Okay. Okay. I'll come, everyone, to the continuing lecture on interpreting scripture. We're currently talking about types, illustrations, and allegories. So we're trying to understand types, the difference between types, illustrations, and allegories. And really allegories are things that, you know, people make up based using scripture, they make up things and then they give their own meaning. So there's no connection at all. Whereas types are specifically stated in scripture. And therefore we can use them confidently. Illustrations are also stated in scripture. But there's a variation, there's a difference between the type and the illustration in how we process them, how we work with them. Allegory are things we make up. So God never stated to be a comparison and meaning. And so we put meaning into it and then we come up with something. So I was trying to give some, you know, some examples of it and we will see a few more examples as we go along. So let's pick up from where we paused. I'm just going to go ahead and share the PDF so we can look at it. Okay. So we said, you know, in the type and the illustration, there is some resemblance, correspondence, and allegory, there is absolutely no correspondence. We are just forcing some meaning into it. Secondly, the type, there is historical reality, meaning it actually happened. In the illustration and truth, so in the type and anti-type, there is, you know, there is historical reality of both. So the type and the anti, the type and the anti-type, they've actually happened. In an illustration, something happened and it's pointing to some truth or it's bringing out some truth in the New Testament. Yeah, you know, some truth is brought out. But there is historical reality of something that happened, the illustration. It did happen. In allegory, you know, something may happen, but the literal meaning is later said. Like we mentioned, you know, David and Goliath, and the literal meaning is unimportant. Just some other meaning is assigned or superimposed on the text. What else can we say? The type and the foreshad of the anti-type, that means the type is prefiguring or it is pointing to ahead and it's saying like, you know, now what you're seeing is going to come out in a very heightened manner. It's going to be fulfilled in the anti-type. You're going to see this and more in the anti-type. The illustration, it's not necessarily predictive, but it's more like the New Testament is looking back at the Old Testament and saying, you know, that was something like this. Okay, so it's an illustration of this, an example of this. And there doesn't necessarily have to be a fulfillment of what was happening. It's just an illustration, a comparison. Number four, the type and we will look at some example and, you know, even I will be clear on it. Number four, the type is fulfilled by the anti-type. That means there's a higher level of revelation brought out by the anti-type, much more, much more, like the real tree that you see is much more than the shadow that you see. The shadow has something, but the shadow is telling you something better is coming and, you know, that it's going to be really great.  You would actually see the trunk, you'll actually see the branches, you'll actually see the leaves and a whole lot more happening in the actual tree. In an illustration that doesn't happen, there is some point of comparison, but it's not a height in revelation. It's not like much more. It's just a point of comparison that's being made and so on. It could be totally different as well. You know, like actually the brass serpent would be more like illustration, what I just referred to in the earlier lecture, the brass serpent. Jesus is saying, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so the Son of Man would be lifted up. So it's an illustration. That one is illustrating this. You know, both have been lifted up. Something is happening. Both are bringing redemption, but that's it. You know, you can look at that as an illustration. The allegory has nothing here. You know, the allegory is basically us making up things and it doesn't fulfill any particular truth or prophetic element in the text. The type is divinely designed by God. Illustration is designed by God as a picture of truth. So parables also could be good illustrations. So parables are, you know, we will talk about parables in the coming lecture next week. But they are illustrations. They have truth in them, but they're not, you know, it's not necessarily fulfilled in something. It's a communicative tool to bring out truth. And God is using that or he's picking that out for us saying, this is an illustration of truth. So parables are all good illustrations, examples of good illustrations. The allegory really is the interpreter's imagination. You know, it's not designed. It's not designed by God. The interpreter is making something up and bringing out something, some insights. And like I said earlier, what is spoken may not always be wrong, but the use of the text is actually not correct because they're bringing something out that was not intended in the original text. It's all somebody's imagination. And so the type and the anti-type, the scripture talks about this being an anti-type or fulfillment of that. Illustration is not referred to as, you know, a type or anti-type. It's just given to us as a story or given to us as a picture. And certain truth is brought out for us in scripture. So for example, in Galatians 3, Paul uses Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac and Hagar and Ishmael to illustrate the law and the grace of God that has come. So he says, you know, just as Hagar was put out, so the law is sent away because now the promise has come, the grace has come. So he's just using it as illustration to get across the spiritual truth. But we do not say that Hagar is a type of the law and Sarah is a type of grace. We don't go there. The Bible doesn't state that. He's just using that as an example, as illustration, but he's conveying a spiritual truth. So we just stay with that. And we don't call, you know, type an anti-type in that case. He's just using it as an example. So like that, even the Apostle Paul in his writings will use examples. Now he talks about the armor of God and he uses, you know, various pieces of armor as examples, you know, helmet and breastplate and so on. They're illustrations, but we just leave it there. We don't copy on that and say it's a type of something spiritual that God has given to us now. It's just illustrating that these are the things that we need to use in our spiritual warfare. The allegory, like we said, it's not mentioned, it's not stated in scripture. It's people, what people come up with and so on. Okay. So examples of types and illustrations. Let's go through it. You know, I mentioned some and sometimes even I get mixed up, but I need to read things through on what would be. All right. So types and anti-type. So these, you see, the type and anti-type, it's very clearly stated in scripture. That's one very important thing. The Bible really states it and the Bible actually points to it as a comparison. Example, like we mentioned, Melchizedek. Hebrews 7 clearly states, Christ came after the order of Melchizedek, meaning in a similar way he came as a priest. And what is the point of comparison? Melchizedek didn't have any beginning, didn't have any end, meaning it's not recorded. He was a real person, but his origins and his ending was not. So it uses that and says, even Christ, who had a perpetual priesthood, never had no beginning, no ending. Okay. So the Bible is scripture specifically stating, so you can do a comparison. Then same way in Hebrews, he compares Aaron, the Aaronic priesthood with Christ's priesthood. And there's a lot of comparisons, but he's also drawing distinctions. He's saying, look, under the Aaronic priesthood, they offered the blood of animals and sacrificial animals, but under Christ's priest, he offers his own blood once for all. Under the Aaronic priesthood, people were, you know, all the men had to do it. So they did it every year over and over, over for themselves and for the people. Well, again, Christ's ministry, this one who had no sin, he went once and for all. He gave himself once for all and it was done. So he's drawing a lot of comparison between that priesthood and Christ's priesthood, drawing comparison similarity. The blood covers here, the blood cleanses, also some distinctions, but it is clearly stated. So we can study both, you know, we can study Aaron's priesthood, understand that in order to understand Christ's ministry much better. Because there is that, biblically, it's being compared. So you can study that the Old Testament as a shadow to get a precursor, to get some understanding. And then you come and study Christ's ministry and say, you know, oh, this is, this is a fulfillment, it's much better here, but that helps me understand this.  Of course, there's resemblance. So it helps you understand. But the tree, of course, is much better when you look at the tree itself. Yeah, I think we mentioned the Passover, you know, the Passover lamb was killed, Christ our sacrifice was Corinthians 5-7. So, you know, you can go back into the Old Testament, look at the Passover, how, what happened there. And then it helps us understand better or some elements of Christ's sacrifice. Of course, Christ's sacrifice is much more than what was spoken of by the Passover, but it gives us insight into this. The unleavened bread, that was another feast. And the scriptures specifically states, you know, the believer's life of holiness should be like that, the unleavened bread. That means the bread had no yeast in it. Similarly, yeast is compared to sin. And similarly, the believer said, you must live a life where there is no yeast, meaning no, no sin. Right? So there's a comparison there. And, you know, we can look a little bit into the feature of the unleavened bread and see, okay, you know, how they intentionally, they cleaned them the house, they removed the leaven out of the house, and that's how they did it. So, we intentionally must clean up our home or our lives and walk like that. That's the point of comparison in the type and the anti-tax. Just a few examples. So, we can look at more, you know, we can make a long list of things where the Bible is drawing these comparisons. Similarly, illustrations where the Bible is specifying it, right? But the difference is that this was not necessarily predictive of the truth, right? It's illustrating in some way. There's some comparison, but it's not predicting it. And the truth is much, much greater, right? This has a lot more. But it is an example, right? It's an illustration. So, Adam. Adam was called, so Adam, Adam, and then Christ is referred to as the last Adam. Adam is the first man. Christ is second man. Adam was the man from earth. Christ is the man from heaven, heavenly man. So, the scriptures are comparing that. Both in Romans 5, and I don't know if I mentioned first Corinthians. I didn't. Okay. So, you know, both in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, Adam and Christ are compared, but Adam is only an illustration. And he historically was real, but the truth about Christ is much greater, right? Adam sinned. He affected the whole human race. Christ walked in obedience. He blessed the whole human race. So, like that Christ is the truth. Adam was an illustration of certain things, right? But not necessarily type and anti-type. He's not predictive in nature, right? But there is some comparison. Jonah being in the three days and nights in the fish stomach. It's an illustration of Christ's death. So, Jesus pointed back and said, even as Jonah was in the belly of the whale, so also the son of man, and then in it is the fact that he is going to come back alive. Just as Jonah was there and he came out, Christ was there, came out. Okay. And here's something that I got confused with, which I mentioned earlier as a type, anti-type, but actually it's better as an illustration. The brass serpent, Jesus points back and says, yeah, just like serpent was lifted, Christ would be lifted. The point of comparison, the truth that Christ is there, is that he provides salvation. The people looked at the brass serpent, they were protected or healed. People look to Jesus and experienced salvation, but it's not necessarily predicting or foretelling, it's just an illustration. Or Jesus' example, he said, okay, in 1 Corinthians 10, he said, you know, the rock, he talks about the rock that was struck. He said, the rock that followed them, and even as the people were baptized into the cloud, which led the people of Israel, and the rock from which water came up. So he uses that and he says, you know, he Paul writes, and he says, that rock was Christ. So it's pointing to, it is illustrating, I would say, something about Christ. The truth is in Christ. The rock provided water to drink. That was, you know, a grace given to them. Christ through Christ, you know, their salvation, everything released to the people. He uses the cloud to say, just as the people were baptized into Moses, you know, we are today baptized into Christ. So he's using it, he's pointing to the ultimate events as examples, as illustrations, and saying, this is the truth that we are experiencing. It's illustrated over there like this, you know. So we can say, we can take that and use that as an illustration, because the Bible is specifically pointing to it as an illustration. So you can say, you know, that rock was Christ, they cross the Red Sea, type of a baptism or example of a baptism, what a baptism, so on. So you can use that. But these are stated in scripture, so you're free to use it. So the point I want to get across here is, type and illustration are specifically pointed to out for us in scripture. The Bible is pointing these out for us. Allegories are not. And therefore we should try and avoid, my recommendation would be try and avoid allegorizing scripture. And if you're going to do it at any, if you still want to do it, then it's better to tell people, look, I'm just, you know, I'm just using this as inspiration, but it's not really what the text is saying. But type and illustration is, you have chapter inverse for it, you know, and you're basing it on scripture. And illustration is to bring out truth. Type and the type is to draw comparison and to help the understand the anti type bitter. In illustration, you're bringing out truth from that event or what was, what happened. Okay. So if in our study of scripture and if our interpretation of scripture, we are careful, you know, how we do this, then it's good. It's good for us. And it's good for the people that we are ministering to. We know that, look, I am staying within the rules of the scriptures. I'm staying within, I'm with the text of the scripture. And this is what I'm doing. So it's fine, you know, whether you're using a type anti type or whether you're using an illustration that's given in scripture, okay, you know, it's there. I can use it. I can explain it like this. It's fine. Right. So for example, Noah, what's, yeah, Noah's Ark, right. Jesus said, as in the, this is in Matthew 24, he said, as in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days, you know, before the coming of the Son of Man. Okay. That's illustration. It's not a type and anti type because there is no, you know, it's not like a predictive thing, but he's pointing back from the new, he's looking back and saying, Hey, there's some truth you can get from that. Okay. So as in days of Noah, what happened? He said, they were marrying, they're giving in marriage.  But there were a few people who went into the safety of the Ark. They were taken away because they were paying attention to God. That is no one is household. While everybody else around was busy with the things like marrying and giving in marriage. There were a few people who were listening to God. And they were the ones who were kept from the judgment that came on the earth. So Jesus is saying, as in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days before the coming of the Son of Man. He's using it as an example and illustration. And the truth is, you know, be careful. Don't get caught up with the things of the earth that keep you away from obeying God. So to that extent, you can use that in your preaching. But don't go beyond that. You know, don't say like, Okay, we have to build an Ark because Jesus said, you know, as in the days of Noah's soul, and don't say the Ark is the local church, you have to sign up and become a member of the local church. Only then you will be saved from tribulation. You know, don't say all those things that was not intended. That is allegorizing. Right. You just stay with the truth that Jesus wanted to bring out from the illustration he pointed to in the Old Testament. Okay. So we will talk more about the parables because parables will also fall under this category of illustration where he uses illustration from our world to tell us truth, spiritual truth. Okay. But let me pause here and see if there are any questions at this point from anybody in the class, you want me to explain or if you want to, you want me to, you know, if there's a particular example you want to look into and we can work on it together. Hi, Pastor. Go ahead, John. Pastor, the book of Song of Songs. How do we interpret that? And I think most of the people consider interpret it as an allegorical way. How do we deal that? Very good. Very good. Yeah. So like you rightly said, a lot of sermons that I preach out of the songs of Solomon or Song of Songs are actually allegories, meaning that is not what the scripture intended. So it's just human imagination at work. Now, of course, people are not going to say wrong things, meaning they're not going to, most of the songs are like, you know, okay, they're comparing Solomon as Christ and, you know, the woman as the bride as the church. And so they put it, but actually that is not correct interpretation of scripture because that was not what was intended. So you say, well, what were songs of Solomon about? Well, it is talking about human love. It's talking about, you know, what Solomon went through. And it is talking about his emotional experience, I mean, his experiences and so on. So you read it for that and why is it in the Bible? Well, God put it there to show that there's nothing wrong with human love. And as long as it's kept in the place that God wanted it to be, it's fine. Then you say, but why can't we interpret it as Christ and the bride because of this reason? Nowhere in the Bible is it stated to do that. Right? So we see that types are actually stated in scripture. Illustrations are actually stated in scripture. So song of Solomon doesn't, it's not stated, you know, example, if there was a new test somewhere in the New Testament, it said, you know, as Solomon and the sugar mite woman were in love with each other, so was Christ and love with the church example. I'm just saying if there was a verse like that, then yes, then we could go back and, you know, we are authorized to interpret song of Solomon as though it was an illustration of Christ's relationship for the church. But sadly, there's not a single verse in the New Testament or anywhere in the Bible that is referring to song of Solomon like that. So I would say we should not do it because it's not the correct handling of scripture. But sadly, there are lots of books and songs and all of that have come out and people just go with it. But if you look at it with, you know, with saying like, I want to stay true to the handling of scripture, that's something we should not do. We should not be doing, right? And so just read it as a book that is talking about human love, human interaction, and whatever you can, you take from it and leave it at that. But don't allegorize, we shouldn't allegorize it, you know, at least I wouldn't do it, you know, because I know that's not what the scripture intends. That's not what the Holy Spirit intended. And yeah. So that's adding to your thoughts in this. So what would be the purpose of having this book in the Bible? Like is it to replicate how he loves women and husband and wife's life? Yeah. I think what I would take away from that is God saw it fit to put this book in the Bible, to let us know that he created human love and our capacity for human love. So we talk about Agape love, which is the God kind of love, which God gave us. But he also gave us the human love, whether it's friendship or whether it's romantic love, he created that. It's not against God, but it has to, of course, be operated within the confines of scripture. So God saw it fit to put the Song of Solomon, the book of songs in the Bible. And I think the message is, God is saying, look, I created this and it's part of what I gave you in a gift to us as people. And it just has to be done right. You know, if you think about the book of Ecclesiastes, it's a very, again, it's a very, yeah, I don't know, I use the word depressing or a very, again, it's written by Solomon. And we begin to ask the question, why is the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible? And there it tells us that, look, a man who was given the wisdom of God, when he was just looking at things from a very earthly perspective, he came up with all this, but God's allowed it to be there because in that we're also seeing God's wisdom. We're seeing contrast between God's wisdom and the human mind, you know, and we're seeing all of that. And God let that book be in the Bible for us to learn from. And, you know, some even, some writers and scholars will say that Solomon was in a depressed state of mind when he spoke that, the book of Ecclesiastes. So that's why, you know, he says vanity of vanity is all is vanity. Now, is that true? All is not vanity. You know, all is not when God created life for the purpose. But throughout the book of Ecclesiastes, you find Solomon making that statement. Why would a man who was given wisdom make the statement? So he was not necessarily operating out of that wisdom. But then God put it in the, let it be in the Bible. So I think, so my personal takeaway is, Song of Songs, Solomon Ecclesiastes, God let it be in the Bible for a reason. We should read it in context, takes what he, you know, what he wants us to see, but not, you know, superimpose our ideas other than what's already given for us. Thank you, Vastav. One more question related to this. But when we write songs, okay, we have, we have hymns or we have all songs saying, he's the lily of the valley, which I think comes from this book. So when we also, you know, maybe write a love song, or, you know, to worship the Lord, can we use any of those as they have used? Oh, what? Yeah, yeah. I think it's fine because these are figures of speech and these are nice literary statements, which have a lot of meaning. So when we say, you know, the lily of the valley, of course, it's a phrase in Song of Solomon using partial scripture text, but we are using that figure of speech to the Lord, and that's perfectly fine, you know, or you're the rose of Sharon, or you're the, his banner over me is love. Of course, these are all statements from scripture, scriptural texts, and we're using it to the Lord, and they're figures of speech. So it's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, even though the, even though the context in which it was used was used different, right? It was the woman saying it to Solomon, you're the lily of the valley, or sorry, Solomon saying it to the woman, you know, whatever context you're, the context is different, but it's a figure of speech that we are using towards God. Yeah. Okay, I saw somebody else's hand raised. I think it is Colin. Yes, go ahead, please. Yeah, there is somewhere I read a book they call Unlocking the Bible. It was written by David, David Paulson. He was an English surgeon. He died in 2019, I think. But he was explaining that when King Solomon, these three books that he wrote were portraying how he lived his life on the historical point of view, that Songs of Solomon, he wrote it when he was in his young age. In fact, he was, that lady being mentioned there was his God designed lady because every man should have one lady. And it was the third, the third lady. And when he was writing, he wrote it when he was a young man. When he was writing Proverbs, he was middle age, trying to give his son some advice. And because we see that there is a massachaline and a feminine gender when we read the Proverbs. And at the same time, when he was writing the last book, which the name is hard for me, but I call it The Preacher. When he was writing The Preacher, he was an old man, seeing that having reigned after 300 wives and 700 concubines, he really saw that life was vanity. If you do chess, physical and the human things, if you really do follow what the Lord says, it will always be fruitful. So they had to say that faster. Thank you so much. Very good. Very good. Thank you. Thank you for sharing. Good insight. Yeah, very good. Yeah. And that's, that's a nice, nice insight, you know, which I haven't read before. So it's good. Very nice. Very nice. Thanks for sharing. I, there's a good way to look at it, you know, different stages of his life and what he wrote. Good. Any other questions? Let me see in the chat anything. Okay. Okay. If there are no more questions, our next chapter, let me just start off the next chapter and then we will continue it next week. So we've looked at types, illustrations, allegories. Good example of illustrations are the parables. So we'll just go into a little bit about the parables and then we will continue it next week. Okay. So parable. So again, the parable is in a week, we would say it's figurative, it's analogy, it's illustration that are true life, true to life stories or activities, things that we are actually doing here on earth. And of course, they're taken from Bible times. So, you know, we will have stories about the shepherd and the sheep and the silver and the fisherman and so on and so forth. So Jesus used these stories in order to just like illustration, we said illustration is pointing to spiritual truth. In parable, you can say it contains or the truth is hidden in that story. Right. So in order to bring out spiritual truth and in order to encourage people to seek up spiritual truth or even to understand and to relate to spiritual truth, Jesus used parable. Right. So, you know, if you look at the word parable and it's from its roots, root words, root words, it simply means a story that is thrown alongside to illustrate. If it's used to illustrate spiritual truth, something you're bringing into or bringing alongside, you know, it's okay. Let me add this in here. And the purpose is to illustrate truth. Right. And it could also have been meant to understand like short statements that are similar to Proverbs that are bringing out truth that are intended for people to think about, think through. And as you think through the story, you're going to come upon spiritual truth. So Jesus used this. He used these real life stories and he just talked about these stories. He didn't always interpret this. That's very interesting. When you think about it, he didn't interpret the stories. He gave the stories. He said, you know, God's kingdom is like this. And then he gave a story. He threw it in, brought it alongside. So you can imagine if you and I were in the crowd and listening to Jesus and we remember him saying, the kingdom of heaven is like this. And there's a story. Example, a woman, you know, she lost a coin and then she searches the whole house. She lights a candle and she searches the whole house until she finds the coin. And she has great rejoicing when she finds the coin. So very short, very short story. But it sticks in your mind. And you're thinking, God's kingdom is like this. And a lot of us would be, I mean, you know, if we were in that day listening to Jesus, we would relate to that story because, you know, we ourselves could have done that. You know, something fell somewhere in the house and we light a candle and we go search for it. And until, and then we find it, we're so happy. Then he started thinking. Now Jesus never interpreted it. He just gave the story. The kingdom of God is like this, right? And like that, we know the other stories, you know, the lost sheep, the shepherd leaves 99 in the pen and he goes looking for that one sheep. And when he finds that one sheep, he comes and makes such rejoicing. He says, Jesus gave a story. Kingdom of heaven is like this.  Wonder what he meant. Because Jesus didn't interpret it. He just gave the story. They're thinking, what does it mean? And maybe to some of them, they will fall upon the truth. That means they will come to the, oh, maybe that's what God is like. He searches, looks for the lost sheep and until he finds the lost sheep. Maybe that's how God and his kingdom work, you know. So the whole intent is, I'm bringing a story along. The truth is hidden in the story. I'm not interpreting the story for you. But as you dwell upon the story, you will fall upon that truth. You will hopefully understand truth. It's intended for people to search the truth. Now, of course, we know that the disciples, the apostles, on many occasions, they would meet Jesus personally and say, Lord, what did you mean? Right? So that means they're asking him to interpret. Tell us what is the truth actually in the story that you want us to know? Right? So truth was hidden in the parable so that those who were his followers, they could understand the truth. And yeah, then he didn't make it so obvious to those who were not interested. In other words, like Jesus said, take heed what you hear and the measure that you give is what you will get back. So the intent was you have to seek, you have to search, then you will find the truth. If you're not interested, you will not find it. You'll just hear the story and go away. But if you take heed to what you hear and you give attention to it, then you will come upon the truth. You will understand what is the truth that is hidden in the story. Now, of course, the other benefit of the story was it was a very effective form of communication, right? Because people would like to listen to that and they could easily relate to it because he took things from our world and he began to use them to speak to us. So, you know, and I just listed out these these these parables and many of us know many of these, you know, the two houses, one on the rock and one on the sand, cloth, wine skin, you know, you don't stitch new cloth into an old garment, wine skin, you don't put new wine into old wine skin, the sower, the weeds, mustard seed is so many, you know, short short stories are, you know, some had a lot of description in it, like, you know, the, the, the, the two sons, the prodigal son, we often call it, and so on. So, he gave a lot of these parables or stories and people could understand spiritual truth from it, right? Now, what we will do is just, you know, how do we, you know, today, how do we use these parables or how should we use parables when we are using it to preach to people, all right? So, that's our interest because the parable served a definite purpose while Jesus was speaking it to the audience then, but obviously, it is there for us also today. Right? So, how do we interpret that for ourselves to understand it and how do we explain it to people and just some guidance and most of us are familiar with parables, so we won't take too much time on it. So, we will pick up here next week, we will finish up parables, then we will get into some the next thing I want to say after we do the parables is to talk a little bit more on allegorizing, like, sorry, we'll talk about prophetic text, that means how do you handle prophetic text, and under that we'll also talk about allegorizing, because a lot of prophetic text has lots of images, right, pictures, we're seeing pictures, and so how do we handle that part, we will pick it up next week. So, we will start from here and we will kind of proceed into handling some other things. I hope you're all following me and try and try and put it to use as you study the scriptures and as you use it in your preaching and teaching, these guidelines will keep us all on the right track as we go. Okay, so let's wrap up for today, we have a few minutes, somebody could pray with us and close, and then we will dismiss, please. Anybody could unmute your mic and pray? Any further, thank you a lot for this morning, thank you a lot for teaching about or allegories, illustrations, parables, yes, as we learn all this, help us to understand the word rightfully, entrance of the word, use light, test the word, therefore help us by learning all this, by the teaching in this class, we will be able to interpret the scriptures rightfully and apply it into our life form, we will be established in the truth of the word and follow it and do it as your salts and blades in this world follow, and also we will teach it rightfully to others so that even he may learn more, less possible for teaching these truths to us all, as we go through this course, teach us more, establish us perfectly in the word so that always when you read a word and share your word to others, you will be truthful and grateful to the rightful thing according to will and glorify your name, by all this and by your ministry in this world, your name will be glorified, others may be edified and brought rightfully to your kingdom and taught rightfully about your kingdom, in Jesus' name we pray, amen. Amen, amen. Thank you, thank you everyone, enjoy, take a quick break and get ready for your next class, enjoy the rest of the day, thank you, see you soon, God bless.


For calculating sample size, if study variable is a proportion and if we are doing it for a single group, then this is the formula. The example is prevalence of anemia. Here in this formula, z to alpha is standard normal DV8, which is given by the value 1.96. z to alpha square will be 3.84. T is the prevalence or proportion of, which usually comes from the previous studies or from the pilot study. Q is given by 100 minus p and D is the allowable error or precision. Here, D can be either absolute or relative. Absolute means if it is five percentage means we will substitute directly this five percentage. 10 percentage relative means we take 10 percentage of the prevalence. 10 percentage of 50 percentage prevalence means five percentage. So, here is one example. Previous study, the p was identified as 60 percentage. So, then q will be 40. Here, it is the relative precision that is 20 percent relative to 60 percentage. Then the calculated sample size, when we substitute in the formula, it will be 65. So, the formula is 3.84 into pq divided by d square. If we increase the value of precision, then we get decreased sample size.


I'm going to grab that. I'm going to grab that. I'm going to grab that. I'm going to grab that. I'm going to grab that. I'm going to grab that. I'm going to grab that. I'm going to grab that. I'm going to grab that. I'm going to grab that. I'm going to grab that. I'm going to grab that. After Mr. Kinsella's presentation, we'll have commentary from Professor of Law at Berkeley, Professor Talha Syed. Professor Syed teaches on intellectual property and torts. His research focuses on patent and innovation policy for pharmaceuticals. Professor Syed got his JD at Harvard Law School. Lastly, we will open up the floor for Q&A, so if you have questions, hold your hand up high so I can call on you. And without further ado, please join me in welcoming Mr. Stephan Kinsella. Thanks very much, Alina. Glad to be here. I'm from Louisiana and I was at LSU in 1988 to 91 for law school and I wasn't even a member of the Federal Society back then, but it was very small. So the turnout at Berkeley is much larger than it would have been even at that conservative place then, so that's heartening. I've long been an admirer of the Federal Society. I don't believe the state is here to protect our rights, however, unfortunately. So a little bit more radical than the average Federal Society member. I'm a patent attorney, an intellectual property attorney. I've spoken on this issue many, many, many times over the years, probably hundreds of times, more than I would have wanted to. I gave an intensive course at the Mises Academy about five years ago, and it took about nine hours, and even that didn't cover everything. So in the 30 minutes I have, I can only scratch the surface and hope to give you a new perspective that you can consider. I won't persuade everyone here. I might not persuade anyone here, but at least you can think, hmm, maybe there's a little bit more to this issue than I thought. So let me get the boring stuff out of the way first. Just what is intellectual property? Intellectual property can be viewed as legal rights protected by law, having to do with the products or creations of the intellect or the mind, and that's why the word intellect is used there. Classically this includes four legal rights, patents, copyrights, trademarked and trade secrets, and there are many others that have been spun off over the years, either by common law or by legislation such as semiconductor mass works, which protect Intel's chips, boat hull designs, database rights in some countries, not the U.S. so much, moral rights in some countries, not the U.S. so much, rights to one's alikeness, and even reputation rights which are not classically considered part of IP, but I believe they should be given the way they operate. This is defamation or libel in slander law. And then there are certain cultural things happening around the world that you could think of as similar to intellectual property laws such as killing people for painting pictures of a certain profit that they shouldn't be printing, a painting, and even the modern leftist cultural appropriation idea that you're not entitled to say certain things if you're not of the correct race or ethnicity. Those are IP-like, although they're not technically enforced by most governments. Okay, why should we care about intellectual property? And it's impressive that we have a nice full room on a beautiful day wondering about this topic that makes most people's eyes glaze over like my relatives at Thanksgiving. IP, we should be interested because it's a subject of heated debate in political theory. On the one hand, you have people like Ayn Rand, the sort of father of the libertarian movement, and I say father because she clapped her hands in glee when she was referred to as a man one time, but she said patents are the heart and core of property rights. And she told her lawyer and friend Murray Frank, who's an IP lawyer, oh, IP, intellectual property is the most important field of law. Okay, so, and then you have things like the U.S. Department of Commerce releasing a study in 2012, purporting to show that intellectual property intensive industries contribute $5 trillion and 40 million jobs to the U.S. economy every year. That's probably actually true, but it's IP intensive industries. That's like saying that companies that rely on roads contribute 100% of the GDP to the U.S. economy as if it's an argument for roads. Then on the other hand, you have empirical studies saying that patent trolls, which is just one small slice of the patent problem, cost $29 billion a year to the economy. And then you have the United States through Donald Trump and other administrations trying to foist IP protections on other countries through trade agreements and treaties, like the U.S. M.C.A., the new version of NAFTA, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which I and others have called intellectual property imperialism.  So it actually matters that we get this right. This is an important, important topic. I've been a libertarian since about my high school years, and I was, everything made sense to me that I read. It all made sense to me. Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Henry Haslett, Frederick Bastia, these guys. But when I came across Ayn Rand's comments about patent and copyright, it never quite made sense to me. She's in favor of the government granting these monopoly privileges to have a limited right in time to exclude people from competing with you in the field of either ideas for copyright, which last roughly 100-plus years, or patents, which last roughly 17 years. And it struck me as odd that you would have a right that would expire. It didn't seem like a natural right, like the other things that made sense to me in free market economics and libertarian theory. So I always puzzled that. I shelved it to the side because I didn't understand it. It's a very arcane topic. And in college, I kept thinking about it a little bit. In law school, I thought about it some more. And when I took the patent bar and decided to become a patent lawyer, I started thinking about it even more and researched and read a lot. And by the time I passed the patent bar in 1994, right around the same time, I became convinced that I was trying to find a justification for patent and copyright law because everything I read made no sense.  That's the solution to the problem. And then when you understand this, it helps unlock the key to a lot of things about political theory, property rights, the legal system. Some of the biggest influences I had were writers that came before the Internet, right? After the Internet, 95, and so this issue of piracy and things like this became way more prevalent and then people started ratcheting up copyright enforcement. And so people started turning their attention to copyright law. It was kind of ignored before. It was the domain of specialists. But there were a few people who had written before, like Tom Palmer, a Cato scholar, and Wendy McElroy, a Canadian, a libertarian, feminist, individualist, feminist scholar. And Ludwig von Mises, who didn't write exactly on this topic in a coherent way, but he did lay the foundations for the economic way to look at human action, which I think helps solve this problem. And then Hans Hermann Hoppe, those are the four writers that influenced me the most to come to my current views. Okay. So I, of course, have spoken on the law as a patent attorney to further my career, and I've written on this topic. But as a libertarian, my main interest always was rights theory, legal theory, contracts, things like that. I only wanted to write, I saw that everyone was confused about IP, and I had finally figured it out in my mind. So I thought I'm going to write one paper on this and get it over with and then go back to the things I like. And so in 2000, I had a big paper from a publisher in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, and that keeps being retreaded and I have to write further articles and give speeches because this issue is vexing to some people. But I have found that once you look at it the way I'm looking at it, which I will get to, it does help to unlock things like causation of the law, fraud theory, contract theory, property theory, rights theory, and also the very issue of the nature and sources of wealth and human prosperity. Okay. So the question we have to answer is not, hey, is IP a good idea? This is a very unprincipled, pragmatic way to look at things. The question is not, is IP a good idea? The question is not, what kind of IP system should we have? The question is, what should the legal system be? What are human rights? What are individual rights? What should the law be? Okay. So to understand that, we have to go back and understand what law is. Law is the legal enforcement of rights, and as Murray Rothbard explained in the Ethics of Liberty, all rights are necessarily property rights, because rights arise because we do not live in the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden is this hypothetical state of nature, which of course never existed, but it's the idea that we live in a state of superabundance where our wants are always satisfied, nothing is ever impossible to achieve, there's no scarcity of anything. We don't live in the Garden of Eden, we live in a world of scarcity. This is where Mises, the famous Austrian economist in his theory of human action, which he called praxeology, comes into play. Don't be scared by the word, he did coin a word, I think everyone gets to coin one word and only one word, although Mises has two, but he's so genius, I'll give him two.  It's very commonsensical. What we do in our lives, all of us, is we act. When we act, we employ means to try to change something that we anticipate is going to happen in the future. When we do this, we employ our knowledge as well. Our knowledge of what we think is happening and our knowledge of what means we can employ to change the course of events. So human action is centered around the idea of employing scarce resources or means of action guided by knowledge. These are the two components of human action. If you lived in isolation, like Robinson Crusoe in an island, you would still have to use means, make a fishing net to catch fish, your knowledge about how to do this, and you would have to use your knowledge. But you wouldn't have the problem that we have in society, which is the problem of conflict. When you have more than one human actor, there's a possibility of conflict. There's also the possibility of cooperation, which makes us richer through the division of labor and social interaction. But there's a possibility of conflict because we live in a world of scarcity. There are scarce resources, and the nature of the resources is that they can be used only by one actor at a time. And if we're to use these things peacefully and cooperatively with each other, we need rules that permit us to use these resources without being violently interfered with by someone else. This is exactly what property rights are. Property rights are simply the allocation of rights to scarce resources. Every legal system has property rights. Socialist systems, communist systems, theocratic systems, dictatorships, autocracies, democracies, and even free societies have property rights. There is some legal system which gives an answer to the question, when there's a dispute over this resource between A and B or C, who gets it? That's the answer, and that's what the ultimate purpose of law is. Law is a codified or an existing set of rules that determines the owners of scarce resources. When there's a dispute over these resources. Now, the natural set of rules that tends to emanate from the common law and from human interaction in human society is very simple. It's basically the Lockean idea, John Locke's idea, and you can summarize it this way. In the case of the human body, which is a scarce resource because they can be owned by either the person himself or by someone else, which is what we call that slavery. The libertarian answer and the common law answer and the traditional answer is the default is every person owns himself. Okay, that's the answer. You know, unless something happens like a crime of murder, self-defense, something like that. But in general, everyone is the default owner of their body. That's the first property rule. And then for everything else in the world that's a scarce resource, every external resource that there is that was one time that was at one point never owned, that is previously unowned. For these things, the things that we need to employ, land, animals, wood, materials, food, these things, we determine the ownership in the case of a dispute by three rules. The first one is original appropriation. This is the Lockean idea of homesteading. That is, all things being equal, if two people have a contest over a resource, the first person to use the resource has a better claim than the other. Unless, rule two, it was transferred by contract. Okay, so if I own it because I got it first and I give it to someone else by contract, now they have a better claim than me and then the rest of the world. And then a third or subsidiary thing would be transfer of property because of a tort. If someone harms someone else, then they owe them restitution or rectification and some of their property can be transferred from them to the other person to rectify the harm that was done. But those four rules, self-ownership plus in the case of external resources, original appropriation, contractual, consensual transfer, and transfer because of rectification, are basically all the four rules of all law. All legal systems originate from these things. Now what distinguishes libertarianism from other, even the common law and classical liberalism, is just a more hyper insistence on consistency for these types of rules. So therefore, you know, we're really, really passionate about self-ownership and about, you know, we reject the idea of the hypothetical contract between people unless they actually had the agreement, you know. So, but the core of the common law and the private law that even you're studying now is rooted in these basic principles. Okay, now before we apply this to IP law, let's just quickly understand where IP law came from, the history. Okay, you can go back as far as about 500 BC. There was, in the Greek city-state of Cyprus, there was some culinary competition and there would be a competition who had the best recipe for a dish. And whoever won would have the monopoly right for one year to be the only one who could cook that dish. So you can see the beginnings of this idea of someone having a monopoly on some idea they come up with that other people like or that's useful. Fast forward a little bit. You started having this practice in the, say, 14, 1500s of monarchs granting what's called a letter patent, a letter patent, which means patent, the word patent means open in Latin. So it was like an open letter, an instruction from the king to the world saying this guy is the only one who has the right to practice this trade in this region, right, to sell sheepskin in this area. So it was just a monopoly grant. It was anti-competitive and it was just a favor handed out by the king to someone in exchange or something they had done for the king. This problem got out of hand and in Britain, in 1623, the parliament passed the statute of monopolies to reign this in and so they restricted the king's ability to grant these monopolies, these monopoly privileges, but they kept enforce the ability of the king to grant monopolies for inventions. And then in 1789, when the U.S. was founded in the Copyright and Patent Clause, this right of Congress to enact a similar thing, similar to the statute of monopolies, was kept alive. Copyrights originated, look, the church and the state controlled thought easily before the invention of the printing press, right. The scribes are all members of the church or under government control so the government could control what was being printed. When the printing press came about, it was a threat to the state and to the church because they didn't want the people getting, having mass produced books without permission, you know, with the government having an approval first. And so the government starts the stationers company, we're talking England now, which had about a 100 year monopoly and finally when that expired, there was a debate and so the statute of Anne was enacted in 1709, which is sort of the genesis of our modern copyright law. So you can see that copyright law that we have now originated in censorship, that is the control of thought, and patent law originated in the grant of monopolies, which are anti-competitive. And of course, this is the way they work now, although what happened was in the 1800s, the free market economists, when they saw the emergence of this modern type of patent and copyright system that the U.S. started and then the Western Europe started enacting, the free market economists started saying, wait a minute, these government granted privileges are getting out of hand. They're contrary to the free market, they're contrary to private property rights. The industries that had grown up around these monopoly grants and had become dependent upon them like the publishing industry and certain companies that made inventions, they fought back. And the way they fought back was they said, it's not a government granted monopoly privilege, it's a property right. And everyone said, it's not a property right. Property rights last forever. Property rights are property rights in tangible things. And so the defenders of the IP system said, well, it's an intellectual property right, it's a creation of the mind. And when they did this, they used a combination of two types of arguments, utilitarian arguments, which are pragmatic and sort of consequentialist, empirical, and deontological or principled arguments basically rooted in the Lockean conception of our natural rights. So let's go quickly through the utilitarian argument. The basic utilitarian argument, and you'll hear this today, and this is the predominant argument most people use today because everything is utilitarian, is that there is basically market failure. They won't put it this way because they don't want to seem like, they don't all seem like they're criticizing the market because most people today would think that intellectual property rights are a type of property right that's part of the capitalist western system. And it went along with American and western prosperity since the 1800s. So they think it's a natural part of the market. And it is true that people trade these rights, they sell them all the time. So most people think this is natural. And so the argument is that without patent law and without copyright law there would be a so-called under-production of creative goods because there wouldn't be enough incentive to do it. And the reason is because unlike physical goods or tangible goods or corporeal goods as we say in civil law, it would be too easy for people to compete with you. So the idea is that if I have a car factory like Henry Ford, it's not easy for someone to make a competing car company. It's fine if they compete with you eventually, but that's just part of the free market process. But if my product is a book or a map or a painting or a computer program or a new carburetor design or a pharmaceutical, as soon as I start selling this, then the key part of the value is the way it's arranged. And that is a pattern, that's information. And that can be easily duplicated by competitors and therefore they're going to compete with me right away and I won't be able to sell my product at a monopoly price long enough to recoup my research and development cost. That's the basic idea. And therefore we need the government to come in and fix this market failure and give people monopoly rights for a limited time so they can recoup more of their cost and there's more incentive to engage in these activities in the first place. This is the basic utilitarian idea. There are so many problems with this notion. Number one, it's totally unprincipled. But let's just talk about the burden of proof. When you come up with a system that is a derogation from the common law rights, from our natural rights, from the free market, you would think the burden of proof would be on the proponents of this. Now the founders didn't have any empirical studies to prove that patent and copyright would benefit the free market or make us wealthier. In fact, they originated in anti-competitive monopoly grants by kings and pro-censorship restrictions on free speech by the church and the crown and copyright. So they basically had at most a hunch. The Constitution doesn't require patent and copyright. It only gives Congress the authority to issue patent and copyright laws if they want to. And they did the very next year. By the way, there's also an argument you could make that patent law is clearly constitutional. I don't deny that, although that doesn't make it right, my opinion. The Constitution recognized lots of things that are wrong like taxation and slavery. But copyright law, you could argue that the copyright clause was enacted in 1789 when the Constitution was ratified. Two years later, in 1791, when the Bill of Rights was ratified, the First Amendment restricts the Congress's ability to restrict freedom of speech and freedom of the press. And the Supreme Court has long recognized that copyright law clearly does infringe freedom of speech and freedom of press because it literally prevents people from printing or saying what they want to say. So what the court has done is the court has balanced. They said, well, we have attention in the law. We have to balance it, sort of like antitrust law versus patent law. Okay, but as you all know, there's a candidate of interpretation of statutes and constitutional provisions that has the later provision that is enacted can override an earlier one, which is why prohibition of alcohol is now overturned because the later amendment came later. So you could argue that the First Amendment in 1791 came two years later under a different Congress and to the extent there's a conflict between copyright law and free speech and free press rights that the free press rights, the First Amendment has to prevail. And the court has just dismissed that argument because it would be too disruptive to overturn copyright law based upon the First Amendment. In any case, we'll go with that. And by the way, trademark law is not authorized in that clause, which is why the trademark statute, the Lanham Act, is held to be valid under the Interstate Commerce Clause and which is why states still have their own trademark systems because federal government couldn't quite preempt that. Okay, so in any case, the problem is that, as I said, the burden of proof needs to be on the advocate of intellectual property. Have they fulfilled that burden of proof? They didn't at first. Now, there's a famous economist Fritz Maklop. He's kind of an Austrian leaning economist. He was hired along with Edith Penrose in the 50s to do an extensive study on the patent system. And what he concluded in an officially authorized study for Congress, no economist on the basis of present knowledge could possibly state with certainty that the patent system, as it now operates, confers a net benefit on society. So what he concluded was that if we didn't have a patent system right now, there'd be no evidence to justify instituting one. And in the meantime, there's been French economists Lavak and Menir. By the way, I'm going to post this on my website. So I'll have these notes there. If anyone wants to follow up on this. French economist in 2004 said that an economic analysis of the cost and benefits of IP law is no more within our reach today than it was in Maklop's day. Boston University law school professors Besson and Moir, who are economists, they concluded in 2008 that on average patents place a drag on innovation. And the economist Bolger and Levine, who studied this issue in a groundbreaking work called Against Intellectual Monopoly, and they started this research hoping to defend patent law, and they concluded that it's totally indefensible. They argued that the case against patents can be summarized briefly. There is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless you equate it with the number of patents awarded, but that's just circular reasoning. Okay, so the utilitarian case fails, but I'll be honest, as a libertarian, I would be against the patent system and the copyright system even if the utilitarian case made sense because it's just wrong. It's just like the argument against the minimum wage or antitrust law, people have a right to collude. People have a right to offer someone less than a minimum wage for a job. That's a fundamental human right, it's a property right. The utilitarian arguments always have to come second. Now, when the utilitarian argument fails, people resort to what was the sort of original argument, the natural rights argument, the Lockean argument, and by the way, Locke did not endorse, Locke did not believe that his natural rights theories implied patent or copyright. He was loosely in favor of copyright as a utilitarian measure, but his theory of property, even he didn't think that. The problem I believe is that John Locke made a mistake unintentionally, but the way he formulated his argument and it has led to unending human misery and even death since. John Locke argued this, he was trying to argue against the monarchical system before and Fillmore's argument. John Locke said, listen, governments are here to serve us. How did he argue that? God gave earth to the humans. Every person owns himself because God gave him control over his body. If you own yourself, you own your labor. If you own your labor, you own what you mix with it if no one else owned it first. This is the labor mixing argument of Locke. This is the natural rights argument of Locke. Unfortunately, I think his argument was flawed in that he didn't need the labor step. He didn't need to say you own your labor because you don't own your labor. Labor is an action. It's what you do with your body. You do own your body, but you don't own what you do with it. So that mistake led people to think of labor as a substance, as a thing that you can own, which has also led to some people believe to the labor theory of value, which led through Smith and Ricardo to Marx, and then to Communism. And of course, Communism led to lots of destruction and death and human immiseration in the 20th century. I'm going to skip my alternate theory, history that Locke's views have led to... I'm going to skip my excursion that we have global warming now because of Locke, because we don't have thorium energy because we had plutonium energy because the military needed to... I mean, we had uranium because the military needed to make plutonium for nuclear weapons because of the Cold War, which is because of Marx, which is because of the labor theory of value, which is because of the labor theory of property. Well, that was it in that show. Okay. There's one other argument some law professors make, unfortunately, to quasi-libertarians, Richard Epstein, who's a libertarian, and Adam Masoff, who's an objectiveist law professor, and others, what they argue is that, oh, you libertarians who are anti-IP, you're wrong to say that IP is some artificially government-created right. It's a natural right. Thomas Jefferson thought it was a natural right. John Locke did, which is all totally wrong. And then Locke did not think it was a natural right. And even if they did, they were just wrong. But what they argue is that patent rights and copyrights, they're very much like classical natural law common law property rights because you can trade them, you can rent them, you can bargain for them on the market. Yeah, of course. But during slavery, we could buy and sell humans, too. There's a whole body of case law during the shadow slavery days in the antebellum South. So what? What the law does and what the law can do doesn't show what the law should be. I'll wrap up quickly. What is the future of IP going to be? I would just say this. The birth of the Internet is a great thing because the digitalization of information, encryption, torrents, the Internet has made copyright enforcement very, very difficult. It's made piracy rampant, and that's a good thing. The more we can undermine copyright law, the better. And my hope is that the more 3D printing becomes a thing, the same thing will happen to patents. So hopefully the technology and the free market will undermine these systems. I'll conclude with a quote from Thomas Payne. A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right and raises at first a formidable outcry and defensive custom, but the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason. Thank you. So this is a bit of a strange assignment for me because Mr. Cancelo has made an argument against intellectual property on libertarian premises. I have not too much to disagree with about aspects of his conclusion. So I'll say a bit about that in the beginning, but of course, not of course. I entirely don't accept the premises. So it's kind of a bizarre thing. I actually more or less am sympathetic that the case for intellectual property rights is in fact much weaker than it's commonly thought, both on instrumental grounds and on principled grounds. And I also agree that the issue is very important. I also agree there's massive overreach today. So on all of these, we agree a lot. And so it's not really clear what I should say about that. But my basis for thinking this is entirely different than his. And I guess where we disagree a lot is on his basis. So I think I should say more about that than about the fact that I also agree that Machlup's conclusion in 58 has not been challenged to this day that the overall case for intellectual property rights on an instrumental or economic basis has always been and remains even at best, that there's many costs of intellectual property rights from an instrumental economic basis. Alongside there are sensible incentive benefits. And that at best, patents and copyright may be justified on an instrumental basis in a few specific areas where the costs of production are very high and the costs of reproduction are very low. Ostensibly patents and movies and biotech, but maybe not even there and we could talk about that. So I kind of agree with all that. So I don't really want to push on that too much. The reason I agree though is that for me, intellectual property rights, you have to begin with the basic idea that they are rights to exclude others from using a resource, information or knowledge or culture, which resource is intangible. And because it's intangible, it's non-rival. And because it's non-rival, many people can use without anyone degrading anyone else's use. So it's really unfortunate, unfair to restrict access on that. I'm not sure, but I don't know if I heard in Mr. Gonzalez's talk any point what the actual burden or harm of IP rights is. So for me, that's the, I think you might have not, I mean, I think your view is that it interferes with the property rights of people, but you didn't sort of catch that out here, I think. So you might want to speak to that a bit. For me, the harm is that it restricts access to something which once created should be available to all because it does not derogate from anyone's use that others share it. That's the miracle of intangible resources. Having said that, there is both fairness and incentive arguments for why the creator might be owed a decent return for the effort that went into creating something that's socially valuable, and that if we don't give that decent return, it might be that others will be discouraged from doing so and we might get less innovation. That's my basic, very modest framework. Access restrictions on intangible resources are a default bad idea, but some way of generating those resources may be required through some legal policy to promote fairness and robust production, robust innovation. What the ultimate principle basis of that is, we could explore and I'm happy to discuss, but it's this mix of sort of, you know, basic ideas of wide access and fair returns that motivates my view that intellectual property rights like some other innovation policy mechanism should be evaluated in terms of how well they enable wide access and robust production and fair equitable returns. And on that, I'm not committed to intellectual property rights as being the best scheme or how strong they should be. My own view is that current rights are through the roof way too strong. There's a massive overreach. There's a very clear political economy story why that happens. It's completely unfortunate and it's expanding to this day and what's happening on the internet with criminal enforcement and so forth makes it all even much worse. So on all that, we I think are not too far apart, although, you know, one could have various sort of modest disagreements, but where we disagree is sort of the foundational basis of our positions. And so on this, I don't have much time, so I'm going to just try to say a few things. So Mr. Kinsella, you know, has what he claims is the sort of libertarian principled position based on natural rights arguments. Now, to me, there's a few problems with this. First of all, it's always puzzling to me why it's called the libertarian position when it's really the propertarian position. It's not about freedom. It's about property rights. Well, then say that it's a propertarian position. It's not about an unvarnished principled commitment to freedom. It's about the guiding motif being something called property rights. Now, on the idea of property rights, I just want to say three things and see if I can get it in in this time. First, the idea that all... So first of all, natural rights. I've never understood what people mean when they say natural rights. To me, rights are claims against others. Mr. Kinsella seems to agree. There are no rights on a desert island by yourself. Rights are claims against others. Rights are social relationships. Now, the basis of those rights can be in various different kinds of arguments. Those are arguments. Calling them natural is just cheating. Where do they reside? They're not your eyesight. Eye sight might be natural for some. To call something natural is a dishonest way of trying to get pre-modern warrant for a normative argument as quasi-non-normative.  There are rights which we can respect based on reasons. We have to give reasons for those rights. When the reasons are given, they can be more or less persuasive. Calling them natural does nothing to the argument except try to convince you that it's not a normative argument at all. It's like a physical act.  Well, okay, good. But that doesn't tell me about whether the chair is nice or not nice. Cleasing or not pleasing should be set upon or not whose chair is it, and so forth. Those are normative arguments. Historically, until about 17, 1800, normative arguments were couched in the language of time immemorial, divinity, revelation, and so forth, or something called natural right, which was a fusion of them. Natural reason, according to Locke and the second treatise. Ultimately, natural reason is just reason, and I'm fine with arguments from reason, but putting this label natural on it as if it's not any longer something human, something social, something historical, something normative is a cheat. Pure and simple. It's an attempt to deny the inescapable reality that rights are social relationships which we have to argue about to determine which interests merit protection over which other interests. I have no problem saying the arguments should be grounded in something called right reason of the second treatise, but then you have to tell me what the premises and principles of that right reason are. So let me go to that second point. On that second point, the idea that all rights are property rights strikes me as patently bizarre. Either it's going to be tautologically true because we're going to empty the concept of property rights of any content and meaning, in which case what's the point of the exercise, or it's going to be false because I don't understand what it means to say that my interest in being able to express myself should be protected as a right against other people's interests and not hearing what I say and being able to violently stop myself from speaking, oh, well that's really a property interest because you're using your vocal organs and you own them. I don't know what that means. I don't know how that helps anything. I don't know what that means except to illicitly try to reduce all human interests to the logic of the market. And that, to me, a very historically specific, recent phenomenon, libertarians or what I call propertarians think it's somehow time and memorial. They're just wrong. There are no such arguments until very recently on the stage of history because the social form that those arguments track is very recent on the stage of history.  That's fine, but that shouldn't be then naturalized into some sort of trans-historical human phenomenon through the gobbledygook of natural and blah, blah, blah. It just doesn't make sense. It's dishonest. It's patently absurd. The argument should be made on their own terms, not with the invocation of unhelpful metaphors which try to hide the ball. Last point. The rights of property that are being claimed as absolute and sacrosanct here are the rights in one's body, self-ownership, and the rights in external resources based on first occupancy, fundamentally, in this contract and rectification. But that's a very strange argument, first occupancy. The first person who delimits or does something that no one else has done now has it. Locke never made that argument fully. He thought that that argument by itself was too thin a read and he was right but of course by itself that can't be enough, just being there first. What if you're there first in a lot of places and you don't leave enough and it's good for others? Well, there's a problem. Locke understood that. The authoritarian literature has struggled with this from the beginning. How do you deal with the in-built limit on property rights in external resources based on the enough and it's good proviso? There's a whole industry talking about this. What does it mean to be born into an earth that's already been occupied and owned by everyone? What is all this about? And fundamentally I can't really argue against this in this time I'm happy to argue against it at length but I just want to leave you with an idea that fundamentally this whole mindset is a bizarre idea that humans are born fully formed self-autonomous beings at birth. They are not. They are born vulnerable fragile deeply dependent individual beings all the way down. Adults at some point in a market society come to resent this reality and deny it deeply by pretending something else is the case and then invent a series of fictional just so stories which none of which have any grip for anyone who's not already in the grip of the idea, the infantile desire to escape the reality of society and history and go back to some pre-mortial fictional story in which there are absolute rights sacrosanct between self-governing sovereigns who relate to each other as pinball machines and can't define their rights in any plausible way. There is no such thing, period, as an absolute right because rights are social relations and to have an absolute right would mean to have an interest protected against any other interest absolutely and that is conceptually and institutionally not on the cards. Okay, I'll stop. I'll try to speak for five or six minutes and leave room for Q&A. How about that? Yeah. Okay. I really appreciate the responses. I've done several debates that's the most intelligent response I've ever gotten which is probably why you're probably somewhat anti-IP. If we had two hours each we could go into this in more detail just quickly. The harm of IP is in terms of copyright, there are people in jail, Aaron Schwartz committed suicide facing penalties, people die and the culture is distorted, there are censorship and freedom of the internet is threatened. That is a huge thing. Internet is one of the most important tools we have against state tyranny and when the government threatens internet, internet freedom in the name of copyright, it's a big problem. So that's the harm of that. The harm of patents, I believe, it has slowed down innovation and human progress depends upon the accumulation of knowledge over time. You can't have those harms. You need principal harms. So give me the principal harms. You've got to have principal harms. You can't have instrumental harms. Well, your criticism about natural rights, actually I agree with a lot of what you said. I tried not to rely upon natural rights arguments. I'm using the word natural as a shorthand but actually I agree with Hans Hermann Hoppe's argumentation ethics and the more dialogical arguments for liberty which sort of agree with the is-ought problem of the standard natural law argument. So I would take a more libertarian take on the Habermasian type of arguments. Yeah, of course. That was Hoppe's PhD advisor, Habermas and Appel. That's great. So I'm trying not to rely on natural, but I do think that there is a way to use the description of the natural position without having a loaded argument. Mises did it. Hoppe does it. There is, and Rothbard did it. There is a natural position and you can describe that natural position and then you can make reasoning based on that. I think my case when I have more time to do it and in my writings is based on reasons and I agree with your appeal to right reason. I have used the word properterian before. The problem with that is that term has been co-opted by some alt-right guys. So I don't like to use it. And also, as I said, every legal system on Earth believes in some form of property rights. So I think the question comes down to who gets the property, right? And that's the libertarian distinction. I do agree with you that rights are justifiable claims and that you have to use reasons to adduce them. Now, you talk about being dishonest. I do agree that when you assert the word natural you can bend the needle. But what's really dishonest is calling government-granted monopoly privileges intellectual property. It's not property. And you are correct to identify the locking proviso as a potential snag in our arguments, which is why those radical anarcho-capital libertarians of us completely and utterly reject the locking proviso. So I have written in print and so has Hapa and others that why we disagree with the locking proviso. And I do think that original appropriation is good enough because it establishes a link between one person and the resource, which is an objective, intersubjectively ascertainable there's the hypermouse for you, link between a person and a resource, which gives him a better connection to it than anyone else. Now, as for this hypothetical previous state, as you know in the law we don't have to trace title back to Adam and Eve or the Garden of Eden or even to the sovereign to settle a dispute. When there's a dispute between two people in the real world, they go before a tribunal and A and B both claim this resource and all you have to do is trace back the common ancestor. This is what the law does. The civil law and the common law both do this. So you basically have to go back to a common ancestor. You can stop there. It doesn't matter how that common ancestor got it because from that point on, you go back four or five generations, you find the grandfather who had it, and then you see what he did with it and who gets the best title from there. So the law is about better title, which is relative. It's not absolute. It doesn't need to be absolute in practice. I'll stop there. Almost everything you spoke about I've written on in more detail on my website and I'll be happy to take questions either now or by email later. But just go to c4sif.org, which is my website. I've got tons of material there which elaborate on all of this. Thanks. Sure. And if you want to speak on that too. Yeah, the ontological argument is that is the Lockean argument that we own ourselves and therefore we have the... I think there's a confusion between economic concepts and legal concepts. So economically we trade. Economically we profit from our labor. Economically you can say you sell your labor, which is simply a legal way of describing the motivation for engaging in labor or in action, so you get rewarded for it. Someone gives you something in exchange for it. That makes us think legally that if I trade an apple for an orange with someone's title being transferred, I'm selling the apple, someone's selling their orange, I'm buying the orange for my apple, etc. If I get paid to paint someone's fence, then we think of that as a sale too. And legally we start thinking of the thing that was sold as an object that you must have owned.  So the idea is this idea that if you work hard in a free market system where everyone's rights are respected, you are going by and large to profit from what you do. So people start thinking that you have a right to profit from what you do, which is why one thing I disagree with and what you said professor, the idea that you're owed a right of return. I don't think you are ever owed a right of return. But this is the idea that hard work, this marriage is almost a Protestant idea. If you work hard, you're entitled to some compensation. I don't think that's true at all. Someone who's an entrepreneur, and we're all entrepreneurs, every action we take is entrepreneurial in the sense that we're predicting the uncertain future and we're trying to make up a psychic profit. And what we do, we might fail, we might succeed, but no one is obligated to fulfill that for us. If I start a new restaurant, a new hamburger chain, thinking that this is going to be a hit or a new pizza delivery thing, and someone's going to compete with me pretty soon. So I might be able to make a lot of money for a few years and the competitors are going to come in, they're going to imitate me. I'm not entitled to those customers. When people say, he stole my customer, they sometimes take that word steal too seriously or he stole my girlfriend. I don't own my girlfriend, I don't own my country. Just because we use the word the possessive my, doesn't mean there's really a title relationship there. So language is really key here. We have to be careful about metaphors and how language is used ambiguously and unintentionally or intentionally for equivocation. So the principle argument is that, here's the principle argument. It's the idea that if you create something, you own it. And the idea is that, well, I created a symphony, I created a novel, I created a new design for a carburetor. I created it, therefore I own it, I can control what people do with it, which is why a professor called it a resource excluding a resource, economically it's not a resource. It's an idea. That's why I use the Mises idea of praxeology to distinguish between the use of scarce means or scarce resources. These are corporeal, tangible, material things as opposed to information. So the idea is that if you create something, you should own it. And they make the analogy to Locke's idea or the natural right idea, which is sort of sloppily formulated. So people think that creation is one of these sources of ownership, which is why I specified the three I did, original appropriation, contract, and rectification. You notice that creation is not one of those. Creation is actually not a source of ownership. This is a mistake everyone makes. They believe that if I create a chair, I own it. That's not true. I own the chair because I own the raw materials that went into the chair. I had to own them first to own the chair. So creation is a source of wealth. That is, I take a resource that I own, I rearrange it into a better form. It's more valuable to me or to others. It makes the wealth of the world higher. But you don't own wealth. You don't own subjective value. You only own the underlying material. That's the scarce resource. Conversely, if I didn't own the raw material that I made the chair from, like I'm an employee at a factory and I'm making the chairs for my employer, I don't own the chair that I produce. So creation is neither necessary nor sufficient for ownership, which, by the way, is part of the Marxian mistake. So Marx thinks that employees are exploited because they're labor, right? They're not getting fully compensated for the value they put into the chair because they're labor. So this whole idea of labor ownership locks use of the labor in his argument is a mistake. And so the fundamental mistake, and I've called this libertarian creationism, the idea that creation is a source of ownership, is a false idea. Once you believe that, you can say, well, if creation is a source of ownership for tangible things, creation is a source of ownership for poems or novels. So I reject creation as a source of rights utterly and completely. Which art exactly? I mean, I'm not sure I even know what a response was to respond to. Do I think that people deserve, as a matter of fairness, social recognition and returns for meaningful contributions to society? Yeah. Do I think that's a right? Well, I don't think there's any magic to that. To me, RIGHT has no magic. It's just a label for a normative argument based on reason. That's it. Now, do I have a comment on the Marx thing? Well, not really, because that's not what Marx thought. That's what Ricardo might have thought, but not really. Marxist have thought that, and you're right about that. Marx himself never had any interest in Locke and deserved theory of any sort. And you can tell that, I mean, on the issue of national rights, I'm wondering, is this agreement here, is it just like a verbal thing, just like a word, national, I think it's sometimes I'm finding something other than it being like a something based and factual reason. It's not just factual reason. So let me just be clear. I think the word natural rights has mental blocking properties. The minute you say natural right, you've made it seem as if you're making an argument, A, of individuals outside of society, all rights are social security, conceptually and institutionally. That's just the truth. There's nothing to do about it, but that's what it is. All rights are social. No, no, no, but natural rights theorists have, for most of history, argued that natural rights can be justified in unilateral, individualist ways. Anytime you get an argument that justifies someone's rights in a unilateral, individualist way, without taking it into account competing bilateral claims, it's someone who doesn't understand what a right is, conceptually and institutionally. And that misunderstanding is facilitated by the rhetoric of natural, which has had historically that role. Second, natural also has the rhetorically loaded character of inviting you to believe that this is something you observe as a empirical claim, rather than something that you argue for as a normative claim. The minute someone says, yeah, of course, all rights are social and normative and backed in normative reasons, we're fine. Then the word natural plays no role. If you say, well, that's what everyone means. Then my question is, well, why use the word natural? What does natural add, except to say certain reasons do not depend on their recognition by a certain contingent legislature? Well, that I agree with. Of course, I absolutely believe that rights are not just a conventional, positive legal rights that a legal system may or may not recognize. Of course, I agree. We all have the right and obligation to be critical of the existing rights of a legal regime according to reflection and reason. Of course, that's right. Anyone who doesn't think that besides, you know, Bentham is crazy. But that's a different view. The word natural doesn't add anything. I claim the word natural does more work. But if you accept that rights are reason-based and dialogic-based and Habermasian-based, then we have no methodological agreement, disagreement on that question. I just think it's good to drop the word natural and use it not to disagree that. I don't disagree. I agree with most of what you said. If you want to look into this further, look at some of the stuff on my site with Papa and argumentation ethics and Papa's criticism of natural rights reasoning a funnier one, by the way, is Robert Ant and Wilson had a book called Natural Rights or Don't Put a Rubber on Your Willy. So he was sort of mocking the Catholic Church's natural law stuff which is related to natural rights, right? The idea that you're going to extend what's been said by the church or what's been done in history as an argument for what normally should be. So I agree with you that you can't go from an is to an ought. That's one problem with the classical natural rights argument. And the other is that it's