[0:05] Unknown Speaker (Audience): I have a question for Professor Hoppe. Professor Hoppe mentioned that decentralization should be the goal, and Josef also mentioned that earlier. My question is, do you think this process of decentralization should occur in Europe? To me, it seems that the greatest threat to European civilization at the moment is American hegemony. My view is that if Europe undergoes a process of political decentralization, then it will be unable to defend itself, perhaps against the United States, not only militarily but also culturally and socially. This, I think, would be a great disaster for European civilization if the United States found some way to infiltrate Europe—that might not be the best word—it would be an even greater disaster. We saw after the fall of the Roman Empire, for 400 years, it was chaos, anarchy with the Visigoths, the Swabians, and other groups. I’m just curious whether you think this process of decentralization should occur in Europe now, whether now is the best time for this. Certainly in America, I understand if there’s internal instability and the union falls apart, I think that’s a desirable thing for Europe and for other countries that have been abused by American hegemony. But perhaps the disintegration of the coalition of European states that exists now, although imperfect, is not the best strategy to pursue at the current moment. I’m curious what you think.

[1:44] HHH: I would be all in favor of the European countries breaking with the United States. The first step would be, of course, to leave NATO. I do not expect that the United States would attack European countries if they decide, “We will leave NATO.” I don’t think they would have sufficient public support in the United States for doing something like this. I also hope that the European Union will break apart. The European Union currently is only kept alive insofar as some European countries, especially Germany—because Germany is, of course, the eternally guilty country until the end of all days and has to pay for its sins committed in the past until the world ends—if the payments from Germany to various countries would no longer come, these countries would have no reason to stay within the Union. You see diversions, for instance, already now that Hungary is continuously punished, Poland is continuously punished for slightly different reasons by the European Union because they do not adhere to the high standards that are typical, let’s say, of the most idiotic government in Europe, which is the German government. As soon as the payments would stop, there would be no reason for Poland to stay within the European Union. As soon as the payments would stop, there would be no reason for Hungary to stay within the European Union. Once it becomes established that it was the United States, in cooperation with Ukraine or Poland or whatever it was, that blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, there will be a massive move in the population in these various countries to disassociate themselves from the United States. That would encourage not only other countries leaving NATO, but it would also affect the European Union in the same way because what the European Union does is it tries to eliminate competition between various regions in Europe. That’s why they introduced something like the OECD introduced now a minimum tax put on all companies of at least 15%. Even Switzerland, which I always hailed as one of the great examples of neutral countries, in terms of idiocy, only lags a little bit behind the other European countries. So they agreed, for instance, also to accept this 15% minimum tax. Of course, if you are not part of the robbing gang of the gang leaders, you would have to strictly oppose something like it. It reduces the competitiveness of Switzerland as compared to other countries if they have to tax the same way. They have not reached a point where the taxes have been uniformed or harmonized all through Europe, but that is, of course, what they are trying to do. They want to make all countries equally poor instead of allowing some countries to flourish and other countries to go down the drain. I think it is good if some people go down the drain.

[5:38] HHH: I also want to address a little bit the point that Josef made when he said what Jesús Huerta de Soto was in favor of the European Union. Let me say this: this is a nice thing to say from a Spaniard’s point of view because Spain was one of these countries that had very high inflation rates, and their currency continuously devalued. He was in favor of that because he thought joining with Germany and the Netherlands and those countries that pursued a more sober policy, expanded their money supply less than the Spaniards did, would discipline them. But, of course, the exact opposite has happened. If you look at the overall picture, there in the heads of the European Central Bank, you now have a Spaniard, a Greek, an Italian, a German, a Frenchman. You’re overwhelmed by highly inflationary countries and their functionaries determining now the policy of the European Central Bank. So my view on this: I disagree with Huerta de Soto on many, many things, but I do not agree with him on that one. The purpose of money is to be the most easily salable good of all goods, to facilitate trade and reduce transaction costs to the utmost. But this one currency that exists must be out of the hands of government, and this is precisely what the gold standard did. The gold standard was destroyed by governments because it did not allow them to inflate as they like to inflate. If you have fiat currencies, then I think competition is good because it forces countries that are more inflationary to look at countries that are less inflationary, and they have to reduce their willingness to print more money because they know people will go from currencies that are more inflationary to currencies that are less inflationary. So under fiat money regimes, it is good to have competition between different currencies, but that is, in a way, contradictory to the idea of money. So you are in a system of partial barter. I think Rahim mentioned that briefly because he quoted me. You want government out of it. If it is in there, then competition is indeed a good thing because it curtails the power of each individual central bank to do whatever they please. I’ve said more, and I don’t want to monopolize this.

[9:07] DF: I’m not sure the rest of us need to be up here, but I’m probably saying that too early. In the form of your question, you said after the Roman Empire collapsed, that anarchy broke out. Isn’t that what you said? Is that what we’re after?

[9:31] Unknown Speaker (Audience): Well, by anarchy, I mean regions that were defenseless, that had no way of—there was no coalition of states or whatever, no coalition of qualities that was capable of defending itself against invaders: Visigoths, Swabians, Ostrogoths, the Franks. These groups were very fragmented. My question was, if this happens in Europe now, then it would render you very vulnerable to the United States, which at the moment is becoming stronger and stronger despite all the instabilities. So anarchy might break out again, and that would be a bad thing for Europe.

[10:17] DF: Okay, so you are on record as opposed to the rest of this crowd that anarchy breaking out would be a bad thing.

[10:34] DF: I consider myself—okay, sorry, do you have a comment on that, Professor?

[10:47] HHH: As I said, you have to also see what the American army looks like in the meantime. The American army—they let the Ukrainians do the fighting for a reason. The American army is just a laughingstock. They have great military equipment, might be, but in terms of the personnel that they have, I think affirmative action has taken over the American army too. They also have tanks that can be manned by pregnant women and make sure that they are able to operate tanks despite all the problems that women, as compared to men, have when it comes to things like this. No, I think the American army will not attack the European countries. After all, there are also mighty European countries like France that have atomic weapons. The French people would certainly resist an invasion by the Americans. I think Switzerland and Liechtenstein would also resist an invasion by the Americans. You have to have public opinion in your favor. There’s no public opinion in the United States in favor of occupying European countries.

[12:25] Unknown Speaker (Audience): This question is mostly for Professor Hoppe. You’ve made what many of us perceive as a lot of very important contributions to libertarianism, such as argumentation ethics, Austrian class analysis, the critique of democracy—contributions that have helped bring people to libertarianism and helped libertarians get libertarianism right, so to speak. Kinsella has also brought about his contributions in IP, and of course, before you, Rothbard and Mises made their contributions. So, going forward with the next generation, are there any areas that you would love to see new contributions in, areas that might be underdeveloped in libertarianism where you would love to see new ideas come about and see libertarianism brought forward to the future?

[13:18] HHH: I think Stephan Kinsella has brought libertarianism ahead quite a bit. If you read my preface to his big book, I hail him as being the most important legal theorist of his generation. You will find a tremendous wealth of additional things in his big fat book. As you heard before, there are many, many big fat books coming along in the next few years if he holds up his promise. Stephan, can you say something about this?

[14:04] SK: I have thought about this before, about what fields need to be developed. [Areas That Need Development from Libertarian Thinkers.] Most of the ones I have in mind are fairly esoteric. A lot of them are pragmatic, like strategy, because we’ve tried so many strategies over the years. By the way, someone told me they misunderstood—my new IP book will not be a thousand pages; it’s probably a hundred pages, so it will be a nice slim synthesis. That may be something to write about, like areas for future research to give people suggestions for what they could work on next. But I’m about out myself.

[14:50] HHH: I think there’s nothing wrong—in mathematics, you also have very, very slow progress, if at all. In disciplines like logic, you have very slow progress, if any at all. There are some disciplines different than other disciplines. In the natural sciences, there might be continuous progress taking place. In medicine, I hope there will be major progress taking place.

As far as economics is concerned, I think there is not much beyond what Mises and Rothbard have done that can be done. We should be just happy that we still know what they have written, that we can recapitulate it ourselves, that we preserve our culture and our knowledge. That is sometimes the only thing that we can do, and we should be happy that those things are not simply forgotten. The ruling elites want us to not read these books, not learn these things. Every generation has to relearn a large amount of things from people who lived before them.

As we heard from the IQ talk, this is even more important now as the general IQ is going down. The few people who still have a high IQ have an even greater responsibility now to make sure that those things that already exist will not be forgotten and unlearned but kept alive. If somebody comes up with something great, I would be surprised, but I’ve seen at Mises Institute conferences where sometimes people do something new. I laughed about it—I didn’t see that there was anything new; it was just new confusion that they spread.

So, learn what is there, recapitulate it, and spread these things to other people. Don’t always strive for innovation. That happens once in a while, that somebody innovates something in these disciplines. There are disciplines where innovations take place from day to day, but not in logic, not in mathematics, not in praxeology. There are very minor refinements that can take place, but not much more.

[17:49] DF: They say in finance that knowledge is not cumulative; it’s cyclical. That gets proved over and over again as we go through one boom and bust after another.

I would say for Austrians in the crowd that are interested in finance, Murray Rothbard wrote a wonderful book called The Mystery of Banking. But at this stage, that needs to be expanded upon considerably to take into account the shadow banking, the expansion of the Fed, the expansion of the Treasury, and the various programs that have been layered one on top of the other. As these programs get instituted in each subsequent emergency, they never go away. So, Murray’s book, while very valuable—another of his books is What Has Government Done to Our Money? or In Defense of the 100% Gold Dollar—again, very valuable and something that students would never be taught anywhere else. But a book on the entire system, how it works, and the exponential growth of the Federal Reserve and its powers and influences is what should be done. I would hope that it would be done by some student at the Mises Institute or somewhere else, but that is sorely needed in terms of being sorted out.

[19:54] Unknown Speaker (Audience): My question is for Olivier Richard. I saw that in your references, you had Edward Dutton a lot. He has a very jolly YouTube channel that goes into details on IQ. What he actually proposes is that IQ didn’t peak just a few decades ago but that it actually peaked in the late 1800s. The data that he provides for this is not just IQ tests but also other pieces of data, such as major per capita innovations, reaction times which were measured back then, which also strongly correlate with IQ, and the usage of complicated words in text. If you analyze this, then the IQ roughly peaked around 1880 or something like that, which is much earlier than what you have presented. The rationale provided there, how this could possibly be, is that IQ tests oversample the part of IQ which can be taught. One example that is brought is that, for example, the statement, “There are no camels in Germany, Berlin is in Germany,” and then the question, “Does Berlin have any camels?” Many people from a hundred years ago would answer, “I’ve never been to Berlin, I don’t know if there are any camels,” even though they had this three-chain of arguments. Now in school, you learn these logical chains very easily. So, do you agree with his assessment with a very different timeline regarding IQ decline, or do you think there’s a flaw in that reasoning?

[21:53] OR: I’m not familiar with this channel. Obviously, I’m familiar with his name, but only insofar as he co-authored many papers with Richard Lynn, which I had to read in order to put the presentation together, especially on the sort of anti-Flynn kind of side of things. Richard actually was in this sort of conversation with James Flynn about how to name the Flynn effect. I somewhat quickly said that Richard had written an ’82 paper that should have really given him the name, but Richard was a very modest man. So what he did is he looked at all the people prior to 1982 who had observed what we now call the Flynn effect—that is, a rising IQ. I think the first one he got was from 1930. I don’t remember exactly; I didn’t include it in my study. But let’s assume the sample size is, you know, maybe until World War I. So, I think there’s considerable evidence that after the IQ test was invented in 1905, after it was adapted to English by Lewis Terman at Stanford in 1916, from then onwards, all the revisions have been upwards from that point onwards. But I do agree with you, or with Edward Dutton, that correlates to IQ—reaction time is definitely a good one. Another one, which may or may not be feasible, is the size of the brain. For that, you need three-dimensional tomography or whatever it’s called because you can’t just measure the circumference because the brain is shaped in a very strange way—well, the skull is shaped in a very strange way. So it’s possible. My gut instinct, in the absence of better data and certainly in the absence of having seen the videos that you’re referring to, would be that possibly the smart fraction in 1880 was very intelligent, and then a lot of the people who were not intelligent, who were dragging down the average, were malnourished, essentially—the poor. That would probably explain what I know because I’ve read things written by people in the 1880s, seen the tests they had at Oxford and Cambridge, and they’re extremely impressive. So maybe that’s the way I would reconcile it, but I cannot really say much more given the fact that the IQ test was only invented in 1905.

[24:40] Unknown Speaker (Audience): My question is to all the speakers. I might be mistaken in my observations, but if I look at the United States or the European continents, what I see currently is great economic mayhem that they won’t be able to clean up that easily—between green communism, socialism, drugs, inept governments. Everybody out there, even the normal Joe, is able to see something has gone wrong. Every day, his shopping basket is costing him more while he doesn’t have more. The systems are going down—healthcare and everything. So something has gone wrong, but there is no mention of libertarianism or Austrian economics even as a viable alternative. People feel this is wrong, but when you say, “What is the solution?” so few people are exposed. Even in some of the top Ivy League universities, when you say you’re a libertarian, they’re like, “Oh, you believe in that fringe economic theory.” So, what do you think can be done by the Mises Institute or by other people like us to get this as a possible alternative? In the end, I believe everybody is logical about their own pocket. If you say, “This is what’s been wrong, and here, look, there’s a theory; this might get your pocket to be better,” I think at least the exposure would increase.

[26:33] HHH: All of education has been essentially taken over by the state. That also applies to the private universities. The private universities are almost as much dependent on the state as the state universities. All their research grants and so forth are governmental grants, and the government, the state, realizes that the Austrian School is their main enemy. They have to be destroyed. Look, Mises did not acquire a paying job at any elite university in the United States. He had to be paid by outside supporters, even though at that time, at least as far as Europe was concerned, he was one of the most famous economists, and many people now agree that he was the greatest economist ever. He could not get a paying job in the United States. Even Hayek, who is a moderate guy—very moderate; he could live with a Swedish welfare state—even Hayek could not get a paying job in the United States. The University of Chicago had to be paid by the same group of businessmen who also paid Ludwig von Mises’s salary. He returned from the United States back to Germany because the University of Chicago refused to pay him a pension, and because he knew Ludwig Erhard in Germany as some sort of friend. Ludwig Erhard, at that time, was either Chancellor or Economics Minister; he finagled for him to get a job at the University of Freiburg, even though he had already passed the age when you can make somebody a tenured person in Germany. Murray Rothbard, with whom I was very close—as far as I’m concerned, he is the brightest man I ever met in my life. The guy was smarter than all Harvard and Yale faculty put together. He couldn’t get a job at any major university. At the end of his life, by luck, he ended up with some sort of endowed chair at a low salary at the University of Nevada. I was happy enough to be taken with him; he took me with him and managed to finagle that I would get a job there at the same university. None of the Austrian economists, especially not the outspoken ones, have any chance to ever land a big job at any leading, so-called leading university in the United States or in any other Western country. By the way, I think Guido Hülsmann, also by accident, by the fact that some strange events had happened, that the committee that selected professors for French universities, for one year, it was possible for him to get a job. I doubt that accidents like that will happen very frequently. Guido, if that was not right, what I said, simply just protest. He’s one of the very few people whose protest I would take seriously, but I think I was right in what I said. The quick answer is no, they don’t want us. They consider us to be their enemy, and nobody gives us any money.

[30:56] Unknown Speaker (Audience): I have three quick questions. For Doug: What are your three favorite financial newsletters? For Olivier: Are you aware of any studies that examine the impact of the dissolution of the family on IQ development? For Stephan: Are you aware of any other area in law that should not exist, such as IP law?

[31:20] OR: Obviously, I’m not Richard Lynn, so he would know. I only know the papers I read in preparation for this. There wasn’t really much talk about that. I think that there’s definitely a clear case for cognitively demanding intellectual stimulation of children to be positively correlated with their ability to realize 100% of their IQ genetic potential. As I said, IQ is 80% heritable from age 18 onwards. It looks to me that a broken family would probably not really fulfill that very much because then the kid is just going to be playing on their iPhone the whole day. That’s the only correlation I can see with the literature I’ve read.

[32:21] SK: There are lots of areas of law that shouldn’t exist because there are types of laws that shouldn’t exist. Maybe the first one, which is interesting to me, would be antitrust law or competition law, as it’s called in Europe. Of course, that’s all invalid as well. Administrative law would not exist if not for a huge bureaucratic state. But maybe more controversially, from a more theoretical point of view, I sometimes think maybe criminal law should not exist, and everything should be restitution-based. It would be based upon criminal law principles, but it would be sort of restitution-based instead of retributive or punitive. But that’s a deeper topic.

[33:07] DF: First of all, my favorite, by far—and I am a paid-up subscriber—is Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, which has been in business for 40 years. The primary writer and proprietor is James Grant. If you haven’t read James Grant, he has many books and is a big fan of the Austrian School. It’s probably in every other newsletter he mentions Austrian work in one way or another. It’s expensive, I will tell you that, but it’s not as big on actionable ideas and hyperbolic pronouncements. A lot of it is economic history. So if you have the time and you’re interested in just great financial writing, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer is a wonderful publication.

Secondly, I also subscribe to what I consider a financial newsletter, even though they are videos online, and it’s called Real Vision. Real Vision follows the same format. It has a free daily that you can get either on X or you can sign up for it. You get long-form, 30-minute interviews that are quite insightful by people who are outside the CNBC typical financial framework.

Then they have a next step, which is called the Essential step—I forgot what they’re charging for that—and then beyond that, if you really want to dive deep into this stuff, they have another level. It’s set up just like a financial newsletter. Raoul Pal is the proprietor of this. He lives very nicely in the Cayman Islands, it sounds like. I find it very useful because it gives a variety of points of view and makes me think, even though I’m listening to somebody that I don’t necessarily agree with. Sometimes, Keynes said that at some point, you don’t judge the merits of individual securities; you try to guess what the public is going to do next. From that kind of newsletter, from Real Vision, I would recommend trying to do that.

I struggle to find a third because it falls off very quickly, but there probably are others out there. I know people who, until his recent death, were dedicated subscribers to Gary North, and who a few of us know. They were very happy with his work. Those are the two that I can think of.

As far as general advice is concerned, somebody like Doug Casey is, of course, useful, but there’s not so much direct financial advice but simply making you aware of the dangers of the world and how you can protect yourself against those dangers. He thinks along the same lines that we think. I had him here a number of years ago too. He has this website, International Man, I think it is called, that is useful to read, but not if you think, “I will become rich and follow his advice.” He advises you just if you want to protect yourself from inflation, investment in gold and gold mines might be a good idea, and things of that nature—very useful but not directly useful on your way to becoming a multimillionaire.

[38:35] Unknown Speaker (Audience): My question was going to be the same as this gentleman’s question over here on IQ and when it peaked. All I would add to that is that the Edward Dutton stuff is very interesting, and I find it very persuasive. I’m convinced Olivier only said that it peaked in 1992 because a lot of people in this room would have been going through school in 1992 and could go home thinking we’re the brightest generation that’s ever existed or will exist. The only additional thing to say is that the name of Edward Dutton’s website could be applied to all of us in this room. He calls himself The Jolly Heretic, which I think we could all do the same.

[39:20] Unknown Speaker (Audience): A short question for Doug: I was curious if you’re going to have a third part of your series and what it might be about. Then a longer question for Dr. Richard: In your presentation, you showed a graph and talked about four different forces on IQ. One of the positive forces was nutrition, and you said that really is only growing better in the developing world right now. Then you also said one of the negative forces was an influx of immigrants from the developing world. So, I’m wondering, that graph that you showed where it goes down, don’t you think it might actually flatten or go up again as those migrants that are coming in are not going to be as stupid in the future?

[39:59] OR: I think what Richard would say to that is that even if the whole third world is super well-nourished and every kid has to be stimulated intellectually at school until age 18 or homeschooled until age 18, even then, they only achieve 100% of their genetic abilities for intellectual quotient. That is lower than the eight countries that I cited. The basic example is the blacks in Africa have tested at lower IQ than the blacks in the US because blacks in the US are forced to go to school until 18 and they are well-fed. Nonetheless, there is still a gap between the whites and the blacks in the US in terms of average IQ, and that was the whole point of the first book I cited, The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray, which obviously was very controversial, but the data is a bit overwhelming. It’s very hard to contradict. So, I think it’s going to help a little bit, but not enough. There’s still a limit to how much they can catch up with us.

[41:36] DF: Did you have a question for me? What was it? If there’s a third part of your series, what would it be? Well, our gracious host here has not signed on to this yet, but yes, I do have a third part planned. It’s already written, and I’ll tell you what it is: it’s the entrepreneurship academic entrepreneurship racket of teaching entrepreneurship, or as I might call it, teaching the unteachable.

I’ve done the work already; I’ve done the paper. Yes, if there is interest in hearing about that, I know that there are plenty of Austrian friends of ours who are making a handsome living at various US universities, but virtually every US university is now adding an entrepreneurship program because young people view entrepreneurship as being rich. They want to be rich; they want to own their own company, and they believe that’s something you can sit in a classroom and learn. History certainly defies that.

So, yes, that would be the third part to the racket series if there is an interest in anyone wanting to hear it.

[43:30] HHH: To these people, I would also say, if you are so smart, why ain’t you rich? No, entrepreneurship cannot be taught. The only thing that economists can do for entrepreneurs is to help them avoid absolutely stupid mistakes. But that’s the most that they can do. If you see the money supply going up all over constantly, and then people expect that prices will fall next year, obviously, they are making a big mistake. But those are the only things that we can tell them.

There are many successful entrepreneurs who are dumb when it comes to passing a microeconomics class with myself, but nonetheless, they are far richer than I am. Obviously, they have skills that I don’t have, and you cannot teach these sorts of skills. If you could teach them, then you could not even explain why there are successful people and unsuccessful people because then there would be some sort of algorithm that you have to follow, and then you will be a successful man. I don’t know anything about these artificial intelligence things so far, but some people think that artificial intelligence will allow us to make successful predictions in terms of the stock market.

I think that is also all nonsense. If that would really be the case, then all people would use the same sort of artificial intelligence and make the same forecast. But if all people make the same forecast, then these people will not be rich because all buy the same stocks. So, artificial intelligence will not help us. They help us to do certain routine things more easily. I think judges will have difficulties keeping their jobs in the same number because artificial intelligence will tell them all the judgments that were made in similar cases. People who write fundraising letters or something like that—there exist probably thousands of fundraising letters, and artificial intelligence will write a nice letter to tell people why they have to donate for this or that instead of employing deep thinkers to write these fundraising letters. Artificial intelligence can probably just turn them out in a minute for any type of purpose for which you want to raise funds. But entrepreneurship cannot be taught.

[46:32] Peter Wong (Lion Rock Institute) (Hong Kong) (Audience): I have some statements to make in response to Doug as well as Dr. Hoppe’s comment on Doug Casey. I try to defend the indefensible regarding newsletters because I’m currently a writer in a financial column. I don’t know whether I should be classified as one of those newsletter producers, and in a way, maybe I’m also selling snake oil.

Personally, I write a financial newspaper column not because I want to teach people how to get rich—firstly, I’m not rich, so I cannot teach people how to be rich. But before I wrote the financial newspaper, I ran a think tank with Nick for a period of time. I tried to get donations from donors and offered the material basically for free regarding free-market teaching. But from my point of view, it didn’t work very well. It’s free material, and not many people care.

But as soon as I put something financial on—what I’m saying is basically the same thing, but I just change the terms with different marketing—people listen to me. I have no intention of making them rich, and I think this is not teachable. Of course, I need to say something, “Oh, this company, based on my knowledge in economics, I think this company runs very well.” I don’t give the timing of when you should buy, I don’t give the entry price, I wouldn’t give at what price you should sell. I just say, “This is a good company because they run it this way. I would love to own the share.” But whether you can make money or not, I have no guarantee.

In the past, I needed to get money from donors, offer the material for free, but as soon as I change the clothes, people pay me to say the same thing. I don’t know the other people in the newsletter industry; maybe they just want to make money, maybe they just want to sell snake oil, I don’t know, but for me, it’s just a market technique to draw eyeballs.

[49:29] HHH: Basically, we agree on this, right? I give financial advice sometimes too. I just think that might be a good idea, or that one, no, I don’t think I would touch that. Everybody does it. I think Josef is in that business also, right? You give advice.

[51:11] JS: We still have time, right? Do we still have time? A little bit.

Audience: Josef, I’m glad you have the microphone because which year and number of the Playboy I have to buy to read the article?

[51:25] JS: Good question. Send me an email; I’ll scan it for you.

[51:43] Unknown Speaker (Audience): On the IQ, I just wanted to make one little premise—maybe you can agree or disagree. We’re talking about means in IQ, right? It’s just averages over a population. It doesn’t really matter whether it goes up or down because, as you said, it was a reflection of migration, nutrition, and education, and so forth. But as long as smart males hook up with smart females, smart people will still exist, unless smart males start to procreate with low-intelligence women, making it much more average, and then that would be a problem. But as long as we keep—I mean, not we, that’s just all I’m saying—is that I’m not really afraid of seeing these curves, the migration. As long as these low-IQ people have children, and then we high-IQ people also have children, then I don’t see it as a problem.

[53:09] OR: Basically, the question is not whether smart people will still exist—it’s a bell curve, so literally, if you go on the right tail, you’re going to have some people there. The question is how many, and that is kind of the problem. You mentioned three factors in your question, and there was a fourth factor which I mentioned, which was called dysgenic fertility. There’s ample evidence that the smart men who marry smart women have fewer children than the dumb men who marry dumb women. So that means that this right side of the bell curve is getting thinner, and that is a bit of a problem. If you extrapolate to the mean, if the mean goes down sufficiently, the first thing to break down will be indoor plumbing. You won’t be able to flush your toilet just because the infrastructure needed to do that has a lot of engineers and qualified people in the middle of the bell curve to keep it running. So, you may need a big garden to go to the toilet.

[54:38] HHH: As a criticism of Richard Lynn’s book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, some people—not so much a criticism, but more that he did not emphasize enough that it is even more important—is a smart fraction of the population that must exist in order for a country to develop. If it’s small, I think—I have not personally studied this; I only read some of these things—they said you at least have to have 15% of the population that have to be well above 100, or something like that. That is absolutely necessary in order to have some sort of developing country going on, even if the rest of the population is rather lousy.

But of course, what Olivier just mentioned, there is a division of labor in society, and in developed countries, there’s a huge division of labor. Even if the smartest people would have to do plumbing, and they have not been trained to do plumbing, even brain surgeons might not be able to fix the plumbing defect that has occurred. So, you need these people too in order to make it possible for the very smart ones to do their very smart work.

Every person can somehow participate in the division of labor; even people with very low skills are useful for certain activities. What the welfare state does, however, is ruin even those people that do menial work by allowing them not even to get training in these menial activities that are just as important for a comfortable life as some of the top achievements that some of the top people do. Just see at your home if the water pipes break, and your house is getting flooded—what do you do in such a case? You need certain people that are maybe not the brightest people, but what they do for society is very important.

Everyone has a place in society, and we should just avoid that people can linger around, do absolutely nothing, and be paid for this. This is, of course, what the welfare state does. The point that you made, that smart people have fewer kids and dumb people have more kids, is, of course, promoted by the welfare state. You get paid for doing nothing and producing kids. So, if you do that, yes, that will end in disaster.

[58:16] Unknown Speaker (Audience): I have a second premise for Dr. Kinsella, but I will start by introducing it by coming back on something that Professor Hoppe said on taxes. My premise is that there are always multiple arguments to make a point. For taxes, you could say, for example, well, taxes, especially income tax, are basically disincentivizing working—that’s an argument. But the other argument is that taxes are basically theft, and that’s a moral argument. Even if taxes were somehow positive, the moral argument that taxes are in violation of property rights trumps all other arguments that may exist.

So, for Dr. Kinsella’s argument against intellectual property, I haven’t read your book yet, but everybody says it’s very thick, so I read your first book, which was very thin. The main gist of it, at least in my understanding, was that intellectual property is basically immoral because it goes against the rights of everyone to use an idea, which doesn’t harm anyone, so it’s within your right to do so. All other arguments—maybe that’s why the book is thick because you have a thousand other arguments—but do they really matter when that first argument is almost the most important one or the only important one?

[1:00:00] SK: I get it. I focus primarily on the rights issue, which you’re calling moral. Fundamentally, you have the right to do anything as long as you’re not using someone else’s resource without their permission. This is why I mentioned that one of the three property rules is rectification—if you commit a tort or aggression, then you might owe someone some money. But fundamentally, by using an idea that I got from the public, that was publicly available somehow—like if someone sells a new car or a new invention that has a unique idea in it, and I see that, this guy is giving me the information—so if I use that information, I am not trespassing against his resources. I’m not going into his factory, I’m not going into his home, I’m not breaking into his computer. So, I’ve not committed a tort, so there’s no justification to take property from me.

Now, the taxation thing—I think Rothbard has this classification schema; I think you would call that either autarchic or binary intervention, where the government just takes money from you by coercing you to pay it for taxes. But in the patent case, it’s more of a triangular intervention where they’re basically letting one of their subjects take money from another one of their subjects, and then they get a cut from patent office fees and things like that. When in the past I have countered the utilitarian arguments by pointing out that even by their own logic, by the utilitarian logic that patents benefit society—I don’t accept that’s the standard anyway—people criticize me for even answering them because they say I’m buying into utilitarianism. I said, well, I’m just trying to tell them that they’re wrong even on their own terms. But even if they were right on their own terms, I would still oppose patents. So, you’re right.

[1:01:53] DF: I think we have reached the time to stop.

[1:01:58] [Applause]