A Deliberation on Localism

Transcript · May contain transcription errors · en

What's an externality that I will not tolerate? And as you can probably imagine, localism, as in like patches of people that agree on that, is like a really good meta system solution to that kind of a problem. You say, okay, well, you make a patch of people here and a patch of people there. And uh as long as those patches are internally in agreement, then they don't need to agree across the patches. All right, thanks, Jeremy. Thanks everybody for coming out. One thing I'll say is I'm really excited about the Free State Party as kind of a proposition, uh, as something that we're uh looking at, you know, what do we align on across the state? What do we maybe not align on and don't want to uh indulge in? And that's that's where my attraction to the Free State Party comes from. So I think it's really cool what's happening, and I think it's happening widely, but also definitely in a very concentrated way here in New Hampshire.

So my name is Joe Norman. Um I have a background in systems science. Uh now I run a uh uh software education company, it's AI software, um, it's for kids. Uh you can look it up, it's SageTeacher.ai if you're curious. Um, and we're here to talk about localism. Localism is something that um I profess that I am a localist, and what does that mean? You know, it's definitely I'm not gonna give you a formal definition here because I don't think there is one, but it's a uh tendency to look towards local solutions and also to take um location seriously as always a relevant variable in what you're looking at. And um this sort of implies that there's different uh scales or scopes of entities. There's an individual, there's maybe a family, there's a village, there's a town, there's a state. These things are all um real, they're not sort of just a mere collection of individuals.

They have their own kind of reality to them, whether that's policy, economic, spiritual, etc. Um, and so to me that's what localism is. It's a taking that space is something real and important, and that sounds really obvious, and in many ways it is. Uh, but when you look at what's happening with our networked world, with uh globalist policy, with uh treating uh everything as sort of um disconnected and sort of location free in a way, then that's sort of a breakdown of localism, in my view. And so that's that's what I'm here to discuss with Travis about. So I'll hand it over to Travis now. Um Travis Corcoran, um software engineer, part-time hobby farmer, uh part-time author of science fiction and homesteading topics, and a state legislator uh here in New Hampshire. And uh and I've got a new book out, Red State Mars.

Uh you could help me out by picking up a copy at Amazon. Um the definition of localism, uh, let me first say that the most influential books on establishing my sort of libertarian anarcho-capitalist neo-reactionary whatever mindset are Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick, um, The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, The Moon is a harsh mistress by Robert Heinlin, and then several books, but most notably Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. So when we look at seeing like a state, the argument is uh, you know, the czar is far away and isn't getting very many bits of information from these remote things. So it's sort of the Hayekian local uh knowledge argument. And so what sort of mandates can come out of Washington, D.C. or can come out of Moscow when, you know, if they put themselves in the business of regulating garden patches in backyards, uh they will, in the best case, come up with, you know, three square meters of carrots, three square meters of cabbage.

And uh they know nothing about the local biomes. This advice is terrible because it's so remote. Robert Nozick uh gets into these sort of local versus centralized in not a efficiency argument, but in a morality argument. He says, let's look at every utopia that has ever been designed. All of these utopias are great for the person who designed them and for the 2% of the population that's like him and absolutely living hell for the other 98% of people. And Nozick ends his book with the idea of what we really need is the concept of meta-utophia, which is a collection of different utopias where people can sort themselves and then opt into the situation that maximally benefits them. This idea has been discovered and rediscovered. Scott Alexander of Slate Cigar Codex came up with it, I think he called it Archer Polego.

And this is what I believe in. That local groups should have norms that suit them. And this is different from sort of pure anarchy. And uh beforehand I was talking with someone else. Um we were talking about you know sorts of things that you could have in your neighborhood. And on the one hand, like, you know, hey, we're libertarians, we all want pure absolute freedom. But do you want a leather daddy with pierced nipples and you know, uh assless leather pants walking down the sidewalk in front of your kids? Now, the the default libertarian would say, well, if you ban that, then you're an authoritarian fascist, but but and but you if you ask real people, everyone except that one leather daddy guy will say, No, that's horrible. I don't want that in my neighborhood. Um so I I always think that politics has to, you know, uh there's a Jewish phrase that uh the Torah exists for people, not the people for the Torah.

Um our legal code has to deliver uh things that people actually want. And if you have this absolute freshman year, libertarian, absolutist system, this is pure liberty, and three people in New Hampshire and no one else in the rest of the world wants it, then what have you done? You've made a very stupid role-playing game that's gonna sell three copies at drive-thru RPG. So, this is what I think localism is. It's talking about sort of meta structures that enable small scale behavior where people are maximally uh cited uh among people like them and can accomplish the things that matter to them. That's great. I know we're uh supposed to move into our propositions here. We did list of propositions, everyone got to vote on them, agree, disagree. There's a lot to unpack there. But I just want to say I'm okay, seeing like a state, great reference.

I'm with you 100% on what you're saying. Uh I would say I'm a little bit you said there's only like one guy who wants the assless chaps guy. Unfortunately, it's not just one guy, it's a bunch of guys, it turns out. But um And the great thing is there's a couple of neighborhoods, you know, across the country. So yeah. Right, yeah. Yeah. So um, but I mean, this is what one of the reasons I I'll say I don't, I said up front kind of excited about the Free State Party proposition. Part of the reason I'm excited about is because I don't consider myself a libertarian. And it's not because I'm not interested in liberty I am, but it's because I've been sort of shying away from the libertarianism as it's sort of practiced, because it goes in this pure libertine direction where it's like, no, no, no, it's my freedom to do whatever I want, sort of period.

But when you get into the more subtle, you know, the nuance of what are the what are the more uh intelligent libertarian theorists say, that's that's not what it is. There's obviously the non-aggression principle, but that's sort of a uh a single way of looking at this issue of externalities. We live in a universe where uh causality is kind of um rampant. It's not a thing like uh friction does not overcome human causality. Uh human actions get amplified through the social space. And so every action we all take ripples through social systems, and the causality are these huge chains. So, what is an externality actually becomes a very hard question to answer in a sort of a objective one-time sense. And so what we need to negotiate with one another is what qualifies as an what's an externality.

It means I do something and it impacts you. Okay, you're on your side of the property line, I'm on my side of the property line, but I'm wearing my assless chaps, right? So am I affecting you or not? Is that like something you can act on or not if it's bothering you? And so we have to negotiate with one another what is the line there of like what is an externality that I will tolerate as part of your freedom, and what's an externality that I will not tolerate. And as you can probably imagine, localism, as in like patches of people that agree on that, is like a really good meta system solution to that kind of a problem. You say, okay, well, you make a patch of people here and a patch of people there, and uh, as long as those patches are internally in agreement, then they don't need to agree across the patches.

So I just kind of want to point that out. Okay, let's let's jump into the propositions. So the first proposition we had is localism is the goal and not just a way to get something else. So I I would say no. Um I I see localism as very much a tool, uh, and this gets back to my intro about seeing like a state and meta-utopies and everything. Um localism is uh like enforcing APIs or you know, Docker, uh Docker's a terrible example. Um but uh it is a way to segregate people. Um and you were talking before about externalities. I think this is absolutely the core of it. And you also mentioned NAP. Um, I hate the concept of the NAP because it's simplistic and it puts all of the absolute complexity off stage or off books. And then also the veterans will get uh benefits. Um, but that's going to happen in the future.

Uh so that doesn't need to be on the profit and loss statement or on the balance sheet, and that is off book spending. Um and so you've just taken, you know, the the thing that we really need to get to the bottom to and said, you know, oops, out of bounds, you know, it's like freeze tag or something. You know, no, I got into the safe zone. You can't tag me, you can't look at this. Um, so the problem with the non-aggression principle, Heimlin uh expressed it once. It's so simple. Uh your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. Like, well, okay, but we need to define what's a fist and what's a nose. Um is my you know delicate sensibilities a nose? Um are your uh clothing choices um you know a fist. Uh and and either they are or they aren't, but we need um you know some mechanism to discover that.

And and this actually, you know, it it's always easy to reason from the most extreme cases where you know someone walking down the street totally nude with all sorts of you know perverse stuff. Like, yes, it's clearly outside of the bounds. But it's often interesting to think about the much harder cases. Like, what if someone is dressed inappropriately? And um, you might not want your you know, kids to see somebody who is is dressed in this way, but it's not actually obscene. And so this again, I I I think you will never have a society as a whole agree, you know. Um, you know, that that yes, a hundred percent of people agree that you know going without a bra is absolutely terrible and it should never be done, but you will find small groups that can agree on this. And and you know, that even applies here.

Uh, you know, Jeremy DM'd me ahead of time and you know, said a nicer version of don't wear your ratty t-shirt. And you know, uh great, you know, here we are in a small society. I should uh conform to expectations. So, okay, so just to repeat the proposition, uh, localism is the goal and not just a way to get something else. So that was you saying you disagree with that. That's correct. It's not the goal, it's a way to get something else. It's an enabling technology to get what we want, which is sort of a maximization of all sorts of other utility and harmony. Yeah, right. And so, you know, all these props have this kind of quality, where depending on how you might define some of the terms and the assumptions behind them, you could go one way or the other. I we both register disagree on this.

Part of the reason I register disagree is because it's not that I don't think it's a goal or the goal in some sense, but actually I think whenever you find um good, really good solutions to things or really the way things could or ought to be in some sense, means and ends actually converge. So you think of something like really wholesome, like uh playing with your kids. Well, are you playing with your kids because that's a means to an end of them having a nice future and you know getting strong and athletic as you play with them, something like that? Well, yes. But is that the only reason you're playing with them? Well, no, there's like an intrinsic joy to it as well. So for me, localism, it is a meta system. I like that because anything that's a system gets a little bit too rigid and too formalized and will break and will be uh corrupted and all of that.

So this sort of meta system conceptual idea, it's for me, it's both a goal, it's a means and an end. It's like uh it's a means insofar as like Travis is talking about, it's a um it's a way of solving certain kinds of problems. There's a bandwidth problem of central control. They don't know what's going on locally, they have no sensitivity to that. Um they are um, and then so it does like solve certain kinds of very practical problems, but it's also an end in that I do believe that that's uh this sort of way of agreeing to disagree, using space as a tool, location as a tool, is also uh production of a harmonious existence, and then that's a goal, that is a goal. Um so it's both a goal and and uh means and an end, in my opinion. And so that's why it's sort of answered one way or the other. But uh it's it's uh it's a way of solving many, many, many problems.

And the challenge is how do you get to that place and how do you get how do you self-sort. Travis brought up this kind of idea of self-sorting. I think we're seeing that in New Hampshire. We're inviting people in who uh are like-minded in some sense, and we're also maybe uh making it a little bit more uncomfortable for people that we don't really want near us. And so this self-sorting process, I think is very uh important to thinking about how this works. Um what I was gonna say. Sorry, I read the screen and then I I lose it. But um basically means or end, it's both, in my view. And um the trick is how do we get there? And I oh the other thing that came to mind was basically just think about New Hampshire and our place in all of this. Um you see over and over, like uh sort of the Doomer perspective on this New Hampshire project of like, hey, you're surrounded, you got Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, you're fucked.

Sorry, kids here's excuse me. So screwed. Um the uh um no, that's not what's going on. Self-sorting process is the opposite of that. So you have diffusive systems, and that's like a gas diffuses into the room, right? You put some gas here, boop, it's into the room to the whole room. Complex organisms, human beings are not like a gas. We are actively self-sorting. And in some ways, the white pill is that we're surrounded by that, because you can go there and they can come here, and we can self-sort this out. And we don't need to live the way you're insisting we live, and you don't have to live how we want to live. So yeah, just kind of put some sleep. So to follow up on that, and it's off the proposition, but I think it's an important thing. You made a great point, which is that there is a sort of repulsive force near us, which is better for our coherence than if there were not this repulsive force.

And if you, you know, again, think about sort of an endless fluid, and it's positive that life probably, you know, began in primordial oceans where you just have chemicals floating around. And one of the very first things that gets evolved is cell membranes. Um, because once you have a cell membrane, you can you know enforce certain constraints on what happens inside the membrane and sort of you know treat everything else outside it is inherently hostile and then gatekeep. Um, and so I think that the concept of localism uh absolutely implies sort of boundaries, whether hard or soft, the act of gatekeeping, the act of both attracting what you want and also repelling what you don't. Yes, yes. And I think so. This is one of the things that uh this particular free state party, part of the thing that seems to be bringing us together is a uh an acknowledgement of that reality.

It's biological, it's from the beginning. It's obvious it's biological and everything that's built on biological, social, spiritual, all of that. Jamie, can you bring up that wolf map? Everyone loves the wolf map. And so uh so I I like to think of it as selective permeability, right? There's some kind of selection logic, and you are letting certain things in, certain things out, other things are bounded, and without that, you have no life, you have nothing. And you certainly cannot create the conditions for homeostasis for a sort of internal logic to persist without such a boundary. And um if what the internal system you want to be is to something that looks like liberty, looks like libertarianism, you absolutely need that membrane to hold those conditions steady for that to unfold. Without that, not gonna happen.

So I think this is like a really this is like a very practical distinction that uh a lot of libertarians don't get. And you know, they'll never get what they claim they want. Maybe they actually want something else other than what they claim they want, but they'll never get what they claim they want because you need the conditions for a system to evolve and unfold that and and that can only happen with a boundary. So all right, next prompt, I think. The supply chains incentivized by capitalism have made ordinary life fragile. Um good. I was hoping I disagreed uh earlier when I did this, because I absolutely disagree right now. Um one of the things I hate most is people talking about sustainability. And I don't hate just the greens who are saying, you know, oh MGOMG, this is unsustainable. They're sort of the trad right LARP who just effectively looks around and says, I don't like this, and then they work backwards.

Therefore, it is not sustainable. Like I don't know. It might be perfectly sustainable, right? Uh gay race communism might dominate for 10,000 years, you don't know. Um, you not being able to afford a house might be sustainable. That might go on for 10,000 years. So whether you like something or not says nothing about it. Uh all sorts of really bad systems. I mean, we lived in the mud for you know a hundred thousand years. That was quite sustainable. And so getting to fragility, um, what makes uh uh quality of life in an economic sense and then a subjective sense, right? Like we all like antibiotics and we like not freezing to death, and we like our you know, 50% of children not dying in childbirth, we like 100% to survive. Um, all of those come from technology. Technology depends on uh uh division of labor economies, and division of labor economies are inherently more fragile.

If your village has one blacksmith and one seamstress and one loom operator and one fisherman, etc., you are much more fragile than if everyone is equally good at chewing sticks, and that's where you get your nutrition. Um and so yeah, things are fragile, but what what does fragility mean? That if it went bad, you might fall back closer to the default level of suck, which is more sustainable. Uh so yeah, uh it leads to some increased fragility, but uh absolutely worth the trade-off. So you're saying that um you're saying it's fragility because you can have these single points of failure. So if you divide the labor, so I only have one heart, that's the day if it goes boom, done. Um but in like the practical, you know, uh most cases in capitalism, you don't just have the single point of failure.

You have many competing entities and they do fill one another's And and I didn't express it well. I was sort of saying, like, even if I accepted that framing, I would still disagree with it. Which doesn't mean I accept the framing. Uh-huh. Interesting. And then you know, to me, what kind of turned on this particular proposition's phrasing is this ordinary life. And if ordinary life is sort of our status quo, if that's what we mean by ordinary life, I would say it's seems to be remarkably stable. And that's actually to your point about people who look around and say, I don't like this, therefore it's fragile. Um actually it seems remarkably stable, especially in the way it um kind of imposes on individuals. You try to chick get outside of it, good luck. Uh so it has a remarkable stability, and because of uh the way you know capitalistic supply chains work, there is a remarkable robustness when things change, the system adapts, and uh things flow where they need to based on pricing, it was very you know Hayekian type of thing.

So yeah, I wouldn't say supply chains incentivized by capitals have made ordinary life fragile. I'd say no. They've made ordinary life very stable, maybe more stable than in the history of the world. Uh that doesn't necessarily mean that everything about ordinary life today is good or as good as it could be or something, but it's it's certainly uh not fragile in in that sense, in my opinion. Back in the 70s, there was a famous bet between I believe Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich. Um, and uh Paul Ehrlich was uh a real doomster. And I remember like as a kid in the 70s, I saw a book, I don't know if it was by him or in the the memosphere around him called The Population Bomb. And I I I got doom pilled as like a seven-year-old. I'm like, oh gosh, that future's gonna suck. And this was like terrible.

It it um uh, you know, the the world sucks, and and it made me like really massively depressed for probably 20 years or so. Um, but Paul Simon won the bet. He was arguing that commodities are gonna get cheaper. And he wrote a book on this topic called The Ultimate Resource, which is a great book. And his argument is the ultimate resource is human ingenuity. And one of the things that uh human ingenuity does is not just like, oh, when iron uh starts to run out, we dig deeper, we come up more with more ways to process low-grade ore, this and that, but we also look for things that can substitute for it. So you know, cars these days use much less steel than they did back in the 1970s. And this is amazing that we can achieve the some same functionality without the same inputs. So getting back to fragility, uh, you know, if suddenly there was some huge problem with copper, nanotech uh gets out of control and eats all the copper, um, it's not just that we could go looking for more copper, it's that we could substitute all sorts of things.

We could use aluminum as conductors, etc. So I agree with you. I think capitalism uh is an anti-fragile force. Oh, this is the next prompt. Jumping in modern self-sufficiency is more of an indulgence than a livable reality. Oh, this is our first one where you where we've disagreed, you and I. So I answered, I disagree with that, you answered you agree with it. Modern self-sufficiency is more of an indulgence than a livable reality. Um I take my answer, I sort of uh said, okay, I'm imagining the assumption here is self-sufficiency implies sort of individual or maybe your family, kind of homesteading, you know, we're surviving off the land, back to the land. And uh that's an indulgence insofar as you could LARP that way if you have other uh means, and me too, yeah. I do like my chickens and all that.

Uh it's a great thing to do in New Hampshire is LARP as a homesteader. Um you can actually do more than LARP, you can engage in small economies and things, it's really cool in New Hampshire. But self-sufficiency, I mean, this is a really self-sufficiency is a very interesting topic to me because what you really need to think about is what do we mean by self-sufficiency? We mean, so in in biology, there's this idea of auto-poesis, and that means that uh auto-self poesis make, create, and it's the idea that living one of the characteristics of living organisms is that they continuously physically rebuild themselves constantly, right? You have like a network of components, and those components are doing things, and the things they're ultimately doing is rebuilding those components. So there's like a loop, there's like a causal loop.

And so, what is self-sufficiency? It's sort of autopo-poesis at some other scale, at the family scale, at the town scale, at the state, nation, globe. And the question that I really have, and I don't have a clean answer to this question, is at what scope does self-sufficiency in the sense of this sort of social autopoesis become feasible? And um and I think in principle, that could be a very like we can go live in the mud and we'll make it, you know, we'll do it. But uh so my sense is basically the global economy went too far in the non-local direction, and we could be doing a lot more as say a nation, more as a state and more as a nation to be self-sufficient in that sense. So is modern self-sufficiency an indulgence in the sense that maybe think people think, oh, I'm gonna be self-sufficient, you know, hoe the dirt and and and eat the turnips or something.

Yeah, it's more of an indulgence in this world for sure. But the idea of pursuing self-sufficiency at smaller scopes than we do today, which is like where what is self-sufficient today? Is the globe self-sufficient? I I guess so. It's hard to tell. It's hard to tell if we're actually like reproducing ourselves in a uh stable trajectory, if we're kind of like off in some transient wandering into the wilderness, and it's not really clear where it's all headed. Um, you know, if you come back to the same state you started in, you kind of have a fixed point. If you're going somewhere else, you don't really know where you're going. Um, so um I don't really know what the proposition means, if I'm honest, but I wanted to disagree so that I could uh kind of think think through that, or at least offer to think through that around uh what what is self-sufficient?

Who? Over what scale, over what scope, how? And you know, obviously it's part of the MAGA movement, all that. There's a sense among people that wow, we offshored all of our physical manufacturing and production, and that was probably a mistake. Let's try to see what we can do to bring it back. Um there are um there are benefits to having economic loops, closing these loops more locally. And in certain ways of doing, you know, seeing like a state type stuff, you make your Excel sheet, you have your assumptions, you do your formulas. Oh man, look how much we end up uh benefiting from outsourcing it all to China. Well, it turns out there were things not on the spreadsheet that are intangibles or at least intangible from that perspective that do matter. And uh so I'd like to bring self-sufficiency closer back to home.

I am not living under the illusion that me and my wife are gonna like uh live off the land or something like that and have any decent quality of life, but it's not merely a self-indulgence to pursue self-sufficiency over tighter, more local scales, is what I would say. Um probably half the audience knows this, but just quick background on this topic. Uh I'm a homesteader, I've raised pigs, I've got a flock of sheep, chickens, uh vineyard berry patch, two orchards, etc., and I do all of the butchering and make my own bacon and we heat the house with wood, which I log on the uh property. Um, and so uh I forget the exact phrasing of the question. Ah, there it is. Um, more than a livable reality, right? So um on the continuum of those, you know, trying to achieve it, I'm probably like in the 1%, you know, pretty hardcore out there.

Um, and yet there's you know nothing close to actual self-sufficiency. Uh when some hydraulic lines blew out of my tractor, I went to Napa Auto Parts this morning, had them uh fabricate some you know custom hydraulic lines, which you know probably used steel mined in Australia and you know, flare fittings made in China and the rubber came from South America and on and on and on. Um so if if we take self-sufficiency as an absolute you know binary or a Boolean, um, I would argue that uh there is no such thing as self-sufficiency at any scale less than 300 million people, sort of bare minimum. I I think that uh if we cut off a hundred percent of trade from the United States to the rest of the world, you know, first of all, our chip fabs are outside. So how far back would we fall in technology?

The year 2000 to the year 1950, I think we could probably sustain a 1950 or a 1975 level of technology inside the US. And then if you went further and said, okay, uh that cutoff is permanent, so now we've really got to optimize, because of course there's going to be sort of transition uh, you know, transient effects, et cetera. And so if we spent the next hundred years sort of trying to onshore stuff, I think that perhaps in a population of 350 million, um, Jeremy tells me that the next prompt is the global division of labor. So uh I didn't even know this, but that's exactly where I was headed. Um we were talking earlier about uh quality of life comes from a division of labor economy, and there is you know some factor, I don't know if it's the logarithm of the total population size or the square of the total population size.

Um, but this plays into my thoughts about the future. I think that to continue to develop, you know, we need to colonize the solar system and we need a trillion human beings, um, and hopefully most of that trillion or all of that trillion have American Western enlightenment norms. That's my ideal utopian version uh vision of the future. Um so I I think that there is something to be said about being selective, not having off books accounting, where hey, look, if we offshore stuff to China, and I remember the 1990s, and suddenly tools got really cheap. I mean, people don't remember, like a wrench used to be an expensive item. A hammer used to be expensive. Now these are effectively free at Harbor Freight, right? I mean, you can just buy a new wrench every week and throw it in the woods when you're done with it, and it's not gonna impact your quality of life.

Um, so there is something to be said for that rather than I dropped a wrench, I've got to spend two hours walking back and forth in my field looking for it because wrenches are so expensive. So there are some benefits, but obviously the hollowing out of uh the American working class and blue collar and the rust belt. Um so uh I I think there is no such thing as true self-sufficiency, um, and yet partial self-sufficiency has some off book virtues. So this was the global division of labor is a boon, is what we transition to. It's a boon. It was originally a blessing, then we change it to a boon. I answered for the blessing. Um I said I agree. I guess um to you know, return to this idea of single point of failure. If global division of labor means every nation does one thing, that's the one thing they do, and if that nation fails at doing that, we're screwed, then that's not that's not a boon.

That's that's way too fragile. But that's not the reality of global division of labor. Maybe we went a little too far in that direction, it's pulling back now. It's it's it's not people could see that the costs associated with it, and it's coming back. Um, so is it a boon? Um, yeah, I I guess so. I mean, everything that Travis said, I mean, it's uh you you figure out who can optimize a thing and they do it, and there's competitive uh incentives to optimize better than the next guy. And and yeah, you have a lot of stuff at your fingertips that you didn't have before. Now uh is that um does that always make us better people or a better nation? No, probably not, but um, it's in terms of economics, it's certainly uh a boon. And um one thing looking into if you don't already know the term is the uh economist Ricardo had this thing, theory of comparative advantage.

And the thought is if you have Party A, who is both better at growing apples and better at growing beef than Party B, um, then you would say, why would he want to trade anything with you know Party B? Party B can't give him anything. But if his ratio of skills in growing beef versus apples is different from the ratio of skills of the other guy, there are gains uh to trade to be had. Um and so again, we can get to the off-books thing when we say, Oh, you know, China can make wrenches, um, maybe not more efficiently in the absolute, but certainly more efficiently compared to something else they can do. You know, China is not very good at growing soybeans because they don't have the acreage. So, you know, th this was, I don't know if it was David Friedman or somebody back in the 70s or 80s. And, you know, what if I told you I had a magic factory that could make cars?

It turns wheat into cars. Um, would you be in favor of that? Oh, yes, that'd be wonderful. But what if I then told you that at the back of the factory there is a ship dock and in fact we're outsourcing it to China? Oh no, it's terrible. Um, this was an interesting argument. This is an argument I fully endorsed at the time. Um, but this is a problem with a lot of sort of facile or uh does everybody know Alex Narashta? He works at uh, I think Cato. Um absolute disgusting SOB. Um and uh he is paid to lie. Um, and I I've got a friend who's a grad student who uh did some professional work with him. Uh I'm sorry, uh Spiv, I'm getting you in trouble here. Um, but you can tell him the truth about things, and it doesn't matter because he is paid by his corporate masters. Now I'm sounding like a leftist, I mean antifighter, his corporate masters, but it's literally true.

Um and so you always have to wonder about what the off-books uh things are. And uh funny, getting back to sort of comparative advantage. Uh, here's how you can tell that leftists are the true free market capitalists. They absolutely believe in comparative advantage, and they want brown people to deliver their burritos to them um on bicycles. Um because no white person like them should have to do that. They deserve to write blog posts for the Hoffington Post. I don't even know what the topic was. I'm just ranting now. So okay, comparative advantage. Yeah, I think one of the one of the one of the we one of the weaknesses of that idea is that we were talking earlier about like there's a adaptivity to the market that's like usually underappreciated. And the thing about comparative advantage is it tends to sort of lock in conditions now as if they'll always be that way.

And I think part of like you kind of want to keep some things spun up that maybe they this doesn't seem like the optimal place or time to do this thing, but we kind of keep the base level of know-how going. Because I think that's one of the things about uh biology, social systems, society's economics, is that everything is deeply know-how based. It's really not uh knowledge is mostly in doing things and continuing to do them, and things that we can't articulate, we do. Um and I think there's a real um loss when you say, well, that you know, country A, country B, whatever, they've got that. We're gonna stop doing that, we're just gonna trade with them. Uh, because you lose that know-how, and the know-how is much harder to get back than it is to maintain once you have it. So there's there's sort of maybe non-obvious uh benefits to doing things that seem non-optimal in the background, if you will, uh, so that as conditions change, you can actually adjust the same.

So I totally agree with you. Yeah, and yet I'm conflicted internally. And the reason for the conflict is this, right? I I can lay out as you basically just did, a perfect argument for why the US government should not allow 100% of the small electric motor manufacturing to take place in China. Because if you do, then China can make drones and we can't make drones, and on day one of the war, we stop getting any motors for drones and we run out of drones on day three of the war. Um so I'm a lobbyist uh for the electric Motor Association of America, and in a hundred percent good faith, I go to DC and I explain this case and I have case studies, and unlike Alex Norasta, I am not just doing this because my paycheck depends on it. I truly believe. But how does this not eventually create the incentives for well, and since we are getting this 20% import quota from China, and if manufacturing is still shrinking, then obviously we should raise it from 20% to 40%, or we should you know start handing out money.

You know, all systems end up degenerating over time in responding to the incentives. And one of the incentives here is get better at lobbying. That incentive might actually be stronger than get better at making uh drone motors. Um, and we see these things where there's regulatory capture or lobbying capture. Um this is one reason that the public schools are so bad. The teachers unions are absolute shit at teaching kids, but they're absolutely great at lobbying the voters. Um, I agree, I do not want industry A and B and C to depart our shores forever because it's critical not just for our national survival, but for our sort of technological survival to have these uh tech trees that we can go further, right? I mean, once you truncate, you know, it's just like a tree. If you cut off the top, you you uh you're never getting more more growth there.

Um but how does this not just turn into sort of a Soviet system? And and I don't have an answer. I want A, but I see B. I don't know. Well, we can leave it at I don't know, because I don't know either. Okay. So I guess we're gonna switch gears now, Jeremy says. Okay. Oh, yeah. A town should be able to vote to kill a data center. I'm interested to hear your answer on this. Okay. So you said disagree. Right. Uh I don't know. Uh this is, you know, um, yes, no questions are absolutely great for getting uh uh volatile, angry uh fights going, right? Um and I I I I and signal I was saying, Jeremy. Maybe we're not fighting enough. Yeah. Uh your your questions were either great or horrible, right? Um so I've said many times that if your rule always results in you winning every single battle, then your rule is not based on a consistent principle.

It's just uh my opinions by enumeration. Um and so uh everybody should Google Keegan, K-E-G-A-N. He's a psychiatrist who came up with the concept of Keegan levels. They've been popularized by the blogger meaningness. Um Keegan level three is effectively I should get whatever I want. Um, and Keegan level four is that we should have rules of law that is a reproducible process. And even if rule of law occasionally means that I lose a particular case that is meaningful to me, I would still rather live in a system that is repeatable and things happen by a process because there is greater utility to that. Um and I am, you know, I I endorse that Keegan level four is better than Keegan level three. So here I get into a question. On the one hand, I really, really think data centers are great. I think people who are against them are just 99% misinformed, they don't know what they're talking about.

But on the other hand, uh am I just asking for special pleading where what I should get is towns should always be able to do what I want them to do, and they should never be able to make bad decisions. You can't operate that way. Um but again we get to markets and uh meta-utopia where people should be able to make decisions, even bad decisions that hurt themselves, as long as other people are allowed to make good decisions. So I think probably towns should be allowed to um ban data centers, but you know, I'll change it to make it even uh more uh uh spicy. Should a town be able to override the second amendment? Um let's answer this one first. Yeah, I know it's gonna want to show the scope of the note is basically. No, no, no, it's funny. You argued against yourself, so I didn't get to argue against you.

So um, because I I think for this one it's obvious to me. It's like a town should okay, a town, so that's the thing I uh would only take issue with is like what's a town, is that the right scale? But basically my answer is yes, because of what we talked about before. There's externalities, there are. Uh there could be noise, there could be visual blight, there could be things associated with that data center in your town. And it's the best people that have a handle on whether they want those externalities and to tolerate them, and they could be positive externalities too. You got jobs, you get things, it's not always negative externalities. And so the town is almost like the perfect unit size in my mind to make a decision like this. It's not the individual, maybe it's the neighborhood. Maybe it's like if you can hear the data center or something like that, okay.

You're in the externality zone of the thing, you should have a say in this. Um so for me, it's absolutely yeah, a town should definitely be able to ban a data center. But different than the second amendment, and we should, and it's interesting, we should we should dig into that. Um, but uh the um I mean what this is exactly it, and this is what I sort of in the beginning I was giving a little spiel on what my view of localism is. This is like uh this idea that different scale units are real, that libertarians often sort of miss that idea that like um the only real thing to many libertarians are like individuals, and everything else is just a collection of individuals, but that's not the case. People organize into different entities that are sort of like superorganisms, and a town is kind of like that.

And so, yeah, you should be able to, if your town doesn't want it, and also, let's say that every town independently decides they don't want one. What will happen? Okay, maybe they go to another state, other towns, but also what would happen is there might be a reason they're not wanted, and you're now uh spurring the market to innovate, saying, what is the problem? Maybe if it looked like a beautiful castle, maybe you'd want it, or whatever, right? Like whatever your thing is, whatever your town's thing is. And um, so I think that it's good to people to reject things because there might be actual problems, there might be imagined problems, whatever it is. Um, but then you actually are participating in the evolutionary selective process that causes things to innovate and change such that they do fit into their context, into their environment, where the context being the town and the townspeople and their preferences.

And, you know, I I'm mostly with Travis here that I think uh I have no intrinsic problem with data centers. I think a lot of what's going on with them is heavily politicized, there's bad information out there of what's going on. There's also things that are probably legitimate. If one, you know, you bought this beautiful house, you're looking at the forest next door, and then one day there's a big ugly data center next to you, you're like, ah, what the hell? So there's like legitimate gripes as well. And um I have zero problem with the idea of a group of people rejecting something like that and saying, nah, we don't want that here. Why? We don't need to explain to you. That's part of localism. Is you it doesn't require an explanation. We can just say we don't want it. Why? I don't know, because I flipped a coin, I decided I don't want it.

None of your business. So um, yes, that uh they should absolutely be able to reject a data center in their town. A town up from me where I live, um, not a data center, but a big ugly, ugly, you know, subsidized workforce housing went in. The town didn't want it. Like pretty much 100% of the people that lived in the town, the planning board, everybody, but they went through the Supreme Court, this, that, and the other thing, did a legal battle, forced it on the town. I think that's wrong. I think whatever the structure of the system was that allowed that to happen is wrong and should be updated and changed. Because if an entire town doesn't want your dumb, ugly thing that you're gonna make some subsidized dollars off of, then they shouldn't have to tolerate it. So Jeremy's gonna change the topic.

Um, but I uh I'm I'm gonna insist that I get like another sentence or three in here, which is I think that there's a lot to be said for localism, um, but also there is a lot to be said against democracy. Um democracy uh often has no skin in the game. Um and so when there is skin in the game and you have price signals on things, uh suddenly people start paying a lot more attention and start making decisions that matter. Um and and that are intelligent and uh trade off uh different things. Um I will not get deeply into it right now, but I've got a sub stack called Defending the Enlightenment. In there I have a three-part essay series uh that is a libertarian defense of zoning. Um, and this talks about a free market mechanism where people can pay each other to offset externalities. And so I think that it becomes very easy to uh there's a great meme, which is two of the giga chads, uh the black and white Chads, and one of them is typing his keyboard and says, you know, confidently XYZ, and the other one says, Do you actually know anything about XYZ?

And he's no. Do you? No. Um, and and yet they're totally confident, very happy to move forward with their extremist uh positions. And I think that when money is actually involved, people start researching and make better decisions. Uh a town can ban anything it wants as long as you're free to leave. A town, so I said agree, you said disagree. A town could ban anything it wants. Um I'm sure because of the absolute nature of the statement, anything, I probably you could probably oh, you could come up with a counter arguing okay, yeah, they shouldn't be able to ban, you know, ban breathing, whatever, right? So, you know, in it as a general point, it's like, yeah, it just like dovetails with the last thing. Like, yeah, if a town doesn't want a thing, why are we who are we to force it on them? Who is like the external party here that's enforcing this on a people?

And so um free to leave is an interesting part of this, as long as you're free to leave. I actually think that's like one of as I think about what is localism and how would you kind of apply it in any kind of a universal sense. I think that's one of the important things that uh should be universal is people should not be prisoners, so you should be able to leave. However, you should not necessarily be free to enter. And so you end up with a situation where it's like you're free to leave, but you gotta find someone who wants you or will accept you too. Um so I think that can balance out that sort of free to leave doesn't mean free to free to come, and um yeah, you should be able to ban ban what you want. Now, uh I guess this actually brings up the the second amendment issue, though, is like should a town be able to uh allow to ban guns, uh, for instance.

And that's an interesting like structural issue with the US. The US has said actually one of our you know, universal, as far as the US goes, principles is well, uh you should be able to bear arms so that uh it's sort of an informal uh you know, refresh button, and um you can you can restart the system in the most uh brutal way if it becomes necessary. You know, that's what the second amendment really is. It's not the you know individual self protection, it's it's it's global reset potential or something like that. Um and so should a town be able to do that? Well, I don't know, they do, right? Cities do that. So the issue I have with free to leave is on the one hand, uh A.O. Hirshman had a book that I reference all the time, uh, or a large essay, uh Loyalty, Voice and Exeter. I always get it in the wrong order.

And in my personal life, I tend to always come down to exit. You know, if I don't like an online group chat I'm in, I'm not going to try to lobby people to talk less about a certain topic. Um I'm not going to just suck it up. I'll just leave. There's lots of other stuff going on in life. I've got other group chats, et cetera. Um, if Massachusetts is behaving like a bunch of dicks, I will not try to change the system. I will just pack up and move to New Hampshire as I did uh 12 or 13 years ago. But we were talking before about off-books costs where you hollow out communities. You think, oh, this is great, we're getting wrenches cheaper and we're exporting grain to buy them. Um but there is the off-book cost of when we shipped the uh the textile mill out of North Carolina, and then suddenly all the families there fell into joblessness and started using drugs and went on welfare.

That isn't accounted for in the import-export numbers. So when we talk about free-to-leave, there is a lot of social structure embedded in a community where you are longtime neighbors of a guy, you lend them your tools, he helps you mow your lawn, your aunt is next door, this and that. And so free to leave, free, you know, this gets back to the sort of you know, free as in software or free as in beer, um, you are free to leave, but in fact, there's a huge cost there. And so when we talk about cost, there's always the concept in economics of a dead weight cost where you've got your supply and demand curve. And if in general uh the market clearing price of apples is one dollar per apple, and then the state puts a tax raising the price of apples effectively to $2, but the recipient still gets a dollar for it.

Uh the amount consumed, the amount that people will want to buy at $2 is a lot less than the amount that they would want to buy at $1. So there is this big region of the graph, which is foregone profit or foregone uh enjoyment, where lots of people who uh would buy an apple at a buck fifty now don't buy an apple and they lose out, you know. Um and so when we say that you are free to leave this town, there are people who, well, in fact, I would like to leave this town now that my second amendment rights are infringed or now that this has happened or that has happened. Um, and yet I'm not perfectly free because there is a big cost involved. I would have to sever these social bonds. I've customized my property to my own liking over 20 years. I planted orchards, I wanted to retire and pick apples in those orchards and share them with my grandkids and this and that.

So there is sort of this libertarian concept, and it's expressed in science fiction that you know, sort of everyone lives on a spaceship or everyone lives in a mobile home, and so you can just pack up and move away and this and that. Um, and I I think that these people have built these utopian visions with technology very intentionally designed to make it seem frictionless and to make it seem low cost, because they realize that in the real world there are huge costs. I mean, for first of all, you're gonna pay three or six percent of your house price to a realtor, you're gonna pay a 1.5% transfer tax in New Hampshire, in addition to all of the soft stuff, like losing the customizations of your farm and losing your neighbors. So, on the one hand, yes, um exit is great. Uh the system, every system always depends on exit as the final choice, um, and yet a huge amount of destruction of utility can be done even while everyone is free.

But okay, but what about the other part? A town can ban anything it wants. And and I guess what I'm arguing is because the cost of doing that uh is so high, we should tread very carefully here. So I'm free. I mean, this is this is the interesting thing that's sort of like, what does it mean free? And that's sort of your point here, is it's not like a freeze and there's no cost. You're free as in no one's preventing you from choosing to incur those costs. And so again, let's get back to putting prices on things. I mean, here's a thought. If 55% of the population of a town thinks, wouldn't it be great if we got rid of guns in this town? My response would be, that does sound great. Why don't you buy the easement of owning guns off of the other 45% of the population? And if that costs $3, that is almost nothing in the town budget, and it turns out that you're not actually consuming much utility, that freedom wasn't worth much.

But if the first guy says, yeah, I'm not going to surrender my right for less than a million dollars, the second guy says, Yeah, a million here, suddenly realize this is a trillion dollar project, and you realize, oh, if we're not willing to pay that, then the benefit that we get from imposing this is much less than the cost it imposes on people. It's interesting. Was your example like 50-50 almost, right? 51%. I I it we seem to end up in that sort of 51%, 49% case a lot. And I wonder why, but it sort of comes down to this idea of local patches, right? It's almost like every time we see that pattern, we should ask yourself, why are why are why are people mixed up this way? Why are they not people over here, you know, 51% over here, 49% over here, where everyone's happy. And um it's it's really like the way we we even tally these things up reveals that we're not doing a good job with these spatial patterns.

Oh, I disagree. I I think there's something very, very interesting going on here. In economics, there's this concept called hotelling's law. Uh does everyone know this? Does anyone know this? Okay. The simple version is we have a boardwalk, it's a mile long. Um, and we assume that you know, customers. Oh, thank you very much, appreciate it. Uh, and we assume that customers are roughly evenly distributed along the boardwalk. And we've got one vendor who's gonna start selling ice cream, and we've got a second vendor who's gonna start selling ice cream. Where should they position themselves? You might say, oh, maybe at the one quarter mark or the one-third mark each on the one-third mark. This is great because it will minimize walking for the customers and this and that. So let's start with that as the initial condition.

Now, everyone to the left of the leftmost vendor is just gonna walk to him. He's the shortest one. Everyone to the right of the rightmost vendor will walk to him. Let's talk about the people in the middle. They will split where they go. From the exact 50% point, some will go left. From the other side of the 57% point, uh, they will go to the right. Now, what are the incentives for these two vendors? Each of them uh should be inclined to pick up their shack and move it 10 feet closer to the midpoint because this shifts the midpoint from the midpoint of the boardwalk to the midpoint between the two vendors. So you iterate this a few times, and what you end up getting is the two vendors both converged at the 50% point, and each of them has sort of an absolute monopoly on all of the customers to one side or the other.

Um, and yet we have increased the total average distance that people will walk to get ice cream. This logic is not particularly interesting for ice cream vendors, who cares? But this logic is quite interesting for Coke and Pepsi. So, on the entire spectrum of beverages that you might have, should it be more sweet or should it have more of a citric acid bite? Um, you could imagine a world where they're spaced out, but what happens is the incentives are for Coke and Pepsi to both converge to the 50% preference point. And this applies to political parties. So I I see all the time, oh, if only XYZ happened, then the uh the then the Red Party or the Blue Party would have an absolute lock on electoral politics forever and never. No, they wouldn't, because the political parties, like let's let's say that we brought in a hundred million uh illegal aliens, we give them all citizenship, and all of these illegal aliens want free welfare or whatever they want.

What you would see is that the two political parties would both shift to once again divide the population evenly. So where I'm going with this is the questions that you end up asking in this, and you're saying, but why is it that you know it's always 51%, 49%? And you're right, it is always 51%, 49%. And my assertion is that is because of hoteling's law, we pick the political battles that are 51% and 49%. We are not having a debate where one party is saying we should hand out free machine guns to every four-year-old. I mean, you know, Michael Granger and I in the State House are saying that, but no one else is saying that. Because if we stake that out, then the Dems would stake something else out, and they would get 99%. So you end up moving to the center where the Dems are saying, well, yes, of course, there's um concealed carry, but you shouldn't do it in schools.

And uh the right is saying, and I I think I saw Sam Farrington here in the audience earlier, the right is saying, yes, you should do it in schools. Um so you end up getting very close so that we split uh 50. Yeah, the most information. I mean, it's it's if you have a, you know, you you brought up uh, I guess a Boolean, but like a Bernoulli's kind of thing, the most information is at the 50-50, like flipping a coin. So it's a similar idea, actually. I guess uh that that that could be why things tend to be the 50%. I think there's another effect where uh we are looping in very large, uh spatially large portions to where so imagine there is a situation, just as thought experiment, where you have you know town black, town white right next to each other. If you count the preferences over that region, you've got a 50-50.

But that's very different than a checkerboard. And both problems exist where we we uh do things statistically and we get 50-50, and uh statistics like that destroy the spatial patterns that are present. So there are spatial patterns that are that are present, and we do destroy them in that way. But I I agree with you totally that we tend to pick political battles that are the most information rich in that sense. Um so um we are jumping. Yeah, I already said how much I disdain democracy, but the people have voted, and there's like a vernoullian hoteling's law. So you disdain democracy. What do you what are you uh in favor of? Uh markets and/or neo-fascism, I don't know. It's complicated. Uh what about you know, one of the things I really like about living New Hampshire is the town meeting, which is like pure democracy.

Very rare in the US to have this. And I tend to think it kind of works, at least it works in my town. My town's about a thousand people, so it's a small thing. And uh I think it's sort of like uh uh uh what do you call the uh Dunbar's number, right? It's like I I think democracy does work up to about a thousand people, and then from there not not so much anymore. Um what do you think about town meeting? Um Does your town have it? Oh, yeah, yeah. Um I think that one problem that you always see with systems is selection bias. And everybody knows the meme of the airplane with the red dots, and so uh you know selection bias. And so you have anytime there's concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, you always motivate every member of the police union shows up at the meeting, every member of the school teacher.

Um I I find town meeting interesting. It's it's better than say uh systems with very large feedback loops, uh large and laggy and obscured feedback loops like the federal government. Right. Um so if I had to choose either it operates like the federal government or it operates like town meeting, I'd take town meeting. Okay. Let's get to Jeremy's question though. You can owe a place and people things that you never agreed to. Um I I will take a very short uh stab and then let you go into more depth. Certainly, I think you can owe some people things that you never agreed to. I think that you uh owe your parents uh certain responsibilities. Uh certainly people that you've brought into the world, your own children, you owe almost infinitely to. Um although I guess you might say you agree to that, but you know, to make it hard, what if your children were accidental?

Um but but how about a place? Um I don't know. What do you think? You certainly can. I don't think there's any way around it unless you sort of eliminate the idea of of duty altogether. So, you know, we're talking earlier about uh what's the standard by which you decide is a thing good or bad? And if you have no standard, then anything's you know, nihilistic view, there's no real basis of anything. Um but can you owe a place and a people things you never agree to? Yeah, none of us uh agreed to come into this world. That's not how it works. You arrive in this world. Um and then the question pretty much devolves just do you owe anybody anything at that point? And it's yes, you do. I'm I I uh I'm a Catholic, I believe in God. Um, so it's easy for me to see that it's not it it seems like a very uh narcissistic and uh uh nihilistic way of looking at things to think I don't owe anybody anything because I didn't ask to be here, something like that.

You know, in uh in Christianity and Catholicism, you put God at the center. When you do that, you realize, oh, my what is my existence about then? It's about service. Okay, it's primarily service to God. Then that devolves to service to the people around me. And so, of course, yeah, you owe people a lot of stuff. You you owe yourself uh to to the people uh around you, and that's a people and a place, I suppose, because you have a people around you and you're in a place. And so I can't really see any way that that wouldn't be uh something I agree to. You owe you can owe a place and a people things you never agreed to. Life uh contains contracts, but life is not a contract. So this is sort of framed as if there's a con. Oh, I never agreed to this. It's like no shit. Um, so yeah, you you you of course owe people things that you never agreed to, for sure.

There's an optical illusion, the necker cube, and this is two squares overlapped, and then the diagonals are drawn in. And the illusion is that you look at it and you can think, oh, this you know, it's sticking out of the page, and then you look at another way and oh, it's sticking into the page. Um and we talked earlier about Keegan levels, and at Keegan 5, basically there's lots of different systems, and you might say that this system is appropriate for measuring this, but this other system is appropriate for another thing. And so where I'm going with this is I'm also Catholic. Um, you know, I'm simultaneously a Catholic and sort of anarcho-capitalist. Um, so I can put on, you know, a squint with my left eye, and I think, yeah, you know, yes, for all the theological reasons you elucidated, you can owe a people in a place uh things, but then I can, you know, squint the other eye and you know say no, and unless I uh signed the contract.

And let me go on a quick side rant. Another problem I have with sort of sophomore libertarians is they often reinvent a legal system from first principles and don't understand all of the issues that our legal system has grappled with over a thousand years. So they'll say, I should be uh totally free to walk into a restaurant, eat at the buffet, and walk out again. I was never presented with a contract. I didn't put my thumbprint or a cryptographic signature on it. And you know, the legal code has grappled with how much stupid overhead there would be if you needed to sign a contract when you walk into a restaurant. And it has come, uh I think it's called like contract by adherence or something, where if you act as if you were doing this contractual thing, and you know, everyone knows you actually are, um, you know, you go into the store, you take the keys, you rent the car.

Uh even if they fail to make you sign the contract, it's not your car, you don't get to keep it. Um, so I both am annoyed at libertarians who say I didn't sign the contract, but also when I squint the other eye, I can you know see the argument. So I don't know. I'm conflicted. Interesting. Well I I didn't quite connect. So I like this kind of idea of like this implied understanding, like implied contract, the whole situation implies it. So that sounds like it still argues in favor of you do owe people things. Right. So they're both pointing the same direction, aren't they? Well, what I what I would say is when you walk into uh a buffet and you pick up a plate, yeah, you are taking affirmative steps to show that you are engaging in the business model they're doing. Yes. So in in the view of life, what you know, and and and so if you didn't, you wouldn't walk in there, you wouldn't take a plate, or you turn around and leave.

Um in life, you you know, someone says, Hey, we're gonna observe you over the next year or two, and then we're going to decide if you have adhered to the contractual idea of being a citizen of New Hampshire. Um, and you would say, Okay, and if I don't like it, you know, if if I don't, what do you expect me to do? Well, leave. Okay, I'll I'll leave across the border in Massachusetts. And someone there says, same exact thing. What can you do if you don't think I I don't want to owe a loyalty to these people? Should you get in a lifeboat and paddle out into the middle of the ocean? Yes. Okay. That that is an argument. That is an argument. Yeah, you you just it it's the condition, it's our condition. I it is comparable. It's part of it's part of being not self-sufficient, actually. We're not self-sufficient.

And so we do, we owe things back into the things that are supporting us. A man should be free to do whatever he wants on his own land. We both disagree. Yeah, I mean, of course, I mean, of course, again, it's one of these sort of absolute statements where it's like, of course, but it's, I think, for the libertarian question here, it's um it's once again, I think that the thing we have to bring to the level of consciousness, in my opinion, for like any kind of liberty movement, is that different groups of people, different individuals, and then uh uh ideally uh sort of uh coarse-grained into groups. This is your most unpopular answer each, by the way. Oh, interesting. Um so um you what you do on your land doesn't stay on your land. There are causal effects that propagate out necessarily. So you can't be free to do whatever you want on your land because the things you do on your land don't strictly stay confined to your land.

To the extent that they do, sure, I'm in favor of that. You know, I don't personally feel like oh, they want to build a cabin, but like, you know, there's all these codes and things. It's like, yeah, in my personal opinion, you know, build the cabin on your land, whatever. But if you build uh actually, I remember a few years ago, you've had a thing where someone put up a like I don't know, a pole barn or something like that, really like obnoxiously, and that's an externality that is imposed upon you. And so that person probably felt like it's my land. Yeah, that's the only thing. And it's like, yeah, well, it's my life, and this is and I'm on my land. And so uh we live in a uh like I said before, the like causality kind of an event happens, causal chains spew in all directions, and they go and go, go and go.

And so we have to like face that and understand that like my idea of what I should be free to do might be in uh tension with my neighbors' uh freedom of enjoyment, and we have to negotiate that. And the best way to negotiate that is to find the people that you have the most uh harmony with around those externalities and and to live near them and not near the people that you're gonna annoy when you're doing what you want to do, and not near the people that are gonna annoy you when they're doing what they want to do. And and then in the finer grain details, you have to just negotiate those those boundaries out with your you're saying your adjacent neighbors or things like that. So your argument, so I agree with you that there are such a thing as externalities, and there's a sort of very annoying argument pattern that I get into with people when I'm trying to explain.

Do you understand what an externality is? Do you and um there I think is sort of a temptation to ad hoc the response, where I will say, if I paint my house an ugly color, is that an externality? No, it is absolutely not at all an externality. So, you know, it sort of snaps to grid, it's zero. Right. And if I'm shooting laser beams across the property line that light your house on fire, yes, that's a violation of the nap. Right. And then you sort of work into the middle to find where does this phase transition where it suddenly becomes a violation of the nap. Right. And it becomes very arbitrary. Yeah, it's and you know, they they will just say, well, everyone can tell that five broken cars is your right, but six is a junkyard. Exactly. And you know, I and I I I do tend to agree, right? That that you know, and this gets back to calculus when you're you know looking at a function and you want to figure out what is the min and the max of the function, there's like a couple of places you look.

You look at the minimum end of the range, you look at the maximum end of the range, you look at any point where the derivative is zero, where the slope is, and and so you know, I sort of bring this process where like, okay, let's investigate where the phase change happens for you. And I think there is no coherent answer. They're arguing on the fly because they do not have a pre-existing mental framework over it. Um I I I think that this actually points to something interesting. There is actually no place where it snaps from zero to one. And once again, I come back to price mechanisms. So we could come up with something arbitrary where you know everyone has a constitutional right to three broken vehicles on their lawn. But if you want to go beyond that, then we need to engage in some sort of tradable easement or buying permissions off of people within 300 feet.

And the whole you know concept of buying permissions is quite interesting in the same way that you know, taking away second amendment rights, but do it with price mechanisms. Because it might turn out that, like, oh, I really don't much care. You know, yeah, it's a little bit of a nice sword, but if you gave me 10 bucks, I'd be happy. Okay, interesting. And so he's, you know, this guy's almost certainly gonna do that. Maybe it turns out for the next 10 cars, 10 bucks a piece. Um on the other hand, I you know might have an arbitrary set of preferences, and like everybody's preferences are arbitrary. The Gustabus nonest disputandum, you can't tell somebody that their preferences or their utility function is wrong. Um, but if I say, look, you know, uh, when I was a kid, I was beaten up by an abandoned car.

I hate them more than anything. Uh I will not let you have an abandoned car on your lawn for less than 300,000. If we just accept that as a fact, he's like, well, it's worth a lot to me, but it's not worth 300,000. So again, you know, the market has cleared. Yeah, I think what you're saying, I think there's a certain class of extra galleys that's true for, and then there's other ones that do have the kind of phase transition and immediate snap effect that does vary across populations. You know, go back to your your guy with with the with the uh Pierce nipples and whatnot. Like some populations uh so so that where what class is that in, right? And for some that's an instant snap, zero to one. Yeah, and for others, it's like great, like, can we get more in here? And and some uh and then and then there's the preference works in the opposite way.

I'll pay each leather daddy a hundred dollars to my neighborhood. So uh and then there's some where there is sort of a price. Well, everyone's got a price, you know. So um I don't think that it's true that it's always the case that sort of this uh this sort of buying your way into the externalities you impose is always the right thing, or it's always always continuous and there's no snapping, especially when we enter the moral domain, what this kind of sort of thought experiment gets to is like there's a moral domain, and that's actually one of the interesting classes of externalities in my mind that's not usually considered as one because it's not like economic, uh, but it's like sort of moral externalities. And what do I want, you know? I think one of the again, uh we're kind of bringing this back to what I'm attracted to about this free state party thing, and one of the major things about it that to me uh is like okay, I want to be involved in this, I want to be part of this, is pro-family, and that pro-family is pro-kids and pro-kids being around.

And not universally true, but there is a tendency that once people have children have a family, uh, you start to become sensitive to different things that maybe you weren't so sensitive to before. And a lot of these kinds of moral externalities involve like, well, I'm like an adult, I can kind of like contextualize this and put it in its place and deal with it, but my kids aren't. And for a time, my job, in my opinion, is to shelter them. Yes, it's not to uh isolate them or never uh introduce them to the world or anything like that, but it's like the younger they are, the more they shelter them, and the older they get, the more I kind of introduce them to what what's in the world and things that that aren't so great sometimes. And so um, yeah, I think this idea uh uh of moral externalities are where the if people truly are holding on a moral principle, then there's no price.

Well, but in a sense, there is if we tie it to the earlier proposition about you're free to leave the town, right? Um, so at some level, uh, you know, there are so many leather daddies, and each one is willing to pick in five thousand dollars, and you're like, hell, uh, you know, for five million dollars, I can pack up and leave and buy a farm somewhere else. And so this is where I think that um compensating for externalities with cash bidding and tying in with localism. You know, I talked earlier about the problem with you can just leave is that leaving imposes a tax unless you get a dead weight uh loss. Um, but I think that these two things dovetail quite nicely. Interesting. Like that. Next topic, Jeremy. A nation of localists would struggle with national defense. Um I could just start with that.

I would say no. Um I guess we both disagreed uh in this case. My no is pretty simple because I don't consider localism to mean uh a single scale. In fact, like I think a proper localism must be multi-scale. You have and and the and this is like um I I didn't know you're Catholic, interesting to learn that. Uh in the Catholic church, there's this principle of subsidiarity, which is basically you push things down to the lowest level that can handle them. Um and so if a decision or an action can be taken at a smaller scale, it should be. It's a principle, church doesn't always follow it, but it's it's a guiding principle there. And um, you know, national defense is one of these issues. How low can you push it? Well, it turns out you can't push it very low. You you've got a nation, uh you're existing in a world, world where nations have hundreds of millions of people in them, many of them, and uh yet national defense is a tricky, tricky situation where there's always uh it is a literal arms race.

There's always um external forces trying to uh impose upon you, and so the natural unit, the natural localist unit for national defense, is the nation. Um and so I think this question, sort of the premise is like if you have like a country, you know, of small scale farmers, and that's it, and no one ever kind of coordinates on a larger scale, you're gonna have trouble with national defense. The answer is uh potentially yes, depending on what national defense looks like. Um now, if it's sort of having an a, you know, AK 47 and like uh fighting off the imperial force indefinitely, you know, by you know, sort of bothering them until they leave in 25 years or something. We've seen that that can work. But in terms of like the way we live life and our way of life, uh, we do need, in my opinion, a national military.

We probably could devolve some of it, um, some of the functions back to more uh local uh type of uh militias and regional things, structures. Maybe I'm not an expert in that, but maybe. But in a general sense, uh it would not suffer because in a proper localist system, you would actually move a thing to the scale that it needs to be at to be effective. If something is ineffective at the town scale, then you don't do it at the town scale. It's that simple in my mind. One of my favorite science fiction authors uh was Werner Vingy. Uh, and he was a professor of computer science at uh University of California, something or other. Uh very interesting guy. He wrote two novels, uh, which were both great. The first one was The Peace War. Um, and the peace war involved among other things, sort of the US falling apart um and falling into an anarcho-capitalist state, and it had a sequel marooned in real time.

But between the two, there was a little novella called The Ungoverned. And the ungoverned uh is sort of just the that word is a reference to sort of anarcho-capitalism. And if you Google for this, it is online for free, I believe, at Bayon uh calm. And the plot of the ungoverned is that there are these private protection forces, and very much David Friedman machinery of freedom sense. And there is one state, it might be like New Mexico, and New Mexico sends an army, or Arizona sends an army into another territory. And this other territory does not have a centralized government. And so they are fairly ineffective at fighting back. And these local individual security service providers are doing the best they can. But then the army runs into this one thing where there are automated machine guns and there's chemical weapons and lasers are shooting out through the dust clouds, and then eventually a nuke pops off.

And the general of the invading army is very shaken. But he says, Well, I I think we can still press on if that was their main army thrust. And someone says, That wasn't their army, that was one farmer. And so I read this when I was 13, and I enumerated earlier some books that were formative on me. This uh novella was absolutely formative on me. Um, and I made some uh subtle references to it in my own uh anarcho-capitalist novels, uh The Powers of the Earth and Causes of Separation, named some characters and other things the same way. I think that there are potentially structures in the space of localism and anarcho-capitalism, etc., where you could imagine some sort of porcupine style defense against aggression. Um so uh, you know, I I think individuals should be allowed to have machine guns and tanks.

Do I think individuals should be allowed to have, say, nerve agents? I'm not sure. I've met a bunch of individuals, and I don't respect them. You know, I I think half of the free staters I met should not have uh chemical and biological weapons. Um but on the other hand the other half should. I I reserve judgment, but like for sure half of them shouldn't. Um but uh, you know, can you imagine structures where sort of you know you know somebody is very wise and judicious, and you know, the community as a whole has a need to defend itself. Obviously, we can't have a town meeting and vote when the tank column runs through town, but would I delegate to you prudent decisions on deploying thousand-ton cluster bombs or something? Um and so this is I think an absolutely great topic for science fiction where you get to explore ideas like this.

I'm open-minded on the topic. Interesting. Okay, so I guess like we have a few minutes left here. I have a qu question for you. And this is sort of, you know, getting you you said you like meta stuff, so this is the most meta for this group and our topics here. And I'm just curious, what to you, what is freedom and what is liberty? Like, what is that? Oh, um there's a kind of question that often aims for the truth, but the the most honest answer is I don't know, it depends. And uh I am I I I love words. I have a 20-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary. Sometimes for fun I pull it out and read it. And it will always turn out that a word that you thought was pretty simple uh has seven different definitions, and you start to look at them, you're like, oh gosh, they are very subtle, but they are in fact distinct.

So um I've heard lots of definitions of liberty, right? So one, the you know, freshman year, libertarian, the nap, I can do absolutely anything I want as long as it doesn't harm someone else. Uh there is sort of a Christian nationalist one, which is liberty is the liberty to behave well and well-ordered and this and that. And this gets down to, oh, I see. Liberty is the freedom to do exactly what you think I should do and nothing beyond that. And you know, if freedom doesn't let me make choices that you disagree with, it's not really freedom. It's it's just a nice word. Um I don't think there is one simple definition. I think there's a lot of definitions, each of which are useful in different contexts. Um maybe that wasn't. So that's okay. Wit in which way are you a libertarian? I I would simultaneously call myself a libertarian at anarcho-capitalist, uh, a membered, uh registered member of the Republican Party, uh neo-monarchical fascist inclination.

I I don't know. Uh-huh. Um I think that's a that's a fair and honest answer. I mean, these things could go so far and they go no further. Um but getting back to what you said about sort of moral lines, right? There's a whole lot of stuff um where I would say, hey, you know, we can haggle over this, you know, I I probably have a price. Yeah. But then you get up to the lines of sort of absolute good and absolute evil and you know, Catholicism and stuff, and I'll say, like, no, I just can't compromise there. Yeah. And then to go off on a side topic, um, I sort of backed into Catholicism as the second order of thing, whereas the primary thing for me, you know, as a 19 or 20 year old who had been an atheist through much of my youth. Um, I said, you know, okay, on the one hand I call myself an atheist, but on the other hand, I am absolutely convinced that there are things that are morally good and things that are absolutely evil and can never be compromised with.

And so there needs to be some objective axiomatic rule in the universe, and and this rule is something that cannot be measured with an oscilloscope or a micro balance scale or a gravity potentiometer, et cetera. Um, and so, you know, I'm I'm very libertarian uh up until we can't put a price on things and we can't compromise because it's absolutely evil. Yep, okay, that's fair. We I have a similar uh path where you know it was sort of looking around, it was actually evil for me that became obvious. Like, for me too. Yeah, it's like okay, you look at something you go, well, that is evil. Yes. Once you say, okay, this is objectively, maybe that's not even the right word, but like this is certainly evil. You'll never convince me that it's not. But that applies at least some things are not evil collectively, and then okay, actually those things are good.

And once you realize that, well, there's an objective standard, you sort of can't be nihilistic anymore. You can't be atheistic in some sense. Now there's an interesting question because we can nail down these two, like absolute white and absolute black, right. And then there's stuff that may not actually be gray, but in sort of like in a lab, there's measurement error. And so, as human beings, we have to have sort of epistemic humility. Yeah. That like I just know for sure that torturing dogs is evil, and you can't do that. Um, and I know for sure that hugging your child and reading them to bedtime is absolutely good. Yeah. Um, but in the middle, there are behaviors that like it it might not be super virtuous, it might not be according to my preferences. I might have an instinctive aversion to it, but am I sure that it's in the black zone?

You know, I don't really know. You mentioned like the Christian nationalist view on this. I don't really know what they profess. Um, but I do but uh when you said it, I'm sympathetic to that view of sort of the freedom, what? What is freedom? It's like freedom to do good, freedom to do the right thing. And you do need uh the ability, it's sort of in the Hayekian sense in the moment, man on the spot, to identify what the right thing is. We have to discern that, and it's so contextually in this gray zone, it's so contextually uh uh you know, contextually rich, I want to say, but like overloaded with context, so that no one from outside could ever look peer in and have an idea, well, here's the right thing to do. Only the man on the spot, as Hayek calls it, could like actually figure out what is the right thing to do here.

The man on the spot, his connection to God, only that. And and and so I I see what you're saying, and I don't disagree, but I would also argue that one needs to have epistemic humility. And if you're a hundred percent sure certain, like I'm watching this guy and he is whipping a dog, I'm gonna jump in. I don't care what the law says, I'm going to take that out of his hand, I'm gonna knock him down. Um, but if you know the a person is yelling at their kid, it's not good, it might even be bad, but like, do I have perfect knowledge and am I so sure? And you know, oh, I mean, I think this whole idea of localism is premised on epistemic humility. Because you're basically saying, like, I don't know what's good for this group of people, like ultimately, like maybe maybe these evil and and perfectly good things, yes, but in the in the middle, anywhere in that range, they I think the right the right thing is to let them make that determination as as a group.

So uh so we can uh I think we're down to like 60 seconds, so we're gonna wrap it up and say it's complicated and we don't know. We don't know, but uh New Hampshire is uh something beautiful has happened here. I appreciate the invite, appreciate the conversation. Thanks, Travis. Thank you. Thanks, Jeremy, for having us.