Show notes
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 361.
A nice young man, self-described as "generally an anarchist? But also a statist (monarchist? ie 'the kingdom of heaven') in the spiritual sense" had some questions for me since he doesn't have a lot of people to bounce his ideas off of. I agreed to do it if we could record it, in case anything interesting came out of it. You be the judge.
A variety of topics came up, primarily his interest in the problem of "oaths" as the root evil in the modern world, and related/other issues like the nature of contracts, usury as evil, Pournelle's "iron law of bureaucracy," Jesus, and the evils of the Uniform Commercial Code (something to do with Babylon), and Galambos.
Transcript below.
https://youtu.be/EEj137ADBzY
TRANSCRIPT
Libertarian Answer Man: Oaths: With Kent Wellington
Stephan Kinsella & Kent Wellington
Oct. 17, 2021
00:00:03
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Okay, hey, this is Stephan Kinsella, Kinsella on Liberty. This is another one of my episodes where someone asked to talk to me about something. And I said yes, if I can record it in case there’s anything of interest to listeners. So this is Kent Wellington who briefly informed me he’s not exactly a libertarian but just has some questions. I don’t really know what you want to talk about, but Kent, why don’t you introduce yourself, however you want to do it, and then we can start?
00:00:27
KENT WELLINGTON: Hey there. My name is Kent Wellington, and I just have been very anti-IP since I was a child really. And when I realized that Mr. Kinsella was the one who wrote one of my favorite books, Against IP, I was really taken aback. And then I was like, wow, I should reach out to him and just try to have a conversation with him because I’ve sort of been in the – what do you say – I’ve just been up in the towers on these topics for a long time, like my whole life.
00:01:14
And I’ve never – I never really get to talk about these topics with anybody one on one, and I just saw his – that he puts his email out there, so I was like, I’ll just email him, see if he’ll – he’s willing to talk to me for even a minute. So that’s what we’re doing right now, and I have some very different takes, I guess, what I think are some novel takes but maybe aren’t, and I’d love to be proven wrong, or I just wanted to throw some things at you regarding contracts, IP, anarchism, a few different things. Mainly, I guess my main hypothesis is – so I’m very into the quotes from Jesus on oaths, and I believe that, without – so I think that oaths are the key social mechanism of the state. Do you – what do you think about that? Are oaths not the key social mechanism of the state?
00:02:41
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Oaths? O-A-T-H?
00:02:44
KENT WELLINGTON: Yes, oaths, yeah.
00:02:46
STEPHAN KINSELLA: I’m not sure I know what that means. What do you mean?
00:02:51
KENT WELLINGTON: So oaths are – if you want to become a doctor in the US, at least a professionally recognized doctor, you have to take the Hippocratic Oath. Others are – so our whole professional society is filled with oaths, which are really these sort of mystical activities, and our secular world is filled with these oaths. To become a lawyer, you need to take the bar oath. To become a politician, you just swear in. You need to take an oath of office. There’s a bajillion oaths you need to take in modern society if you want to partake in modern society.
00:03:42
And so Jesus – and I’m not necessarily getting religious here. You can just say that in one of the most popular books in the world, which the Bible is, well, the biggest guy, the most important guy in the book, in the New Testament, Jesus, in his biggest speech, the Sermon on the Mount, he says take no oaths at all. Instead, just say yes or no. Anything beyond this comes from the evil one. So my interpretation of that is that anything beyond you giving your word, like if I invite you to my birthday party, and I give you the – I say, hey, can you come to my birthday party, you can say yes or no, or you can say maybe too. But anything beyond that, if I say, hey, well, will you swear on it, or hey, will you sign this contract, or hey, will you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. To me, that’s opening the door. That’s exactly what Jesus was saying. It’s opening the door for bad things to happen.
00:04:49
And to me, it’s what is the root cause of – it’s the potential root cause of all the bad things that happen with the state because – so like Jesus says, anything beyond this, anything beyond a verbal yes or no, it basically invokes – as I mentioned to you in an email, I’m also – I – so have you heard of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy?
00:05:25
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Vaguely, but I don’t really remember.
00:05:28
KENT WELLINGTON: So he – so the law states that in any organization, over time, the bureaucracy will overtake the main organizational mission. So when you swear an oath or you have a contract or something, there’s always a third party that basically you’re acknowledging an elevated third party that is, at least on a long enough timespan, is going to corrupt things. And so to me, IP – so if – so IP is a form of a contract. I mean it’s a contract. If I have in my – I mean I just see that whole entire concept of IP as BS.
00:06:32
But let’s say I have my little idea, whether it’s a drawing. Let’s say it’s a drawing, and I just go to the government, and we have a contract. You could call it an oath where they’re going to protect my work. They’re going to monopolize my work. So to me, Jesus – I’m like – when I realized that Jesus said this because I had never heard that in a – I grew up in church. I’ve never heard that before, heard him say that. To me, that’s like – Jesus is the ultimate – he’s an anarchist in a sense, but he’s also, of course, a total statist, monarchist because he advocates for the kingdom of heaven and all these things, royal terms and things. But I was really blown away that he just prescribes so clearly this way to…
00:07:41
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, so I think we would need a definition of oath because you’re using it by examples, and you’re even including – I think it’s a stretch to include it – to call the IP grant an oath or even a contract with the government. It seems to me what you’re getting at is – and I imagine there’s lots of analysis of Jesus’ comments there, which I’m unfamiliar with. But I would assume he’s against oaths because oaths typically show allegiance to some kind of authority. And that gets close to having a false god. You should only worship God. You shouldn’t worship the state or the king. So I would imagine that the prohibition on oaths has something to do with that. I don’t know. It’s just a guess.
00:08:33
But I don’t really know the clear distinction between making an oath and just saying yes or no. I mean yes or no could be a contract. Contracts are different than oaths, I would think. But I mean the standard libertarian idea is that the state exists, is criminal, but the reason it exists is because it’s the rule of the majority by the minority. How does the minority get away with it? They get away with it because they basically have the majority convinced of their authority and their legitimacy, and they do this from a variety of ways. They bribe them. They brainwash them. They propagandize them.
00:09:11
And they get them to say the Pledge of Allegiance, which is like an oath, and lawyers have to take an oath, and everyone has to start treating the Constitution as this thing of – and then even the social contract idea is – a little bit sneaks this in because even if you’re not a congressman or a politician or a lawyer or a doctor, they say that you’ve taken an oath to the Constitution even though you never did because by living here you agreed to live under the Constitution. And they make you say the Pledge of Allegiance, so they sort of ingrain in everyone this idea that we all have this obligation or duty to the Constitution and thus to the state.
00:09:49
KENT WELLINGTON: Totally.
00:09:50
STEPHAN KINSELLA: So I think that’s one way they – that the government or the state maintains control and keeps the population docile and following their orders. I suppose you could bring in this idea of oaths as part of the description of what goes on there, and maybe Jesus had some wise things to say about the danger of oaths that you could build on in that analysis, but that’s all I know about that.
00:10:18
KENT WELLINGTON: Okay. I also want to point out that later on in the book of James, so James is talking about what Jesus had said, and he says remember, brothers, above all, swear no oaths. So this no-oaths commandment is so central. To me, it’s basically like the number-one commandment of Jesus besides the – sort of the key sacraments or something. At least the really concrete commandment of Jesus is to swear no oaths, and to me, that’s just so plain.
00:10:59
STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, I mean I suppose – I mean I think it seems at least compatible with the libertarian distrust of the state. I mean we don’t think that people should be allegiant to the state, and we don’t have any allegiance to the state, and we shouldn’t treat the state like God, which they want us to do. And maybe Jesus was giving something similar. I mean there are decent libertarian arguments, like you said earlier, that Jesus was an anarchist. There was a guy names James Redford who has an article, “Jesus is an Anarcho-Capitalist.”
00:11:28
And I think the fact that Jesus speaks in monarchist language and has a theological conception of this hierarchy of power in the spiritual realm doesn’t contradict the possibility that his secular thinking is compatible with private law and anarchy. I mean even the idea of render unto Caesar would not mean taking an oath....
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