OA22: Libertarianism is Bad and You Should Feel Bad

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:01:18 Thomas: Hello everyone, just before we get to today's episode, I just want to point out the obvious, that this was recorded before the world ended, so apologies that it's a little off topic, but it is a great episode, maybe it'll cheer you up in times like these, but I'm sure Andrew and I will have something for you related to the election I'm guessing soon, so with that said, maybe a little nice diversion from what you're likely going through right now. Here it is. Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. How you doing, Andrew?

0:01:50 Andrew: I'm great, Thomas. How are you?

0:01:51 Thomas: I'm doing great. We've I got our first question of the day.

0:01:56 Clip: He who questions training, only trains himself at asking questions. What?

0:02:04 Thomas: Anonymous listener at, no, nevermind. I'm going to pretend I asked this because we can't, let's let's face it, but uh, listener Thomas S asks, what is jurisprudence?

0:02:17 Andrew: Yeah. And this is a question that has come up a couple of times because it's a word I tend to use. I think we I think I used it fairly extensively in our You Be the Supreme Court episode, series of episodes.

0:02:29 Thomas: I'm gonna laugh so hard if it's another term where you're like, well, it turns out there is no definition, we just kind of, what if all of law is actually that lawyers just BS us all the time, like it's, well, no one's ever defined it properly, it means, it's more of a feeling

0:02:39 Andrew: Let me say, I got a number of folks who sent me messages after Opening Arguments 19 in which I did not define what it technically means to have a burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And I got three or four people who sent me messages saying, "Thank you for defining that."

0:03:05 Thomas: Yelling.

0:03:06 Andrew: So what is

0:03:07 Thomas: Yeah, see, it works. This BS lawyer thing totally works. People just think you use words like jurisprudence and they're like, he knows what he's talking about.

0:03:16 Andrew: Jurisprudence? Put simply, jurisprudence is your philosophy of law, of what it means, particularly at the Supreme Court level, to rationalize and understand what legal terms mean, right? And so this is something that has gone through, right, there are a number of different philosophical schools. I'm not going to get into any of those because they could be a show in and of themselves and maybe will be someday. But I talk about what I think, what I would call a sort of modified realism school of jurisprudence. And there have been a number of elements that a lot of our listeners can infer from how I talk about the way in which judges think what the law is.

0:04:04 Andrew: Right. So how you approach. So it's a meta question that you're you're just your jurisprudential philosophy determines how you answer the question. What is the law in any given case?

0:04:14 Thomas: Is this something that's going to be strongly affected by where you went to law school, who your professor was, and that kind of, is it kind of a clicky type thing or no?

0:04:22 Andrew: No. No, not at all. I mean, this is something that is, again, I've made the analogy. We both met Bart Ehrman at the Myth Information Conference a couple of weeks ago, I've made the analogy to what Bart Ehrman is doing in biblical scholarship. So, this method of jurisprudence that I'm about to articulate is taught at every law school from the very bottom all the way up to the very top, which is, of course, my alma mater, Harvard Law School. And it is a view shared by, I'm going to say, 90% of judges, of people who practice law, of people on any end of the political spectrum. And basically, it goes something like this. So I say modified realism. The realist school of jurisprudence first gained popularity in the 1930s and basically pushed back against earlier theories that said that there is this kind of philosophical ideal or, you know, Platonic form of what the law is. And the judge's role was to find that. Right. And and

0:04:23 Thomas: No. Okay. Oh, yeah. Oh

0:05:30 Andrew: That, you know, when you read 19th century cases, that philosophy really held a lot of sway. And so you would see judges, you quoting from Aristotelian philosophy or, you know, sort of more abstract points in it, yeah, in an effort to you know kind of get at this, yeah.

0:05:44 Thomas: Wow. They're talking about Plato's forms or something like in order to

0:05:49 Andrew: Yeah. Um, and in the 1930s, um, the the realist school basically said law is what judges and lawyers make of it, right? There is no abstraction, uh, but, uh, but law is sort of what lawyers do. And in particular, I was thinking about this when we were talking in You Be the Supreme Court about tailoring legal briefs to individual judges, right? Legal realist innovation, right, to say, right.

0:05:49 Thomas: Wow, yeah. Yeah. Right.

0:06:19 Thomas: In contrast that was sort of my, uh, naive thought, which was like, well, the lawyers are just going to write whatever the law is, and then that would be fine, but yeah, that makes more sense when you explained it to me at the time. Like, oh no, of course there's humans involved, they're going to kind of form it how, how they want to use it and how they see fit.

0:06:29 Andrew: Yeah, you've got to persuade real human beings. And so that that element of legal realism to this day and says, know your audience, right? Know the types of arguments that you are making. That's, you know, part of the framework. And then from there, some of the critiques of the first realist movement is an idea that it was, you know sort of totally, that legal realism was totally untethered from any kind of fixed guidance points, right? Like, you know, you can go too far in saying, you know, law is just whatever the lawyers make of it, right. Like, well, is, you know, don't we have certain fundamental principles that constrain, you know, what you come up with, right, like, is it when we when we say, as we have in prior discussion on the Second Amendment, when we say, boy, D.C. v. Heller really seems to be wrongly decided, or more more critically, seems to be an activist decision.

0:07:39 Andrew: When you use those terms, when you say a case has been wrongly decided by the court or is an activist's decision, you are making a statement by implication. You're saying, no, if you'd followed kind of mainstream jurisprudence, you would have come out the other way. And so what is mainstream juris prudence? In my view, it is this. It recognizes that the fundamental constitutional terms, When they are set out as phrases are meant to embody a kind of moral principle. I take this from Ronald Dworkin for all of my lawyer fans who are listening to the podcast, who is probably the most influential legal theorist in American law in the 20th century. But so things like due process of law are meant to carry with it principle.

0:08:28 Andrew: And then that principle is applied over time through case law, each of which builds on the prior case that comes before it. Those cases are determined by real judges who, you know, may have their biases and you may look back and say, OK, this case seems to have overreached a little bit. Let's, you know, try and rein it in. Let's try and curtail it. But but in general, there is a respect for stare decisis, which is to say, once a case has been settled on that point, on those facts that you are loath as a Supreme Court justice to overturn that unless, you know, there's sort of a true crisis point where you go back and say, no, you know what?

0:09:13 Andrew: There's no way to fit this into our existing legal framework. This is just, we just made a mistake, right? And we've talked about a couple of those kind of landmark cases that have gone back and overturned prior cases because there was no way, way to make things compatible, right? So we talked about like the Gideon versus Wainwright decision, which says that part of that moral enunciation of the right to an attorney is the right to a state-sponsored attorney if your life or liberty is at stake, if you can't afford one, right, because saying theoretically you have the right to be represented by counsel doesn't do you a lot of good when you're in court.

0:09:53 Thomas: Right.

0:09:53 Andrew: Um, and that I think is, um, really the the the long and short of it. Right.

0:09:57 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. There are so many parallels that probably not appropriate for this show that, but, but like, I think of it so much like how people think of morality and there's like this naive view that if you don't have some firm and to draw the analogy, like some firm Platonic ideal of what the law is, then anything goes, you know? And, and the same way that people say, if you don't have, you know, like a deity telling you what to do, then anything goes. And then the reality is, well, no, not exactly. I mean, we can do our best to kind of form these systems and to be as consistent as we can and recognize that mistakes are made. But also there's sort of a principle behind the law that we can try to apply. I like it. It's a much more nuanced view than it sounds like there used used to be in jurisprudence.

0:09:59 Andrew: Um, right. Right. Well, and that's Yeah.

0:10:46 Andrew: And I, and I think that you've hit on, you know, we've, we've done a number of shows criticizing former Justice Scalia, but that argument, right, the if you don't go with my way of judicial, judicial analysis, then you're just making it up is, you know, the argument that's at the core of what Scalia did while he was on the court, that, you know, I think is erroneous. And I think it's a really good parallel to the morality discussions that you've just brought up, right? That it's a false dichotomy in morality as well to say, you Now, anything that is not a command-driven morality system has no fixed point. Well, that's not true at all.

0:11:28 Andrew: And, and the same thing I think is true in majority jurisprudence and, you know, what I would call sort of the standard model here, uh, which is, um, just because there are, uh—just because there's no one correct definition out there doesn't mean that we're talking about something where, you anything goes. And I think

0:11:20 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting.

0:11:52 Andrew: That's a really good parallel. And the reason I wanted to tackle this question in our A segment today before getting into our main topic is because of this role of judges' analysis in jurisprudence, it means that philosophical concepts still play really an important role in shaping how judges view the law going forward. And a really, really good example of this is, you know, the movement on ownership as an individual right, which, you know, longstanding listeners know was only formally recognized in the D.C. versus Heller case, which, which is less than a decade old, but was driven by philosophical and historical arguments in law review journals that lawyers and judges were reading.

0:12:44 Andrew: And those arguments percolated their way up to the first Supreme Court case that, you know, was really on the facts. And that no doubt influenced some of the judges who voted with the majority in that case came to those conclusions. So that's the role I think that philosophy has in contemporary jurisprudence.

0:13:08 Thomas: Interesting, well thanks for taking us through that.

0:13:15 Thomas: Okay, time for our main topic for the day. Now, I'm laughing because throughout the course of recording this show, you have made references to your dislike for libertarianism, and you may have have done so on my show, Atheistically Speaking, a little bit as well. And I laugh every time, but I also know there are a lot of people who are probably not going to be laughing so much. But I'm glad we're going to talk about today libertarianism and I think more how it might have started as relates to the founding of the country and the philosophy behind some of the the legal aspects of that. So I'm excited. We'll see how many libertarians Andrew pisses off. Definitely email him, not me. And then we'll go from there.

0:14:05 Andrew: Yeah, and look, I think it is healthy to have a dialogue. So hopefully if there are some hardcore Ayn Rand folks in our audience, and I know there are, write in, tell me I'm wrong, but I don't think I am. So and let me give, let me get kind of a quick disclaimer, right.

This is sort of the Bill Weld disclaimer, which is if you define libertarian as, you know, socially liberal, but economically conservative, conservative, and you know, that's how I'm sort of splitting the difference, um, you, to me, what I think that means is we would look at your, uh, economic conservatism, right, which typically means, you know, no taxes, uh, and we could have an argument about, uh, the social impact of a particular policy, uh, I, you know, and that's fine, but but what I, what I am thinking libertarianism as a, as a philosophy, and as it affects the law, is the view that taxation is theft, right, or the view dat taxation beyond, uh, you know, sort of the bare minimum necessary for, you know, basic defense and fire and police and running the courts or whatever, that, like, the hardcore Ayn Rand, uh, Robert Nozick position, uh, and and the reason is because, um, and Thomas, I'm I'm sure you've had this encounter, like when you have a political discussion with a libertarian who views taxation as a side constraint, then they say, oh, well, this, you know, requires a taxation. And of course, like, that's coercion. And my philosophy says we don't want to have coercion, and so you can't talk about like,

0:15:46 Andrew: Well does this raise or lower the overall tax burden? It's just a tax is something the government ought to be prohibited from doing. It

0:15:54 Thomas: Yeah, Well, like you referenced, there's going to be different levels of libertarian. And one thing that I thought was funny was kind of some of the stuff that went on at the Libertarian convention where they nominated, you now, I'm having an Aleppo moment. What's his name? Where they nominated Gary Johnson.

0:16:09 Andrew: Yeah, Gary Johnson, that's excellent, do

0:16:14 Thomas: Yeah. And it was funny because a lot of people talked about the, I didn't, I couldn't watch it because, I mean, it sounded really boring, but I read a lot lot about the kinds of views that were expressed there. And I think there's a range of it. And, you know, like you said, if there's an view of, you know... In general, you just want less... I don't know... Less taxes or something. That's one thing. But the full... It seems like there's a hardcore element in our country that's full-on no taxes, no government, almost like an anarchic kind of thing. And I'm guessing that's a little more what you're talking about.

0:16:49 Andrew: And the the question, there were a couple different questions that, um, resulted in news coverage from the Libertarian convention, but the one that I think you were thinking about is the question to Gary Johnson as to whether he would support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and he said yes, and the room booed, yeah, no, it was right, and and again, the reason is because there's a view of, I think, this real that really sets up the sort of the core discussion here kind of nicely, right? So so I would say there are two prevailing views about government, right? The first one, by far the majority view of, I think, not just every lawyer and judge in this country, minus a handful, but most people, is the social contract view, right, and this was put forward by a number of different philosophers, including, most famously, and by far the most influential philosopher in U.S. history, and that is John Locke, right?

0:17:06 Thomas: Yeah, that was that was one. Outrage. Lock.

0:17:53 Thomas: Yeah. I was going to guess that.

0:17:54 Andrew: And yeah. And so in his Second Treatise of Government, Locke sort of outlined a hypothetical experiment, right, and this was, it's not clear whether Locke thought there was ever an actual state of nature, but basically he said, okay, imagine that there's no government, right. What would happen? There there would be things that would be pretty bad. Right. And in particular, it would be difficult for people to vindicate their own rights because people have differing abilities to do so.

And people tend to be partial to their own cases and not give enough credit to the rights of others. And the way I always used to explain that was think of any sitcom from the 1960s forward where you have the two neighbors and the and the tree that hangs over the fence between the two neighbor. Right. Like, you know, so you cut down the branch And then you come back and the tree is cut down, and then you come back the next day and the fence is torn down, and you come back the next day, and, you know, their dog has been let out, and, you know, all that, and it escalates to, you know, both houses are in ruins, right?

0:18:54 Andrew: And that's the fundamental they're called lot

0:18:53 Thomas: Yeah, I'll put in the laugh track right there after that and post.

0:18:58 Andrew: Right again This is not this does not even qualify as bad lawyer humor. It's bad. It's bad sitcom writing inciting, but that notion that people cannot properly judge their own case like, they tend to view slights against them as more serious than they are, and they tend to view their own offenses to others as less serious than they are. And so you wind up with a cycle of escalation whereby, you know, one hanging branch results in both houses being burned down. So Locke said, imagine instead then that people agree to give up the enforcement of their rights to a neutral third party, to the the government, and then they turn to it to settle disputes, right? Obviously, I could do a lot more on the social contract, but that's sort of the basic idea, is that regardless of whether there is or not, that there's this thought experiment. And the idea is, boy, we're better off enforcing our rights against one another through an agency like government.

0:19:00 Thomas: Yeah mm-hmm.

0:19:57 Andrew: But because it's not like like, you know, it's not like in the absence of government, you know, we're total monsters. There are limits on what government can do. And those limits are, you know, for Locke, those were our natural rights: life, liberty and property. Counter to this view is a view that says every action of government must be justified by a transfer of it of rights properly held by individuals. And so I think the most popular face of the libertarian movement from a philosophical standpoint is Ayn Rand. But to be honest, the best philosophical work is Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which is a 1976 textbook that really galvanized a lot of libertarians and is, I think, still the primary source of many of their ideas.

0:20:48 Andrew: And And so what Nozick set out to do was justify the move from the state of nature to a government, to what he called the minimal state, that involved not violating anyone's rights. And the idea was, if you couldn't get from point A to point B, then you couldn'T actually...

0:21:13 Thomas: Can't have government.

0:21:14 Andrew: Yeah. Well, then if you couldn't get from point A to point B on a particular thing, then the government had no right to do that thing. Right. And and so the idea is, look, if one if you can't trace back the source, it's not like miraculously getting a bunch of people together generates a right. Right? It is you have to justify it in terms of I have given you X. Okay, now government has X. Okay, so those are sort of the competing theories. Nozick's view of the constraints on government are, I've used the phrase side constraints, but basically it is like the example I used to use prior to the George W. Bush presidency was side constraints are things Things like torture. Right. They are things that no matter how advantageous we think they might be, you cannot you cannot use the mechanism itself.

0:21:23 Thomas: Right.

0:22:09 Andrew: Right? So you might think of them as as, you know, Kantian, you know, norms. In other words, there's no there's no utilitarian benefit that can overcome something that government is prohibited from doing.

0:22:20 Thomas: Right. See I've been waiting to say that actually. I, I was wondering if this is sort of of dependent on like a rights-based form of morality versus sort of a utilitarian thing, which might view this completely differently. Because it sounds like for these assumptions to work, or for that guy who wrote the book about, you know, about whatever, you really have to value these rights. And you have to think like, these are firm things that we all have that are necessity. Necessity, whereas to me, that's not really self-evident, but I don't know if you want to get into that at all.

0:22:24 Andrew: It Yeah, yeah, no, I think this is, that's a great discussion to have. You are 100% correct, right? If you have a libertarian view, libertarian, if you have an utilitarian view that says the only thing we're concerned about is what is the net effect on the, uh, greatest good for the greatest number of people, then none of these side, right, then sort of like by definition, the side constraints

0:23:19 Thomas: Yeah, government's pretty easy. It's just like, well, it's good.

0:23:21 Andrew: Yeah, they don't come into play. Yeah, right. It is. Are we right? Are we better off with X or without X? So Nozick. So let me take up the mantle of Nozick and argue against it. If you say government is justified by its its utilitarian benefits. The first question Nozick would put to you is, OK, I want you to imagine someone and we will call her the utility monster. OK. And the utility monster derives an unbelievable amount of happiness from your suffering. Right. Right. That this is that. I'm sorry. The utility monster is, know, we.

0:23:23 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah? Was this a sexist book where he's like writing about, he's actually writing about his ex-wife? That's what made him think about this thought experiment?

0:24:03 Andrew: Right now, he he used the male pronoun, but I was thinking of I was thinking of Somebody in one of my philosophy classes. But, and so, you, so when I inflict one unit of pain on you, however we go about quantifying it, the utility monster immediately recoups two units of pleasure, right? So now explain to me, consistent with utilitarianism, why everything just doesn't devolve into feeding the very worst people in society as utility monsters, uh, with, you know, whatever they're doing, because they're, they're gaining

0:24:06 Thomas: Oh, so you're thinking thinking about your ex-wife.

0:24:41 Andrew: Tremendous amounts of pleasure from your pain

0:24:42 Thomas: Well, this strikes me as an incredibly stupid argument, but I guess are we to take this? Okay, I'll show you a monster that gets twice the unit of pleasure from not having pain inflicted on people. How about that? Does that exist? Now we'll go ahead and see which one of those actually exists. And we can kind of look at society and see, well, the majority of people are just kind of normal. I just hate all these idealized arguments that I don't have any actual basis in real life. It's kind of frustrating, but so that would be what I would say to that. But okay.

0:24:46 Andrew: Good Right, right. Um, his His other argument is the experience machine, right, which I, I've actually heard you tackle, uh, on atheistically speaking, so I won't, I believe you have, right, like it's the, okay.

0:25:19 Thomas: Oh, really? I don't recognize that name, but it may be when you explain it, it' ll be something.

0:25:26 Andrew: Well, it's, suppose you could, put, again, he wrote this in 1976, so he He didn't have the benefit of the movie The Matrix, but basically it's, you know, if you could plug all of humanity into the Matrix such that their, quote, actual humanity has been stripped away, but they're being fed a virtual simulation that makes them unbelievably happy, then doesn't utilitarianism suggest that we ought to plug people into the Matrix? And so the corollary to that is, as you are appealing to our general intuitions, the fact that everybody who watches The Matrix says there's something wrong with being in The Matrix, and there's something liberating about being outside the Matrix, even though being outside the Matrix is, you know, you're in that garbage world eating that, like, you know, terrible gruel and stuff like that, that suggests that there is a non-utilitarian way of looking at the ultimate disposition for human, right?

0:25:30 Thomas: Yeah. Uh-huh.

0:26:27 Thomas: Right. Well, I, yeah, I probably talked about that a little bit. First off, I don't take, we could, we'd have to get into the ground floor of just because we have an intuition about something, does that mean it's somehow morally powerful and it's giving us answers about what's actually right and wrong about the world. Just because I can think of lots of situations where I say, oh, well, think of this, and then what's your intuition on that? And we all say, oh, I don't like that, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. It might actually be. Maybe the one guy who tried to get back into the Matrix. What was his name? I can't remember.

0:27:01 Andrew: Yes. Yeah.

0:27:03 Thomas: Maybe that character was the only one who had it right. How do we know? But anyway. Anyway, yeah,

0:27:07 Andrew: Well, I, I think, and again, sort of without going too far down the rabbit trail, the, think Nozick would say, but you just made that appeal to, you know, sort of our basic intuitions and facts about humans in response to my last argument, right? So if you're going to say there aren't really utility monsters out there and we don't have to worry about feeding them, okay, fine, but now we do have to worried about, like, is there, and the serious argument beneath the Matrix, right, like we don't have the Matrix to plug people into, but the serious argument there is, isn't there, uh, an intuitive notion of, you know, human dignity or whatever it is that you want to call it, uh, that overrides our sense of, you know. Providing goods.

0:27:49 Thomas: And I think you could put that in utilitarian terms. And Also, I would say that it's not, I don't think it's a contradiction from my last answer because I think it is an empirical fact that our intuitions are not the best things for us. Like, I can show you empirical data. Like, my whole thing has been, my answer to the first one was empirical data, and the second one is as well. You know, I could show you empirical experiments where our intuitions are not necessarily correct on things. But anyway, yeah, I get the devil's advocate thing, but I don't find him terribly compelling right now.

0:27:52 Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, that,

0:28:23 Thomas: But, anyway.

0:28:23 Andrew: That's, that. That's fine. This is not you be Robert Nozick. So, Um. But I, I guess the, the sort of before moving on. I mean, it, it's, you can answer it either way. But the question would be, are there any side constraints? Is there anything that the government can't do as a matter of right? You know, something like, know, is it just if I showed you, you know, that the hypotheticals of you know, I'm going to torture somebody to do X, I'm going to deliberately execute an innocent person, right? Like, come up with whatever horrifying scenario

0:28:27 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. No,

0:28:59 Andrew: You want yeah and

0:29:00 Thomas: I think there are. I would still, personally, for me, I would put those in utilitarian terms. But I think they're not.

0:29:07 Andrew: That would be, I think, a sort of John Stuart Mill type, uh, rule utilitarianism, but but I think that's a fine, that's a fine answer. So, um, so now in understanding and and and sort of critiquing the philosophy, we, we have, regardless of the ontological nature of rights, we have at least agreed that there are concepts of rights that express themselves as rules in the form of side constraints that the government can't do, regardless of the benefit. And I would say that that position, again, is sort of broadly popular across entire political spectrum. Right. So the, even, example, you know, Nozick's archenemy was his Harvard philosophy colleague, John Rawls, who wrote A Theory of Justice, which was, you knows, very broadly redistributive and not worth going into right now. But at the beginning of A Theory of Justice, Rawls says, you know, that person possesses an inviolability founded upon justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override, right? So, in other words, Rawl's and Nozick, representing polar opposites of what you can do with property, both agree that side constraints are meaningful.

0:29:12 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Exactly. Sure.

0:30:22 Andrew: So, for the libertarian, the question becomes, is property, is depriving somebody of their property a side constraint? Right, um, and that's, and to me, that's where, that's where the argument needs to take place and it's where the arguments that I have with libertarians do take place. There's everything else like right

0:30:40 Thomas: Yeah? I would think no. I mean, I don't think there'd plenty be valid instances where you could take away property, but that's just my intuition.

0:30:47 Andrew: Right, yeah, which, which we know is a terrible basis for, no, um, but, but, but it's, right, like it, it goes back to the question that I posed at the beginning of the segment, which is to say the difference between the Bill Weld position of, in general, I'd like to have less taxes versus the Austin Peterson, who was the other sort of hardcore libertarian candidate who ran for president against Gary Johnson and who, you know, thundered at the Civil Rights Act of 1964, because the Austin Peterson branch, to the true believing branch, a business's right to collect income and to, to determine who can walk through its doors, is its property, right?

0:31:33 Andrew: And telling that business what it has to do with its property is the side constraint that the government can't do, right. And it doesn't matter, right, you can launch as many utilitarian arguments as you want about how obviously society is so far better off with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than without it.

0:31:56 Andrew: And he You're making the wrong argument because, you know, right.

0:31:59 Thomas: Well, but how do they deal with conflicts in those rights? And I'm not, I'm sorry if I, I don't know if I'm getting you off the thread that you want to be on, but wouldn't you need somebody like a government or a third party to ensure that if I violate your rights, if I steal your property, or if I do something in some way to harm you, wouldn't you need some way to ensure that you could get something back from me? And wouldn't that be taking property? I don't get how any of that would work.

0:32:32 Andrew: Well, and that's but that's that that is what that is one of the minimal functions that libertarians think. And we talked at the beginning of the segment about how libertarian ideology sounds a lot like anarchism. This is an area of distinction, right? The libertarian would say, no, no. I think there are legitimate functions of government protecting us as one of them, but so is vindicating our rights in that Lockean sense that we set forth, right, which is to say if somebody invades your rights, you then can go to a court and convince a neutral third party that your rights have been vindicated, and then that that court can restore the balance to you. So the person who violated your rights is a transgressor upon your rights. They have initiated violence upon you.

0:33:20 Andrew: Restoring the balance does not count as initiation of violence, but the initial act does. So that's why you will hear libertarians talk about, and now mind you, then they run that all the way up the chain, right? Because government only gets its powers by direct delegation from individuals. So if I can't take your money, then when the IRS shows up on your doorstep with, you know, jackbooted thugs behind it to take your Money, they consider that theft. Um, and, and they consider it the initiation of violence against you or you as a person.

0:33:51 Thomas: But what, okay. But so many libertarian claims that I come across have to do with like regulating corporations and business in general, right? Why can't those be formulated in terms of rights then? Why can I say like, okay, oil companies by polluting the environment are infringing on our right to clean air or whatever it might be. Therefore, it's not actually a regulation in a sense that a typical liberal might think of. It's actually we're just getting money, our property back for you violating our rights. I wonder if that appeal works.

0:33:56 Andrew: Right. Yeah. Well, it, I will tell you how I have phrased it when sort of trying to bring in economic conservatives and libertarians into that argument is the notion of externality, right? Which is to say, right, if you have a factory and you're dumping pollutants out the back of the factory, then you have to pay the cost of remediation of those pollutants, right. Like, you know, and throw the libertarians own arguments back at them, right that there's, there's no such, you have no such thing as a free lunch, right. Like you've have to pay your own disposal costs. And I have yet to. I mean I think that I've had success with that argument. Right. Which is to say you know that there are free rider problems that even libertarians would agree in sort of the you know unregulated business where you know you're really polluting into the the environment. They will still come back and say, okay, well, I will give on pollutants coming out of the back of a factory, but you have to give on all other regulations of the private use of your property on that property.

0:34:43 Thomas: Yeah.

0:35:37 Thomas: Yeah, I

0:35:38 Andrew: And I think that's a bad trade-off, but not the least of which is, right, you know, that's fair. But then we sort of get back into, you know, the utilitarian question. And to me, this is a tiny side road, but I think it's important. There's no area where I think that it's more important to get back onto the utilitarian question, utilitarian model of analysis, than the question of the inheritance tax or the death tax, as they call it, right? Because from any social model of impact, the estate tax as it is right now has a $5.45 million personal exemption. So if you're a married couple, you can shelter $11 million in assets tax-free. As a lawyer, somebody who does stuff like this, that's enough to protect any business from being transferred to carry on.

0:35:42 Thomas: Might give on on some of them I don't know, yeah.

0:36:35 Andrew: It will not result in any hardship to the economy. The tax only applies to the several tens of thousands of the wealthiest individuals in the country. It generates a fair amount of revenue. The one thing you don't want to do, like when you tax something, you are artificially increasing the price of it. And therefore, by standard macroeconomic theory, you are decreasing the demand for it. The one thing for which demand is inelastic is people dying.

0:37:07 Thomas: Yeah.

0:37:09 Andrew: Increasing the cost of that has literally no adverse social consequences. When you look at an estate tax and you analyze it from a social benefit perspective, right? It ought to be, when the question is, you know, like the Hillary Clinton plan, should we increase, should we impose a surtax? And literally part of her plan is a sur tax on estates that pass at death that are over a billion dollars between couples. It's $500 million per individual, right. So literally it's going to apply to like three people per year, right, and generate a tremendous amount of revenue, revenue that would otherwise just be lost, right?

It would be totally dissipated and will have zero external costs. Well, that vote on that in a country of 350 million people should be 349,999,997 to three, right. Like, you know, throw a few people on the other side who stand to be beneficiaries, but it's overwhelmingly smart public policy. And yet, you you know, sort of by characterizing it as, oh, it's a death tax and it's the government, you know. I don't even understand the argument, but it's couched in moral terms. And so it's actually polled relatively unpopularly.

0:37:36 Thomas: Yeah.

0:38:24 Andrew: And that makes no sense because it is literally one of the few government sources of income that, you know, that has no external consequences, way. So

0:38:33 Thomas: That's interesting. I think everybody, and I myself included, I feel I do feel a bit with with some taxation questions is like, well, why should the government get it, you know, it's a, it's an interesting balance. I could see someone wanting to stick to their guns of like, they don't have, the government has no right to this, you know. And so I do get that kind of libertarian counter-argument to it. But when you approach it, it does really seem to boil down to what your system of morality is. And it's funny that we all go around with these things in our head that are, for some people, a lot less formed than for others, you know, if they thought about it. But it has a real impact on how we think about public policy and stuff like that.

0:39:17 Andrew: To me, then, it boils down to the question of, is property an individual right? And can it be defended as such? And because then if it is, then from within the libertarian framework, you can make that argument. But if it's not, if that can't be defended philosophically, then you can't even make the libertarian argument. You can always make the utilitarian argument. We've talked about that. But if property cannot be defended philosophically as a side constraint, then in my view, and again, love for listeners to correct this, openarguments at gmail.com, then the entire edifice crumbles and you just have no position from which to say taxation is theft. So here's my argument for why property isn't an individual right that serves as a site constraint. Okay. And it goes like this. First, you have to ask, what is property? Right. And, yeah.

0:39:31 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Webster's Dictionary defines property.

0:40:19 Andrew: And it's harder to define that than you would think. And so we go back to John Locke. And Locke really sort of, as a man of his time, conceptualized property in a way that resonates with kind of the founding of this country, right? He described it as, you mix your labors with that which is unowned and thereby come to own the final product, right, and think about how that like fits in with the American dream, right. Like the notion of colonists coming over, there are virgin field fields of timber, and I cut down a tree, I chop the logs, I build my own log cabin with my own two hands. I come to own that cabin, right?

0:41:05 Andrew: And yeah, and it has, it has a lot, and that really is, that definition of Lockean property is enshrined in the history and jurisprudence of our laws, right? You won't find it in a case, but you will find that that philosophical notion underlies an awful lot of historical property decisions in this country. But Locke said, as you might, well, in fact, let's not do it as hypothetical. What problems might you see with that? Yeah.

0:41:04 Thomas: Yeah. Sounds nice. What I don't know. Could it have to do with the fact that an awful lot of what we have is not necessarily obtained by labor? Or, I mean, I suppose you would substitute that that with currency and the fact that currency represents labor.

0:41:47 Andrew: Well, What you Would say, right. So, so from the philosophical perspective, right, to answer that question, that's how you have the initial acquisition of wealth, right? Right. And then everything after that is the free transfer of wealth from individuals. Right. So you create surplus by applying your labor to that which is not owned by anybody. You come to own it. That generates wealth. Wealth can be exchanged for currency. Currency is voluntarily traded.

0:41:55 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:42:14 Thomas: Well, if that solves that, then I guess nothing jumps out. Because even something like, what if we all work on something? Or what if there's property uncommon based on all of our assets and labor? I suppose you could solve that using that currency solution. So I'm not sure what you're going for.

0:42:30 Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. So so the problem Locke with was what if in your efforts to create surplus, you start hoarding the resources. Right. And he used an example with, I think, like an apple orchard. Right. And so, you know, you go by, you pick all the apples, you store them in a bin and the apples start rotting. Right. And now you've got a system whereby you haven't created any surplus because you've stolen all the apples and they're rotting. And so Locke had a proviso at the end of his definition that said, so long as there is enough and as good left in common for others. And so there's the Lockean proviso to that acquisition definition.

But amusingly, the best refutation of the Lockean definition of property comes from our friend Robert Nozick himself. And I just want to read you some of these because these are fantastic. Okay. Nozick says, gives rise, this Lockean definition of property gives rise to many questions. What are the boundaries of whether labor is mixed with, of what labor is mixed with. If a private astronaut clears a place on Mars, has he mixed his labor with and thereby come to own the whole planet, the whole uninhabited universe, or just a particular plot? Which plot does an act bring under ownership? So, you know, you might think about that like the sort of what's the character of the labor with which you are mixing, right?

0:43:23 Thomas: Yeah, Yeah.

0:43:55 Andrew: Then he asks, and I love this question, but why isn't mixing what I own own with what I don't own, a way of losing what I own rather than a way of gaining what I don't? If I own a can of tomato juice and I spill it into the sea, do I thereby come to own the sea or have I merely foolishly dissipated my tomato juice?

0:44:06 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:44:18 Andrew: And then he goes through some counter arguments and says, you know, your labor is adding to it. He said, no, no. Ignore the fact that laboring on something may make it less valuable, not more, right? Suppose I spray pink enamel paint on a piece of driftwood that you have found. But even if that's not the case, why should one's entitlement extend to the whole subject rather than just the added value to which one's labor has produced? Then we cut to the chase. The crucial point is whether appropriation of an unowned object worsens the situation of others. And this is the first edition of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pages 174 to 175. And I have to say, I could go through, I mean, Nozick has counterarguments, but they're pretty hand-waving arguments.

0:44:18 Thomas: Yeah.

0:45:04 Andrew: Once you come to the provision that this notion of absolute property acquisition is instead limited property acquisition, it is limited by the proviso that there must be enough and as good left in common for others and that you must legitimately add value and not merely, you know, spray paint a piece of driftwood pink. And I think most importantly, right, the tomato juice question, right? Which is to say there is a sense, right – how do you answer – as a utilitarian, it's very, very easy to answer the tomato juicer question, right? No, sorry, you just poured your tomato juice into the sea. Sorry, go home. Then answer the astronaut question. Right.

And that is because there is a sense of social proportionality. There is a rule of reason. Well, once you've done that, right, then you've said property can't act as a side constraint. We can value it. We can disagree over how much to tax people. But what we can't say is that the act of taxation is in and of itself something that is prohibited or ought to be prohibited. In fact, what we would say is, gosh, it seems like taxation is at the core of what we should do to regulate property, to figure out that people get back the value of the labors to which they have added and not merely, you know, engage in the hoarding and wasting that was

0:45:44 Thomas: I got

0:46:30 Andrew: Key to Locke.

0:46:30 Thomas: To ask something that I'm worried I missed. Why did that come from Nozick? Why did those...

0:46:36 Andrew: Because Nozick, uh, is a, um, was sadly, he's dead, um, he, he was a very, very smart guy and he was legitimate philosopher. He later wrote, he's also an ex, uh, teacher of mine, so I get to do another name drop, um, he later rode a book called Socratic Puzzles, in which he, uh, he was written about 20 years later. It's a fantastic book if you like philosophy. It's got some great, uh, philosophical experiments in it. In it, he wrote a chapter in which he said, essentially, you know, I never really set out to become the Anarchy, State, and Utopia guy. And Anarchy State, this is a direct quote, he said Anarchy, State, and Utopia was an accident, right? Like I was sort of playing around with notions of government, and I'm still not a big fan of Rawls's Theory of Justice, and sort of trying to work through all of the angles. Uh, you know, he doesn't quite recant it, but he does say, you, I, I don't want to be, you know, revered in the way that, uh, that Ayn Rand wanted to be revered, um, he

0:46:43 Thomas: Hmm. Oh. Oh, awesome.

0:47:10 Thomas: Wow. Okay.

0:47:32 Andrew: Was that he was a slightly right of center guy. I mean, he'd probably be left of center, you know, in today's, uh, political environment, but he was a slightly right of center guy, uh, in a very, very left of center, uh, Harvard philosophy department, uh, um, and so I think he was, you know, sort of honestly kind of exploring through those issues. I could tell you, I mean, ultimately he goes through all of it, and his, and his conclusion is, I don't think it's important to worry about original acquisition, right, these, these issues are going to drop out in. So at the end of the segment, this is 182, he says, I believe that the free operation of a market system will not actually run afoul of the Lockean proviso.

0:48:11 Thomas: Interesting.

0:48:11 Andrew: And, you know, if you recall the crucial to our story you know, involves business interaction. And if this is correct, the proviso will not play a very important role in the activity for future state action. And so he just basically, I mean, I I characterized it as hand-waving. I think that's a fair characterization. He says, look, this is, it's a problem and it's interesting, but it's not insuperable because it doesn't really, because really what we're talking about is not how you come to own property, but how you've come to exchange it. And my critique there would be, if you don't have a robust theory of how you become to own property then you can't claim it operates as a side constraint, you can only claim that that it operates as a condition that we weigh in a utilitarian fashion, but not as an absolute prohibition, like torture, for example.

0:48:12 Thomas: Wow.

0:48:58 Thomas: Interesting. So Yeah, So that's all to establish that you don't believe property can be a side constraint, that government can never take your property.

0:49:06 Andrew: I want to end with a case. It's a real case that most people learn in law school, and it involves an obscure aspect of property law, but one that that I have litigated recently, actually, called Adverse possession. And adverse possession is another one of these legal principles that can be explained by reference to bad sitcoms. Have you ever watched, and usually it's the same one with the tree hanging over the fence, where all of a sudden somebody will go down, you know, one of the aggrieved neighbors will go down to the recordation office and discover that their deed actually runs through, you know, the side corner of the house of their neighbor, right, and they start, they put a piece of tape down the middle of the yard and, you know, now I own this corner of your house and you own this part of my garage, and, um, you seen those terrible sitcoms?

0:49:14 Thomas: All right. Hmm.

0:50:01 Thomas: No,

0:50:02 Andrew: I'm, I'm like talking

0:50:02 Thomas: But that's a very easy thing to imagine. All right, all

0:50:03 Andrew: Okay, yeah right right so in other, other words, imagine a situation where you have a deed, uh, this is, this is easier to do if you imagine a, a tightly packed development like row homes, for example, right? Imagine that the, the actual deeds that are recorded with the government's office are off by two feet in every direction, okay? So, which is to say you actually own title to two feet of your neighbor's property, including the common wall, and like, you know, a foot of their kitchen, what have you. And your neighbor on the other side owns two feet onto your property. Right. And so on, all the way down the entire street. There are two ways that we could fix this, right?

We could fix this by having everybody deed to everybody else those two feet of land, right, or we could have a doctrine called adverse possession, which says if you meet the requirements and you have possessed property and you've done so in a way that is, and it's got to be like seven different criteria, I'm not going to go through those because no one cares, but it is both exclusive and open and notorious. Right.

0:50:17 Thomas: Right, okay.

0:51:13 Andrew: And you have done so for the statutory period, which is between 20 and 30 years. Then the law says, OK, you have adversely possessed that piece of property. You own it.

0:51:24 Thomas: Is this like the official version of possession is nine-tenths of the law?

0:51:28 Andrew: Yes, it is. It is absolutely it is it is the official it is also the official version of, you know, like finders keepers. Right. Like so you would say, right, I've been I've I've been using this piece of my kitchen for, you know, 20 years, and I have not been using the piece that's on the other side of the wall. So eventually, after the period, all of the property just reverts to the individuals as they have been using it, regardless of what the deed actually says, right? Right. So rule of adverse possession. But because it's because that has its roots in the Lockean definition of property, as I promised earlier, there was a case that says, OK, it's easy to imagine, right, the row home example, because in that case, you imagine everybody is sort of innocently just using their house.

0:51:30 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah,

0:52:19 Andrew: Right. But what about what we actually call in the law the land pirate? Right. What about somebody who says, I want to go out and I want to take your land and I'm going to and even though I know it's your land, I'm gonna use it. I'm gonna meet all the criteria for adverse possession because adverse possession doesn't have an exception that says, know, you have to be innocent in your intent. It doesn't care. I would would thereby come to own your land. This happened. There was a company called Nome 2000 that bought a plot of land, a gigantic plot of land in Nome, Alaska, which I believe Nome, Alaska is so far inside the Arctic Circle that it has that time period where there are two weeks at a time where it's complete darkness.

0:53:04 Thomas: Uh.

0:53:04 Andrew: Anyway, it's really, really far north. It's really cold. I have no idea why anyone would want to live in Nome, Alaska. If we have listeners in Nome, Alaska, write to us at openarguments@gmail.com. So Nome 2000 bought this huge plot of land, and a guy went up, cut through the fence, right, fenced it all in, right, and built a little log cabin and, and refenced it in, and lived there for 30 years.

0:53:31 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:53:32 Andrew: And then Nome 2000 eventually noticed and took him to court and said, come on guy, like he cut through, you know, no trespassing on the fence and built the house there, like kick him out. Uh, and the courts actually said, nope, sorry, um, this is, and their justification was rooted in the Lockean proviso, the notion that, uh, you cannot, uh, hoard and waste property. It was basically like, um, Nome 2000, like dude, you bought, you know, thousands and thousands of acres and yet you couldn't hire a guy to like pace the fence once every 30 years.

0:54:04 Thomas: Yeah.

0:54:04 Andrew: To see if somebody had built a house on it. Like if you can't be bothered to, you know, make that little use of your property, then you know what? Like we want to encourage people to come on and make better use of the property than you are. And it is, again, I think in the context of because the statutory period is so long, right? You wouldn't want to lose your statutory rights in five years or seven years or whatever, or, you know, 30 days or whatever. But, you know, 20 to 30 years is a long time. And I was definitely persuaded by the arguments of the court that, you know, even though this guy was 100% guilty, 100% trespassing, that, um, you know, if you can't, you can be bothered to have a guy, you know, walk the fence every 15 years, maybe

0:54:06 Thomas: Huh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Clearly.

0:54:50 Andrew: You deserve to lose that little little patch.

0:54:51 Thomas: You. Weren't using it for anything worthwhile, you know. Yeah.

0:54:54 Andrew: So in my view, that kind of refutes the Nozickian conclusion, right? That, that indeed the Lockean proviso is important that, uh, and, and is a part of our law that says, you know, even when we think of, you Know, classically unowned space, right. Going out and enclosing a whole bunch of snow in Nome, Alaska, like, you Now that, that, um, that we think you have to not Not only, you know, put it to use, but you have to avoid the hoarding and wasting of just, you know, enclosing off so much that, you're kind of the equivalent of the, you know, astronaut claiming the rest of the universe.

0:55:32 Thomas: Yeah.

0:55:32 Andrew: There you go. That is not only the philosophical argument against libertarianism, but how it plays out in practice. And I would say, you, know, in my view the implication of that is when When you talk taxes, it's not good enough to just say tax is bad. You've got to look at what the tax is and what its social implications are, and then we can chat. And then if you want to make a pro-business argument, say this regulation is going to kill jobs or whatever, but make the argument. And it's not good enough to just say, oh, you're a statist and you're, you know, sending the jackbooted thugs to come steal the fruits of your labors, like which which are arguments that I have heard. So I

0:56:14 Thomas: Yeah, interesting. Well, I'm very curious to hear people's response to this. We'll see if you get a lot of hate mail. Yeah.

0:56:20 Andrew: Open arguments at Gmail dot com, I

0:56:22 Thomas: Yeah. Okay, then that way we'll both see it and I'll get to laugh at the the hate mail you're getting. All right. Well, that was fun. We're a plum out of time, but I think you did it. You got through what you're trying to get through despite my interruptions, but thanks for that.

0:56:37 Andrew: Think, because of because of your interruptions, as always.

0:56:43 Clip: The law breaking down

0:56:49 Thomas: All All right, let's get to breaking down the law. Andrew, what is a pardon?

0:56:55 Andrew: Yeah, this question came in. We actually had a question that came in before we did our Snowden episode. And then I made a quick remark at the end of episode 19 about what constituted a pardon. And a listener asked, what exactly is a pardon? So I thought I would go go through that. A pardon is a specific legal device that an executive can use, either the governor of a state or the president of the United States, to absolve and erase an individual's responsibility for a crime. It differs from -- there are other legal devices that can accomplish similar results. Like you may have heard of commutation, which is shortening the sentence of somebody who's already arrested. When you are pardoned, you know, you are forever excused from any criminal liability for the act for which you have been pardoned.

0:57:47 Thomas: Right, right, and I remember you said it's not saying you're not guilty, it's actually the opposite. It's saying, you know, you are, it is sort of admitting guilt in a way, but you're just never going to be punished for it, right?

0:58:08 Andrew: Yeah. And in fact, the seminal Supreme Court case is called Burdick v. United States. It's a 1915 decision. We will, as always, link it in the show notes. And, in that case, the Supreme Court said that a pardon carries with it the imputation of guilt, and accepting the pardon is an admission of guilt. And so this case, Burdick, was involved the question of whether you can refuse to accept a pardon. So in that case, you had city editor of the New York Tribune newspaper, which I think has long since gone out of business, had a confidential source. And as is typical of journalistic ethics still today, he was subpoenaed, asked to reveal his sources, pleaded the fifth, and refused to divulge those sources.

0:58:59 Andrew: He was then imprisoned as a result of his failure to identify the sources and was subsequently pardoned by President Woodrow Wilson, but because of the imputation issue, Burdick did not want to accept the pardon. And so it was litigated for the first time. There were differing arguments back and forth as to whether he had to accept the pardon or not. The law since 1915 has been that that person who is being pardoned must accept that pardon, accepting the pardon carries with it an admission of guilt to which the pardon applies. And then it is affirmatively the burden on the individual who has been pardoned to affirmatively advance that pardon in court proceedings.

0:59:54 Andrew: So in other words, the pardon can't be forced on you. The court can't act on the pardon unless you ask the court to do so. So you can continue. And you think about this in it's true in journalist cases. I mean, the reason that a journalist will go to jail rather than reveal their sources is part of the journalistic code of ethics. And like we talked about civil disobedience. So I think the idea here is that you can continue to engage in a form of public protest by saying, you know what, I'm not going to take that part. So, and it also, you know, as pointed out, carries with it the negative imputation that, you know. Once you do accept it, you can't go around going, well, you don't, I mean, it was pardoned, but that was just a formality. And, you Know, just in case, Like, no, it's it's really it's not the same as pleading guilty, but it does carry with it that admission of guilt.

1:00:47 Thomas: So let me ask a couple questions. So can, so it's a power that the president and governors have, right. Can the the governors pardon anybody, is and and the president can pardon anybody, are there any like restrictions on it or

1:01:01 Andrew: The the the president can pardon anybody. The governor can pardon everybody in his or her state.

1:01:05 Thomas: The State, okay, yeah.

1:01:06 Andrew: So, yeah,

1:01:07 Thomas: That's what I was Wondering, okay, like it. And then I wanted to ask, anyone undo a pardon? Can anyone overturn it? Can Congress overturn a pardon from the president or something like that? Or is it just you're stuck with it?

1:01:17 Andrew: You're stuck with it. It is an act of final resort. And in fact, I alluded to this in episode 19, but there were a number of controversial pardons by President Bill Clinton on the last day of his presidency in 2001, including financier Mark Rich. And if Congress had the ability to overturn pardons, they absolutely would have overturned a large number of those Clinton last day pardoms, which were widely seen to be political paybacks.

1:01:18 Thomas: Wow. Wow.

1:01:54 Andrew: So for all of those folks who have written and said we have given the Clintons, you know, an unfair ride here on this podcast, there's your there's Your Clinton bashing.

1:02:05 Thomas: A pardon? What if he was like, I pardon you. And then, yeah, I don't know, a year later, he's like, oh, wait, that was a mistake. Need to unpardon. Or is it permanent?

1:02:16 Andrew: Nope nope a pardon is permanent and uh and unconditional

1:02:16 Thomas: Wow. Wow. That's interesting. All right. Well, anything else we need to say on breaking down pardons? Or is that good?

1:02:21 Andrew: Nope

1:02:29 Thomas: Your catchphrase of nope.

1:02:28 Andrew: Yeah I have I have the best catchphrases. I do. I can't tell you. I am waiting for a listener to come up to us at a convention or public appearance or what have you and tell me, "Don't take legal advice from a podcast." So that's when I know. Yeah. Yeah, we will.

1:02:49 Thomas: Oh, we got to get the shirts going at some point. Yeah. Awesome. Alright, well, we've got a ton of patrons to thank. Andrew, why don't you take our new patrons this week?

1:03:46 Thomas: Absolutely. And now I've got to thank our top patrons, and they are Roger Metcalf, Danny Rosari, Eli Bosnick, Dave Nichols of the Positively Doubtful Podcast, Dale, Steve Sigmund, Jim Grove, Desecrator Patrick Fussell, Amanda Lipnack, La Bibliotecatrice, Heather Loveridge, Leon Hartley, Geeker41, Sean Pitti, Hunter Ashe, Michael, Kaylee Reiser, Jeff S., Sakashite Fukasami, Pro Panic, Philip Stromberg, Zabby, and Fredrik Alstromer, and of course, as Andrew mentioned, the Inciting Incident podcast, our number one patron. Thank you so much. I can't believe how many top patrons we have now, but it's a pleasure thanking every one of you. We really appreciate your support. All Right. Well that's our show for today.

1:04:33 Thomas: One more quick reminder, if you don't mind, fill out our little survey, survey.libsyn.com slash open orgs. We really appreciate that. Don't worry. We won't be bugging you about it for too long. Just a couple episodes here, but thanks for that. And anything on your plate to remind people about, Andrew?

1:04:51 Andrew: Nope.

1:04:52 Thomas: Just your killer catchphrase, as usual. All right, thanks for listening to Opening Arguments, and we'll see you next time.

1:05:05 Clip: This has been Opening Arguments with Andrew and Thomas. If you love the show and want to support future episodes, please visit our Patreon page at patreon.com/law. If you can't support us financially, it'd be a big help if you could leave us a five star review on iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever podcast delivery vehicle you use. And be sure to tell all your friends about us. For questions, suggestions, and complaints, email us at openarguments@gmail.com. The show notes and links are on our website at www.openargs.com. Be sure to like our page on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at OpenArgs. Until next time. This podcast is a production of Opening Arguments Media, LLC. All rights reserved.