[Speaker 1]

Each speaker will now be given 10 minutes for responses. Professor Kleiman, you may start when you wish.

[Speaker 2]

Okay, just sit back for a minute and then I'll start. Yeah, sure, why not? The one question that I think I can respond to um is Can you have your libertarian commune in a Marxist society? I would never call a society a Marxist society. It's not a society that runs according to the vision of some dead guy.

That's a misnomer. But let's talk about a communal society with individual property, but not private property, where people freely associate. Socialism. Can you have a libertarian? and on Twitter.

There's no problem. You do your thing, we do our thing. What's the problem? And if you remember, I even concluded by saying you want to advocate in a system where people do have individual property, that they relinquish that and sell themselves to the highest bidder or whatever. You want to advocate for that, that's fine.

But if you want to have a different society, you go establish a different society. You go pick berries. I think this is actually completely wrong.

What I'm saying I think is completely consonant with the ethics of libertarianism as I understand it. You do your thing, we do our thing. You don't want to be part of our society? You're not part of our society. You go establish your own society. I don't see the problem there. And free speech within our society? Yeah, I don't see any problem with that either. I'm all for that. I mean, I think free speech is really important.

I do think that social change leads to changes in the way people think and behave and so forth but I'm not making anything... you know, I think we can have socialism right now with people the way they are. You know, some are assholes, some are, you know, dicks, some are okay, some are good, I mean, yeah. Okay, so I don't think it's the case that we have to totally transform the nature of human beings, you know, before we can have a just society.

I think what we need to do is, as I said, return to a situation in which the great mass of people have individual property, you know, and don't have to basically turn themselves into a kind of slave, a wage slave, you know, year after year after year, generation after generation after generation.

Okay, now as I understand it, what Professor Beeland and I said about exchange, voluntary transactions, is exactly the same, only he... made it sound good but i don't i don't think we have any any disagreement okay uh... yeah you're a little bit better off after the after the exchange the one who you were you were before you know so you have to sell your house for five thousand dollars so that you don't starve okay so now you have the five thousand dollars you don't start but you're homeless you did it so obviously you benefit from that i mean you know That's the nature in which voluntary exchange always has to be good.

However, you still can't say that voluntary exchange between two individuals is always good for society as a whole. If you're trying to do a social ethics here, you can't say it because they're third parties. These third parties may be hurt by your voluntary transaction. In their own subjective estimation, if we believe in subjective preferences, a lot of people do not like exchange societies.

That means that a lot of us are hurt by your market transactions. How do I know this? I look at the news. You look at the anti-globalization movement. You look at the protests against trade deals and so forth. There are a lot of people who don't like this. So if you want to respect the subjective preferences and their expression in these kinds of actions, then you're dealing with a situation in which you're actually advocating some people be better off and some people be worse off.

I don't see anything else that I could respond to here. It was a bit abstract. I don't mean that as a derogatory comment, but because it was kind of like at a high level of abstraction, I just, I don't relate to these kinds of questions that way. So it's about all I can say.

[Speaker 1]

Yep.