[Speaker 1]

Professor Bieland, you have 15 minutes for your opening statement. You may start when you wish. All right, thank you. So I will not argue for capitalism. The reason is not that Android did such a good job and convinced me, but rather that it's just such a confusing term. To the leftists, it's about privilege, usually sanctioned by the government or the state. To those on the right, it's usually to be pro-business, using taxpayers' money to prop up businesses.

So I stay away from that term, and I think it was even coined by Marx. Instead, I will talk about the free market, because I think that is what society is about if we are truly free. I see no difference between the market and society. Those are two sides of the same coin. So when I talk about the free market, don't think of me as Donald Trump or some other Republican. That's not what I mean by a free market. That would be the pro-business type of market.

I'm not that kind. I'm talking about complete freedom, complete voluntarist society. where we choose ourselves because if we want to exchange with some other, we do it because we're better off doing so. There are no arbitrary limitations to our actions. That's a very, very brief summary or explanation for what the free market means. There are no regulations. It's purely voluntary.

Now, in this country, since we're in Sweden, talking, Republicans and others would probably talk about this as a mixed economy. Of course, that's a little ridiculous from my perspective. Mixed, sure, but in a country where 50% of what we're producing is expropriated by the states. In an already regulated market, I wouldn't call that a mix between free market and state. I would call that States. That's basically it. Okay, so keep that in mind when I talk about free market.

I talk about free people, free individuals, and nothing else. And I'm starting from the beginning. Professor Kleinman's argumentation about wage slavery basically starts halfway. I will start with just property. Now the case for libertarianism is really a moral one. It's a case that is based on a principle about non-aggression. A principle about non-aggression. I have no right to impose physical violence on Professor Kleinman, whether I like it or not.

And I also have no right to threaten such force. That is libertarianism in a nutshell. That is the free market in a nutshell. I'm free and can contract with whomever I like, whenever I like, basically in whatever terms I like as well. This means that libertarianism is a minimalist ideology. It's an ideology that you can fill with whatever practice you want, and whatever practice you like.

It's a live and let live type of ideology. In a libertarian society. You can have your Marxist commune, that's no big deal. The question is, in the Marxist society, can you have your libertarian commune? If the answer is no, well, then I can stop right there because I win on knockout. So what this really means, if we're truly free and individuals, that means that there is no blueprint. We cannot say that this society should.

This is what society should be like. Society should be structured exactly this way. We cannot we cannot show an architecture or a structure for what society must be like in order to be just. because I don't have that power. You don't have that power. Sophia doesn't have that power. Professor Kleinman, that's a good thing, doesn't have that power. So if none of us have that power, we can't really say exactly what's gonna be.

It's really an ideology that talks about the means and not the end. The means are whatever we choose the means are. The means are all voluntary. The end is whatever emerges when we voluntarily interact or choose. not to interact. That is what libertarianism means. Now this means that society is really an open-ended enterprise. It is something that fluctuates, that changes all the time, and we can't really say at any point whether we're in the right place or the wrong place.

What we can do is simply act. in whatever way we find moral or ethical. But it means we cannot guarantee anything. We cannot guarantee schooling for everybody or education for everybody. We cannot guarantee that no one ever is poor. But we can also say that no one is ever forced. Because that's the principle we live by and that's the principle that we will enforce. Voluntarily, of course. Now, libertarianism is an ideology where we have no illusions about man.

It's not an ideology where we have this utopia, and whenever we get there, people will change. They will behave differently. We'll see the rise of a new socialist man, some people claim, on the socialist side, that is. We claim nothing of that kind because we treat people just like they are. And we recognize that people are different. Some are egotistical, narcissistic assholes.

They are going to exist in a utopia as well. The question is, what does society do with those people and how do they affect our lives? Because obviously, since we're in here, we're not those people. But we don't like them. So how can we deal with those people? Well, the answer is market. And the reason the answer is market is voluntary exchange. You can be so much better off if you produce for others rather than just for yourself.

Which means... that we focus our efforts, it means that we need to trade, we need to exchange with others in order to actually live up to that potential. Now in exchange, both parties are better off, just like Professor Kleinman mentioned. Now if the starting point is an oppressive one, It still doesn't change the fact that in exchange you're both better off. Because otherwise you wouldn't choose to go through with it.

If the starting point is horrendous, well you're still better off doing it. Or you wouldn't choose to do it. It's that easy. You always have a choice not to do it. The question then, of course, is what is a just starting point? And I totally agree with Professor Kleinman there that it should be a just starting point. Now, what happens if we exchange and we're both better off? If Professor Kleinman has something I want more than he wants it, and I have something that Professor Kleinman wants, and he wants it more than I want it, well, then we just exchange stuff and of course we're both better off doing so.

Or another way of thinking about this is, If I'm a baker and I have a hammer, and Professor Kleinman is a builder and he has flour, we would be better off exchanging those things so that the builder has the hammer and the baker has the flour. Of course, this also means that the output increases. This also means that the rest of society is better off, if, of course, the starting point is a just one.

Now, this is important because in a free society we exchange... and we produce value, we produce to satisfy others, this is how we keep the narcissistic, egotistical assholes in check. Because if we produce and focus our production on something we know that others want, it is in my interest to serve others. And that is how a totally free market works.

I produce not to satisfy my own needs, But indirectly I do, because I produce what I know, what all of you need. And I sell it to you, so that I get the means to satisfy my own ends. Now, this means you create value through production, but it also means that the value is realized through consumption. It is through consuming a certain thing that we satisfy a need. It is through consuming something, whether it's a service or a good or whatever it is, it is through consuming this that we are better off.

This is also why we exchange. Now, I write about this in The Seen, The Unseen and The Unrealized in terms of Smith, Ricardo and Schumpeter. And the reason I combine all of those people is that Adam Smith is known for talking about the invisible hand or fist, depending on who you ask. And, according to two of you in here, the invisible hand, but he's also talking about the division of labour, something that Marx started with, and most economists in the 19th century started with.

Simple because specialising means that you're so much more productive. Now Adam Smith talked about the pin factory in which different workers do different things, and there are lots of different things. like 19 operations or something like that necessary in order to produce a pin. And he shows in this example that by splitting those tasks between us, all 19 of us, we can produce something like between 2,300 and 4,600% more pins.

Now, since we produce a lot more pins, this means we can satisfy a lot more wants for pins. Obviously, we're all better off if we specialize, but it's also the case, as Ricardo talked about, that we're not exactly the same. Adam Smith talked about how he used very manual... not very advanced labor at all, and still he got these outcomes. David Ricardo talks about, since we're different, we should do what we're, relatively speaking, best at.

Which means we will always increase the output, the outcome, the consumption, the satisfaction of needs, if we do what we're relatively better at. Combine those two, and people are in the right place within specialization and division of labor. add to that Schumpeter and you have innovation as well, then you have the production of new capital that can make labor more productive.

This is what capital is. It's really tools, machines, that help laborers produce even more output. And that's where we want to be, because then we can satisfy a lot more wants. And this is how we satisfy consumption needs and how we create value. Now where does this lead us? Well, it necessarily leads us to entrepreneurship, which is my field of study. Now in entrepreneurship, imagine this open-ended enterprise that is society.

What is entrepreneurship? Well, it is production, but production of what? It is very easy if we here adopt a model of society where everything is fixed. nothing changes much, we know exactly what resources there are, so we can just reallocate them. Well, that's not true, because in an open society, nothing is instantaneous, production certainly isn't. A new carbon model takes about 10 years to develop. So any type of production is very uncertain, simply because we aim for needs that have not really been realized just yet.

So people's preferences are volatile, people's needs are personal and subjective. They're even contextual. Steve Jobs mentioned once that sometimes consumers don't know what they want until they see it. Well, this is a task of the entrepreneur to produce these things that consumers will want, to satisfy the needs that will emerge.

In such a society, it's very, very difficult to redistribute wealth, to redistribute the means of production, because you don't know to what end. The only way of doing this is through decentralized decision-making through entrepreneurship, because that is how you aggregate all of the people's wishes and all the people's imaginations of what might be.

That's the only way we can combine the local knowledge of everybody and all their guesses. and figure out how to best use the resources and create new ones. We should not forget that. We create new resources all the time. It's not a matter of some people accumulating capital and then everybody else is left without. It's a matter of how we create more capital. That is the true question here.

Do we create more or not? And in a market, we do create more, a lot more and very quickly as well. Two minutes left. All right. Now, the non-aggression principle of libertarianism. is compatible with many different views of what property is. I myself am a soft proprietarian, which means I'm not a neo-Lockean in any sense of the word. Instead, I think that just property is acquired through use of that which is unused.

And it's a use claim that happens where there is no challenge or objection to that claim. Now... Whether this is important or not depends on Professor Kleinman's comments on what I'm saying right now. But we should realize that property in some form or another is necessary in an open enterprise society as the free market.

It is necessary in a society where capital overall is expanding, where we are increasing our prosperity as time goes by and as we work and engage in work. And in this society, also we should recognize that loss is probably more important than profit. Profit is the big motivator, the driving force of the market, yes. But loss is what moderates it, loss is what tempers it, loss is what keeps those very narcissistic, very focused and sort of hotheads.

out of business. Without loss, we would see no focus of capital in the hands of those who are most able, which is necessarily a problem. With loss, we would have people lose capital if they're doing a bad job rather immediately, whereas the capital will be redirected through market prices to those who do a lot better job. Now, the market is not efficient.

It is a messy, an approximate enterprise. But the reason for that is that it's an open-ended enterprise. Society doesn't have a goal. It doesn't have an end. So we can't really say. But the market is unbeatable because it includes everybody. And everybody has their say. A no buy is as important as loss. Time. All right, thank you. Thank you.