Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. Joining us is Bruce L. Benson, Devoie L. Moore Professor and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University and courtesy Professor of Law at Florida State University College of Law. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Bruce. Thank you. The enterprise of law strikes many, I would say, is probably quite radical. You question whether or not government is even needed to provide so-called law and order. And you use the quote in the beginning of the book. You say, you use economic theory to compare institutions and incentives that influence public and private performance in the provision of law and its enforcement. How does economics help us think about law and its enforcement? Well, of course, first of all, law and enforcement involves the use of scarce resources, which means they have to be allocated. In economics's studies, the allocation of scarce resources, the allocation process isn't through markets, of course, unless we talk about bribery and things like that, then we get a market kind of process working. But nonetheless, we can look at the institutional environment and think about the incentives that individuals have who are in a position to make these allocation decisions. So really, it's in a sense the economic model of behavior as in public choice theory, for instance, being taken to the public sector in general and to the legal system itself in particular. So all of us are fairly used to state provision of law and law enforcement. The system we live within and, well, we know that we deal with private security guards occasionally and may have heard about arbitration between parties as opposed to taking disputes to court. For the most part, we just kind of think of state-provided law and law enforcement as the way things work. But in the introduction to your book, you make a point of saying that typically we think a market, one of the things a market does is provides what the customers want. And you contrast this with state-provided law in saying that in many ways it fails to provide what people would want, what we might expect in a market. So what are some of the ways that state law or authoritarian law, as you refer to it, doesn't live up to what the customers desire? Well, I guess we can look at what's going on today in places like Baltimore and Cleveland and places, Ferguson, Missouri, I guess, where we've seen significant abuses of power by the police. As one example of the public sector not doing what we want it to do, we can see instances, in fact, significant instances where prosecutors decide to drop charges against some individual or decide to plea bargain down to some lower kind of charge. And so the victim of the crime really doesn't even get the satisfaction of having the criminal effectively punished if that's what the function of the process is. In terms of legislation, we see all sorts of laws created that actually are not about protecting us from bad things, but are, in fact, about protecting certain privileged groups from competition or protecting their privileges and so on. So I just read in the paper this morning about the two young girls trying to set up their lemonade stand and the police came and shut them down because they didn't have a proper license. Is that the kind of thing we want our legal system to be doing? I don't think most of us do. I'm struck when reading your examples of how the legal system fails to provide what we want because reading it from a libertarian perspective and also being very aware of what's going on in Ferguson and in Baltimore and the story of the girls' lemonade stand being shut down and then these stories of there was the one just earlier this week about the 11-year-old who was playing alone in his yard for an hour and the parents were arrested and charged with neglect, I believe, and he was sent to Child Protective Services. And I guess I had two reactions. I wanted to see if I'm maybe misreading where, for one, I would say that, I mean, we know if you poll parents, you poll people about should children be allowed to play outside. A shockingly large percent, if not the majority, I believe think no. Kids of an age who used to play outside all the time should not and it may be driven by kind of the panic attacks people have now about how dangerous they imagine the world has become. At the same time, a lot of the rules that you or a lot of the things where you say the law doesn't give what people want tend to be you say people want harsher sentences than the law currently provides or that is enforced that the plea bargaining leads to us basically going easier on criminals than we otherwise might or the market demands. But to me, from a libertarian perspective, those seem like features not bugs that if... Going easy on drug criminals seems like a good thing. Right. If the state is going easier than kind of the vindictiveness of Americans want, I guess I would be kind of hesitant to institute a market that would be as vindictive as the voter wants. Well, you're missing the point, I guess. My point is that we don't like many of these things that are coming out of the system. A different system is going to produce different outcomes. You're not going to have plea bargaining between a public prosecutor and a criminal or the criminal's lawyer in a privatized system. It'll be bargaining, perhaps, but between the victim and the offender. So you have some perhaps bargaining, perhaps arbitration, perhaps mediation. And the acceptance of the bargain is then not up to some public prosecutor, but it's up to the victim himself. What will satisfy the victim. And prior to the rise of criminal law, the kinds of things we think of as crimes today were illegal, but they were illegal in a system of civil liability. Now, someone here thinking when you're saying state provided law or publicly provided law, someone's first thought is going to be, well, that's the only choice. Anything else is not meaningfully law. And the idea that there's private provided law just seems kind of silly to many people. But in your book, you've explained how this is a erroneous concept of law. And we haven't always had state provided law in this way in that story. So how did that used to be the case that we didn't always have publicly provided law? When people say the state has to provide law, they're defining law as rules provided by the state. So it's a tautology. If we want to think of rules as the behavior that other people expect us to adopt in various kinds of interaction, then those rules come from lots of places. And in fact, most of the rules we follow in our day to day life are not rules generated by the state. The state may have at some point written them down, but they were developed through communities, individuals interacting, contracting, developing various sorts of mutual insurance arrangements, mutual assistance arrangements, all sorts of other sources of law. If you don't like the term law, you can call them norms. I call them customary law because I think that gets at the idea. The argument I make is one that is not at all shocking to say an anthropologist. That law comes from different places. Law can be imposed from the top down, which anthropologists are referred to as authoritarian law, or it can come from the bottom up through various forms of voluntary interaction, and they call it customary law. The customs that individuals adopt within their communities are very powerful in many situations. And if we go back in history, you go to, say, a number of tribal societies, you find systems where there is no legislation, there is no central authority to enforce rules. Nonetheless, these people get along, they interact, they trade, they enter into joint production, and all sorts of things because they know how each other is, or they at least have expectations about how each other is going to behave in these situations. So there are rules. A lot of these rules that you're describing, these customary rules, are things that we have experience with today. Everything from, you know, we know that you're supposed to, at least in the United States, you get in line for something. You queue up and that's the proper way to handle it. And if you cut in line, people get upset with you or look at you. You don't double dip chips either. We have these kind of rules and we know just behaviors that are appropriate or not. And so thinking about those or thinking about stuff on the margin about, you know, a higher security guard to protect your factory as opposed to a cop, we get all that. But I think what you're describing and where the absence of state-provided law and enforcement seems particularly weird and where I guess I'm asking if you could expand on how it worked before, how things worked before the rise of the state is in those, the things that like the really hard laws, right? The ones like against murder, against, you know, outright theft. The things where we don't, it doesn't feel right that the way you handle those is to give the person the stink eye or refuse to associate with them. We want some sort of like real enforcement there. Or blood feud or something along those lines. But blood feud sound pretty bad. Yes. And so how do you, how did those kinds of issues get settled without a centralized authority? Well, let's just, since we're a common law country, let's go back to England prior to the development of what we might call royal law, law of the kings. And think about how those kinds of situations were dealt with. There was a custom, a view that every individual, free individual had what was referred to as a peace. Essentially, the individual had property rights. They had property rights to their homes, perhaps to farmland, to the cattle and horses and sheep that they had and so on. And the expectation was that everyone would respect each other's peace. Well, some people don't respect the law. They certainly don't today and they didn't then. So how did they deal with them? Well, the typical community of freemen would form sort of mutual insurance arrangements, reciprocity kinds of things. They called them the tithing and the hundred, or that's at least what historians have named them. And the idea was that they would cooperate in various activities. If cattle strayed off the, the individual could call on his neighbors, the tithing to go help him find them. If he was robbed, he could call on his neighbors to go pursue the robber. If they had obligations to maintain the road network or network of paths within the community, so a path cross of somebody's property, they were supposed to keep it clean so other people could use them. This was all built on frequent interaction and reciprocity among these individuals. Now, if there was a dispute as to whether they caught the right bad man, the right robber, there was also a court system that worked at the hundred level. There was a court, but it was not a court backed by the king or something like that. It was representatives of each tithing would act essentially as a judge and jury, and they would decide on guilt or innocence. And if there was a finding of guilt, then the expectation was that the offender would pay restitution to the plaintiff. So if you've got someone who was robbed, the court would come up with an appropriate restitution. In fact, it was a pretty common understanding about what the payments would be for various kinds of offenses depending on the situations and so on. So how do they enforce that though? How do they make sure that you paid? First of all, of course, if the individual couldn't pay, they had alternatives. For instance, these were mutual insurance arrangements, so one community, if a member of that community owed restitution to somebody, they might pay the restitution for the individual and then the individual would owe his own neighbors and friends. If the individual refused to accept the court's judgment, the individual would be declared an outlaw, essentially word would spread that this individual is outside the law, no longer protected by his own community, and essentially he's free game. His property could be taken and so on. That might sound harsh, but of course the police are seizing assets today from people who haven't done anything, but maybe violated traffic law. So the outlawry, well it might sound trivial today, was a significant thing back then because you had to have protection from within your community in order to survive in that environment. If you were an outsider, you did not go into another community without being voluntarily accepted by that other community. Now the point that you make in the book, the point about restitution is incredibly powerful and something a lot of people haven't thought about and I've pointed out to people that isn't it strange that if I get into a fender bender with someone, me or my insurance company pays them, but if I punch someone in a bar or someone punches me, they pay the state and that's supposedly a crime of which the victim receives nothing. And that is kind of a head scratcher. It's so common. Oh, crime is the people versus the king versus it's so common that we don't even think about that it's really strange. How did it come to be that you're paying the state when you committed crimes against people? Well, let me say first of all it came about slowly, gradually, and not without substantial resistance. The system of hundreds and tithing in the restitution system, referred to often as the man price system, was essentially universal in these communities and then the system included everyone, the wealthy, the powerful, the poorest farmer and so on. And so the king, of course, the kings came arose in England not to establish and enforce law, but to fight wars. They were typically war chiefs who ultimately were able to claim some sort of divine right or some sort of authority that would allow them to lead armies and that sort of thing. But then, of course, they needed funding to maintain or be active in their wars. And so they start looking for ways to fund their operations. The king's primary source of income, the early kings, was essentially the produce from their various estates. They had lots of different estates around the country and they travel from one to another and consume what was produced there. They didn't have much in the way of money coming in that was liquid that could be used to buy other things. So they're looking for ways to get money. Well, one avenue was the king's peace. Everyone had a peace. The king had a peace, too. But the king has power in that he has military forces and so on and the support of other powerful individuals. And so he started expanding the king's peace, for instance. Was the king's peace geographically assigned or was it temporarily assigned? For instance, he would declare that a foreign traveler in the kingdom would not have the protection of a local tithing or hundred. And so if that individual was attacked, the king would step in and pursue justice. But it was a pursuit of justice in the sense that the king got the compensation, not the traveler. And so you lose that link between punishment and restitution and it becomes punishment with no restitution to the victim. Of course, most traveling groups and especially the merchants and the churches and so on traveled with protection anyway. So this isn't a big deal. It sounds like a good thing. It sounds like, wow, the king is stepping in to protect people who are traveling and that's a good thing. So some minor sorts of changes like that start occurring. The king declares that his peace extends to the major holiday period. So any offense committed during a certain holiday period is an offense against the king and the money goes to the king. The restitution payment or compensation payment goes to the king. After the Normans invaded, much more powerful kings, within a century or so you start seeing a distinction between crime and criminal law and civil law that hadn't existed before. And the distinction essentially was with criminal law, the king gets the money. With civil law, the victim gets the money. And the king is constantly expanding his jurisdiction, his peace to sweep in more and more opportunities to collect money. Law enforcement was a revenue generator for the king initially and that made it very attractive. It still is. That was what was striking about reading this is that it was one of those kind of, aha, that makes so much sense now, sorts of moments. One of the things that came out in the aftermath of the Ferguson situation was the enormous percentage of the city's budget that came from these fines that they were levying on their citizens. That they kept just jacking up the fines and jacking up the number of things you could be fined for. It was like 60% of the municipal budget. And so they had every incentive was for them to just harass and find their citizens and see them not as people that they ought to protect but as a source of revenue. Yeah, and people just don't realize how important this has become. In the area of drug enforcement, for instance, the since the early 1980s, we've seen lots of changes in asset seizure laws that allow civil seizures. All they have to do is suspect that someone has committed a crime or that they purchased some asset with proceeds from a crime and the police can seize that property. There are lots of police agencies around the country that whose budget is a substantial part of their budget comes from seizing assets from people who haven't even been arrested or charged. And so you've got these fines, asset seizures, all sorts of activities that are generating revenues for the government or for the policing agency or something like that. So someone's probably thinking right now that pushing back, okay, so criminal law is developed as a moneymaking scheme for kings in the state. But at the same time, if we don't assume that kings are entirely nefarious people, which may be a bad assumption, but if we don't think they're entirely nefarious, maybe they said, well, the crime is not being prevented well enough by this system of restitution and private provision of security. And so one thing I need to do for my subjects as a good and decent king like King Richard and Robin Hood or something like that is to give them protection and step in to help out the people who don't have enough money to pay for their security firm or are not being assisted by the community. And yeah, I'll take some money from the people to help me do that better because that costs resources. But overall, it's a better system wherein to prevent and to protect people via this criminal law rather than the restitution system before. So it's actually a positive evolution forward of the state taking over something that it should be taking over in the first place. Well, that's a good story. Unfortunately, it's false. The kings did not take over the policing function or the protection function. They just took over the collection function, I guess you might say. The kings relied on the local voluntary policing arrangements to collect their own fines. In fact, they as the king took more and more of the money shifted out of restitution into essentially fines. The local communities resisted. They didn't want to take people to court to try to collect restitution because they weren't going to get restitution anymore. They were going to get money for the king. So they would try to avoid that through direct bargaining, for instance, with the offender and various things like that. It also creates incentives to use violence against the offender rather than actually trying to get a peaceful settlement. And so you get a period as the kings are trying to expand their jurisdiction but still have the local communities do the policing where you get a lot of resistance. And so there's a sort of give and take through over a century when the kings would demand more and more of the money and the local communities would just quit doing their policing stuff. And so the king would have to back off some and let them collect some restitution. And so they'd start doing their policing stuff again. Ultimately, the system of tithing in 100 broke down. The policing function just there was no policing. And so then the king, this was after the Norman invasion, created what was called the Frank pledge system, which essentially ordered these communities to do policing in order to collect the revenues for the king. Without compensation. And so you get an effort to use force to force people to pursue criminals when previously they'd done so voluntarily because of reciprocities and the recognition that they were helping neighbors who would later help them and that sort of thing. Now you mentioned that in the book you mentioned that they even made it illegal to go outside of the system to solve the crime by your restitution situation by yourself in order to put. I think at one point you mentioned that to put ads in the paper just asking for the return of stolen property. No questions asked. They made those illegal because they wanted to collect fines. Yeah, fascinating. Yeah, and so you have a long series of laws trying to force the local communities to do the policing functions. The, as we move through time, the king starts creating local officials, justices of the peace, for instance, who would be ordered to organize the policing and see that offenders get taken to court and that sort of thing. They were ordered to do so without compensation as well. The king didn't want to spend money on law enforcement. They just wanted to collect revenues from law enforcement. So harsh punishment in that actually I read, I can't remember where, what historian wrote about this system where essentially every community in England at one time or another was fined for failing to do its policing duties. And some of these places and some of these individuals would rather pay the fine and do the policing stuff. But then you also start seeing organizations, private organizations that joined together to take on some of these functions that the king was trying to do in a relatively efficient way. So, for instance, there were organizations where, oh, I forgot to mention, the victim wasn't expected to prosecute. So the victim was ordered to bring witnesses to trial and pursue charges against the offender, even though the victim was not going to be compensated. So the victim was not only no longer getting restitution, but he was expected to have bear more costs in order to collect the money for the king. And this, of course, led to people demanding some sort of restitution or retribution if they couldn't get restitution. And so you start seeing increasing levels of really nasty sorts of punishment, capital punishment being an obvious one, but all these stories about people being put on the rack and things like that start coming into play after the king takes over the process, because the people themselves are not being satisfied with the system. But anyway, the arrangements would oftentimes, depending on if it was a business group, for instance, they might hire a private security type individuals who would then pursue criminals and bring them to justice. The king never really stepped in until into the... There's a period where punishments are getting so harsh for trivial kinds of crimes that the people in the country in general didn't want to impose those punishments. But the only alternative to punishment, physical punishment, was to convict the individual for a relatively minor, really minor crime, and then they were branded as criminals. The juries then were nullifying royal law by refusing to hang people for minor cases of theft and things like that and simply branding them as thieves and letting them loose. Those were the choices, essentially. So there was demand to do something about this and demand to come up with ways of dealing with these criminals that was somewhere in between capital punishment and branding. And the king started transporting criminals then to the colonies in Americas and in Africa and places like that. Even then, of course, the king wasn't spending any money. He franchised a particular firm to do the transporting, and the firm got its money by selling indentured servants to contracts to the colonials when they transported these criminals over to them. So anyway, you start seeing a new development, transportation as a replacement for capital punishment. And then transportation gets cut off with the American Revolution. And so they put these so-called hulks in the Thames River. These big dead ships, essentially, would sit there and they put more and more of these criminals onto these ships, waiting for transportation to start up again. And it didn't, of course. And at that point, the king ultimately has to start paying something to get rid of these criminals. It was very expensive, but they transported a lot of them to Australia. Finally, you start getting prisons built to house these individuals. And you see a shift from the criminal process being a money generator for the king and the central government to a system where it's increasingly costly. And that's what we see today, of course, is a system that's extremely costly to the government. It's still, as you say, a revenue-generating system, but the revenues are being generated for local communities and local police departments and things like that, whereas taxpayers are paying huge amounts for prisons and so on. I wanted to talk a bit about the really fascinating analysis you give in the book of the incentives that exist within the legal system that we have today and how those cause problems specifically in the legislative process and then among judges and then among the police. But I did have a quick question before we move on to that. The story you've told so far has been about England and then America. Can we tell a similar story about other parts of the world? Because after all, other parts of the world have the same sort of authoritarian, state-driven law that we have in the West. Well, certainly we got our law from England. So did Australia and Canada and South Africa and so on. So the background for the development of the law was the same for all of those countries. Other European countries had similar processes as kings became more and more powerful. I have not taken a deep look at, say, Asian societies and that sort of thing, so I can't be strongly affirm that. But on the other hand, something like the tithing and the hundred has existed, has developed essentially everywhere. It really was an institutional arrangement that evolved out of tribal arrangements. And so those tribal arrangements, you find the same sorts of things in New Guinea and the Philippines where you're still finding these tribes. And so you certainly can find lots of hints that the same process has occurred and pretty strong hints in places. I honestly can't say whether the same story tracks in China, for instance, although I suspect it does. Yeah, then let's turn to that analysis of, basically it's a public choice analysis of our modern legal system. Let's start with the lawmaking process. One of the things that you point out is that when the state is the one making laws, when you have the centralized authority, you end up with different interest groups operating who each may have their own goals that work across purposes. And one of the, I think, really interesting things was that we end up as a result often with far more laws than we ought to have because incentives exist to create more and more and more laws and that also those laws have a focus that often doesn't make a lot of sense from the perspective of what we really ought to have or really want to have. Can you tell us a bit about why that happens, how that happens? Think about the example I just discussed about the king's creation of criminal law over time. When they tried to force the local communities to do the policing, the local communities resisted. So they're creating, they're passing laws that say local community do this policing activity and the local community is refusing. And so they pass more laws trying to force them to do these duties and threaten them with fines if they don't and so on. And so you see a growing set of rules attempting to force a community to do something that doesn't want to do. The same sort of thing happens all the time when we think of customary law evolving from the bottom up. It essentially means the community as a whole is agreeing voluntarily to accept these rules. They're not going to voluntarily accept rules that discriminate against them. So they tend to be fair on bias kinds of rules that come out of these systems. There's some bizarre rules that come out of them too. Oftentimes in primitive societies because they don't understand various things and so on and they create some rule to do something they think will help. But those rules don't have any effect. On the other hand, when the state creates a rule that says, you know, you got to do something, the individuals who are targeted by that rule don't want to do what the state says. And so they find ways to avoid it. And the legislature can never anticipate all the kinds of adjustments people are going to make. People are pretty entrepreneurial in finding ways around the law. And so you get a method of bypassing or circumventing the law created by the state. And so they have to create another law to block that. And then they have to have more police and so on. I always tell my students about the 55 mile an hour speed limit that was passed back in the 70s. The police, of course, had the, well, individuals, first of all, truckers all had CB radios. And so they'd call each other and warn them about police stings and, you know, traffic stops and things like that. And so they would avoid these speed limits. They'd drive over the speed limit and avoid being ticketed. And so they had to have tried to create some rules about what you could do with the CB radios. They then developed the radar guns to detect speeders some distance down the road. But then, of course, the private sector comes up with a radar detector which could be installed in cars. And so the state had to make those illegal in order to use their enforcement methods. And so you just get this spiraling process of more and more laws trying to force people to do things they don't want to do. I think a good analogy to the kind of laws that come from customary norms versus the ones that are imposed on the top down is an informal pickup baseball game that kids play in a backyard versus the formal little league system. Because when you have the informal pickup baseball game, everyone kind of has to respect everyone else because you're trying to make everyone happy and you don't want people to go home because the rules are not working for them. And so you adjust the rules on the fly and you have this kind of emergent system trying to make everyone happy and everyone having a good time.  And a lot of times the kids don't enjoy it as much as just the pickup baseball game in the backyard. Yeah. Good analogy. I believe that's from Steve Horowitz. Yeah, Steve Horowitz taught that up. And Peter Gray is a guy who wrote an essay on that which we can link in the show notes which I think is a good analogy. I think the story is really fascinating and there's so much in the book more than we've even touched on. But someone's thinking, what is the relevance? We talked about Ferguson and we talked about various problems. But the story of a primitive past using a primitive, quote, legal system and then evolving forward and now this doesn't apply. We don't live in small towns or small tribes where we have reputation is a huge thing and reciprocity. We have much bigger areas. So, you know, are we saying this was better and we should go back to not having state law now? Does this even apply anymore? What are the lessons that we can learn from the development of authoritarian law and how can we apply them now? Well, I know personally I wouldn't want to live in Papua New Guinea in one of those tribal societies that still have predominantly private law. Or blood feuds.  Well, see, Francisco Parisi, I think his name is, wrote a very interesting paper about blood feud. And essentially explained that restitution arrangements evolved out of the blood feud to mitigate the violence associated with the blood feud. And I've written, I've studied the Pashtun tribes in Afghanistan where you see the same sort of thing. They have a blood feud kind of legal system, but there's all sorts of ways to avoid the blood feud. And Parisi's story is simply that with no legal system, essentially people would take revenge on people that harm them. But people lived in communities and these kinds of violent conflicts and feuds could spread and generate significant negative impacts on the rest of the community. So there's pressures starting to build to alleviate this problem of violence. And so the result is that a customary norm develops that says you cannot take more in retribution than you initially suffered. It's the eye for an eye kind of idea. And of course, that means then that you start, you have an objective thing that both parties anticipate is going to occur. I put out somebody's eye. The expectation is that that guy or one of his friends or family is going to try to put my eye out. Well, I don't want to lose my eye. Maybe I can offer him some money not to do it. And so as a replacement for revenge, you get negotiation and payment. And ultimately then the order of events shifts. Initially it was revenge. But you can negotiate. And ultimately it becomes negotiate, go through a fair trial, something like that. And then if it doesn't work, you can take revenge. So what are the lessons for today from this idea that there can be private law and private provisional law? What are the lessons for today? Can we scrap what we've got and go back to a fully private system? Is that would that be inadvisable? Well, what I would like to see is just opening up legalizing lots of private alternatives. And then if the state can compete, fine. But if they can't compete, they go out of business. A modern example in Japan, if an individual commits a crime against another individual and that individual gets caught. He typically a representative of that individual, someone in his family perhaps or something like that will go to the victim and say, boy, this guy's really sorry for what he did. Is there something he could do to alleviate your suffering? And so you get a negotiation oftentimes with the help of a mediator where ultimately the offender pays a compensation to the victim. And if the victim is satisfied, he writes a letter to the judge who's going to try this guy and says he was remorseful. He's compensated me. You shouldn't punish him too severely. That works pretty well. You don't hear nearly as much about crime and prison riots and things like that in Japan as you do here. That doesn't eliminate crime. There's always crime or offenses. Another example, in lots of communities now, there are what are called victim offender mediation programs where an organization, maybe a church, some private organization develops a program to prosecutors actually like it oftentimes because it relieves court crowding where they divert the offender into a mediation setting where they sit down typically at a table with the victim, a mediator, any other affected parties, perhaps members of families and so on. They talk about it, the offender, I mean the victim is able to actually tell the offender how much harm was done. The offender sees the victim as a real person instead of just someone they didn't know that they took something from. They negotiate a contract for compensation. It doesn't have to be money. The offender might agree to mow somebody's lawn for a year or do some other sort of task for a period of time. Or they agree to pay or something like that. The last thing I read suggested that about 95% of these victim offender mediation efforts lead to a contract and something like 92% of the contracts are fulfilled. Well, that sure is a lot less costly way to deal with these offenders than putting them in prison where we spend $20,000, $30,000 a year to house them and feed them. The offender is perhaps doing productive work and the victim is being compensated for the loss. These kinds of programs are spreading. Really, there's lots of them in New Zealand. There are growing numbers in Canada and the United States. We see them cropping up in Europe now. So it's in a sense it's a move back to restitution. Perhaps just one of the worst things that the authoritarian system does is it keeps us from thinking about new ways of solving problems that arise and keeps us thinking in this one state-centered type of way. Well, it keeps us thinking that way because it doesn't – I mean, it bans the alternatives. That's the thing is when you talk to people, you even raise the topic of we could have law enforcement, we could have law creation without the state. It seems as silly as the notion of democracy. When you were describing democracy to the people of Europe a millennia ago, it sounds just as crazy. It's in large part because the state does everything it can to stamp out those alternatives before they get a chance to get off the ground. Yeah. You know, why don't we have – someone might say why don't we have private police? The answer is we do where it's allowed, where the state doesn't prevent it. And we do in many cases where the state does try to prevent it. The railroad system in the United States and Canada has its private police force. Lots of corporations have their own security system with large numbers of security personnel. So if the state allows these individuals or these firms to engage in policing-like activities, the private sector will produce it. Right now the dominant function of the private sector in terms of what we think of as policing activities is in protection because that is allowed essentially everywhere. You can hire private security to protect your home or your business and so on. And there are estimates of perhaps three times as many private security personnel in the U.S. as there are public police. And these people range everywhere from the typical sort of stereotypical night watchman or mall cop to highly trained, sophisticated private firms and personnel guarding all of our nuclear facilities in the United States, guarding all of our chemical facilities in the United States. Used to guard – used to deal with airports. Now we have TESA. I would invite a careful comparison of the two with airports. I think we made a huge mistake moving to public provision of airport security. So there are all of the everything that we think of as a function of the state in terms of law and law enforcement is in fact being done or has been done by the private sector. And there's always this give and take tug of war as people try to move things into the private arena and state tries to pull them back into the public arena and that sort of thing. But it's something that people don't really notice. Thank you for listening. If you have any questions, you can find us on Twitter at freethoughtspod. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.


One comment to make before I start the day. You may remember I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal. Well, the truth of the matter is so it happened to Rufus.  But we have to gather the information. We have to continue to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need to continue to fight. And we have to gather all the detail so this could be an actual have a war crime trial. This guy is brutal. And what's happening in Bukha is outrageous. And everyone's seen it. No, I think it is a war crime. Are you going to do more sanctions on Russia? I'm seeking more sanctions, yes. I'll have time to do it outside, too. You should be held accountable without sanctions. Well, no, the war crimes are up. Yes, I'm going to continue to add sanctions. Thank you.


Two or three weeks pussy foot around squats and deads 225 for Two separate sessions two weeks 275 two separate sessions one week One session 315 three by three so today. We're not gonna push it by any means But I like to get maybe 365 on the conventional pole for sets of five and squat 315 for three sets of five to eight Now we got the belt squat also, so maybe we'll hop on that thing.  I've helped on the internet Let's say 80% of you have the same mistake going on We got no tension in our hammies and our glutes, right? We want to get all the slack out when people here pull the slack out of the bar What we're actually talking about is pull the slack out of our system out of our body And we'll have point of contact obviously be in the floor and in the bar with my hands and in between there I need it stiff You know what I'm saying so He's just way to set that up is from my opinion kind of the top down, so we'll just bend over Once you grab that bar my hands may be loose, right? There's nothing going on from here I'm gonna teeter-totter my hips down, but even more so once I get this rigid Imagine this being a straight line color. Maybe you can add in some dope effects Imagine this being a straight line and I'll shove that straight line this way as one piece behind the bar And that's how you push into your hips from here Take here From here To here even there I feel stretch in my hand and then the last piece is literally just getting heavy hands getting that weight actually into your hands Where you hear this noise? And that's happening by Shifting my weight from here in front of too far in front of the bar. I have no tension on my hamstrings I'm gonna get behind the bar tension my hamstrings hips slightly lower in the shoulders It's gonna look different depending on how you're built What you guys are doing is just squatting down grabbing this bar now. There's no tension anywhere That's called weightlifting that's what you're gonna set up for a clean and jerk They're gonna get their knees out of the way first on purpose and then they have the leverage to get back under the bar We don't need to do that We want it to be the straightest line if not slightly back towards us and the most efficient line We need tension in the bar because there are maximal loads. You won't be able to do it What you want to do by cranking on that bar you're gonna tip forward You're gonna miss off the ground weightlifting won't matter because those weights that they're clean and jerking are submaximal compared to their pull So they'll still be able to muscle it through and get it to their knee where they want But for us we're doing with max max max weights You need that tension through the system through the bar body weight more behind the bar so we can get that straight straight line I'm a hook grip Hashtag hipster powerlifting Hashtag millennials Come here. Hell yeah. I just did a double over. I was just digging around with the hook grip Making fun of millennials. I did double over Three reps there and then I probably could have done it But sometimes if you're like testing your grip and I already have bad back sometimes you'll end up like this Just worried about my grip. So I'll be safe and sorry. So switch it up. I mean, I don't really like being uneven Yeah, we're on a stiff bar for all you hipsters No straps for all you hipsters three sixty five times five challenge me only the comments can beat that Give me three weeks. I'll be stronger and Steffi Cohen But for now Steffi you win. I'm pretty pain-free You know everyone Asked what I did to rehab or why it took weeks off or what the official diagnosis was and I covered it a little bit It's Q&A.  None of those seem to work So then what I began to do is try to reduce the intensity to a Manageable load meaning as light as I could go with no pain and Then continuous a decent frequency to get practicing see if I could build it back up didn't help So then after chatting with experts and my own experience of me and my hip and back issues over the last 29 years on this planet. I knew that mentally and physically this time for a break now. How am I going to rebuild? Similar to what I first tried to do, which is go to a manageable load that did not hurt Start to build up some volume there and then just linearly progress I'm not gonna linearly periodize all the way up to a new PR But what I will be able to do is handle two to three days a week squatting and deadlifting Outloads that don't hurt get some work there and then just slowly add weight every week or every other session And that's what I've been doing and so far so good


Oh my God. I can't believe I'm saying this. This is terrible. I got this call coming up with someone that's doing research. I think he's doing a PhD on being a vehicle. A overseas Vietnamese hopefully discover something that I didn't know before about the Vietnamese overseas experience. Hopefully find out some more things about myself. Yeah, I don't even know what he's going to ask, but I'm sure it'll be fun anyway. So let's connect to the call. Yeah, good. How are you? I have always been interested in the issues of being being Vietnamese, being born in one country, and the reasons for people returning and living in Nam. So that's kind of what sparked my research. Any of your personal name details like that will not be published at all.  Yeah, it's all good. First off, could you tell me what you were doing in Vietnam when you first had lived there? I actually went back to travel. So the story is my parents retired in 2010, 2011. So my excuse was if I didn't find a job I would go back and spend six months in Southeast Asia, you know, do the whole backpacking thing. Vietnam would be my base. It was just six months. That was whatever was planned. Four months into it, I sort of ran out of money and my parents were like, why don't you get a job to fund the next two months of your travel? I was like, okay, yeah, that sounds good. And then I actually, I got a job at this tech company and that kind of spurred my whole working in the tech industry. Where were you born? Where are you? Yeah, where did you go up? So I was born in East London and I grew up in the UK. How would you say that life was like in London in the UK? Not that much racism and everybody was pretty like welcoming because the town was really nice. My school was very nice. I was probably one of three ethnic people in my school. The other one was my sister. I had a pretty suburbian life. I would say non-typical sort of ethnic childhood. I think I was very lucky in that sense. Yeah, how do you describe your cultures growing up? Okay, so this is where it gets quite interesting, right? So my dad is Vietnamese and my mum is born in Vietnam, but her parents are from Hong Kong. So growing up at home, we would speak Cantonese and it was a way for my dad to learn Cantonese. That was the dominant language, right? But when I was younger, I traveled to Vietnam and I could speak Vietnamese because, you know, my dad would leave me at my grandmas or whatever, you know, to about like four or five sort of loss of Vietnamese. So in my household, it was very Chinese dominant. My culture when I was younger was definitely more of a Chinese identity because there was just more Chinese people in the UK and we went to Chinese school and that was really the dominant form. I had never met too many sort of overseas Vietnamese from, you know, the small neighborhood I was in. So that was really the identity, kind of Chinese, British, but of course, like in any kid growing up, it was weird. I didn't really understand, you know, my culture that well. I didn't really want to speak Cantonese or my mother tongue. I would always speak English. It's not until I was like 16 that I really tried to learn my mother tongue. I was almost embarrassed about speaking Cantonese when my friends were in the room at my house or something. It was it was it was one of those. Yeah, so that would be my childhood, I guess it was like this constant struggle to figure out like, you know, who are you, right? Like, because at home, you have a different set of values, a different way to communicate. But then outside, it's contradicting everything your parents believe in. So you almost sort of stumble across lots of different things, right? Like your parents might be like, drinking and smoking is bad. But then your friends are like, it's fine.  Or, yeah, it's OK. Have a smoke. So it's just like, yeah, it was super confusing. But, you know, I crossed the boundary so many times with my parents and they eventually sort of gave in. You're kind of embarrassed to speak in Cantonese until you were about 16. What what was what do you think if you could remember back to what that embarrassment or that that feeling was before 16? Sure. I think it was the feeling of like it being weird or kind of alien and other people around me didn't understand it, apart from me and my family, not quote unquote normal and me having this whole other thing that people didn't really understand. Right. Even though the suburb was really nice, but I just I guess it's the fear of being different. I think you're just trying to fit in as a kid, right? You're just trying to conform versus be yourself. So I think that was a big part of it. What was that chain at around 16 that made you feel more open to the idea of speaking in Cantonese or embracing that side of your view? Yeah, I started watching a lot of like Cantonese, like TV and movies and stuff. And I was like, this is awesome. So I started getting into like the whole media and entertainment side of things. And then I remember my dad left to go back to Vietnam for about six months. So it was like me spending a lot of time with my mom and we had, you know, we had a restaurant, so I would be, you know, speaking to her every day and, you know, learning about business. So me and her got really close. And I think that's where I sort of got more interested because I found out I couldn't communicate as effectively as I wanted to with my mom like day to day. So, you know, I think that part of me, as we got closer, I just sort of wanted to learn more and was more interested in the in the fascination of my culture. You speak more about that. You were talking about fitting in and wanting to fit in. How well or not did you fit into the British culture or the dominant culture when you were growing up? I think I fit in fairly well. I think I'm quite adaptable and I've always been. So I mean, that's why also we're able to sort of like move around, right? Getting used to a certain culture is fine. I felt like I adapted pretty well. You know, I was into all the things that the kids were into. Was good at basketball, was good at skateboarding when I was younger. And you know, as kids, sports is a huge thing, right? I felt comfortable with that. And I think I did a pretty good job fitting in. You also mentioned that you didn't face that much discrimination. Did you could you talk about any discrimination that you either witnessed or experienced yourself? It would always be name calling. We've got into fights, but I'm not sure if that's a discrimination versus just like male egos. Yeah, I'm sure one time, you know, my friend got punched just because he looked like the weakest Asian dude in the crew. Yeah, and I've been like headbutted at clubs. I'm not sure if it's just because I'm tiny. I'm a pretty short guy. And I don't know if that was a sign of weakness because, you know, the stereotype of Asian men, right? Like the name calling and stuff and and that's happened, you know, numerous times, you know, when I was a little bit older. Typical things like that. How would you say that to the the way that you saw yourself? How did that compare with the way that society saw you? Oh, that's interesting. Well, for example, I used to work, you know, in my family's restaurants, right? And then my aunt had this restaurant and it was it was in the suburbs, like even, you know, further into the suburbs, right? So it's a very white area. And, you know, I would be working a summer job there and I'd be serving customers in the restaurant. And then you you'll hear like these are like well off white people, right? So you think they're quite educated and then.  And I was like, what?  So and you and you would come across this all the time. I think that society saw me as definitely different and from another place. I don't think I ever. Well, I felt like that a little bit, but I knew that I also belonged, right? Because I had very similar values to my friends. However, you know, since I was 16, I gravitated more towards like my other South Asian friends. So like people from Bangladesh or Pakistan or I had a lot of friends. Like I had a friend from Iraq and Morocco and those are the people like I found I gravitated towards at university just because we had something different about us and our cultures, like, you know, were more similar than than the British white culture, right? So that was like a new world that I was like discovering as I, you know, went to college because college for us started at 16. When you were growing up, how would you say that you identified yourself? Yeah, I would say British Chinese. Yeah, yeah. I mean, my Vietnamese side was completely suppressed just because I didn't know what that was and I didn't really learn about it. And there was no one to really teach us about it. Of course, we'll hear my dad's stories and stuff, right? The strong Vietnamese identity didn't really come through in my surroundings. And were there any any events that or series of events that happened in the UK that motivated you to move to Vietnam? I had been to Vietnam as a kid. It would always be a very interesting place because we would go, you know, two to three years will go once or every two years. And I had actually been there twice on my own with friends when I was like 17 and 19, you know, spent more than a month here. And I just found it to be a very different place and just like everything is very new and very exciting from from a kid. My dad had always said, I wanted I want to retire in Vietnam. And I think that just kind of got into my head a little bit. So when I was younger, I was always like, I want to work abroad. And the first place I thought of identifying as Chinese was Hong Kong. I want to work in Hong Kong.  So as I grew up, it sort of changed because I saw Vietnam. And so what were some of the reactions that you got from important people in your life when you made the decision to live in Vietnam? So I was dating this girl. She had been there travelling with me when I was 19. And she's like, yeah, it's not a place I want to live. And I was like, well, I'm going to go for six months. That didn't go down too well. So so we ended up breaking up, of course. When I was like 20, I think I moved to Vietnam when I was 24, 25. Yeah, my close friends, when I first originally told them, it was like, you know, I was only going for six months, right? So they're like, I'll see you when you get back. And then blink of an eye, I've been away for seven years. So yeah, it's crazy, right? And then, yeah, I don't know. I just don't think they know because they've never been there, right? None of my friends, well, one or two friends have ever visited me from back home. But they don't know what it is. Like Thailand is much more approachable for them. I'm not like hugely sure on their thoughts about me moving abroad. I think I think I just basically told people via social media, but I'm really not sure like their thoughts, to be honest. What about your your parents? I know that you said that your dad, you know, wanted to retire there. Any other reactions that your parents gave you? Yeah, they were pretty happy. My granddad had always tried to convince my dad to come back. So then my dad originally he decided he wanted to come back. So when I was like, yeah, I think I'll stay. I think he was excited and pretty happy. He's like, there's lots of opportunities here. And, you know, my mom couldn't be happier because I look closer to her and she thought it was a good move. And then afterwards, we tried to convince my sister to come and she had been living in London for a bit and then moved to Amsterdam and then now she lives in Hong Kong. But I think she still wants to come to Vietnam, which is quite interesting. If you can remember like the week or first month that you after you decided that, OK, I'm going to I'm going to live in Vietnam. What was that first week, first month like it was exciting because I just found a new job and I realized it was amazing. Like, you know, the industry that I was in was amazing. Like I I never knew about the tech industry. I always knew that I liked technology, right? But to be in like a company from Silicon Valley, but it's in Vietnam. It was yeah, it was amazing. It was like, as soon as I got the job and I started, I knew that I had to figure this thing out. Like I had to, like, let this run its course and follow the flow versus fly back home. And yeah, it was it was it was amazing. It was like so much opportunity. And I was really excited about learning, you know, about this industry. And I almost, yeah, I never thought about I'm going to go home. You know, this was like, I've got to see what this is and I can go home whenever, right, it's going to be the same.  And I felt like I grew so much that home was no longer home. What about like a space or a place that you felt connected to when you or that you spent time in when you first arrived in Vietnam or or you decided to stay in the space that I felt connected to? Well, I think it would be my grandma's house. Like, so I was staying with my dad's family, but my mum's family lives in District 5 and we had spent more time as kids.  So I would always felt like that house felt closer to me because, you know, I could speak to my family there, etc. And that would be stuck in my memory. So every time I go back there, it feels like a part of me, right? Like a big part of me when I was younger. Other than that, at that time, no, everything was so new. Like, I just didn't know anything. Yeah, how do you connect with new people in Vietnam or elsewhere? Or how do you make friends now? Usually it's work because most like since I've been abroad, a lot of things has been about work. So people in the tech industry and then, you know, I fell into design. So a lot of the people I know are like, you know, designers or developers or people in the startup world. And then, of course, a lot of it is dating, right?  Yeah, you meet a lot of people and the first girl I met on Tinder, like she was cool and I think we maybe saw each other for a few months. But it's her housemates at the time that I'm still friends with today. And I've lost contact with her. Yeah, so like, you know, it's almost like a gateway to like a whole new set of people if you get to meet their friends and things like that. So, yeah, I mean, Tinder work and community events.  When you are living in Vietnam, if you can recall back to that time, what do you think it takes to be accepted in the Vietnamese society? Oh, what do I think it needs to be accepted in Vietnamese?  How long have you been living here? And then everybody's like, what the hell, man? Like, you don't speak Vietnamese because as I mentioned in your survey, I'm pretty bad, right? Like, I understand quite a bit, but like, stringing sentences together, I'm just not very good, right? Like, maybe just like understanding some nuances in the culture, like Vietnamese manners, I think is very important. And I think that's something my dad definitely did instill in us. And we didn't know what it was. We just thought it was manners. But it's a very like the Vietnamese way of doing things, like walking into someone's house saying hello and acknowledging that people are there, right?  I'm sure there's more, but I guess I'm still kind of learning. Like, I don't really know because I'm in this world, like, like in the UK, for example, I don't really belong because I have, you know, a different culture set. But also when I come back to Vietnam, the same thing is true, right? Like I've dated Vietnamese girls and they've said, you're really white. And I'm like, OK, I'm like, cheers, man. Thank you.   You know what I'm saying? Like, and yeah. And I'm I'm like, well, this is who I am. Like, that's kind of how I grew up. And, you know, I've learned to sort of put my own value set together, right? And my own things that I find important and how I behave is is actually my own, whether it's white, Vietnamese or Chinese. That's like that's the mould that I'm going for. Yeah. So from what you just described, would you consider yourself part of Vietnamese society? Yeah, I think I think so. I mean, I'm definitely like of a subculture.  And and then those are the people I gravitate towards as well, right? Just because it's easier to get long, understand, have jokes. But yeah, definitely so. I think, you know, VKs in Vietnam are doing really interesting things. And I think, you know, they try to give back as much as possible, hopefully, and not just take. But yeah, I think so. You just spoke a little bit about you feeling like you didn't belong in the UK. Could you speak a little bit more about that? One of the examples is like physically looking different, right? Looking different, different kind of hair, you know, skin tone, different height. Dating when I was younger was was a little bit different, right? Like having girlfriends and stuff was a little bit different. It's not like I had never really struggled with speaking to women just because I have a sister and my mom is, you know, very outgoing. So, you know, that that was never a problem for me. But sometimes being romantically involved as much as your friends were, right? With other girls is is different. Celebrations of certain cultural events, like, for example, Christmas, right? UK Christmas is very interesting. And I never knew like I saw Christmas dinner on TV, right? Home alone or whatever. But it's not only until I actually went to my friend's house and spent Christmas with him and his family. And I was like, holy shit, this Christmas is way better. I was like, this is awesome. Like even I got presents and I was like a guest, right? But in my house, I was presents, like was a thing until like, you know, 15, 16, and then we've never got any presents after that. It was like, oh, whatever, right?  And like we had family things.  But our Christmas was filled with a lot of people. We always go around to like other people's houses and stuff. And I always see my cousins, you know, we'll play video games into early mornings. But their Christmas was more like tight knit. People get drunk, you get drunk with the family, which is it was very different. But I think I prefer that that Christmas to be fair. Yeah, when you were living in big, could you tell me a relationship that you had with Vietnamese local? Yeah, when I first got to Vietnam, like I was really into basketball, right? So I had a friend like when I was 17, you know, we had something in common, which is basketball. But in terms of like how we are as people, we're wildly different. Right. And why do I say that? It's because Vietnamese guys when they get drunk are very touchy.  Why is he touchy? Why has got his hand on my leg for like half an hour? This is weird, right? Coming from the like a British culture, we don't do that shit, right? Like we're not touching people, right? We're very like keep keep your hands to yourself, man. And I was like, OK, weird. But then like, you know, he would invite me around his house to meet his parents and I was like, what is going on? It's like I'm dating this dude, right? And he'll always call me and like, you know, even back then it was like, no, man, just text me. Don't ever call me like don't call me. Right. So it was very it was it was interesting. It was very like it was weird at first. It was very weird. Right. And I was just I just wasn't used to like interact with locals. And then I learned very quickly. Oh, OK, this is just how it is. And yeah, learn to enjoy it over time. Would you say that that would is like typical kind of relationship that you like typical of your relationships with locals? That they're very like that they're more full on than than my British friends? Yeah, I think so. I think so. Yeah. What about a relationship that you had with you? A very cute. Yeah, could you describe to me? Yeah, like what it looked like? I guess similar to my friends back home, really.  Maybe I had like one American friend in the UK. I got really introduced into like the American way of doing things, right, in my company. And because there was lots of vehicles there. Yeah, I guess our relationship is just I would say it's it's it's like we're joking on the same wavelength, maybe a little bit different, because it's not British. And that's what I'm used to. But, you know, at least a conversation flows better. I don't have to repeat myself. We understand each other better. Like, we're not we're not touchy. And there's just less friction, right, of understanding each other. Like it just flows better. Earlier, when we talked in our conversation, you had identified yourself as British and then maybe Cantonese afterwards. After moving to Vietnam, how how do you think you identified? I definitely have been embracing my Vietnamese side a lot more, right? Just because I've been like finding out more about myself and what I find important. And yeah, I'm really proud to be Vietnamese now. Like I'm I know that, you know, that I probably suppressed that side for years or didn't even know, right, didn't even identify as that. Like, I'm definitely more proud. And I think my friends know this as well, that I talk about it all the time.  And of course, you know, one of the things is like the Vietnamese economy, where like that's something to be proud of and also means people are doing like really cool things. And so yeah, I'm definitely like, you know, I try to embody that spirit these days. What would you say that it means to be Vietnamese? What do you think it means to me? Oh, good question. The first thing that I think about, I think it's the hustling. I think I wouldn't have like propelled or even been half as successful in my career if I wasn't in Vietnam, just because around you, like it's just everybody's hustling, right? Like and it's very different. And I can compare that to Thailand, but most of my friends in Vietnam or people I work with have like, you know, side gigs and they're doing this and they're doing that. And then people move to Vietnam for that, even if they're not Vietnamese, I think it's infectious. Like the hustling cultures is very prevalent. You know, that kind of if you ask students in university, you're like, hey, what do you want to do? Everybody's like, I want to be my own boss, right? And I think that's really cool. Definitely, definitely that work ethic and that hustle culture is a very Vietnamese thing. I think resilience is definitely a Vietnamese thing. Like, you know, with all the colonization the country has had, you know, and the wars and all that stuff and going through different errors in our history, I think resilience is very good.  So let's just compare it with like the Korean or Japanese society. I think women in Vietnam are more equal than in Korea or in Japan, for example. I think that's also vindicative of our history. You know, I think women have much more of a say and more respected. Of course, there's still like such anistic bastards out there, but I think they could do so much more, right? Like in some regards, right? Not every, it's not perfect, but yeah, I think, yeah, a strong like female power culture you can see it, you can see it everywhere. Wow, Chris, thank you so much. Yeah, man, I enjoyed it. Thank you for listening to me. Yeah, let's connect further and see what this leads. But I would love to, you know, when you finally, you know, have your themes and stuff, I would love to, you know, read it or however you want to share it would be great. Like I'm fascinated by this research. Yeah, yeah, I really appreciate your time, Chris, and I will keep you updated. We done. That was awesome. Good convo's. I mean, of course we went for over an hour, but what a nice guy. All right.