Lysander Spooner

And it does so by providing a store of productive value providing it on an immutable ledger that is borderless.

It's untouchable by the loan-mongering moneylenders, as Spinner likes to call them.

And then it requires no permission to participate in.

It requires no special license privilege class.

We've got continuation of Proposition 5.

So again, Proposition 5 is that there must be free banking in order to get the lowest rate of interest.

So Lysander Spooner writes...

Suppose such were the results and suppose $500 capital, which again, $500 for Spooner was a little over a year's wages or about a year's wages, depending on the type of industry that you were working in as a wage laborer.

It's certainly a provocative title, of course, but the book presents a really substantial biblical, theological and economic argument.

and nick explores what scripture says about slavery the government taxation property a number of things and he brings the bible into conversation with a number of fascinating figures important figures such as augustine john locke thomas aquinas bastiat lysander spooner you name it and he asks whether christians have granted the modern state an undue authority that scripture itself doesn't grant which i think is the most vital question so thanks again for joining me today nick My

pleasure.

Great to be here.

And then to step out of the picture.

That is such a John Drake, Lysander Spooner answer to this.

And it's and it's it's correct on its face.

You know that this is it is the government intervention.

Exactly.

And they put it right alongside the counter arguments like Lysander Spooner's 1856 book, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, where he uses those very same natural law arguments from Aquinas to argue that slavery was completely illegal.

It's a literal, physical debate sitting on a table.

Exactly.

Mm

... you know, the, the American individualists like, uh, Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner, these sort of old-school sort of American agrarian philosophers that wanted, um, in some sense, to fulfill the promise what Thomas Jefferson talked about of a society of small business owners, whether you're small farmers or a small, uh, uh, you know, business owner on, on Main Street.

In your town, and this is the life of the town and the money that you circulate, the currency is the blood that runs through the town, and that currency, uh, y- of the exchange needs to go back into the town and not extracted and pumped into some mothership hovering above, you know, the, the Earth, sucking up all the resources and injecting it straight into the vein of the creepy creepoid who wants to live forever on the spaceship above us.

You know what I mean? The man-made spaceship.

It was really fun to see all that work.

on stage and my wife is there right now actually with the two directors and they're all figuring out the lighting and putting tape on the on the stage so that we know where each set piece is i've been back and forth a couple of times to make some quick repairs here and there so it's very exciting it's all coming down that will be next weekend and um yeah pretty excited about that uh mostly to have it done so i can focus on other things aob good to see you we got flying storm in the chat lizzy boston tracy nanette there are no thumbs of doom that i can see unless i'm mistaken yep still no thumbs of doom so i think we're all right uh okay so we uh last week we wrapped up proposition four in oh by the way after this i will be on the narrative with burning bright we meant to do this last week he was uh suffering from the deep throes of the man flu or something along those lines and um so we had to postpone so we're gonna do that tonight so immediately following this make sure you head on over there and harass us janna ellen i see you there in the chat good to see you cloud topper howdy So last week we wrapped up Proposition 4, in which Spooner describes a scenario that illustrates his overall point, which is that using natural law as the first principle—because remember, first principle arguing isn't necessarily a— Trump card, oh, I'm arguing from first principles.

It is merely that by saying that you are aware of what your foundational assumptions are and you are arguing from those.

And so that's what is meant by first principles arguing, first principles logic.

So with Spooner, we are using natural law as that first principle.

And so that's Spooner's point, that using natural law as the first principle, and with that comes a man's natural rights, and among those being the right to associate with any other consenting person, and with that as your foundation, then logically a man has the title to the full fruits of his labor.

then being self-employed is the best way to reap the full fruit of his labor.

And then if he doesn't have the capital to be self-employed, then he has the right, but he still wants to be, he has the right to then borrow from a willing lender.

And that never left me.

And so then when I got to Occidental in 2016 and I talked to Darn and he gave me a lot of literature, Anatomy of the State by Murray Rothbard, you know, iPencil, a lot of this foundational stuff, even Lysander Spooner's The Law and all this stuff.

that it just all comes together and you kind of have to recognize that like wow you have to put this this mythology this nationalistic ideas aside and like consider them independently from what the truth is about the nature of the state and the government and that like Yeah, I mean, we can touch deeper onto that.

But my mom, she was more conservative.

So that's why everyone now basically believes it's a, it's a legitimate type of capitalism, but it's gone too far, et cetera.

Uh, now, but among the more serious advocates of intellectual property, there are some crazy ones, and the craziest ones would be, uh, Galambos and even Ayn Rand and Lysander Spooner, believe it or not, who was really good on some things, but he was horrible on this issue.

All because they all got...

They all get confused about John Locke's labor theory of property and the related labor theory of value of Adam Smith and Karl Marx in Marxism, um, which is this fallacious view that labor is a type of substance or thing that we produce by acting or by laboring, and that's like an ownable quantity, and then...

This is all pie in the, pie in the sky, crazy libertarian dorm room bullshit, uh, in the end.

Um, so yeah, Galambos is the craziest.

Lysander Spooner is the craziest.

Ayn Rand and Schulman.