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