Hey everybody, today we're debating is taxation theft and we are starting right now. With our guest, Dr. Michael Humer, who's on the left side of your screen, thanks so much for being with us and the floor is all yours, Dr. Humer. All right, thanks. I'm going to share my screen because I have a little slide show that I prepared. All right, so I'm going to talk about whether taxation is theft and my answer is yes, it is the form of theft. So this is what I'm going to talk about.  Then I'm going to talk about objections to this. And then I'll talk about possible alternatives to taxation. And if I somehow have time at the end, I'll say some side remarks about the distribution of the tax burden. So here's my simple argument that taxation is theft. Premise taking property without the owner's consent is theft. Why do I think that? I think that's basically definitional. I don't know if that's the exact, precise definition of theft, but it's something pretty close to that, right? Obviously, if I took people's property without consent, if I go to my neighbor and I go, hey, you have to give me 10% of the amount of money made last year. Otherwise, I'm going to kidnap you and lock you in the cage and so on. I wouldn't talk to you of theft. And that's because I would be taking money without consent. Second premise, taxation takes people's property without their consent. The taxation is not collected going voluntarily. It's compulsory, right? They don't ask you, would you like to pay the taxes? You'd like to buy our services or do that. They say, you have to give them money. Otherwise, we're going to send them with guns to your house. So you don't kidnap you and lock you in the cage and stuff like that. That is a non-consensual property transfer. And so conclusion taxation is theft. And it seems to me pretty simple and straightforward.  I guess most people think that that sounds really weird and maybe counterintuitive. But I find it hard to see how it could not be theft. All right, well, so I thought of some possible objections that people might say. So first objection, thieves don't generally provide valuable services after they take your money. And the government does provide valuable services, which is why they have to take the money to pay for those. My response to this is, well, that doesn't prevent it from being theft. So I'm not saying that they don't provide any valuable services.  So as one example, imagine that I'm running a charity. And the way that I collect money for my charity is I just go out and mud people on the street. But after I take the money from them, then I feed it into my charity, which actually helps me. I would still be a thief, right? I mean, I'm doing something good with the money, but it is still true that I stole it. Another example is the mafia, which collects money for protection. And by the way, in case you don't know this, they actually do provide protection and not just for themselves.   So they are actually protecting you, which, coincidentally, is also the main service that the government says that they are providing for you, that they're charging money for as well. And the fact that they're providing this service doesn't make them not thieves, right? What makes them thieves is that while they're providing the service, they're not giving you free choice as to whether you want to pay for it or not. Here's another objection. Maybe it's not theft because we actually agreed to pay taxes. This would be following the so-called social contract theory, according to which government is established by some kind of agreement between the government and the people. The main problem with this is it's just factually false. We just never, in fact, made such an agreement. So nobody can show me the contract that has my signature on it. There's no time at which anybody actually ever asked me, then you want to have a government, you want to pay taxes, whatever. And they didn't ask you either, right? They don't ask anyone. They just do it, right? OK, here's the third objection. It's not theft because it's legal. You might say maybe theft is an illegal property transfer, right? And maybe you think property rights are produced by the laws created by the government. And so the government gets to just say, if they want some money, they just get to make the laws that say they're entitled to that money and then it becomes theirs. So it's not really your property, right? OK, that's something you might say. My response to that is, well, property rights are not solely produced by government law. There are natural rights. So this is a hypothetical example. Let's say you go to some remote location where it's outside the jurisdiction of any government. And there's this hermit living out there by himself. And the reason it's a hermit is there's no society so that you can't say that there's some other form of law there, right? So he's living out there by himself. And he's created a sphere, right, that he made from wood and stone and whatever. And when you find that hermit, you decide that you like his sphere, so you just take it and leave, right? We would say that you stole his sphere, correct, right? So and that shows that stealing doesn't require there to be a government jurisdiction and doesn't require there to be a law created by a government. OK, objection four. Yeah, but taxation is justified because we need it to maintain law and order, which is really important. OK, and my response to this is, again, that doesn't stop it from being theft, right? You have a theft if you have a non-consensual property transfer, even if you then do something really good with the property. My other response is I think there might be alternative means of funding the government. So it might not actually be necessary to do taxation, which I'm going to talk about in a second. All right, so what could the possible alternative be? How could we provide law and order without taxation? Well, my basic idea is user fees. So if you have to have a government, OK, you know, sign, no. Actually, I'm an anarchist, but, you know, let's not go into that. Let's just say that you somehow you have to have a government for whatever reason. But still, maybe they could fund themselves by just charging money for the services that they're providing, you know, just like everyone else to provide services and get some money. So in this proposal, they wouldn't simply force you to buy their service. They would say, we have a service. If you want to pay us some money, if you don't pay us, we just won't provide you the service.  You just won't provide our service, right? So what could this be like? It might be, well, if you haven't paid your tax bill, it wouldn't be taxation anymore because you will be voluntary. So if you haven't paid the fees, they would say, well, you know, you can't call the police.  If a crime gets committed against you, they won't investigate it. They won't arrest anyone, right? You won't be able to use the government courts, whatever.  So they could say that. And if the government services are super valuable and, you know, they're reasonably good at providing them. And if the prices were reasonable, then people would in fact pay. You might make this objection. You know, maybe this wouldn't be able to raise enough money to pay for all of the great social programs that that we want the government to do. OK, if you know that I'm a libertarian, you probably know my main response to this, which is we don't need all those social welfare programs. So it might be true that you couldn't fund, you know, you can't fund everything the government is actually doing with the voluntary user fees, but that just means that you should cut back on all those programs. Right now, I remind you of my charity mugging example before where I was running this really good charity and I collect money by mugging people, most people think that that's unjustified. Like I can't just go out and mug people or collect money, even though it's going to charity and the charity is good and valuable to society, right, still can't do it. So I think that's like the government's social welfare programs. I don't see why they should be able to force you to pay for them, even if they're good programs, right, which, by the way, side note, I think they're a lot less good than most private charity. OK, so this is my summary. Taxation is a non voluntary property transfer, which is that I'm not saying that that automatically rules it out as being unjustified because I think there could be cases in which theft is justified. Like it could be justified in stealing something in in an emergency, you know, necessary to prevent something much worse from happening, but that does make it harder to justify. So it's not irrelevant that I say that. It's not normatively irrelevant. It means that you need a special justification, you know, similar to the justification you would need if you were stealing if an ordinary person was stealing somebody's property. OK, am I out of time? Have I used up to 10 minutes? Oh, another minute. OK. All right, I was just going to make some comments about the way the tax burden is justified. And this isn't really relevant to whether it's theft or not. But I think it's interesting. I think that most people don't know about it. So this is a table I made. This is data from the Congressional Budget Office in 2013. I haven't updated it lately. But it shows they divided the population into five groups by income. So lowest printile refers to the fifth of the population that has the lowest income. And the numbers in the table are averages, right? So 15, 800 is the average income of people who are in the bottom 20 percent income. And it shows how much money they receive from the government as transfers. So social welfare programs that give you money or benefits and how much they pay on average in taxes. And then their tax of the percentage of their market income. And then the net tax is the amount of tax they paid minus the amount of transfers they received from the government. And what you see in the table is that for the bottom three quintiles, the bottom 60 percent, the average net tax is negative, meaning they're receiving more money than they're paying in. And it's only for the top two quintiles that's positive. And almost all of it is paid by the highest quintile. And these are people who, you know, on average, they make 250,000 a year. So you probably pretty much call them the rich. So basically, the rich are carrying everybody else. This is the same data in a bar graph. The blue is how much money in absolute dollars they're paying. OK. And so I just want to say this. The box, this is a table with another row added, which is the portion of the total net tax that is paid by each group. And what you see is the highest quintile is paying 183 percent of the total net tax. I'm sorry, my other time. OK. Anyway, just ask yourself, does that seem like a fair distribution? You got it. Thank you very much, Dr. Michael Humer. We will now kick it over to Dr. Ben Burgess and give a little bit of extra time on there. So we'll give Ben you the we'll give you the exact same amount of time for your opening. And so with that, thanks so much for being with us today. And want to remind you, folks, if it's your first time here, modern debate is a neutral platform hosting debates on science, religion and politics, including this juicy one you'll see on the bottom right of your screen between T jump and Vosh next week. The super straight debate. You don't want to miss it. So hit that subscribe button right now, as well as that notification button so you don't miss out on it. And with that, thanks so much, Dr. Ben Burgess. The floor is all yours for your opening. Thank you, James. Thanks, Michael. So I do want to start by answering the question we heard at the end. Is it fair that the the wealthiest people pay many times the percentage, the average percentage? Yes, of course it is. But I want to we can we can get into that later. You know, if I want to talk about why that is and why they should be paying even more, you know, and why that's no reason at all to think they're paying an unfair percentage. But first, I want to talk about two questions that are more directly central to what we're talking about this evening. First is taxation theft. And the second is is taxation wrong? And then finally, is the could the answer to the second to the first question is the second question is taxation wrong? Yes, because the answer to the first question is yes. In other words, could taxation be wrong because it's theft? Now, I'm going to say that it's not wrong and it's not theft. But as a logical prior point, I do want to say that even if the answer to both was yes, the answer to his taxation is wrong, can't be theft because the answer to the answer to is it wrong, can't be yes, because the answer to is it theft? Is yes, it has to be the other way around. It has to if the answer both is yes and there's a relationship between those two answers, it has to be theft because it's wrong and not not wrong because it's theft. I know that's counterintuitive, but we'll see if I can catch that check. But I think that saying that taxation is wrong because it's theft is like saying that abortion is wrong because it's murder. The concept of wrongness is built into the concept of murder. That's why we don't talk about murdering enemy soldiers in a just war, murdering a comatose patient who has to be murdered in his living will. And we certainly don't talk about committing murder and self defense. Saying abortion is wrong because it's murder is a noisy way of saying that abortion is wrong because it's wrong and adopting an argument that I got from Michael Brunag, I maintain that something exactly similar is true of taxation is wrong because it's that and this critique is going to apply with equal force to the moderate version of the taxation is theft claim that we just heard that well, sometimes that is justified in extreme circumstances. So maybe sometimes, you know, taxation is justified in extreme circumstances. It's going to apply to that just as much as the more hardcore version of the taxation is wrong because it's theft argument that says that it's absolutely wrong. So the position that we just heard, as I understand it, says that the prima facie of wrongness of of taxation can sometimes be canceled out by competing considerations. And a lot of you know, non libertarians might hear that second part that well, it's it's theft, but theft isn't always on balance wrong and lose interest in the first part. After all, if we're not for perhaps prepared to let indigent people starve to death, if the only way to prevent that outcome is through tax a taxpayer funded social programs, you might think, what does it matter? If we say it's theft, but then theft is justified in extreme circumstances rather than a clean, simple, it's not that might sound like a distinction without a difference. But I think as Michael kind of hinted at in his open statement or spelled out a little bit, it actually does make a giant difference. It certainly makes a giant difference when you start to think about things like whether it would be morally justifiable to have the sorts of things that Bernie Sanders was talking about during his two runs for president, like Medicare for all or universal tuition pre higher education, which would, as his centrist opponents point out in those races, involve raising taxes, even on middle class people and and would benefit not just people who are desperately in need of those things, people who wouldn't have health insurance or couldn't go to college if if those things were treated as commodities, but but even people who might be able to afford them just fine if they weren't treated as commodities, because the Democratic Socialist position is that things like health care and higher education are important human rights that that everybody should have, whether they could pay for them if they're treated as commodity or not, and that treating them as commodity is morally indefensible. And so that is going to be a basic distinction. And and I think the charity mugger thing actually brings out the point quite nicely because, of course, for example, Medicare for all would actually be a financial boon to middle income taxpayers since the current combined cost of taxes and private health insurance premiums is much more than the future tax burden would be for those for middle income tax taxpayers if we had Medicare for all. But of course, if you think that it's wrong, it's theft and all that, then that would just be like the charity mugger. And I think if we take a broader view and think about what would be ruled out by saying that that it's wrong, it has a wrong similar to theft, you know, maybe taxing Peter to pay for Paul's health insurance is like stealing a loaf of bread from Peter to pay a ball, although honestly, even that sounds a little dubious. But even if it is like that, it's certainly only like that if Peter would otherwise not have health insurance. And on a more mundane level, think about public libraries. I think those are vital public institutions and privatizing them would be deeply unjust. But if we see taxation in the same light of street level theft, the justification for public libraries comes under severe threat. You know, Michael Hummer might grant you that mugging an innocent person would be defensible if this was the only way to feed your starving family. But I seriously doubt he'd give you a pass for mugging an innocent to pay for books for your family because they'd already read all the books in the house. So why do I think it's circular to say that taxation is wrong or even all else being equal wrong because it's theft? The reason is that part of what it means to say it's something that's theft is that it's wrong. This is worth digging into. This is a crucial point, you know, might sound nitpicky. Because theft doesn't and can't just mean the definition that we just heard. It can't mean just taking something that's currently in someone else's possession without their permission, because if it was just taking something that's currently in someone else's possession without their permission, then recovering stolen property would be theft. So that can't be right. It can't even as as Michael indicated, you know, with the hermit's spear example, it can't even be that that it's that theft is taking something that's currently in someone else's permission, possession without their permission when they have a legal right to it. And in fact, it really can't be that if you're going to say that taxation is that because, of course, if if taxation is legally established in the portion of your income, your own taxes legally belongs to the IRS, not to you. So that doesn't work either. So it can't just be taking something that's currently in someone else's possession without their permission. It can't even be that plus a legal right to it. It has to be that you're taking something from someone else that's this currently in someone else's possession without their permission when they have a moral right to it and not even just a like mild default, like all else being equal, the fact that something's currently in someone's possession gives us is like a reason for it to stay in their possession. They're really, really strong moral right, maybe one that can be overwritten by someone stealing a loaf of bread to feed their starving family, but certainly not one that can be overwritten for all the other social purposes that I've just mentioned. And so I would say that all of Dr. Kieber's work is still ahead of him because he hasn't given us any reason to think that the that the people, for example, who are paying payroll taxes to pay for old age insurance, you know, social security, that those that those workers have a moral right to their possessions in ways that the that overrides the moral rights of the retirees to to get social insurance. And if we can't say on paying a circularity that we have a strong moral right to the portion of our income being taxed because tax in it would be like theft, we must have that strong moral right because of some substantive libertarian moral theory of property rights. I've yet to hear such a theory. Maybe one will be provided in the rebuttal. Meanwhile, though, I want to end on this point. Our moral horror at mugging or home invasion robbery is not reduced one iota if the victim is a public school teacher or a firefighter or an artist living off a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the mugger is a private sector taxpayer, but why not? If some substantive libertarian theory of property rights is correct, that then that private sector taxpayer robbing that public school teacher would be recover and stolen property. So it seems to me that the libertarian can't have it both ways. Either they can trade on our moral horror at home invasions and back alley muggings to convince us that taxation is wrong or they can ground the wrongness of taxation and substantive libertarian theory of property rights. But I do think they have to. Thank you very much. Did you have anything else? I didn't interrupt. You got it. And so thanks very much. We are going to jump into the rebuttal sections now, folks. These are each going to be 10 minutes from each speaker. And then we'll have following that about 30 minutes of open dialogue. And then 30 minutes or so of Q&A at the end. But do want to let you know right now, folks, our guests are linked in the description. And so we highly encourage you to check out their links. And that includes if you're listening to modern day debate via podcast, as all of our debates are uploaded via podcast format as well. And you can find our guest links in the description box for each podcast episode. So thanks for that. And with that, Dr. Michael Humer, the floor is all yours for that 10 minute rebuttal. OK, thanks. OK, so I don't know. Just going to comment on a few things on how to define that. I said it was a transfer of non-voluntary transfer of property, something like that. I think Ben's view is, well, it sounds like maybe a view was, oh, it's wrongful transfer of property. Or maybe the view is just like the term property already contains a moral implication, right? Like saying that it's your property means you have a right to order something. Now, I don't think theft is defined to be wrongful because, you know, you can have a theft that's justified. But, you know, it might be. It might be that the notion of property is normed is like something that you have rights, certain kinds of rights over. So I guess that sounds OK, but I don't think that that makes much of a problem because like I think I'm pretty confident of my belief in property. And I don't think that I have to prove that there are property rights. So I guess let me just go to that. You know, that's the second thing I want to talk about. Like, you know, yeah, why does anybody have property rights? So now it happens that I have basically a lock in view of property, right? That OK, so I think if there's stuff in the state of nature and whatever, nobody's using it, that you can go and mix your labor with it and then you can acquire it and you can transfer the property by my mutual consent. You know, I haven't I don't have exactly a workout theory of why there are property rights at all. But I don't I don't really think that I have to give this like a complete theory about that or I don't think I have to get much with you at all. And partly because I think it's extremely widely accepted. And so I think it's kind of like a default assumption, unless somebody can show why there shouldn't be any property. I don't think that there's like really a viable alternative system. Right. So there are valuable goods in the world where there are different uses of them that people want to make their incompatible with each other. And we need some kind of solution to that and the solution that we're using is property rights, which is each of these things gets assigned a particular person who makes the decision about what power gets used. OK. And I think so there are other possible systems. There could be a system where it's just a complete free for all. Anybody just uses anything at any time. But I basically just don't think that there's a viable alternative system that anyone would want that doesn't involve property. OK. Now there are things like, you know, socialism and communism where people sometimes say that they don't believe in private property, but that's not actually what they mean. Right. Because like in the socialist countries, it was not the case that nobody could own anything. It was the case that you could not own a business. It was not the case you couldn't own any property. Like you have money and you could own your shirt and whatever and these other things. OK. Anyway, so the other thing I wanted to say is so I think that I'm kind of using common sense morality when I say like I think people have property and like the money that I earned working at some job or something that that's my money. OK. And I think that if you think that that's not my money, then it's hard to explain why a random person can't then just come and take it. Like, OK, if I don't have a property, I'm not money.  Maybe it's the government's money. That's why the random person can't take it because not because they'd be stealing from me that you're stealing from the government. I guess, you know, you have to imagine that it was the money that I was going to send the IRS. All right, but anyway, but I think that if that's your view, I think that we need an explanation of why the government is special, right? So like they're just declaring that they get to take a certain amount of money, they're declaring that it's theirs. And I want to know why it's not OK for just any other personal organization to just declare that some stuff is theirs and then force me to take it. Like, what gives those people the authority to say how much money everybody owes them? And I basically just don't think that there's any good answer to that. OK, anyway, the last thing I want to talk about was, oh, yeah, the can you take money from, you know, just like you go to some public school teacher and can just like rob him? And, you know, this doesn't really seem very good. It doesn't seem like you should do that. I think that's kind of analogous to so you've identified some thief and like that's the person's occupation. And like, imagine that you follow the thief around. So if you rob the thief, I think that's OK. Right. The guy who's occupation, like his sole occupation is thief, you can take his money for him. OK, but what if you do this?  So like, he goes to the dry cleaner and takes his dry cleaning there. And then, you know, later he comes back, he collects dry cleaning. And and you know how many items he had dry clean so you know what the bill was. OK, then later that night, you break into the dry clean and you take that around money. Is that OK? Like, I'm not sure that that's OK. Oh, that's that's a little shady, right? Or, you know, you could take it a step further. So, you know, you might say, oh, but it's solid money. So like, you know, what if we took it a step further? Like, OK, and then the dry cleaner spends that money somewhere else. Like, and then you go to the next version, right? So instead of robbing the dry cleaner, you break into some other business because the dry cleaner spent some money. You like, you do some calculation to figure out what portion of the money is other business that was stolen. This doesn't seem OK. So I mean, I don't really know. I don't know what the right account is. Like, I think it's definitely OK to take back from the first beef. But if you go to the people that the thief spent the money on it and, you know, it gets more questionable than and sort of like as you go further steps, it gets more questionable. The other thing is I would feel differently if I thought it was like an illegitimate job that shouldn't exist or something. So if you're like, you know, like if you're talking about taking money from the same contractors, well, it's not that I think that that's illegitimate, I guess, but I think that just too much of it. Right. So, but, you know, let's say, you know, these companies that's making the bombs for blowing up people in Iraq or whatever. And you think that that shouldn't be happening at all. Then it's fine to take that, right? It's fine to take the money from them. And I would agree with that. But the thing is, like schoolteacher, it's not like a job that shouldn't exist. It just should be funded differently. And if the government wasn't doing this feeling, it's not like they wouldn't there wouldn't be schoolteachers. They wouldn't be getting any money, right? I mean, it would have to be private college, right? So, I mean, it's not it doesn't seem like it's exactly fair to say, oh, yeah, you just like take all their money, right? Because they were funded by the government, right?  Because it's like, I mean, there's so much influence on everything. Like if you try to trace, like, what what money would I still have? The government wasn't doing anything like it might be that no particular transaction that happened would happen, right? So that's not I don't know, you know, and that's not clear that. Any of us would be entitled to money, right? So, OK, but anyway, like, I just want to say, like, it's a kind of a complicated question. What is the appropriate remedy if you think that taxation is theft? But I don't think that changes, you know, just just the judgment that it is a form of theft, right? I'd like the government to stop doing it. But I'm not sure exactly what the rest of us should do about it if the government rescues us to stop. OK, that's all I have for now. You've got to thank you very much for that rebuttal. And we'll kick it over to Dr. Ben Burgess for his 10 minute rebuttal as well. Thanks so much. Ben, the floor is all yours. Yeah, so let's I want to make sure that everybody's like clear about the larger dialectical context here. So Michael Humer said in his opening statement that taxation is wrong because it's like theft, because the thing that makes something theft is that you're taking someone's property, please flag that because it's a deeply equivocal word to use here. Someone's property without without their consent. One of the things that I pointed out in response is that what their property is, right, what we mean by their property is deeply ambiguous. So one thing that could be in is any any property that currently happens to be in their possession, but that can't be it or else a recovering stolen property without without the permission of the thief would would be theft, which is certainly not. You know, we heard the claim that this is more common sense. That's certainly not more common sense. Another thing that it could mean is is that it's, you know, theft is take is a non voluntary transfer of someone's legal property. But with the Hermit spear example, Dr. Hummer made it clear that that's that's not the the notion that he has in mind. And in any case, it can't be the notion that he has in mind, because if so, the suggestion that taxation could count as a form of theft would just be incoherent on the face of it, because, of course, you do not have any sort of legal right to to property that's that's being taxed. So that leaves the idea that it's something you have a moral right to. Dr. Hummer said just now that that it's that the text is that wrongfulness can't be baked into the meaning of theft because theft can sometimes under extreme circumstances be justified. But I think that's entirely too quick. You can you can say that that what it means to to steal something that, you know, that part of that it means taking away property that someone generally has a moral right to that all else being equal, they have a moral right to that they have a that they have a moral right to unless some dire emergency overrides their their normal their normal moral right to it. And in all cases, it's being built in and some such notion has to be built in unless unless Dr. Hummer can give us a fourth alternative to your property means property currently in your possession, your property means property you have a legal right to and your property means property that you have a moral right to, even if that moral right is a defecable moral rights. So it's and if you even think that we're talking about defecable moral rights, then it's then it seems to me that saying that taxation is wrong because it's theft is still hopelessly circular that, you know, it's wrong because it's wrong. So that's so that's one question. Can we ground the alleged wrongfulness of taxation in in its status allegedly as a form of theft and I don't think we can non-circularly do that. Second question, well, if that's not it, right, why why is it wrong? Like or to put the question differently, if we are talking about even a defecable but still very strong moral right, I mean, presumably we're not talking about just like a mild default that can be overridden for the sake of public libraries and public schools and any grants and all that stuff. But a but a very strong moral right. Where does this very strong moral right come from? Well, I heard at least two different answers there. One was that Dr. Humer accepts the lock in theory of property rights or more or less the lock in theory of property rights. The other one was that he doesn't actually need to give us theory of property rights because it's extremely widely accepted that property is a thing that should exist, but I think there's an important there's a really important slippage at the end of that argument. It's widely accepted that property is something that that should exist. In other words, that some people should have exclusive rights or near exclusive rights to to use some objects in the external world. But that is compatible with everything from a lock in theory of property rights that might actually ground the idea that taxation is theft to a Rawlsian theory of property rights, where you say, sure, you know, you accept a lot of the things that we just heard from Dr. Humer that, of course, you know, you have this problem of different people wanting access to different kinds of scarce resources. And even, as he quite correctly says, socialists who don't think that some people should have exclusive access to access to the means of production, certainly think that we should have exclusive access to shirts and whiskey bottles and all that stuff. But that's totally compatible with saying that the right view is that is that we should have exclusive that the things that we should have exclusive property rights to or near exclusive property rights to are after tax income, not our pre tax income. That's a completely separate question from whether property is a thing that should exist in the world, whether there are pieces of property that people should have moral rights to, of course. But whether there are things that there are external objects in the world that some people should have near exclusive rights to is totally compatible with either saying that the worker who's been taxed to pay for social security benefits for for retirees is the person with the moral right to that dollar and with saying that the that the retiree is the person with the defecable but very strong, you know, moral right to that dollar. Just saying that property is a thing that should exist takes us no further forward at all in answering the question of which of them has a morally correct claim. Finally, I want to come back to this question of whether, in fact, what Dr. Humer is defending is common sense morality. I think it's not, you know, and I know I went very quickly past the Rawlsian stuff. I didn't we haven't really gone into what either the Rawlsian or the lock-in theories of property rights actually look like. Maybe we can do that in open discussion or Q&A. But for the sake of not running out of time, I want to come back to this point about common sense morality. So he says, well, this is common sense morality because the money you earned at some job is your money. If it's not your money, a random person come and take it. You know, what's why is the government special? Well, I'd say that the example about the private sector taxpayer mugging the public school teacher actually shows precisely that this is not even compatible with common sense morality because we heard some very tentative, very, you know, halfway kind of things that could be said for, well, it's not exactly great to rob the public school teacher, but common sense morality makes zero distinction between a private sector taxpayer robbing a public school teacher and somebody robbing a private sector employee or business owner. No distinction whatsoever. So if you are going to make a distinction, it doesn't sound like common sense morality to me, so is this like stealing with this on the assumption that taxation is theft, would a private sector taxpayer motivated by libertarian principles stealing from a public school teacher, would that be like stealing from Tony Soprano's dry cleaner? Well, no, because presumably, you know, one, one difference is that the dry cleaner doesn't have the money that is, that doesn't have an income that's entirely derived from theft, whereas if taxation is theft, any public employee, by definition, has an income that is 100 percent derived from theft. And another obvious disanalogy between the the dry cleaner and the and the public employee is that the public employee knows that 100 percent of their income came from taxation. So so this is like somebody who is presumably if taxation is theft is knowingly accepting stolen property. In fact, their entire job is accepted stolen property. They're less like Tony Soprano's dry cleaner than like one of Tony Soprano's employees, you know, who who has a income that's entirely derived from money that they know is laundered from from the from the mafia. So sure, is it true that the immoral intuition that it's OK to recover stolen property gets weaker the more steps you go? It is, by the way, I don't think they'll lock in theory of property rights can make sense of that intuition. But yeah, it is true that intuitively it gets weaker, the more steps we go away. But also in the case of a public employee, we've gone exactly one step. Theft, here's my stolen money. And finally, this idea that the government runs so much of the economy that if people aren't entitled to the money they get from government, it's not clear that any of us are entitled to anything. I think that I think that that is completely correct. But I think that it cuts against any sort of lock in property rights derived idea that taxation is theft, because it undercuts the idea that we all have this very strong property right to our pre-tax income that we can make sense of through some sort of lock in or quasi lock in theory of theory of property rights. So I think that too shows that this can't count as a kind of common sense morality. You got to thank you very much, Dr. Burgess, as well. Now we're going to jump into the open conversation, folks. And from the reminder that our guests are linked in the description. So check those out and want to remind you as always, folks, to be your regular, friendly selves, attacking the arguments and not the person. Thanks so much as the vast majority do a great job of that. And we appreciate it. So anyway, the floor is all yours. Dr. Humor and Dr. Burgess, thanks so much. Thanks. You know, I feel like I still didn't hear why the government is special. So like if I was doing stuff that looked like what the government is doing, I'd be a thief, right? So like, I don't know why they get to do all this stuff. Yeah. So I think I think part of what I said was was a directly responsive to it, which is that the person who believes the taxation is theft has exactly the same problem that that it cuts both ways and it cuts both ways to a precisely equal extent, actually maybe even greater this way, because as you point out, so much income is ultimately derived from the government. In fact, it's not clear that we would like if not for this so-called theft, there would be anything to steal because money gets its value from the fact that it is taxed, it the money in your pocket and my pocket would not be worth anything if if taxation didn't exist. But why is it either from my perspective as somebody who believes that the retiree living on Social Security does have a moral right to to that Social Security income or from, you know, why is that from my perspective, it's OK to have taxation as a mechanism for for doing that transfer. And why is it that from your perspective, the out of all the things that we can morally legitimately do to rectify this alleged injustice, one of them is not having workers mug retirees to to get back that Social Security money. And I think that the I think that the equivalence of these suggests to me that the right answer isn't a deep principle one. The thing is that somebody has to enforce whatever property rights you believe in, right, whether the whether the scheme of property rights that you believe in is one whereby everybody can sort of keep whatever they happen to be in possession of after market transactions or whether the scheme of property rights you believe in is that everybody gets to everybody gets to have whatever they'll get after a just system of redistribution. Someone has to enforce that distribution. And there are massive consequentialist reasons why it's preferable for it to be some sort of orderly, predictable, non-chaotic, you know, non-terrifying mechanism like pain, like having a central government collect in taxes rather than vigilantes on the street using their best judgment. OK, so I'm getting that. OK, so the government is special because it's really good to have a government to have a government doing this stuff. And it's a lot better than having somebody else doing it. That's where I'm getting. But but then I don't understand why the charity mugging isn't OK, because like if it's just if it's really a consequentialist reason like, well, I'm producing better consequences. So people so, you know, stipulate that that's the case, assuming you agree that that's possible, they could be feeling I could be taking somebody's money in the way that would conventionally be called stealing. And then I could spend it in a way that produces more good. Right. So like I mean, if the justification for government is a consequentialist one, I don't see why the charity mugger doesn't get to do this. Because the same consequentialist justification can't be offered. Part of the consequentialist justification can be offered that the charity mugger, you know, if they're if they're doing, you know, move the exactly, you know, the the charities that should morally do that they have that it's going in the that's going that's going to the right place. But the consequentialist justification that that I just offered can't be given to to the charity mugger because the consequentialist considerations that I was bringing up, which remember, are are separate from what the right distribution of goods is. Right. You've got a libertarian theory of what the right distribution of goods is that the just distribution of goods is that everybody has whatever they can get through a series of market transactions where they respect the rules of the market and maybe all the property ultimately goes back to some Lockheed and just active original acquisition that, you know, that's one theory. I've got my theory of what counts as a just distribution, which would ultimately be a Rawlsian one that it's one that we would agree to if if we if we were designing a society and we didn't know who we were going to be in that in that society. But whatever you think the right answer to that question is, somebody has to do the enforcement, right? Somebody, in other words, has to enforce property claims. And so the distinction between the charity mugger and the government playing pain for social social programs. I actually think there are other distinctions. But the one that I already pointed to was that having random muggers just sort of using their own judgment engaged in violence on the street causes a lot of chaos and fear and unpredictability in ways in ways that having a regular routine, a democratically legitimate system of of taxation where you know it's baked in when you get paid, you know, this part is to be withdrawn. You're going to owe this part in taxes just doesn't. Gotcha. So I understood that. So I mean, so you sort of restated the argument. So I'm not saying that the same consequentialist reason of ours. I'm saying there is a consequentialist reason for the charity mugger. Right. And so like what you said at the end there was sounded like, oh, well, you're going to cause social chaos, but it really doesn't seem likely. So like there's a lot of mugging occurring in the country already. There's what there are like millions of crimes every year. So if I go on a month's a month, that's not going to appreciably contribute to social chaos and then I'm producing a good consequence. I don't see why it has to be exactly the same good consequence that everyone is producing right now. Yeah, I mean, it seems like a pretty clear distinction to me that, you know, that we have that that you have one package of good consequences that that doesn't have anywhere that that includes the avoidance of of social chaos, fear, etc. And you have another another package of good consequences that includes everything but that that one of them would have a different moral status than the other. That seems pretty straightforward. It does not seem very straightforward to me. OK, so. Is it so it's consequentialism true? No, but but that's but that doesn't mean that consequentialist considerations are morally irrelevant, especially when there isn't any sort of deontological principle that would that would override them that I would accept in this case. OK, so so maybe this is your argument like, well, there are consequentialist reasons for doing the charity mugging, but there are stronger consequentialist reasons for the government taking the money. And so like, that's why it's OK for the government. Yeah, so I think that there are non consequentialist reasons. There are Rawlsian reasons why we should have a distribution of distribution of goods that's not just whatever comes out of the free market. Those are in principle reasons now that now we're asking a different question, which is how should that distribution should be should be enforced? Should it be enforced by everybody sort of using their individual judgment in this unpredictable chaotic way or should it be enforced through a orderly predictable system and that consequentialist reasons seems seems like pretty strong and compelling ones.  OK, there's a consequentialist reason for me to mug the people on the street and give it charity, but that reason is just not strong enough to outweigh their every right. You know, like, maybe they're kind of a facial right that could be outweighed by these strong consequences, but it's just not strong enough in the case. Right. But I mean, but it is strong enough for the government. Right. But that would be overly convenient. And I mean, I think that that charity mother might actually have a stronger reason because, you know, what if they're an effective altruist and they're giving it to a really good charity and the government is actually not a really effective cause, right? Like, you know, the vast majority of the money the government is spending is not going to good causes, right? Like a huge amount of his wasted.  Well, I mean, I obviously don't think that the charity mugger has a stronger case. I think that I think that having universal social rights, you know, paid for by progressive taxation free at the point of service is unfathomably morally superior to relying on individual effective altruists that the that relying on charity is is degrading, it puts you in a position, it makes you much less free because it puts you in a position of powerlessness because the person giving you the charity can can cut it off at any time.  So I think that the I think that the government does have a much better case just to start with than the charity mugger before we even get into the question of the of the general longness of of inflicting traumatic experiences that that are going to that that that they're going to scar people that having, you know, introducing the sense of chaos into their lives, you know, that you can you can say that people have a general moral right to a certain kind of order and predictability in in their lives that is actually very much like the general in principle rights that they have to things like health care and education. And if the if the money is is left in the in the hands of Jeff Bezos and not taxed way to pay for those other things, it violates the second set of rights. If we if our system for for doing it is a street level vigilanteism rather than rather than the orderly predictable processes of a democratic government that that violates the first right. Right. So I mean, part of what's going on is I think you might be appealing to rule utilitarianism rather than or sort of like real consequentialism rather than act consequentialism. And I was thinking in that act consequentialist way. In other words, I'm thinking if I go out and mud someone, that's not going to undermine social order. And then I'll take that money and I'll do a lot of good when I give it to the most effective charities. I think maybe you're saying, oh, but it's a whole bunch of people. Like if we have a general rule that just like everybody does that, then that's going to have that complex. Now, is that right? Now, so I think that on an individual level, on a case by case level. And again, they have I'm not an act utilitarian, rule utilitarian or any kind of utilitarian. But like almost everybody, at least if they're being honest, I do think that when there's no principle reason to do something or not to do something consequentialist reasons do have their place. And I think that and I think that when it comes to this particular consequentialist reason, I absolutely think that it applies on a case by case level.  And I believe that those that those bad consequences and that that general sense that people have a right to to security, to predictability, to know, you know, whether they're going to be able to have some, you know, some possession in the future, that those are precisely the considerations and certainly not anything remotely resembling lock-in property rights ideology that drive our normal common sense moral horror at muggins and home invasions. OK, OK, so you feel too like, oh, you might be a person on the street and then they feel fear in that moment. I mean, I think on one thing I think, yeah, but that fear is going to be so vastly outweighed by the amount of good that money could do.  You're kind of, I don't know, with, you know, temporaries. But anyway, but the other thing, oh, OK, so let me just, you know, modify it, I should steal the money in a way that won't cause that fear of physical injury, right? So I maybe I should hack into people's bank accounts and like take the money out that way, right?  OK, so like, what if I just do a regular of it, right? So like, they always know that they're going to get happened during the job, right, at a particular time, particularly writing. And I guess I mean, I think most people's reaction would be, well, no, you can't do that, right? Yeah, so I think that I think that what you're first of all, you're not going to to have that that kind of of predictability and orderliness in, you know, in in theft. And and you could say, well, if you did, then it would be somewhat less objectionable, and that's certainly true. And if we remove more and more and more of the disanalogies between ordinary street level theft and and government taxation, such that, for example, the money in your pocket would have no value if not for the activity of muggers, then a mugging would start to seem less and less and less objectionable. But that to me doesn't really say anything interesting about the actual moral status of mugging. And I also do want to just step back a little bit to the big picture and note that, you know, since we both have established that we both have exactly the same problem, because on the one hand, if I believe that a that a retiree has a has a right to that that social security income, that they that they that they should have they should have it. And it would be and it would be morally wrong for it to to be kept in the in the hands of the person who has been taxed to pay for it, that it would be a that that that would that that would violate their rights. But yet I don't think I mean, maybe you could convince me for business, but I don't think that that when it comes to a middle income person, it would be morally right to to mug them. Well, you've got the exactly parallel problem about the public school teacher and the firefighter or the artist living off of a national endowment for for the arts grant. And it seems to me that that in our answers, I've given what strike me, at least as some pretty clear disanalogies between mugging and taxation, whereas all you've really said about why it's wrong to to take away the to to for the private sector taxpayer to mug the school teacher or firefighter is that, well, there should be school teachers or firefighters, which I'm not sure how relevant that is. I mean, if somebody, if a thief gives money to someone and they say, hey, just so you know, this is stolen property, but I want you to use it to start a school. And then you you catch up to them six that that person six blocks later and say, sorry, that's mine and you have to give it back. And you now consensually take it take it back from them. Presumably, we would all be fine with that, even though starting a school is a social function that we think should exist. So that doesn't really seem like a disanalogy. We got that the intuition gets weaker the more steps of the economy we go through. But that's not really disanalogy, because in this case, it's it's gone through exactly one step, right? Thief to person knowingly receiving stolen property. And and we've got, well, if the floodgates would really be opened, if we allowed for that, which seems to hide in your problem, not reduce it, at least from my perspective. Yeah, I mean, you know, like I think the main point that I wanted to make was kind of about, you know, I don't know why the government is special. And I kind of feel like it wasn't exactly answered. So I think that your I think your view depends upon the idea that the people of government is giving the money to are actually owed that money. Like the people are getting social security. OK, but the thing is, like, I think I think the justify taxation, I think you need to claim that you actually owe the government the precise amount that the IRS says. And I'll see how there's like there's no way that's going to come out of a theory of justice, right? Like, I mean, so, you know, like, maybe if we were in an ideal world, like you are if we're in a world where there's like the role in government that's actually doing what they're supposed to do, right? But I don't see how that's going to come out for like anyone in the real world, that you actually owe the the actual amount that the government says, right? And like, and when I say that, a lot of the stuff they're doing is unjustified. I didn't just mean social welfare programs. I think there's a bunch of stuff that you would think is unjustified, right? Like, I think there's I don't I haven't looked up the military budget lately, OK, but when I did, it was the largest in the world by like factors six. It was like six times larger than that in the United States, six times larger than the number two military center or something like that. But so I would assume that you would think that most of that's unjustified, right? And they're just like a ton of this other stuff, right? And there's like, OK, they're giving big stuff to these big corporations or whatever. And OK, so then there's a bunch of stuff that we would disagree about whether it's justified, right? But then you kind of think like, you know, there's no way that they're justifying and taking this money unless you think that they have this kind of special authority where, like, they have the right to just decide what everybody has to do, right? And, you know, and even if they're wrong, right? Yeah. So I think I think there are a couple of different things going on there. By the way, James, just so I have a sense, how many how long do we have left here? I want to make sure I'm not in terms of the intervals or in terms of the 30 minute section? Well, in terms of the intervals just started, but in terms of 30 minute section, three, I think we have 20 out of 30. Yeah, OK, great. Got plenty of time. Yeah, so so I think that there are two things going on there. One is even if some taxation, you know, it's justified to pay a taxation to pay for health care and education is justified, you know, taxation for to pay, you know, to pay for the Pentagon could, you know, could still be unjustified, which I completely agree with, of course, but I'm not sure about the relevance because if the issue is whether any sort of taxation is justified, say, well, not all taxation that currently exists is justified. Yeah, fair enough. You know, some of it is, some of it isn't. You know, the, you know, it's a necessary condition for something to be a justified taxation that it's a it's a just use of it. It's certainly, you know, I think that I think that thinking about the charity member, you know, it's it's not a it's not a sufficient condition. They, you know, I would argue that the that there is that that there is something special about government in the sense that it is morally preferable to have the system for those transfers be the system for enforcing whichever property rights you believe in, right, be the be having a orderly, predictable system, preferably one that we all have democratic input into rather than having it be something much more haphazard and and chaotic. I would say the same thing, by the way, for for recovering stolen stolen property that I want to live in a world where the system for the system for recovering stolen property, if it's not just a matter of like grabbing the mug or shoulder and yanking the yanking it back is is one where where you have lawful, you know, government functions, you know, for for doing that, rather than that, like, OK, here's the compound where they're keeping it. Let's get together a private militia and and and storm it. I think it's generally good to have to have that be done by by government rather than rather than done by by vigilantes. And by the way, in the case that you're saying, yeah, OK, but you'd have this overwhelming consequentialist reason to do the charity mugger, you know, when you're saving somebody's life, I think by your own account, you're going to say that the charity mugger is justified there, too, or at least that's what you strongly suggested at the end of your statement. Finally, I just wanted to say on this question about the. Like, OK, is the amount that's being taxed precisely the amount that's being taxed that should be taxed and all that. I also think this is a case where you're going to have a parallel problem because if you're going to say, well, I have some lock in theory of property rights, that you have a right to to whatever you have, as long as you can trace it back through some series of free market interactions to adjust active original acquisition, where you're mixing your labor with the world or something like that, then, of course, look, the economic history of the real world bears almost no resemblance to to that story. You're absolutely nobody is going to be able to trace 100 percent of their income or anything close to it back back to a pristine lock in story like that. But if you think that if you think that that that rights to current property can be justified by having some vague resemblance or there's enough of a resemblance to that kind of lock in justification, I don't see the disanalogy between that and saying that taxation can be justified, even if the precise amount being not being taxed isn't exactly what it should have on the basis of some well thought out moral theory. OK, so OK, so a few things. So I agree that it's better to have an orderly system than to have a disorderly system, other things being equal. You know, my actual view is I'm an anarcho capitalist. We're not going to be able to get into that. I mean, I'm not going to be able to convince you of that. OK, but I'm just going to say, like, like in my view, there is a way of doing it in an orderly way, but without, you know, without the taxation, right? And we couldn't we couldn't enforce property rights without having a central authority for a certain claim.  Well, I mean, I was thinking it's not just a little bit. I was thinking, like, on a reasonable view, even a reasonable leftist view, it's going to turn out that most of what the government is doing is not really justified, right? So by depending on that, that's not a small part of the budget. And then there's like interest on the national debt is another big part. Now, you might think, oh, but like, there's all these social welfare programs that are pretty big, which you might, but I actually think that if you believe in that, like, they shouldn't even be doing what they're doing. If you believe in social welfare programs, they should be sending it all to the third world.  So anyway, so I mean, you know, you could have a debate about like, OK, what's the outcome if we agree that some taxation is unjustified and some is justified, like, you know, does that does that mean the generic statement of taxation is left as right or I don't know. But like, I mean, I think it's I think it's the majority. Anyway, I mean, what about so when I say that charity mugging is justified? Generally not.  Also, I guess I think if there's a third party who is standing by the pond for some reason, you can't pull the child out of the pond, the drowning child, whatever, but you can force another person to pull the child out of the pond. You should force them, right? I guess that's right. OK, but. But, you know, it doesn't seem to me like you can just like steal people's money in order to give it to a charity organization in general, like, you know, to deal with this just chronic ongoing problem of poverty. And I did discuss that in my book in the problem of political authority greater links. And I don't like in as in many cases, it's not obvious what exactly is the difference between different cases. So like, you can make some suggestions, but it's like it's not obvious what is driving our intuitions, but I tend to go with my, you know, go with the intuitions anyway. If you're going to draw an analogy like, you know, so taxing people in order to give it to the poor, is that more similar to stealing money from like me stealing money from people in order to give it to a charity organization? Or is it more similar to the forcing someone to pull the child out of the pond? It looks like it's more similar to the first case, right? So, you know, so it is like, you know, I've got this ongoing program of coercion. It's to address our chronic social problem, which is not going to be solved, but it's only going to be slightly ameliorated.  I'm going to do this one time that can be over.  What if he doesn't do it? Can you then shoot him? So like, I think the answer to that is no, right? OK, can you then like not shoot him, but do something like super unpleasant? I think probably not, right? So I think you can threaten to do something super unpleasant. But if he calls you a bluff, you probably can't actually do it, right? Like, you can point the gun at the guy and say, save that child. But if he refuses, you can't then shoot him, right? Is what I think. OK, there were enough different things that came up that I think I've forgotten some of that, so I'm not sure I've addressed it. They wanted to see. OK, well, just just just real quickly, I think the thing that came up that that I haven't really heard a response to is that it's is that it seemed to me that I was doing that. None of the the analogies that you were drawing to to explain why it is that on your view that taxation is theft, you know, robbing a public school teacher or a firefighter wouldn't count as as recovering as recovering stolen property. That, you know, I kind of went through a list of objections to the things that you said you said would be differences between the cases. And I don't think we've really gotten a response to any of those. OK, sorry, I might have forgotten. Give you a chance to respond to those. And then we're pretty much at the end of the open dialogue. So I'll give you a chance to respond to the questions, but just want to let you know. And I remember one of the things you said is, well, it's only one step.  Another thing you said was, oh, but, you know, he's not dry cleaner, isn't getting 100 percent of their income from criminals. Yeah, but like that's why I said you're only taking the amount that Tony Soprano gave. Right. And my thought was like that it seems kind of unfair because like. You know, like you take the money before Tony Soprano gives it to them. But like if you take it afterwards, then, you know, like they were forced to provide the service like they provide the service and then, you know, and then they didn't get the money because he sold for the time, right? So it's not, you know, right.  So if I so if I give if I steal your TV and I give it to I give it to James in exchange for some sort of service that he provides to me, you know, I say James, if you make me a real nice cup of coffee, I'll give you I'll give you Michael's TV and I do. He knows that it's a stolen TV in this analogy. He is perfectly aware of that. I give him I give the TV and you come around the next day. You would or you wouldn't have a right to take it back. Yeah, no, I can take the TV. OK, but I don't think that I can just like take money out of the cash register. Right. So I mean, one thing is like, I can't say that that specific money. Like, I don't know that's the money. But I think the kind of public to public school teacher, you do know that that specific money is derived from taxation because 100 percent of their money is and they knew it when they took it. Well, I mean, I was partly thinking, you know, if it if it weren't for the, you know, incorrect government laws, they would be funded. Like there would be school teachers. So that person very likely would still be working as a school teacher. They'd be getting paid by parents. So like I was kind of thinking like, well, some of it's legitimate, right? Because like some of it, you know, is actually coming from the people who are benefiting from it and like they actually want it. But I'm not really sure about that. Although that's also not a disanalogy to the charity mugger, you know, that the who's doing things that genuinely benefit the people that the people he's stealing from. And of course, you know, you could have, look, I mean, somebody's private schools already exist. This is a person who if you think taxation is theft, they made a conscious decision not to go to work for a private school. They made a conscious decision to to go to work for a for an organization that is by your lights entirely funded by theft. I mean, I think that I'm sort of like the government has distorted the market in a way that makes those decisions. It's not completely their fault, right? It's like they haven't exactly made it illegal. Like they haven't made it illegal to work for a private school, but they did it a lot harder. Right. And they've done it by course of me. So again, I'm not so much blaming the school teachers for working through public school, right? And I better not because I work for a state school. Yeah, I think you can buy it. Lady, why people can't steal from you? Maybe I'm biased because I work in the University of Colorado. Like part of my part of my rationalization is, well, there were still the universities in there, in the just libertarian society. It's just like the government has done the worst to stop that makes it just a lot harder for a private university to compete. I don't think that people should mug you. But then again, I don't think taxation is theft. So I don't think that I don't think that taking your wallet would be recovering stolen property. I'm not sure that on what makes sense to say that it's not.  No, but that's because I think that there's a there's a distinction and principle between vigilanteism and government action. But but the denial of the moral importance of that distinction is actually central with your argument. Well, no, I mean, taxation could be theft, but you could still make that distinction, right? Like you could you could say it's theft, but still not agree with vigilanteism, right? No, but you know, but the point is that like the your starting point, right? The original argument is that there is no difference in principle between a street level theft and a government taxation. It's not special because the government does it. And if that distinction is not is not a morally important one, then I have a hard time seeing why I say, well, no, you can't use vigilanteism to get back the money. That would be bad in ways that some of the remedies would be. Whereas, from my perspective, since I do think that there's a morally important distinction between government taxation and and that it actually does, it is morally significant, whether the government is doing it or not. But I don't have a quick chance to respond, Dr. Hummer, and then we've got to jump in the Q&A for sure, as we're a few. Not exactly. So I'm not exactly getting how this is a good argument from your point of view. It seems like you think that you can't do vigilante activity, even if someone did steal from you. And so then the fact that you can't do the vigilante activity against government employees, that doesn't show that the money wasn't stolen. Because if it was, you would still say that you can't do it, right? Well, I think that the that the way that you should get stolen money back is through the state, because I think that the state actually is preferable to vigilante action. But my question is from your point of view, given that you think that the public employee is knowingly accepting stolen property and that the private sector taxpayer and mugging them can be absolutely certain that every dollar that they're mugging is derived from theft. And they were one of the people who were stolen from. I think that I don't still don't really see how you're getting around saying that this is a justified act of recovering stolen property, which in turn, I think undermines the plan that this is just a common sense morality. We both don't see how the other one's view. You know, have the argument. Yeah, OK, we're both trying to evaluate the argument from the other one's point of view. So yeah, you got it. Do you feel good on that? I don't want to rush you. So we're supposed to go to a Q&A from viewers or something. That's right. And so thank you very much, gentlemen. This has been so much. There's tons of positive feedback. People are really enjoying this. So thank you. I want to remind you, folks, our guests are linked in the description. So what are you waiting for? You can hear and read more from those links of our guests in the description box below. We're going to jump into this first question from S.O.D. Thanks for your question said you cannot confer. I think this is for you, Ben. They said you cannot confer a right that you don't have to someone else individually or collectively. No individual has the right to take something that they do not own. We'll give you a chance to respond to that comment. Yeah, no one has no one has a right to take something that they don't own is ambiguous. Again, does own mean is currently in possession of? In that case, nobody believes that no one ever has a right to take something that someone else currently in possession of or recover and stolen property would be wrong. Does it mean that nobody has a right to take something that that legally someone else is the possessor of? Well, I don't think a libertarian can say that, you know, for reasons that I've argued earlier. So what we're left with is interpretations. That statement that no one has a right to say. So take something I don't own is no one has a right to take something that someone else has a superior moral right to, which has the virtue of being true. But it's also completely vacuous because it's circular. Gotcha. And this one comes in from S.O.D. again, says accepting Ben's premise that the IRS owns the money still doesn't allow the IRS to use that money for anything without your consent, which would be akin to a board member using corporate funds without board approval, which is theft. That seems kind of confused because it sounds to me like the questioner wants to have it both ways, either that they're on the one hand, they want to grant me for the sake of argument, my assumption that, for example, retirees living off social security do have a right to that social security income and so it's legitimate, therefore, for the state to act on their behalf and deliver it to them. And on the other hand, it sounds like they want to still insist that somehow in that scenario, the person who is taxed to pay for it has a moral right to it, but that's exactly the issue in dispute. Gotcha. And the legend Rives says, coming after you, Dr. Burgess says, is discriminating against rich people through taxation right? Why should my money get wasted on the national healthcare fraud of September 30th, 2020? Good question. Wait. OK, I think there's like some sort of reference there that I'm not I'm not following maybe maybe maybe somebody can clarify to me what the what that September 30th business is about. But but I think that but I think if if the question if I'm correctly understanding that that what they're asking about is is why is it right to to pay for for somebody for universal health care program? Why would that be morally right? If that's the question, then I'd say just a just a quick add. The first part they said is discriminating against the rich people through taxation right? So I think they mean in terms of the varying levels of who is taxed what? And then they had asked, why should my money get wasted on the national healthcare fraud? Oh, sure. So let's take the first part first that they that yes, it is right. The people who have more money are taxed at a higher level than people who have less money that I actually have a really hard time imagining anybody who thought that taxation was justified, not believing that further premise. I know that there are people who have that combination of views that taxation isn't theft, but we should have a flat tax. But I don't really understand how that works. It seems to me that if you think that it is generally justifiable to have to have social programs that are free at the point of service that are funded by taxation, then that it would that it would be much more just to to tax people with more money at higher levels because they'll still be left with more because the because because they're going to take less of a hit in terms of their own lifestyle due to diminishing marginal utility. That all of that all of that seems totally straightforward to me. I would also add it's a much spicer take, of course, because so far everything I've said in this debate is would not neutral round between me and Michael Hummer, of course, but it would be neutral round between me and like, you know, a much more moderate sort of progressive than I am to. But I also think that that an extra reason why very rich people it's justifiable to tax the higher rate is that is that they they they got that money from from workers who are creating labor, which, you know, which are creating value in ways that they would not have agreed to, if not for wildly unequal bargaining positions and that that and that that is an extra it will be a problem, but real quickly of the second half the question, right? Why is it that that it's justifiable to to take his money to pay for for national health care, because if he was behind the veil of ignorance, he knew he had to just to design a society. He knew he'd have to live in it and he didn't know whether he was what his position would be in that society. He would absolutely opt to have a tax payer free who funded free at the point of service, a system of national health care, because the outcomes are vastly better than the private health care. Look at the World Health Organization rankings, because many fewer people would avoidably die, because it makes us it gives us much. Got you. I hate to rush you, but next up, this one from SOD says fencing is a criminal activity as well. Selling the use of one person's tax revenue for votes from another person doesn't make it moral. I feel bad for Michael. Are there any questions for me? I'm just left out here. Yeah, I agree with you. Let me just double check to see if there are any that we do have one. Let's see. We have a challenge where we have a there are a lot of for Ben. But let me jump to this one that has it's for both of me. They said they said, hi, James, for both speakers, comparative to taxes. Do you consider profit to be theft, especially considering the growing wealth gap? Go with you first, Dr. Michael Humer. No, I don't deserve well. Wait, I mean, that was a really broad statement. Like all profits, but I consider all profits be theft. No, of course not. I like that. But then then you couldn't do anything, right? And you couldn't live, right? So but OK, so I mean, I think I have different factual beliefs from, you know, socialists and it's not just I have different values. I have different factual beliefs. So I think that the reason why in the market economy, the reason why rich people are getting rich is mostly that they're providing a lot of value. So yeah, you know, they have like a million dollar profit. I think basically roughly they provide about a million dollars of value throughout society, and that's why they have paid a million dollars. And so I don't really see a problem. There's you know, there's growing inequality. I don't think that's necessarily bad. So it could be bad and on how it came about. I don't think any quality by itself is bad. I do think it's bad if there are people who are unable to meet their basic needs. That's bad. I don't think it's just inherently bad that people have different amounts. Gotcha. Then Ben, do you have a quick pithy response to the question as well? Otherwise, we'll jump to the next one, which yeah, I do. I think the profit if profit doesn't just mean the colloquial thing that you have more money than you started with, but is profit drive from your position as the owner of a business? I do think that there is a general case for saying that that's illegitimate. And so if you want to if you want to talk this way, that it's that it's theft for reasons that oddly enough sort of near what what Michael said about about his justification for working at a public university, that they that this is that there are various historical injustices that that change the the balance of forces on the ground to give some people vastly more bargaining power over others, they can use this structural position of power to extract what they would never be able to get freely. And I also think inequality is bad for a bunch of other reasons. But since this wasn't even my question, we'll save that for later, maybe. Gotcha. This one. Cameron Roberts, thanks for your question for Dr. Humer, they said, how do you define, quote unquote, voluntary? Is rent voluntary? Is wage labor voluntary, even if essentials of life are withheld from you? If you don't. Um, basically, yes. So, um, I mean, the first part of it is how do I define voluntary? And I mean, in philosophy, you can't really define anything.   Like, you know, they didn't threaten to do violence or whatever. Now, you might say, oh, but, you know, you could be coerced if you needed a particular thing and like the other person demanded, OK, it's like you need money to live in our society or to live decently.  Right. I don't really think of that as coercion. Here's an example I'd like to give.  OK, so whatever, you know, maybe there's a copay or whatever. So it's going to be kind of a lot of money. And then you got to sign this form and then you get the surgery.   They should have to tell you. But anyway, OK, but let's say they actually told you the amount before. And then you sign, is that a valid agreement? Now, I think yes. And and I don't think this is an extreme libertarian view of my mind. Like, I think this is the standard orthodox view. That's valid, even though you are going to die if you didn't get the surgery. And so why? Well, it doesn't kind of coercion because the surgeon didn't give you the cancer. So like if he said, I'm going to give you cancer unless you sign this form. That's coerced. It's not voluntary. But if you already had it and you just said, I'm going to solve the problem. If you sign this, I think that counts, right? And so I think that's analogous to when the employer says, you know, OK, you need my I'm going to give you some money if you do this thing, sign here, then you sign there. You got it. Thanks very much. And then this one coming in from S.O.D. For Ben, they say saying that taxing property precludes taxation being theft because taxing it is legal is essentially saying that anything the government makes legal cannot be a violation of one's rights. Yeah, but of course, that's not anything that I said or hinted at or believe. What I what I said was that various people, you know, Dr. humor here and others have have said that taxation is wrong because you're taking away something that belongs to you. And I said that what I said is that that is equivocal. What does it mean for it to belong to you? That's that's very unclear what it means. There are there are three possible interpretations. Maybe there's a fourth and I'm not just not being imaginative enough. But the three possible interpretations I can make sense of are one, something that's currently in your possession. Can't be that for we get out because then so recover and stolen property would be theft. Another one is that it's that it's something that you have a moral right to, even if it's a defeasible moral right, but then that would be circular as we keep talking about. And in the middle, a possible interpretation I offered on behalf of the libertarian who makes that claim is is that is that it could just mean that like it legally belongs to you, but they can't say that because if that's what they were saying, then taxation couldn't be theft. So that's the context. That's the only context, actually, which I brought up the, you know, that the problem was saying that taxation is that because it's legal. It's if hypothetically your view, what you meant by property is property that's legally yours, as opposed to property that's morally yours or property that you're currently in possession of. I don't think any of those issues work at a course. Just because nothing could be nothing just because lots of stuff we have. Is it OK if I comment on that? Go for it, because I mean, I want to respond to this point about sort of the circularity and I forgot to respond during my question. But so actually, don't think that it's circular, even though property does have a normative meaning or I don't think it's objection to these things. So I mean, imagine a thing where you ask, hey, why is Bob a bad person?  OK, and those terms are normative, but it's not the case that it wasn't explained. So one way of explaining why something is I think I just missed. So I think Bob is a bad person. You ask why and I say, well, he's cowardly and cowardly is a normative term. So does that mean I gave a circular explanation like it means something bad in a certain way? And I think no. So I think it can be a good explanation of why something is bad to use like to use a concept that entails bad. But it could be explanatory because it's bad in a specific way. Yeah, I mean, I just say that the disanalogy is we can paraphrase cowardly in a way that takes away the normative part and still functions as an explanation of why you think that Bob is bad. And I don't see the analogy for taxation is wrong because it's theft. Well, I mean that somebody could give a description of when they think somebody owns property, they could give the descriptor properties that they think lead to property rights. Right. Well, maybe they could. Maybe it's too complicated, but also maybe it's too complicated to give the descriptive definition of what you have to do to be courageous. So I mean, and I think that's about equally plausible. So it might be that actually you kind of have to use the normative judgment in order to capture all of the behavior patterns that count as cowardly. But, you know, it's still explanatory.  I mean, I mean, I think it would it would hinge on whether the stuff that he did that I said was cowardly was actually, you know, unvirtuous or morally bad or something like that, right? Sure, but that's that might be normative, but it doesn't take us back to where we started with Bob as a bad person. It doesn't rely on the initial judgment that Bob is a bad person, whereas saying that so you have Bob is a Bob is a bad person because he's cowardly. And maybe we introduced some other normative stuff, but that doesn't mean we've gone back to Bob as a bad person in a way that when you say taxation is wrong because it's theft, you've gone right back to it's wrong because part of what it means to be theft, it's not just that it has a normative component that, you know, that's fine. It's that it's that that normative component takes us right back to where we started. Yeah, I mean, OK, I mean, I'm not seeing the difference at all.  I mean, I think cowardly implies bad in at least that in a respect. So I mean, I don't think that's different from. You know, the way that like, you know, property implies how to write to it or something. But I mean, but I mean, I think we might be spending too much time on. You know, really quick, really quick, pithy response, Ben, and then we're going to jump to the next one. He's not a coward because he's a bad person, whereas it's it's it would be theft because you don't have a right to take it, which is why it can't ground it being something you don't have the right to take. This one coming in from Parhesia. Thanks for your question. Ben said, how is tax to fund libraries morally justified when that money could be used to prevent the starvation of children in developing countries instead? Yeah, I mean, so then then we're having an argument about priorities for for taxes. And I'm perfectly happy to to have to have that argument. But that seems to be a slightly different thing from is taxation justified? And if we made it for the far to far enough down our list of priorities that we got here, would a justifiable purpose of it be to fund public libraries? So I would be way more happy with taxation if it was actually going to feed starving children in the third world. Like then I would have then I would have a hard time deciding whether it was OK. And be like, maybe that's OK. This one coming in from SOD says money does not have to be taxed to have value. Even prisons and school cafeterias have ersatz currencies. Yeah, those currencies are not going to have the value of the government that currency is going to. This one coming in from bubble gum guns has been crypto and gold don't need government. I think that if you think that that there is any conceivable world where crypto would function as a as a repository value that would be that would be anything like as reliable as as government back currency, where we would have anything resembling a functioning economy with with with with only crypto, then we just have a very deep factual disagreement. Yeah, I love Bitcoin. I had I was going to ask if you weren't going to say. Yes, we have a deep factual disagreement. It's just a great amount. You got it. And SOD, thanks to your other question, said the mob providing protection in a racket also regularly takes dues. It still comes with a threat of violence from non-compliance. Regularity and stability do not preclude theft. Yeah, I mean, I don't think I think it's just factually extremely wrong to say that you can have anything remotely approaching the degree of regularity and predictability with with mob protection rackets that you have with with with government taxation again. And this takes us right back to the factual disagreement we have for it to for it to be analogous, it would have to be the case that if the mob protection racket didn't didn't exist, it would be impossible to have anything with the mob we want to extort in the in the first place. It would have to be the case that that, you know, as you know, the entire time you're planning to open up this deli, it was always part of your plan that the mob would start it and you know exactly which mafia family would be extorting it and that you would have and that you knew that that mafia family would be extorting it realistically for for the entire time your business was going to be in operation or counting on it. And that doesn't even get into the range of disanalogies, which to be fair, we haven't really talked to about what I would see as the extreme moral importance of democratic input. Got you. And this one interesting for Dr. Hummer, they said who and how should determine how the big fees should be in the user fee model that you mentioned in your opening? Oh, how would they determine? I mean, so as a question about justice, they could determine however they want. In other words, you're charging a fee for a service. You have the right to make a fee, whatever you want. Now, that doesn't mean that you should just do anything. But OK, so what would be the smart thing to do? They would think about how much it was worth. They would try to they would try to bring in as much money as they could. I guess that's what businesses do. So I guess it would be OK for the government to do that. You know, they might consider. So when they consider how much is worth to you, maybe they could also consider how much they consider how much you'd be willing to pay, I guess that's the same thing. And so, you know, it's it's not unreasonable that they could charge different amounts of different people. Like if you've got more property, they might say, yeah, we're going to charge you more for protection because you got more stuff to protect or whatever. So it would be OK. Like, so I don't know if this is what the question we're getting at, but I think it would be OK to have different amounts of fees for people with different amounts of money. You bet. And this one, thanks very much for your question. Tugboat 2030 says to Dr. Hummer, was World War Two worth fighting for from taxation? Or should we have voluntarily asked for donations? I think that they're asking. Well, yeah. And then how about the Revolutionary War as well? I mean, in my view, so I'm not an absoluteist, so I don't think property rights are absolute. So I think it can be overwritten if there's an emergency, if you could make the argument. So if we knew that the Holocaust was going to happen, then, you know, we had a good reason for intervening. I don't think that we actually knew that at the time that we entered the war. So it might have been that like we weren't just like we weren't justified based on the information we have, but we were justified like based upon what was actually going on. So I think it could be OK to coerce people in a way that would normally violate their rights if you're like trying to stop a genocide of like millions of people. You got it. And this one for you, Dr. Hummer, as well, I'm not sure what this acronym or what this means exactly. Let me pull this back up. They had said in P O P a chapter. I think it's a chapter with authority. OK, thank you. A chapter 7.2. They said you were undecided about equivalents of isolated theft to save one's own life and expropriation programs for effective lifesaving charity. Have you decided now? Not really. Right. So like I made that comment earlier in this Q and A that if the government were stealing money to still be stealing, they were stealing money. And they were giving it to the most effective charities. Right. So like they could they could be saving millions of lives every year. Then I think maybe that would be OK. Like I'm not sure. But I think it's not justified when they're not doing it. They're not even coming anywhere close. You got it. And this one from John Van Divier. Thank you for your question said, guys, one of you or both of you might be able to identify what their point is and who this is for. They had said, please note, robust political economy. The idea that public decisions are generally suspect due to knowledge and moral hazard considerations. Oh, that's definitely for me. That's that's a libertarian. Yeah. I think that, you know, I don't. I don't accept the factual premise would be the the pithiest way to do what to say it to be to be just a just a touch less pithy. I think if we I think sort of abstract principles about what we expect according to some predictive model from private decision makers versus collective democratic decision makers aren't actually going to take us very far in the real world. I would point to things that I that I said earlier about, for example, the many, many advantages to human flourishing, saving lives and meaningful human freedom of having universal health care as an obvious case by the wedge real quickly. I would also be curious just to follow up on the earlier question. We talked about the that World War Two, but how about the the Civil War, which was the the one that was the first time we had federal income taxes to to pay for that? And there's no knowledge problem there, right? I mean, the Southern states acceded in order to preserve slavery by their own account. So I would be curious about whether that taxation was justified on Dr. Kimersview. Probably not. Well, but I mean, but not just because if it was only that we're spending money and then we're ending slavery, there'd be justified. But it was also like so many people getting killed, right? And and it wasn't that, you know, it's not like, oh, that we would have slavery forever because like no country in the world, like slavery is illegal everywhere in the world now, so it would still be illegal today. We haven't had the Civil War. It just wouldn't take them longer.  I mean, I don't know, but probably. Gotcha. This one's an interesting one. Ben, what are your thoughts on this? Is Ozzie and do appreciate your question. They said, I think some taxes are reprehensible, such as on food or shelter or water or heat or cooling and clothing. Do you have any sort of like qualifications or unique feelings for those taxes? Ben? Yeah, I mean, so I guess I guess we have to dig in a little bit more to know exactly what kind of taxes the, you know, the question had in mind. Do we mean like sales taxes when you purchase those things? Or or or or do we mean some other kind of taxes? If we do mean sales taxes to purchase those things, then I can see an argument being raised that if the effect of those sales taxes was to make it, you know, harder to, you know, to afford those things, that would certainly be a moral objection to that in general. I like income taxes way more than sales taxes precisely because I do want to discriminate against the rich. As a previous question, I put it by by charging people higher rates as we go up in the in the income scale and sales taxes are flat taxes, which I think is structurally unfair to lower income people. And this one from Brian, I'm not exactly sure. Maybe both of you want to respond. They said property is a corollary of causality. Somebody chose to take an action and they in order to survive must be entitled to the effects of that action without a valid definition of property. All we have is luck and conquest. OK, well, so I mean, this gets a thing that I think is important about property, which is, OK, in my view, like I was saying earlier in the Q&A, the main reason why people in the market are trying to get money is that they produce an amount of value that's roughly proportionate to the amount of money that they receive. It's not always the case. There could be cases where you're cheating people or whatever. I think it's sort of like why in large, roughly, how it is. And so because you produce the value, it seems to me like it's kind of fair that you get about that amount of value return. You got it. Thanks very much. And this one coming in from Michael Lyons is taking from another without consent is violence. How is taxation any different? I guess this is probably you felt like you've adequately covered this been in the earlier parts of the debate over and over again. And then this one coming in. Actually, sorry, can I just add two sentences to what I said earlier? I think that the specific invocation of violence is an important thing because no libertarian theory of property rights is really about violence. Violence is about herring. It's like because whether we're violently enforcing property rights that people already have, like using threats of violence to drive someone off your property, if you're not prepared to do that, the property claim isn't worth much or you're using the much milder and much more abstract and indirect and less likely to be carried out threat of violence to enforce redistributive taxation. You're still using violence. So the question is that violence or non-violence. The question is which distribution of resources are we enforcing? Got you. I'm curious to hear both your thoughts on this one. This is John. Appreciate your question. Said, if forcibly taxing 100 percent of my income makes me a slave at what percentage am I no longer a slave? Zero percent. That was an easy answer. Easy question. I mean, I think that my answer is the antecedent is false. If 100 percent of your income is taxed and that income wasn't generated in some horrendously unjustified way, then you have a legitimate complaint. But that legitimate complaint doesn't add up to enslavement. I think that equating, you know, equating unjust expropriation of goods with slavery really, really, really undersells the many and extreme ways in which slavery is more than wrong, most of which are not captured by that. You got it. And Brian F., thanks for your question. I want to let you know, folks, we totally have no more time for any additional questions. We've got just several more and we'll actually we want to wrap up and want to ask this question from Brian F., who said, should lazy people be able to force others to provide housing and food for them? Can you both agree some taxes are theft? I can agree with that.  I think Michael actually, like, named some purposes for which taxation shouldn't exist because the purposes themselves shouldn't exist earlier, like wage and imperialist wars. I don't think that providing food and housing are on that list. I think that I think that it's I think everybody by virtue of being a human being has a right to things like health care and education and housing. And and the idea that we should let people, you know, that we that we should let people go without those things because in our judgment, they're lazy has very, you know, let's let's let's let's put it this way. It doesn't even begin to tempt my moral intuitions. I'm I'm very tempted. But but I mean, let me say it's not I don't think of it as a retributive point. It's not like, oh, you know, I think you're bad. So it's more like so, you know, when the when the questioner says, oh, they're lazy, I take it that they mean the person can get the money. If we don't give it to them, they can get it. They could just like go find a job and they can get enough money to they just don't want to. And I think, no, it's for them. It can go to work. Got you. This last one from Sphinxer of Doom. Thanks for your question says the who the World Health Organization ranking for health care is largely useless when it puts South Korea below the US, despite it being the best performing single payer system. It happens to be the least publicly funded one. Well, I don't know. I don't know about that. I think that I think that the fact that the questioner thinks that South Korea is in the wrong spot is gives me very little confidence that they know better than the who does. I think if you look at the objective, the criteria in terms of things like life expectancy that are factored into the who rankings. If you look at things like the actual feelings of the recipients of the healthcare that are factored into those rankings, the idea that this one ranking feels off to me doesn't doesn't give me doesn't give me any reason whatsoever, honestly, to to think that the questioners sort of intuitive rankings are better than the World Health Organization rankings. Gotcha. And I want to say, did you have Dr. Humer, go ahead if he has something. I was going to say, I feel similarly like, I mean, I don't believe what some random person says about some health care system in another country. But I also like they don't trust anyone else. I don't trust them to judge me about that. And I'm not sure. I don't think I even trust the who thing. But I mean, I didn't really know like maybe they're right. But I'm not going to assume that because I just think there's just too much political bias whenever people tell me, oh, such and such has a great health care system, I just totally discounted. You got it. I mean, I think that I think there are a lot of the things that who uses to determine that that I've already mentioned that I think should not be discounted. I think that people people live longer. They're less likely to die of preventable diseases. The children are less likely to die as as infants. The people who are receiving the health care themselves report better outcomes. So I don't I would strongly dispute that this is a big.  I'm saying like it could be easy to skew the overall results. Like if that like that's a super complicated thing to do, like ranking the overall health care system, and there's got to be lots and lots of choices that are kind of subject to. Got it. And I want to say, folks, I guess, there's a general reason to think that I look at every country that's adopted. I do want to just to respect your guys's time. I'm so sorry. The parties have to pretend to want to keep it. I do want to. We were basically, folks, I want to encourage you to hear more. I know, folks, you're like, I know there's more. So I want to encourage you to click on our guest links in the description box. You can hear more. You can read more. We really do appreciate our guests, folks. And so really, I'm sure you do because you've been listening and the feedback has been awesome. So we're so glad you enjoyed it, folks. And please do click on those links in the description box for our guests. And that way you can hear plenty more from them, read plenty more from them. And so thank you very much, Dr. Hummer and Dr. Burgess. It's been a true pleasure to have you with us tonight. Thanks James. All right, thanks. Been fun. Absolutely. And well, folks, I will be back in just a moment with a post credit scene letting you know about upcoming juicy debates, such as the one on the bottom right of your screen. It's going to be a great one. And so stick around. I'll be right back in just a moment. Thanks again to our guests and their links are below in the description box. Folks, that was awesome. I can't say it enough. Just how much we enjoy that. We really do appreciate our guests and we hope that you give them plenty of love. Just we, you know, folks, I always want to say want to 99% of you do a great job. So I'm giving you a pat on the back. I'm saying great work. Thank you that 99% of you will attack the arguments and not the person. And we love that. That's fun. That's great. And it's a way of showing respect to our guests.  So they're happy to have their arguments. You could say attacked. But like I said, we respect our guests and we're thankful for them. And so we want to encourage you to not attack the person. And that's again, only about 1%, but want to just reaffirm that and say, thank you, though, so much for being here with us, folks. I want to say hi to you all in chat and then tell you about these upcoming debates, folks, you don't want to miss this one. Let me feel I can barely hold myself back in terms of telling you about this. See that bottom right of your screen next week, next Wednesday in particular. So exactly one week away, Tom Jump and Vosh will be debating on the super straight debate. Folks, that's going to be juicy to say the least. And so if you haven't already, click that subscribe button. Or if you're watching on Twitter, click that follow button as you don't want to miss that one, folks, it's going to be epic. And so, yeah, folks, if you didn't know, we do actually have a twitch.  If you have been living in a cave on Mars with your fingers in your ears and you didn't know that we have a twitch, folks, want to encourage you, check out our twitch, which I am putting into the live chat right now. That link is chilling out there. And now I'm going to pin it to the top even of the chat. And so you can find it there at the very top of the chat as well. I want to say thanks, everybody, for hanging out here, though, as that was so fun. And I enjoyed this one so much. And some debates you can probably tell where you're like, James isn't in the chat interacting as much as there are some. Oh, sorry, I feel like I've pinned the wrong one. But thank you, Oliver Catwell, for being here as well as that. Hi, James, lost my internet for a bit.  And so thanks for being here and want to let you know, though, folks, I enjoy this one so much. And that's why sometimes I'm in the chat less because I'm just it's so fun to listen to these. And so you guys, if you didn't know this as well, want to mention, we hope it's useful. Now, maybe you're like, James, not to me. However, that's hard to believe. You've been hanging out here a lot of you for about two hours. And that's why I am so confident you will actually enjoy this in particular. Modern Adubate is available on podcast. So I want to encourage you, folks, if you haven't yet, pull out your phone right now. We right now have Modern Adubate available. And you can see right there those. That's just a list of our sweet debates. I'll let you know about some of the most juicy ones that we've had as of late. So we just released this three days ago. This was Between T-Jump and Arden of Eden debating whether or not Dawkins recent tweet back in April was transphobic. So that was a juicy one. We got a lot of political ones on there if you do enjoy political. And then we, of course, have a lot of our kind of our flagship topic is debates on religion, theism, atheism, everything under the umbrella of philosophy of religion plus even creation, evolution. But we also have seven days ago, we had uploaded the capitalism versus socialism debate. That was a tag team debate. And so, folks, want to encourage you, if you've already downloaded or I should say, if you've already subscribed to Modern Adubate in your favorite podcast app, hey, if you give us a like or a subscription or any sort of positive feedback, that helps us as we really do appreciate that in your favorite podcast app. But good to see you and say hello to you. Gabrielle Reel, thanks for coming by. And Brian Griffin, we're glad you're here, as well as Cameron Roberts. And 49 Hamburger, thanks for coming by. And ordinary G32, thanks for dropping in with us. The Minor Prophet, glad you're here. And Michael Lyon, thanks so much for your kind words, as much love. Brother, thank you so much, Michael Lyon. I appreciate that seriously. And I know there are a few super chats. Forgive me, folks, there might have been one from you, Michael, is that a lot of times is that our our debaters, they are especially tonight. That was a high profile debate. I mean, these guys are respected academics. And I just really appreciate that we have them on for the time that we do. And so I was trying to keep my promise in terms of what I had originally promised for how long it would go. And so that's why if for real, folks, like I don't blame you, I'd be open to it. If you ever were like, Dane, James, you didn't read my super chat. I'm available at modernaitebate at gmail.com. And if you let me know your Venmo, I can actually send it back because I do know that you guys send in a super chat with the anticipation that it'll be asked. And so I want to keep that promise. And when I don't, I'm happy to say, hey, well, you know, I can send it back and I'm sorry about that. And so I know that Michael Lyon, I think there was one from you I missed. And then there was, I think, several from Sphinxer of Doom. Sorry, Sphinxer of Doom. Bubblegum Gun also, I'm really sorry. I skipped like, sorry, we skipped several of yours. So I am generally modernaitebate at gmail.com. Reach out to me. We'll connect and I'll try to make it up to you. And so thank you for being here, though, folks. Want to let you know whether you super chat or not, whether you even hit that like button or not, although, hey, we appreciate it. If you want to hit that like button just for hanging out here. Thanks. I want to let you know, folks, if you are new to modernaitebate, we want to let you know, no matter what walk of life you were from, whether you be Christian, atheist, Democrat, Republican, Republican, gay, straight, black, white, Trump supporter, Biden supporter, you name it, folks. We just want to let you know that we hope you feel welcome. So thanks for hanging out with us. And we're excited about the future, folks, as I've been encouraged.  And it's honestly just awesome. Things have been happening in terms of doors that have been opening up. New things that we're excited about. I want to show you this interesting debate that we're scheduling for next month. This is one that it's kind of a work in progress. It's not that easy to find people that hold all these different positions. The funny thing is right now I have two people who argue they want to argue that that the JFK assassination was not what it appears to be. Namely, you could say that they kind of take the conspiracy version of explaining the JFK assassination. I have two people that are in that camp. I don't have anybody who's in the opposing camp. So if you want to come on and debate that topic, if you have prior debate experience, that definitely is, you could say, a preferred qualification, a necessary qualification is we are getting more stringent on asking people to use their camera as it is. It's a YouTube debate channel on YouTube. It's not talk radio. So we do ask people if they're willing to use their camera. And we're not trying to put anybody down if they don't like to use their camera. We have people that we still make exceptions. People who an example would be like Team Skeptic has always helped out the channel, really loyal guy and I want to be loyal to team. So I don't mind if team doesn't use this camera sometimes.  But Sam Miller, good to see you. Thanks for coming by as well and Pancake of Destiny. We're glad you're here as well as as well as Louis Preciado. Good to see you again. And Red Aims odd said, yeah, let's see. Got called a country fried clown. Well, that is an interesting. I've never heard that one. Amazing. I'll have to start calling you that country fried clown. But yes, good to see you. Benjamin, thanks for coming by. Seriously, said, wow, a debate on Dawkins tweet. Being T shaking my head. Sheesh, I know it is it's a juicy one. That's for sure. And folks, yeah, it's, you know, well, I can't I always have to remain neutral. Our goal at modern day debate is to be a neutral. So I will never say what positions I'm on. Some of you know, like some of my views that, you know, I'm not really like, what's the word I'm looking for? I don't strongly strive to like cover up all of my views. But I also will never make a video that is like, here's the case for X, Y, or Z. And where it's just that type of video. Don't get me wrong. I think that's cool if other channels do it, like totally cool. But we, when we started modern day debate, we were like, hey, we're going to have this be kind of unique, kind of different. And that it will literally be only debates like there's no other videos or maybe like, well, what's the channel's like goal or vision? Believe me, I am always ready to state our vision. Folks, do you remember what the vision is? Namely, we want to provide a level playing field to everybody so that everybody can make their case on that level playing field, no matter what walk of life they're from. And so we're a neutral platform doing just that. And we're excited about it. But Elijah Giles says beta. Thanks for being with us, Elijah. What the? But yeah, I'm excited. Human girl says, got to go. Bye. Goodbye, human girl. Take care. And thanks for your kind words and hacks, too. Says I can confirm modern day debate even tolerates Australians. Yeah, we do. We go that far and I'm teasing you. My dearest Australian friends, it's fun when I look at the YouTube stats as well as the podcast stats that both I'm so encouraged that people from all over the world watch, well, not all over the world. But like, like you'd be surprised, like I'm surprised when I like once in a while there's a country like I've like I haven't heard of that country. So it is really cool. You guys, isn't it amazing?  And so that is super encouraging. Want to let you know, folks, if you're from another country, we really do appreciate you hanging out with us as, you know, we Americans aren't that bad, you know, actually, you know, I always love that I've gotten and I'm encouraged by this, that when I've traveled, I've always gotten positive feedback where most people, they're like, oh, no, we love them. We love Americans like American people are friendly and they're just always smiling. I mean, if anything, they don't like us because we smile too much. But one thing is it's funny, though, that it's like they're like, you know, we're not always crazy about your government. And like, hey, you know, we as Americans sympathize with that. The funny thing is, and that's the funny thing too, is I've also found that when I've traveled, the universal thing that I found across countries is everybody doesn't like their government. And it's in no way to mean that their arguments are there. You could say complaints are not justified. In fact, like some places I've been, I was like, wow, I'd hate your government too, but the idea is it's interesting that it's but yes, log story short. Thanks for watching no matter where you're from. And thanks for your super chat coming in from Michael Lyon says you've always been cool with been cool with James, even though, you know, I'm flat earth, love the channel brother. Thanks for your kind words. Seriously, that really does mean a lot. And we do. I mean, that's the thing. I have, I mean, like some channels that are like, oh, we're all about tolerance and we're all about fairness. And like, we're like radicals about it. I mean, we're like, yeah, we'll host a flat earth debate and we're not going to take a stance on it. Like we'll let the debaters make their case.  Would somebody please think of the children? And I'm like, seriously, not really.  But the other thing is I'm like, you know, you always, a lot of these people that complain about the fact that we give everybody a fair shot. Like I said, we'll give flat earthers a fair shot. We'll give these controversial tonight's like, I would say mildly controversial. We've hosted some political debates that on social issues that were enough to where I worried I was like, we're risking our first strike on YouTube. And the idea is some people, oh, oh, it's like that or flat earth too. Amazing. I'm just amazed at some of the stuff we get in terms of crap for hosting flat or for platforming flat earthers in general. I'm like, oh, it's so bad. But the idea is when people are so triggered by that and I'm like, are you for real the same people that many of these are like, oh, we're all about tolerance and all views are accepted. And it's like, well, you're pretty clear. That's just tongue in cheek.  Like some views they'll say like, this is, this is irresponsible. I'm like, really? Like, like you openly say you don't want some views to be allowed on here.  I'm really sick because it just makes you want to do it more when they do that on Twitter.  And I also want to say thank you to the people who make a fuss on Twitter, because I know that you guys don't do this. But the cool thing is we've got the wind to our back folks. Modern day debate is just going to keep growing. And the reason I say that is not only do we have all of you who are like seriously, thank you for your support and making this channel awesome with your ideas, just being here and being fun and just love your amazing Oliver Katwell says in the chat, just making it fun. Like I enjoy this. This is a time when I'm doing my PhD and sometimes I have like reading all day is oftentimes like my job. And so like serious, like reading peer reviewed, like technical stuff where I'm like, sometimes if it's history stuff, it's so hard. Long story short, this channel is fun for me. And it's, it's so fun that I love getting to do it. And long story short, what I was going to say though, is when people make a stink on Twitter as of now, I never fire back. And there's two reasons. One, I always think, well, if someone's like trying to trash modern day debate on Twitter, I can, rather than getting into some Twitter feud, I can actually go out and try to improve the channel. I can invite like new guests or try to think of new topics, whatever it is. The other thing is, I don't want to discourage them. They probably don't know. Oftentimes when they trash us on Twitter, we actually, I can see like in the Creator Studio, we get an influx of traffic from Twitter. So like, I think, I mean, the sometimes it might be true. I don't know. I don't think it's true. It can't be true all the time. That's one thing I've learned in philosophy is that I think that you can almost never say never. Namely that if you think like, oh, in all cases, X is the case. And I'm like, ah, there's always some counter example. That's going to be a bugger. So there's, there's extremely rare cases of where you can say like, nope, it's just always the case that X. However, I will say generally it seems to be true that there's not really much, it's rare that there's such a thing as bad publicity.  And like I said, I was like, well, if you want to help us grow, you can always trash us on Twitter, but Hulk and bright. Glad you were here. Sorry, you guys, thanks for letting me like rant. I know that you guys are like, James is like just going on. Like he's like, all, all this pent up rage and, and hacks the sunlight is the best disinfectant. That's my thought folks, obviously is that I'm always like, Hey, you know what, if an idea is really silly, then assuming the debaters, which we actually try to make, make sure that they're, you know, roughly evenly mashed and it's not always exactly the same every time. But that yeah, once these ideas get exposed, and that's why we have that video because you might be thinking, well, James, like, I don't know. Well, if you check out this interesting video we put on the channel page at our modern day debate homepage, we have this channel video that says why we host controversial debates. It's got Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist, and you know, like if you haven't heard of Steven Pinker, like, where have you been? He basically talks about the value of debate because oftentimes people and oftentimes these, you could say legitimately harmful ideas because there are, it's true. There are ideas that are harmful. I don't deny that. But the idea is he says, when you don't allow debate, a lot of people go down those rabbit holes and they never hear a response to the ideologies of these kind of, you could say, potentially harmful ideologies. And so I don't like using the word problematic. It's become, I don't like the word problematic. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just that it's become cliche. It's, oh, why X, Y, Z is problematic. I've just seen too many articles with that. It's, they've ruined it. But Oliver Katwell, good to see you and Mark Reed. And also Hannah Anderson, thanks for your support in the old live chat and Bo Smith. Thanks for coming by. So I'm a vampire in Transylvania.  And you serious, Clark? How long? Good to see you as well as Cassan. Good to see you again. And Benjamin says, glad moderate debate, tries to stay neutral. Can't imagine spending that much time on that particular matter. Thank you, Benjamin. We appreciate it. And raw nakedness has returned. Human girl. I mean, it's like Clark Kent leaving and then Superman appears. There's raw nakedness who has appeared. But Gabrielle Real, thanks for coming by, as well as Ozzie and folks. I'm excited though, about the future. Believe me, we are absolutely thrilled for it. Don't bet against us. Moderate debate is going to keep growing and it's because of you and it's because, hey, we're excited about brand new stuff coming up at this channel. That stuff, such as new topics, new guests. We do want to do some travel debates, like in-person debates this summer. That's on the list. We're excited about that. That makes it fun. People usually enjoy those. And then third finger from the right. Good to see you as well as. Radim's odd quoting Jesse Lee Peterson in the whole live chatted. Who else is here? James Montalbano. Thank you for coming by. We hope you are doing well. Thanks for being with us.  Where is it? I'm catching up. Michael Lyons, as I did my PhD 10 years ago. That's rad, man. Really cool and invisible ninjas as modern day debate. The two live crew of debate shows. That's right. I know who you're talking about. Wasn't it like one of the only bands that was banned? No pun intended. By Congress, like back in the 90s or something. But yes, that's the funny thing. I don't even think, I mean, there are, there are some debates like all had been really pretty controversial. But I think we're generally pretty like well behaved in the YouTube world. There's a lot of like, there's a lot of stuff out there, folks. But Danny3648 says, you're also a greater entertainer. James, really good company also. Thank you, Danny, for your kind words. Seriously, I appreciate that. Is folks, I am, well, actually, let me just ask, is there anybody new in the chat? Is this your first time? Let me know as we do like to say hi. And thank you, Platium, for linking the Discord. I'm going to pin that at the top of our chat. And I want to let you know, folks, we are pumped about the Discord. I have to give all of the credit to Platium and Larry Letts and others, MathPig. I have not done anything in Discord because I'm still trying to figure out how to use it. But I do want to say thank you so much to Platium and Larry Letts and MathPig and others who have made it rad. And that is linked at the top of the chat at the moment. It's also in the description box as always. And highly encourage you. If you have Discord, you can check it out. Let us know what you think and thank Platium while you're there because we do appreciate Platium and others. Wilmar Castro, thanks for coming by, as well as Buddy Gordy. Thanks for coming by, says, I'm watching Ben's opening now. So that is juicy. I hope that you, that's cool that you're, you won't hear me until it's going to be quite a while until you hear my voice in terms of what I'm saying right now, if you ever hear it. But thanks for being with us, Buddy. And then Davos, hold those. Thanks for being with us. Let the good times roll. Amazing. I couldn't agree more. And then Platium says, Evening Chat was awesome today. I'm so glad to hear that. And Twitch Chat, so sorry, you guys are behind. Thank you guys for being with us. CDRank says, I'm new. Thank you, CDRank, for letting us know that. And thanks for being here, seriously. We're pumped to have you with us. And to Potsall, good to see you there. In the old live chat on Twitch. That's right. I'm checking in on you on Twitch folks. To Potsall and Brooks Sparrow. Thanks for being with us as well as Ozzy and you still in there. But as well as Sideshow Nav, good to see you. And thanks Sideshow Nav for kind of taking, Sideshow Nav has put in like some serious like time and energy to help formulate kind of our ideas for the moderators in terms of kind of the plan or the strategy that we want to use for the moderators. And so I appreciate Sideshow Bob sacrificing that time as well. And so thank you for your help. And yeah, Lawson's good to see you as well as do work please. Thanks for coming by. And the old YouTube chat jumping back in. Good to see you. Cassan says, James, thanks buddy. Love this channel and community. Thank you, Cassan. Seriously, that means a lot. And Bo Smith says, James, you rock. Thank you, Bo. Seriously, I'm encouraged, man. I appreciate that. And Eric, Michael Lyons says, Eric Dubai said he won't debate here. I'll see what I can do to get someone on another level and will happen. That's funny. I mean, we never feel entitled to have any guest. So I don't know what it is about us. Maybe it's just because we're not that big yet. And some people may be like, but James, it is big. It's like, what is it? I think we're at like 46,000, I think 400 we just crossed over today. However, folks, I am thrilled about that. And I thank everybody for that. But we are excited as it's going to be modern day to bait to infinity and beyond, folks, we are going to keep growing and believe me.  I mean, that's how long it took Joe Rogan to become monstrous. Believe me, I firmly believe modern day to bait will become monstrous. And someday we are going to look back at this and we will be, I mean, who knows? Maybe it's like several years from now, a few years from now, maybe we're at something like maybe even 460,000, something like that, where it's like, just significantly bigger and maybe just five years. And we'll be like, wow, remember when we were only 46,000, that was small. And so you're here early, f