Welcome to Keith and I don't tread on anyone in the Libertarian Institute. Today. I am joined by Jack Lloyd, author of the You guys Got to read these books. This is a great intro into our ideas. He just came out with the trilogy we have libertarian volunteerism. The third one is a vision for a libertarian future and the one in the middle philosophical volunteerism.
This goes through a number of logical fallacies that people it's on page 36. If I I might have to just disrespect his IP altogether and make a video just on the 36 page because it's so vitally important just to get these in the back of your mind. So anytime you come across them, not that you can call them out because that's like so nerdy, but the point is to see through them and not get manipulated.
It's really difficult sometimes when we're like, well, if we work hard, eventually we could have a stateless society. OK, maybe in the meantime we can at least see the world clearly. And that's why I wanted to invite the author, Jack, on to the show. You can find him at volcomic.com. Oh, Eve, what did I do here? Vol comic.com. You can also check him out at jackvlloyd.com. Jack, thank you so much for coming on, man. Keith, it's it's my pleasure.
It's been a long time coming. I've seen you in so many places, so many states, and now we're here, so here we have the voluntarist comic. Before getting into the content of these books and what you do in the Freedom sphere, what is it that comics provide when it comes to sharing our ideas that is not easily achievable through sharing empirical evidence or deontological arguments? Sure. So my comic book series Voluntarist isn't really like a Jack Chick track. It's not a a preachy thing.
It's not meant to be like, oh, here's what voluntarism is, although some people have done that. Actually, I would say this book, Beyond the Government Haunted World by Xander Mars does do a preachy form, you know, using the the, the comic form. But no, my comic book series here is is actually more of a narrative where it just flips.
The status norms that are used to seeing in all the comic book series on its head where everywhere and you know pretty much every medium you can imagine DC, Marvel, Image, you know a dark horse, whatever. They always are going to say that the state is either necessary or inevitable or just a few bad apples, right, That kind of thing. So through the comic medium, I challenge that norm and make government not the default ethical norm and treated as
such. And I think that that ties into, you know answer your question here with the idea of. Using fiction or stories to help people get a picture of what it is that we are thinking about and desiring in a freer future. And I think that there's many great examples of this. You know, using parables or stories or entertainment to get
people to think about ideas. And I think one of the most successful people probably in our space who's ever done that would be I ran, of course, you know, doing Atlas Shrugged and, you know, Fountainhead and so on and so forth. So I think that there's a great value to using fiction to
inspire reality. I think sometimes it's easier for people to hear about ideas through a story and for that to get them to think about, you know, their own lives and reflecting kind of, you know, how a mirror to themselves. So that's kind of what I do with that comic book series is I I really have a a story. It's like a regular comic book
superhero story in many ways. But there are some key differences and points of intrigue that do involve deep philosophical questions about what it means to be really free. Excellent. Check that out in the description below. Want to get into the contents of this book? What is the myth of the rule of law and why does it matter? Oh, the myth of the rule of law, you're saying by John Hasnes, correct? Yeah. So John Hasness, he's definitely
one of my favorites. You know, he was one of the people who definitely helped refine my thinking and push me down the path of voluntarism, especially thinking about the status legal systems. So he's a Georgetown associate professor of law. And so, you know, obviously he has some St. cred there, you know, to his name when he
discussed this. But he had a Michigan Law Review article called The Myth The Rule of Law, and he breaks down many of the common, I guess you could say incorrect framings people have about what? The rule of law is, and he helps people see that no matter what aspect the law you think is fixed or firm, in reality the law is just a bunch of opinions of human beings who often actually disagree with each
other, right? They you could get justices at the Supreme Court, all Ivy League educated top tier schools right? And you have a 5 four opinion. And they're conflicting over over what it is that is supposed to be the law. So how is it that this is so objective and it's it's so, you know, accurate and easily understood by everybody, yet you have the supposedly top tier scholars disagree about what it is. So what he points to is that it's really about finality.
In other words, people are more so just wanting to have. A sense of OK, this is just a final judgement. There isn't really as much a rule of law as much would like to have that in terms of just having consistency and integrity and honesty. Unfortunately, you're often at the the whims of which judge you got, you know, on on the bench depending on your case and what's going on. I certainly experienced that when I used to practice a
criminal defense. One of the judges went on a vacation and I got this nice rotation of like 12 different judges. Who were substituting in while she was on vacation in the juvenile court. And I saw really quickly and directly all the different flavors of judges within this one court venue, within this one context of who is going to be more serious, who is more interested in going to see, you know, the football game afterward? They just want to be done.
You know who really cared? And you know who had their. Different type of bias, you can say in the legal system. So I think that his article really helps people put that into context that you know, really I don't actually live under the rule of law. It's kind of a myth. It's just more so there's a little bit of a framework of of allowable opinion and these people coming from the same kind of backgrounds and there's a scope within that.
But really, it's just about finality, you know, that's that's what it boils down to is people are just, you know, seeing where the resting stop is for a case and. Justice is definitely not always served as, as I'm sure you know quite well. Yes. What I love about the book is how in such a brief amount of time you're able to just take a knife to the heart of something like intellectual property. Just a belief that sort of like
exposing a fish to water. We all assume we have property rights, you have intellectual property rights and that's that. So what I would like you to do is we are going to take the lesson from Henry Haslett that economics is about not just the short term consequences on one group, but the long term consequences on all groups of a given policy.
So when it comes to embracing the idea of intellectual property, walk us through the potential downsides and the deontological approach that you give in your book. I believe it is the first one libertarian volunteerism on intellectual property. Sure. And and definitely a hat tip to Steven Kinsella as well, who's definitely a pioneer in this field and someone who I respect definitely as a, you know, cohort and friend in the in this field of of thinking about intellectual property.
So big inspiration from him and me. You know, I'm just further flushing some stuff out, different framings. But his, his work is great against intellectual property. So you know, when it comes to thinking through that, you just have to think about property rights at the bare bones, right. What makes ethical property
rights? And when we're talking about our perspective here, that is the libertarian voluntaris perspective and sometimes tying in the Austrians perspective, here we're talking about physicality and scarcity, right? Because again, what we're worried about when it comes to assigning these things is that you are not deprived of the physical things that you have. No one's going to come take an apple as you're about to eat it and be like, Oh no, you know, I
can't eat that apple. So where things lack the ability to have scarcity over, right? If someone could, you know, have an apple in their hand and someone through some. Magical machine, right? You think Star Trek or something like that and they're able to copy your apple perfectly, but they don't deprive you of it, right? You haven't been take you haven't had that apple taken out of your hand. They're able to somehow replicate that in a machine elsewhere, but you haven't been
deprived of that. So intellectual property here means that someone else gets to control your physical property, your apple, just by virtue of saying, well, I happen to have this thing first. And you know, for example, if somewhere to make a a drawing like let's just say. You know this comic book here, right?
I have, I have this artwork, and if someone were to go with their own pencil and paper and to draw this exact same thing, I wouldn't have a right to say, well, you can't fashion your property, which again, it's it's not my pencil, it's not my paper. I wouldn't have the right to say, Oh well, you can't fashion it like this cover because that would be me saying, oh, I get to control how you form your
totally independent property. And to have this intellectual property paradigm in the state means the government is going to threaten that person with violent force for doing that, for using what is totally their own physical property, the pencil and paper, to make something that is in similitude
to this. And so that's really where we're at. At the core is that we reject this idea that just because someone makes their property, their physically owned independent property, in similitude to something that you may have made, that that doesn't merit the initiation of force against them to stop them. And so when it comes to creativity and innovation and things like that, we have to think outside of the intellectual property paradigm in order to have that done
ethically. And it's not something that is even weird or unusual to do or or to think about, because it already exists, in large part thanks to the ease of copying and digital technologies. You know, back in the day, maybe you could try to stop people from making copies of records a little more readily, or cassette tapes somewhat.
But once you got to the Internet and and computer technology, anybody could rip songs and boom, distribute them across the globe instantaneously from Napster to Limewire and then so on so forth. People just ripping things off, YouTube, whatever. You couldn't stop it. Like there's no meaningful way to stop people from sharing things. So people had to adapt. And we already know what that looks like.
We know what it looks like for musicians to adapt to those situations, to think about how to monetize. Outside of just purely distribution of music, and that includes things like live performances, special merch there, Crowdsource, fundraising to create things, sometimes doing special releases or limited things, you know, to fans and stuff like that using patronage. There's just a bunch of different ways that people have come up to circumvent that type of issue.
And you know, I think that this is just something that applies across the board to any type of thing. Some people say, well music, you know is one thing, but what about trying to make complex electronics or washing machines
and this to that. And I do touch a little bit about how even right now that stuff is also readily copied in places like China and other places where it's it's hard to control what people are doing over there and they're taking technology and they're and they're ripping it and they're immediately coming out with something new. You you really have to have a product offering off that in customer service and other things that make you stand out.
You're not going to just be able to stand out just by resting on the idea and the first iteration of that alone. So, you know, fundamentally that's just all boils down to is we have this ethical principle that, hey, you can't control how other people fashion their property. And now you just have to think, OK, within the context of that ethical confine, how do you innovate and how do you provide value to others in an ethical way?
And once you have that grounded, it's not that crazy and everything else kind of falls into place. I think one of the main reasons that very good people who are well intended disagree about so many political issues when more or less in the, you know, greater scheme of life they can agree on most other things and act in a civilized manner is so often when people are talking about government, they don't even agree on what the definition of government is.
Very often government is when people come together and organize themselves for the greater good. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten that definition, so it makes perfect sense when, if that's your starting point. No wonder we end up on the other side of every single issue. So before getting into the philosophy of government a little more, when you're talking about government, do you differentiate that from a state and what are those definitions
we're dealing with? Sure. So I use government and state interchangeably generally. I don't. Some people say, well governance is not the same as government. And you know when we're talking about the political realm, we're we're talking about governments being states. That is, you know, groups of people. Typically it's very rare that someone is solely able to carry this out themselves. Usually it's an oligarchy of sorts.
But the group of people who is claiming to own everybody, Everything that's already existing in a region by unilateral forcible decree. And they're doing this by, you know, essentially saying, oh, well, I'm your ruler and I get to own you and your house. Yep. I don't care that you're already been born. I don't care that you already have a house built and you're just living your life. I own you and your stuff.
And whatever you decide to do with that and whatever you decide to trade with others by virtue of that decree, and it's backed up, of course, by force. And traditionally, this was kind of funded through different means. You know, often it would be someone who. Would hire mercenaries and promise them spoils from others. Like, hey, help me get control over these people and I'll give you spoils, you know, as part of that. Of course over time it evolved into more sophisticated systems.
You know from the direct violence model to try to make it seem like oh see, this is of the people. It's not a bunch of of bandits who are ruling you. It's it's people like you and you're you're us. Even though you have nothing to do with establishing the constitutional laws or anything whatsoever. They just say, yeah, yeah, this is you. You're part of what we're doing here is.
They're the ones who get all your resources and money and control you and the ways that you know you can't do back to us. So that's really where we delineate here. You know those terms from other things. We're talking about government and states in in that construct. In a way that's that's this initiation of force that's distinct from other types of rudimentary violence. Amazing how they can say that with a strike face. Oh, so I can tax your income?
No, but I can tax yours. Can I issue regulations on your ability to conduct commerce? No. That would actually make you threatening A politician, which makes you a terrorist. OK, this doesn't feel like an extension of me. Representative, in book one on page 62, you ask the vitally important question. Compared to what? When having philosophical discussions, or even just everyday empirical discussions. Why is it important to ask compared to what? And please provide us with an example.
Sure. So compared to what I think one of the people who I especially think about this whenever I hear the term, it is, you know, Stefan Molyneux from back in the day doing that philosophical deep thinking of of the compared to what's to remember that we are not in this world where every single perfection about everything is is written in the stars for us, right? We are not told, here's what moral ethical behavior is by default. We're not told, here's how all of science works.
We're not told. Here's all, all of math works. We're in a constant state. Of discovery and learning and evolving and adapting. And because of that, sometimes people will critique what your position is, even if your position may not necessarily be the end all, be all of solutions. They might critique you, but then their own position is much worse or more vile in terms of the harms caused. You know, against people, right?
So. You sometimes have to be like, OK, there could be critiques about what I am saying potentially, but compared to what? As in what are you advocating for? And a lot of times this comes into play when we're talking about the nature of statism, right?
Because we're often thinking in terms of state violence with thinking about how the state is actually operating and what they're doing compared to what could be done if that wasn't the means of funding things or that wasn't the means of orchestrating, you know, human behavior. And so that's a lot of times what we're trying to get people to wrestle away from is this idea. Oh, the only way to do this thing is, is the state. And you're like, oh, well, you know, how will that ever arise?
You know, they'll just be warlords and this or that. And it's it's like, no, you know, here's how roads can be funded privately and and can be made right. It's not like, oh, OK, that's not possible to make roads, right. So you know, you have to sit there and and get people to walk through those things and say OK. Here's how you're advocating for things to be funded and things to be orchestrated. And what are the actual specifics in, in terms of what each person's doing to get
there? And they say, OK, well, what if we, you know, in the comparative we're to try to achieve that without all the threats of force and violence and these automatic mandatory takings that end up being used to fund massive wars over in the Middle East and spending trillions of dollars on things that people truly don't want to enrich. You know those in power, right? So it's it's it's just a great discourse to have on anything that you you want to talk about.
And it obviously is very easy to show, you know, if you get a little verse in in some of the details, how much the government actually causes harm in the comparative, especially for interventions. And you know what was before they intervened or in places where you know, you can actually see where the government has gotten out of it in some miraculous way and how things have flourished. So I like to think about it like that.
Oh, yes. Shout out to the Airline Deregulation Act. Thank you very much, Jimmy Carter, for basically only that. The reason that was so important for me is because I would always think, well, the problem is, you know, under like a system of anarchism, I don't, you know, there's no guarantee that my body isn't protected. There's no guarantee that my, you know, house and all the things I've worked for aren't protected. To which you should have, to which I should have asked then
compared to what? Is there a guarantee now? Tons of rioters, Tons of looting, tons of wars with indiscriminate bombing, taking 30% of my income and then bragging about it and then never thanking me, which I will never get over that, That no politician has thanked me for all the taxes I paid, whereas anytime I buy a cup of coffee at a private organization, they say thank you so much.
It's just ridiculous. So, compared to what is so vitally important for people to have in their intellectual repertoire in order to combat propaganda, on page 94 you have the citation which I thought was very interesting. You cite Forbes magazine. Private security outnumbers the police in most countries worldwide. It's an infographic from 2017. What do people need to know about the reality of private security?
Not just how it might or I would like to get in how things might work hypothetically, but also there's so much private security we have today that we don't appreciate. Please enlighten the audience with the private security that's constantly all around us. Yeah, the whole private security thing is, is kind of mind, mind boggling, because in some ways, I think people have gotten so used to it, they don't even, like, kind of think about it in those terms anymore, right?
You know, you might see a bouncer at a club or an armed guard at a bank. You know, or you might see that, you know there's some private security getting people in at a sporting event, right? But they don't look at that and immediately reflect on that in economic terms, they're like, huh, OK, not everybody is is police, right? Like, not, you know, not every single security thing is.
Oh, OK. There's going to be a cop at every single gas station, A cop at every single sporting event, a cop at every bank, a cop that sits outside, you know, your house when you go to sleep. Right. It's something that should be more obvious. But you know, for people it just doesn't connect when it becomes just kind of normal and they're not really like focused, you
know, on that economic thinking. So in reality, you know, around the world especially private security is outnumbering police in many places because the governments. And they're really suck. You know what I mean? Like a lot of these places are, you know, really not not the best places to be. And and you know, basically they, they need armed security to move transport, you know, moving goods across the world. You know, there's literally pirates that can try to take down ships.
And so there's there's literally, you know, guys with machine guns and even rocket launchers protecting cargo vessels from getting taken over. And these are just, you know, common things. It's it's just normal stuff if you're in the global scale of business. That you don't like really think about, you know what I mean?
It's not like, OK the the US government's going to sign a cruiser, you know, to this giant you know, tanker or this, you know, giant cargo ship that's shipping over you know, 10s of millions of dollars of goods. They have their own private security to to stop people who would try to you know board them and pirate them and this and that.
So private security is quite the norm in, in most places, you know, as the first rung of defense because you know, police are not just sitting out there and and private security is needed for all types of of establishments.
So moving toward that end, you know, I I think that if people were to recognize that value of having that frontline security and not having to wait and taking things into their own hands and kind of valuing that, I think they can more readily see how we can move away from police being this like total security force that they're always, you know, imagined to be there when you need them and then they're not there in time.
Of course. And instead of thinking about, oh, OK, well what what would a free market and security look like if people were able to actually choose and have more accountability. So you know, that that's kind of that note there is to kind of put things into perspective for people about what is. And I think that's that's often
what we have an advantage. And I think in in our discourse is that there is a lot that we can point to right now around the world in different pockets, different places about solutions outside the state, whether it's because the government's just not intervening there or the government's just too incompetent and solutions are needed.
So people have to step up. So, you know, I always try to point to reality to get people grounded in that to see where we can go. Yeah, I did some work with an IT firm and to watch them when one of their clients had a ransomware attack where their most vitally important items like this is, their entire life's work was just gone. And you know, there's just a note on the screen. Send us 300 grand and we'll give you your files back.
Maybe. None of them, not a single one, said quick call 911. They called the IT company in Arizona who backed up their files with private security on Google. They had PayPal private security keeping all of their finances intact. They also had Venmo private security. They had multi factor authentication with Microsoft for all their emails and all that information for all their contacts. It was amazing to watch in the
most dire circumstances. This organization, probably not run by anarcho capitalists at all, just as a means of efficiency, said what am I going to do? Call the NSA and say my property's been, you know, stripped from me? They wouldn't. They don't have the knowledge or incentive of what to do. But private organizations do. Excellent part in the book. What are some lessons you've learned when it comes to the possibility or reality of private arbitration coming into
existence? So this is actually kind of fun because this topic was something I was just looking into a little bit as I'm working on my next non fiction book which is going to take a bit longer to do. So this was is going to be a book on libertarian legal theory in terms of a proscription. And so this, this might be interesting as me and Kinsell are going to you know, have our our books on this coming out in the near future or this in the future.
We'll see who gets there first. Kinsella has a lot, you know, he can put together from the past, you know sooner. So, so I was looking at the arbitration issues and and thinking through a few things about private market solutions And something that's that's interesting about it is that with arbitration, obviously there's private arbitration that's been generally respected in terms of US courts saying OK, you know if you agree to arbitration, you know you got to
do that thing. And so there's been conflicts about different issues not getting resolved because arbitration wasn't going as well as people had hoped or there was just like complications and stuff like that, people getting
justice. And then there was this kind of wake up moment where all these attorneys at once like oh you know, we could do class actions through arbitrations by like filing 12,018 thousand arbitrations at once with big companies to try to you know basically drain them of resources in order to you know get a class action going that way. Essentially.
You know, not like a legit class action in terms of you know, filing for a class action but like essentially using mass arbitration filings to get results. So I think that the possibility of arbitration and private dispute resolution is is of course, you know, not even a question about reality. Yes, it does happen.
The effectiveness you know is going to I think really depend on to what extent people are both savvy about, you know, their contractual terms and legal backdrops about what norms are required to contract in the 1st place. And that's actually something that you know, I'm going to be tackling head on, which are you know, the business cultural norms of what you need in order to have a valid, both a valid contract and capacity to even consent to a contract.
So I think that these are some issues that are requiring market realignment. You could say because for so long people have gotten into this comfy idea that the government is going to save them no matter what, right? Sign whatever you want like that.
You know, I think it was Apple, like one of the people putting the contract together for their, their TOS, put in like we get your first born child into the TOS, like just to mess with people just to show that nobody reads it and nobody had read it, like, you know, so many downloads and nobody had, right.
So we have, we have a real problem I think with this idea that the government's the salvation, you know, and we'll take you out of any bad situation, sign away, sign, whatever, who cares, You know, go to California and you know court shop. So you know all these distortions in the market, I think you know, have really caused people to not value reading through contracts and not really, you know, take them seriously.
So ultimately I think that when we move toward a market, more of a market system over time, I think those things need to be addressed and and need to be addressed from a strong philosophical backdrop that respects property rights. So I I think that that's really more the thing that needs to be done because you know, arbitration is something that normally, you know, happens. It's not like something crazy or
wild. It literally exists now and even US courts, you know, will be like, no, OK, your contract says this, whatever. But you know, there's there's even issues there. There's always issues of people trying to either not comply or to try to get out of it and this or that. So you need to have more market mechanisms that people can build into those things for insurance or escrow and other incentives to make them more legitimate. Because the if people think that, well it doesn't matter,
you know what I mean? I can get away with whatever, it doesn't matter state law or private arbitration, but then what difference it make, right? You need to have meaningful accountability and reciprocity and upholding of those things in order to have a strong legal system, you know private or you know some type of quasi government thing in transition. So I think that those those are things that need to to really be
addressed at the forefront. But otherwise you know private arbitration or or private dispute resolution is very easy to do and already exists. You know what I mean, widespread now. I mean, most people when they sign their agreements, are already agreeing to some type of private arbitration most of the time. You know, a lot, you know a lot of the times these boilerplate contracts are already doing that, so.
When I was reading this book, it really came across to me that so many of our of our ideas are so commonly held when it doesn't come to the state as far as interacting with people on a consensual basis, having things like informed consent and all these other things when it comes to, you know, recent issues in the Middle East. The nicest people I have ever met are both calling for a mass genocide of the occupying Israelis and a flattening and turning into the parking lot of
Gaza. It is amazing how good people can be tricked, sort of, into justifying the most unbelievable atrocities. When you were doing research for this book, did anything jump out to you as an explanation as to how such good people? Can make such a 180 when it comes to dealing with the state or even just dealing with other
groups in general. Oh, well, I mean when it comes to people's social psychology on different forms of state violence and picking sides, I think the more that there is a personal history or an entrenched history, that's where it gets tough for people because they're going to, you know, read into the situation, OK, you know, this is the worst aggressor. This is the less aggressor.
And I don't know, maybe we, you know, should port them or or, you know, they're going to generalize against a whole group of people and rationalize things, you know, to short circuit having to deal with the complexities of of these situations and that. And that is a big part of it, is that it is complex and it isn't neat and it isn't easy to deal with because we're dealing with issues of people who are trying to maintain state power all across the board.
We have people who just literally are like, I want to have my, you know, utopian vision of control over this area and I want to, you know, do it by force and establish my version of of government. So it's it's unfortunate that, you know, a lot of people fall into that trap so quickly and miss the bigger picture about all the rationalizations for why people are trying to do what it is they're doing in the 1st
place. And I think that in order to do that, you have to, you know, stop thinking about, you know, these, I guess we'd say historical geopolitical games. You know, like, oh, OK, you know, this government gave them this in the past and this government did this and this, you know, and just realized it's like, OK, forget all that nonsense that, you know, none of these governments had the ethical right to do any of these things in the 1st place.
You know, we should be working toward actual peace, actual property rights ending, you know, forcible, you know, evictions or destruction of property and and and all those kinds of things. It's it, you know, that's really what it boils down to. And so you know, for that situation especially, you know, if we're talking about what's happening over in Israel and you know West Bank got a lot of good
stuff. You know, it's it's such a tragic situation because everybody is losing in the end, right at, you know, at the end of the day, you, you just have a bunch of people who are killing each other and then enacting even more state control and more brainwashing and destroying, you know, people's lives. And so, you know, a lot of the times, you know, with what what people are advocating for, they end up creating no winners in the end.
They end up just creating more blowback and more destruction. So, you know, it's just sad all around. That is an excellent point. In March of 1948, Winston Churchill published The Gathering Storm and in the introduction he says. The human tragedy reaches its climax, and after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people, we have found neither peace nor
security. And we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted, referring to the fact that now the Soviet, Bolshevik, Bolshevik regime now has half of Europe, so even after the most justified war that could ever be justified. It still turns out that even the Prime Minister of Great Britain said, well, even after all that, there were some unintended consequences.
So for their best example, they still have this and they're still willing to go to war against Iran, China, Russia and all of these these other groups. Just terrible. That's why I love having books like this, where people can see the lights and not get fooled. When it comes to not being fooled, you have a section on schooling or education. And you reference a possible alternative, referred to as
unschooling. What is unschooling and what can people do to combat any trickery they came across in state education? Sure. So a little background about me on this and how I came to be interested in it is that, you know, my past work, I've been a juvenile defense attorney. I've been a public school teacher. You know state school teacher, I've been a tutor, company owner, substitute teacher and my dad was a 30 year career New York City school teacher.
So I come from a background with a lot of schooling things and young people and I saw through that all how much the, you know nature of compulsory, you know that is forcing someone to learn at the tune of a bell, these subjects in this order, you know. Otherwise you're labeled as a failure or behind you know or just not smart. You just work at McDonald's, right? I I saw how much that destroyed young people's creativity and self drive and self worth in ways that just were absolutely
absurd. Considering that, you know, whatever you're doing, most of it's going to be forgotten by the time you graduate. It's just it you can't retain all the information you're covering, you know, keep only a little bit. So I thought that it was, you know, time to really take a look at this whole picture and say, OK, what is the nature of ethical education?
And so the education that is, you know, most compatible with the voluntarious libertarian mindset is unschooling, where adults act as facilitators, learning that it's helpers instead of performance judges. And what this means that young people are are free to choose whatever it is that they would like to do in terms of learning within, you know, safe
boundaries. You know, obviously they can't go and like set up C4 at someone's, you know, house and that kind of thing, It's it's, you know, it's meant to be with the respect of property rights, of course. But the the idea there is that kids are naturally curious about the world. They are thirsty for knowledge.
They have questions about everything and they just want adults there to help them with their questions or or provide resources as needed instead of telling them what to do and tell them that they're going to be stupid if they don't learn this particular thing at this particular time. And by and large, most every young person who goes through this learns all the basics, the fundamentals of reading, writing, arithmetic and numeracy.
You know, world history just by engaging the culture and the tools of the culture. And this is done at many different types of places, from unschooling co-ops to official unschooling centers like the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, MA, which they've had to program then since 1968
to just homeschooling. Not really at home, but like unschooling in the context of home schooling, sometimes called world schooling, especially if you if you travel with your child to different places around the world, help them learn new languages, experience cultures and things like that. So that is really the ethos of unschooling and it is a fairly
well developed at this point. It's, you know, the philosophy behind it. And there's a great book by Kerry MacDonald, who is a Foundation for Economic Education fellow called Unschooled Raising a Curious Children, well educated children outside the conventional classroom. I highly recommend people check
that book out. She herself holds a masters in Education from Harvard. She's unschooled her four kids, so she has, you know, the academic credentials for those who need it and the lived experience. So I think that that is a great start. Obviously she's not the only one by far, but I think it's a great start for people to really dive into it and understand what it
means. And so I've done a lot of work helping families exit the school and paradigm through my page the Honest teacher and I've gotten numerous families to finally make the jump get their kids out of compulsory learning and to unschool and and every single one you know who's done that so far to me, you know who's communicated with me about it has said wow this has been an incredible experience amazing
journey. I had no idea that I was you know basically stopping their learning and and actually you know curtailing it through the forced a schooling paradigm and the shame and and the other things like that. So you know and then parents too, they, you know, sometimes have to decompress themselves from the schooled mindset.
They have to kind of work back all the structures they have in the psychological fears they have from the schooled mindset where they think Oh my gosh, if my kid isn't in this you know, K to 12 program, you know, for school, they're just going to be broke or this is that so. And and kids of course through unschooling, you know, doesn't mean they don't have ever any textbooks or a class or anything. They're they're free to take it as they're interested.
And if they want to take a class on Japanese language, of course, if they want to take a class on computer programming, of course it's up to them. It's just a matter of their election, their choosing based on self direction, and that's where the learning is actually deepest and most meaningful. Yeah, and I think not going by that principle is so dangerous for both sides. Once the kids, the kid becomes sort of resentful or does, you know, just the bare minimum.
But it also is bad for the teacher or parent because it doesn't really get them to the point where they say okay. I need to motivate this child to learn about history, economics, philosophy. How am I going to make this interesting for them? How do I communicate it so effectively to where they realize that history really is important in teaching us lessons with how to deal with things today? When I was in school, I felt like they could not care less about respecting my time.
So it ends up being both in the benefit of the teacher and the student when we embrace ideas like this. I want you to lead by example and give us an unschooling lesson on five of our heroes. I know you had to have read a lot of their work in doing research for this book. Please walk us through the most important lesson you learned from Murray and Rothbard. So Murray Rothbard, I would say there's a lot of lessons that I've learned from him in terms of thinking about state violence.
But I'll say in some ways my favorite things from Rothbard are more so thinking about what I liked to change and and be different. So for example, when Rothbard talked about the the market and children thing, I didn't like how he framed that. And so I changed that, of course, noted that in my books as well to something about a stewardship relationship with children. It's not ownership. You don't own the body of the child. They're not your property.
It's a stewardship relationship. So I really appreciated him making these types of statements session The Ethics of Liberty, because it helped me see that there was, I thought, room for improvement of ways to communicate these things and that it wasn't just, oh, everybody's dead and there's nothing to improve upon. There's nothing to do better. But you know, I I love his scathing review of what the state really is in the United States. That's definitely one of my favourites of his.
But the The Ethics of Liberty I thought was is probably one of my favorite books of his and and what inspired me in some ways to do my own writing and and write my own articles and eventually do that to write my own book. OK, and why is it that liberty is ethical as opposed to coercion? Or what the opposite of liberty would be. Yeah, yeah, the opposite of of liberty would be a total slavery. But the ethics and and how I frame that is specifically about an adoptive ethic psychology.
So what we're talking about here is not necessarily, oh, this is the absolute truth of the universe like this. God created everything or there wasn't a God of this that I sidestep all that and just simply focus on the nature of how people empathetically view each other and those relationships and develop that ethical code of conduct from what people expect for themselves. And that's where we start with the consent ethic, how people cannot want their consent violated.
It's it's logically impossible to want somebody's consent to it. And so it builds a strong foundation of reciprocal empathetic, you know, outlook on how you actually act with other people and have consensual relationships. So I would say that that that is a little bit different from other authors. You know for example on Rand and Objectivism and rationalism or Rothbard uses natural law theory, which I'm not a natural law theorist, I I do you know take a divergent from there.
But I think that this type of thinking, this type of framing, where I'm asking the person that is the the reader to think about their own selves, to me that is the most effective way to get people into this type of psychology and into this type of respect. Because you can. You can tell someone all day, here's what the world is and
here's what you should think. And like Macy's did a great job of it. Let me write every single brain spill thing about everything I could possibly think about, you know, in human action. But at the end of the day, if that person you're talking to doesn't have that same knowledge, worldview, experience, what good does it do? They're not going to relate to it. You have to get someone to relate to these ethical principles on their own terms,
their own lived experience. And if you can do that, it's going to be way more, you know, to me, meaningful and deep and lasting because they are actually going to relate to this in their own view and their own, OK, you know, I that's right. I don't want my body to be violated by others. I don't want people to, you know, steal from me and and to come in the middle of the night and to stab me and all this other stuff. Right.
It's way more lasting for someone to have that reflective process in my opinion, and to be able to sit there and say, OK, I can see how this reciprocally if they don't do this to me and I don't do this to them, then I'm actually going to have peace. So you know that that's kind of where I, I take my stand and kind of stick out from, you know, some of these other potential lenses about thinking through the development of human
ethics. What is the most important lesson you've learned from Auburn Herbert? So, funny thing. And he's actually on this, this cover here, he's like hammering out on that little pedestal. So I actually didn't even have much anything to do with him or any real knowledge of him until way later in my journey because I was more so on the, I guess you could say, the Internet voluntarius and the people who were really chugging away at that between 2006. Yeah, 2006 and and 2010.
So like Neil, so, Larkin, Rose Mark Stevens and stuff like that. And you know, going back to even, you know, people from the Voluntarius, oh, I got a cameo back there where you know, I must speak out the best of Voluntarist magazine. A 299 Carl Wagner. So this, you know is a little bit of, you know, the the modern voluntarist thought, you know, kind of encapsulated in this
book. So Herbert, you know, wasn't really as much of a big influence on my journey until, like I was like, oh, OK oh, and that's where that guy, oh, that guy came up with this stuff. So for him it was just more like, oh, OK. So he's the one who kind of encapsulated the voluntariest, you know, thought process and removing your consent from the state and, you know, the group, the, you know, the voluntariest group that he was a part of. And that's where that, you know, coin turn comes from.
So that's my appreciation for him is is that him kind of taking the ideology and and conceptualizing and giving it a name? Yeah, he is the main motivation behind the title for my next book, which I'm titling, Domestic Imperialism. What he does is he makes a very clear, concise argument against that. You know this imperialism is certainly unjustifiable. He's using the example of the British in Ireland if.
I recall that correctly and says, and by the way, this principle also applies to domestic populations. So you know what's really wrong for those British to coercively impose their ideas on those in Zimbabwe? Well, the fact that they're geographically very far from Britain doesn't. What if it's my neighbor? What if there's the closest person on planet Earth to me is threatening me with violence if I don't?
Either chip in for this schooling scheme, chip in for this infrastructure bill, or, you know, refuse to use these drugs. He completely obliterates this, you know, line between foreign imperialism bad but domestic. Well, that's different 'cause you get a vote once every four years. I love Herbert's work work, and I am so glad you're keeping his message alive when it comes to what Ludwig von Mises most important lesson you learn from
him. So with Macy's, his work on the deduction specifically, you know, past his a priori, which I would say I have a disagreement with. With that aspect I you know I diverge on on the the abstraction of man but I do really value the deductions he made past that a talking about human action specifically with people acting in their self interests in order to meet their you know specific wants and needs and how that plays you know on the broader scale of of the economic calculation.
So you know to me that that's where I think he's really basically you know kind of taking the cake on explaining
all those different things. I mean he he's very verbose at walking through here's every single thought of human action when people are in the market and they're looking and perceiving at every you know every other person and and they're you know without all these different people coordinating you know together there's having spontaneous order you know especially of course you know inspiring A Hayek
later. So I to me those foundations I think are excellent and inspiring and, you know, great economic foundation and way better, of course, than Adam Smith, so. I remember, I think it was in a book titled Bureaucracy, where Mesa said something it it was just so short and beautiful, he goes. If man's fallibility is a justification, is an argument in opposition to the free market, it must also be in opposition to
statism. Or it it was just something so brief like that where I just read it and I go, that's interesting. Yes, people are fallible. Well, who runs the state? Owls, plants, zebras. Yeah, humans who we just conceded are fallible when we're talking about the voluntary sector. There are just so many gems in In Mesus's work that I'm glad that he made the cover of of your first one. When it comes to Lysander Spooner, that's who this is. Right at the very bottom. Yeah, at the at the bottom
middle, that's sponer. OK, yes, so he made the cover well deserved. What is the most important lesson the audience could learn from Lysander Spooner? So Spooner was definitely one of my favourites and definitely on my top tier list even in my early days, because his constitutional authority was just such an excellent critique
on the constitution. And of course very impressive considering, you know, his time period in 1800s being so ahead on this like hey, you know, you made this constitution, but we didn't agree, right? So I I think that his encapsulation on, you know, the the man being stuck in a battlefield when it comes to voting is kind of a fun encapsulation that I I kind of like that when it comes to
political action. He sticks out from other voluntary as saying that the act of voting in and of itself is not support of the state. If you're just trying to stop them from literally killing you or robbing you. I I 'cause I think that that is a justifiable form of self-defense. I don't think that you know, there and that's that is like a big split with involuntarism is you know, voluntarists who are against all political action categorically, you know, none of that whatsoever.
And then those who think, yeah, voting in self-defense, like if you can alleviate any type of government theft, murder, whatever, do it. I fall into the latter camp. I think that if we can end wars with a vote just because I don't care, it's like I don't want people being mass murdered. It's like anything to stop that you know, is ethical to me. Anything to stop people being stolen from again, that's that's ethical. You're not murdering more people to stop. You're saying, oh hey, we're
going to stop having this tax. Whatever. Fine. You know what I mean? So I don't I don't see that as inherently supporting the state or saying it's legitimate. I see it as you know basically doing whatever you can to try to stop the theft and violence that is the state. So you know I think that's that's good you know nerd them debate there.
You know, it's actually within the the voluntary sector and a lot of the the mainline ones, especially in in this grouping, you know, involuntariesvoluntaries.com, they were definitely more apolitical teetering on pacifist people. So, you know, there's definitely some risks as among those people, you know, whether that's
that's OK or not, but. So I'm trying to remember, because I've read the Constitution of No Authority some time ago, the argument is that there is no treason when you don't obey the state because you never agreed to it. So when we're calling people treasonous for not blindly obeying the mass murder in government, did I just make that up or is that his general argument? What does he mean by no treason? I I'm not. I'd have to relook at that myself.
I I thought that that was what it is that you said. But I'm having a brain fart and I don't remember exactly. I'd have to like revisit that to say whether no treason, as in the act of rejecting the Constitution, is not treasonous. I thought that's what it was my assumption, but I'd have to double check that. I want to ask about Frederick Bastiat. I just got to read my favorite Bastiat quote and then I'm going to let you take over.
But on page 49, Bastiat says. Please understand of his book The Law. Please understand that I do not dispute their right to invent social combinations, to advertise them, to advocate them, and to try them upon themselves at their own expense and risk. But I do dispute their right to impose the plans upon us by law, by force, and to compel us to pay for them with our taxes.
It was so vitally important for me to hear something like that when I thought that government was equating with society and anyone who was anti government is kind of against society in general. What's wrong with people getting together to do things? Bastiat makes that so crystal clear that that I just got so much out of him. What are the most important lessons you learned from the work of Frederick Bastiat? Yeah, his his law. The law is obviously the the flagship there.
It's it's it's pretty pretty great the his quote with you know socialism and saying that the socialists would accuse you of not wanting to have bread or religion or or anything else just because you don't want the government doing it. I thought that is just such a strong encapsulation, especially tied back to what you're saying with the compared to what?
Just calling out people who say, oh, OK, well, just because I don't want the government doing this doesn't mean, oh, I want no food or I want no security, you know, or whatever it is that they're saying. Oh, well, you know, if you don't have the government, then you have nothing, you know.
So I thought that his scathing critique of the socialists there, and I love how it's of course encapsulated as socialists, 'cause that's, you know, that's who's facing the time stands up, you know, throughout the test of time. And it's always the same thing. People, you know, you argue in the Internet and you say, hey, maybe the government shouldn't do this thing like, oh, you don't want roads.
You know, like so it's it's something that is is so incredibly timeless and that's probably one of my favorite statements out of there. It's unbelievable to find out that that was written in what, like 1850? I think he wrote the law just something like forever ago, like right after the French Revolution. So yes, Jack, remind us where we can find you and where can we purchase the book? Sure. So the books here that you can see do a little zoom here.
So these three books that we were just talking about in the philosophical Voluntarism, Vision for Libertarian Future, Definitive Guided, Libertarian Voluntarism, those books are all printed on demand through Amazon. So they're only in print. They're not in digital. People say why not digital? I say because these artworks are super cool and they make for a great display piece. When you're done, you're going to want them. So that's why I keep them in print.
But and they're not that hefty and you know, people like, oh, I got a big bookshelf like these, These can slip, slip in anywhere you're good. So you can get them, you know, just looking up on Amazon. Of course, if you go to my website, Jack JCKV as in Voluntariest, Lloyd LOYD, Jack V, lloyd.com, I have links there to pretty much everything that I do to some degree, whether it's the non fiction books or my comic book series, which I'm super excited about.
We actually just finished the remaster on the Origins arc, which is 6 issues and there's a trade paperback for that and they'll be up soon enough. You know the first two issues are are still waiting pending queue a placement on the website. But in the meantime you can check out that comic book series on Amazon Digital and on Indie Planet and do all kinds of other cool stuff too. I mean, we have a music video coming out I think within about
a week and a half. The next music video is called Break the Great Reset. This one's going to feature a philosopher, so I worked as producer on that and writer slash, you know, costume prep person. So that is going to be a fun music video coming out talking about the great reset and mocking, of course, the Evil World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab. So I'm super excited for that. And we have some other cool
things come out too. Later on this year, we're going to do another campaign for the next Suit Saga, the next art called Suit Saga and Voluntarist. And then we have a top secret project that we've had in the works for a year coming out January 1st, 2024. So you'll find out what that is soon enough. But I think, I think everyone's going to eat it. They're going to love it or hate it or or they're going to be like, Oh my gosh, what the heck is this?
And then they're going to open it up and laugh. So that's all I can say. I can't say the specifics, but it's going to be something really funny. Thank you to everyone for watching Keith and I don't tread on anyone in the Libertarian Institute. Jack Lloyd, thank you for your time, brother. Oh, it's my pleasure. Always you, Keith.