Is the Free Market Presumptively Good?

Whatever emerges from voluntary exchange is presumptively good. And I agreed with this. You disagreed. I will again let you go first. Uh again, I I I have a really Aristotelian construction of the good. I think the good is something that is determined by the society you're in, the position you are in, the roles that you fill in that, the tell us of your life and uh what you know what you should be pursuing. Uh, and so to the extent that voluntary interaction produces those, and in a society with a general understanding of the good, where you are generally oriented towards the same idea of the good, most voluntary exchanges will do so. And I would like to maximize voluntary exchanges. I am actually not a big government guy, despite being somewhat more authoritarian than many people are comfortable with.

Uh the the ultimate point is to reduce the amount of time the government needs to spend enforcing virtue. That virtue would be self-reinforcing, and so that voluntary interactions would produce virtuous situations. If voluntary interactions are producing heroin addicts, you're not producing liberty. You're producing slavery. And so those are not inherently good interactions. I don't care if you freely chose heroin. It was the wrong choice. I don't care if someone voluntarily sold you the heroin, they should be hung. Uh ultimately, the point is not to produce liberty for its own sake, but that virtue will create the liberty, will follow after you have a virtuous society. And so to the extent that these voluntary transactions are regularly producing virtuous societies, producing the good, then they are themselves good.

But if we have degenerated, as you have noted, to the point where virtue is difficult and the society is degrading, then these kind of voluntary interactions are no longer good. We now have companies who spend insane amounts of money making sure that they can dopamine trap your children into addictive behavior before they ever have control or function over their own mind. How is there any voluntary interaction there? At some point there is no longer voluntary interaction until we impose our will upon those who would peddle that, voluntary interaction is no longer available to us. So the I can imagine voluntary interactions that are bad. The key problem to me here is accepting that, how would you ever produce a system that polices them? Because people want to come up with all kinds of excuses to constrain each other's behavior.

And a lot of those times it's not good why they're doing that and so I I think it makes a lot of sense to have a again it it's it's not always good it's presumptively good and I think it makes sense to have a strong presumption that if two people are agreeing to do something that they ought to be allowed to do it. And any exceptional case to that should be pretty extraordinary. You know I I I tend to not like bright line rules. I think there are like almost always exceptions. So I'm sure both of us could imagine and you've already named some cases of voluntary interaction where the outcomes appear to be bad but I think we have to take that to the next level and think about well what kind of system could police the bad stuff without policing the good stuff. And this may be maybe the heart of and we have a lot of agreement but this may be maybe the heart of of the disagreements that we have is well how would you produce a system that stops the bad stuff without stopping the good stuff you know I and this may be a trivial example but it's one that's been on my mind.

I use AI a lot. In fact a lot of this production uh was was made you know via AI and the Trump administration which I'm often a defender of you know curtailed my ability to have a voluntary interaction you know with uh with companies making this you know this product and so I can totally accept that there are voluntary interactions that are bad, and I would like to find ways of of you know, yeah, I think I think people get addicted to gambling or you know, prostitution or drugs or whatever and this stuff is bad. Uh but it's very tricky and not clear that it's possible at all to stop the bad without stopping a bunch of good stuff. And so if we hew much closer to voluntary stuff should be accepted, yeah, we'll get some bad outcomes, but people like you and I and the people in this room can avoid those.

And if we accept that, you know, it's perfectly normal to circumscribe voluntary interactions, then we're gonna get a lot of otherwise good stuff, you know, stopped because there's no way of getting, you know, one without the other. Uh so you can s sell all of the drugs you want in most of Detroit. Uh you can not sell them in Singapore, they will kill you. Where would you rather live? Where would you rather lay raise your children, right? These are easy answers once we really look at it. Now, this is not to say that Singapore is the answer. But people move to sing Singapore voluntarily. Singapore is mostly. That's that's absolutely true, right? But but once we're there, what is the best way to govern it? And I think we've already agreed that ultimately the best option would be exit, but not voice, right?

That that that being able to voluntarily choose into that system, and and I want to make it clear once again, I think the most important frame shift I want to encourage libertarians to engage in is not how do we design a system. That's the wrong way to get it. You don't. You don't. That's not how societies work. Plato's Republic is not real, okay? Where do societies come from? That's not what happens, right? What happens is they emerge from the ways of being of people. They come from traditions, religions, identities, families, ways of life. Where did the freedoms come from that you love? They didn't come from the Constitution. They didn't come from abstract principle. They didn't come from natural rights. They came from people who lived as virtuous Protestant Christians out of the English tradition.

That's where the things you love came from. And so when we understand that, we understand where those positive interactions come from. And when we have a system that's dominated by that value and that culture, then we can make all the voluntary interactions we want, and they will generally yield good outcomes. And the few that don't are acceptable because they still exist in that framework. So I really encourage people again to just don't think about building systems. Think about building communities.