposes, socialized medicine, Bernie Sanders said something like, well, that’s what Ron Paul believes. He thinks if you’re poor, you should die, or whatever it was. And it’s like, you think because you have the right political positions, you’re morally superior to a guy who literally delivered babies for a dollar. Right. Because you’re a politician. So you’re, by definition, the good guy. It’s tragic. It really is. I was told the other day I have no empathy because of my political positions.

Dennis: Yeah, this is the, this is, this, this implicit threat that you’re immoral for your views and therefore you shouldn’t have them. I agree. That’s not a valid argument.

Logan: It’s not an argument. And, you know, I might be immoral, but not because of my political views.

Dennis: Well, people can be immoral because of their political views. I would consider someone whose political views say that you should coerce people immoral for their political views. But I don’t think you in particular hold immoral political views.

Logan: No, I just meant I personally, even though my political philosophy is the most consistent philosophy of peace and prosperity, in principle I could still be a jerk. I was actually telling my sister this the other day. I was like, the non-aggression principle in some ways is the beginning of morality and not the end of morality. So I could still be a horrible person and, you know, never violate anyone else’s property rights, in principle.

Dennis: Got it. I see what you mean.

Logan: Yeah.

Dennis: Okay. Well, Logan, it’s been fascinating. It was great to have you. And I think our listeners will have a lot to think about.

Logan: Thank you very much for having me, Dennis. It’s been fun.