Sam Seder vs. Libertarian Professor Walter Block: Round 2 (Full Debate) 

Imagine having this guy as an econ professor and him explaining why we cant afford medicare for all but we can afford 10,000 competing courts for petty theft.

Omg that moment when libertarianism inevitably leads to age of consent laws.

Block's explanation of how a simple petty theft crime would be adjudicated in 25 different courts was beautifully moronic

Professor Block is silly and absurd throughout this whole thing but from 41:00-46:40 you can watch his entire premise implode. He's basically arguing that human rights are innate and derived from your body and your labor. But when it comes to mixing labor with land he basically says that Native Americans can't claim this land because "too bad." In other words, the European model for land ownership is by definition correct and Native Americans are greedy if they claim this land as their own. But there is no innate reason to view it that way. It just somehow coincidentally lines up with the idea that Native Americans are owed almost nothing for being driven from their lands and murdered and robbed. In other words, let's just draw the line in such a way that the people in power today can conveniently not have to give away anything they have. You could make a logistical argument against returning all American land to the Native Americans but you can't make that argument on libertarian terms. And that is the point. These things aren't derived from innate purely logical laws of nature that can be objectively ascertained. That's why societies exist and these decisions are made by some version of groups of people trying to reasonably establish how power in society will be determined. No man is an island, even in libertarian fantasy.

"I'm a professor, I'm not supposed to answer a question directly."

Having watched the first "debate" with Block, I must admit I never expected to see a second one, so kudos to the patience of Seder. I find Block to be infantile, self-satisfied and condescending which helps masquerade how inept he is at making his own case. I agree with Seder that the problem with libertarian thought is it never arrives at specific solutions. Apparently the key is to continually frame and reframe the debate, not to solve anything.

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." Mike Tyson never realized it, but at the time of this quote, during his boxing career..... He was actually debunking libertarianism.

Gods, I actually cracked up laughing about 10 minutes in when, during Block's diatribe about courts, particularly when he going off about "bandit courts fighting everybody," I realized he was completely serious and that this is how he views the world.

The amount of time these people spend coming up with this dream world is amazing.

I loved the bits where he would patronize Sam by saying things like 'that was a brilliant ATTEMPT at a reductio ad absurdum' or calling him a 'young man' and Sam just pulled faces like 'wtf??'. This guy is just smart enough to think he's the smartest guy in any room, and not smart enough to realize he's not.

Every single libertarian and ancap brings up age of consent laws if you let them speak long enough. It's just a law of nature.

It always comes down to age of consent with libertarians lol

So when the descendents of former slaves "own" the plantations they were forced to work on he has no issue with the government forcing the current owners to surrender their land. When Native Americans might have a claim to his land he suddenly wants to say that it's an entirely different situation and Natives somehow only own .5%. Total consistency.

Revisiting this video. I remember watching this as a young libertarian and thinking Block was making so many great points and Sam was just being a close-minded statist. All these years later, I cannot reconcile any of the stuff Walter Block is saying. He prides himself on being logically consistent with regards to the NAP. Sam's line of questioning perfectly demonstrates WHY Block's position, when reduced to it's simplest form, is utter contradictory nonsense. This was a fantastic take down of a truly stupid worldview that I regret ever trying to defend.

This guy is talking about settling land, clearing fields, planting corn, domesticating cows... Sounds like a solid system to live under, if you're living in 5000 BC.

In a libertarian society, we settle things in THUNDERDOME!!!

Kudos to Sam for being really good in this interview, challenging Block on a very difficult topic without being smug.

Libertarians be like: We DO NOT live in a society

How can anyone in their right mind listen to Walter Block explain how petty theft would be resolved in 15 different courts and think "Yes, this is a more reasonable system than what we currently have"?

Never before have I heard such a long winded and boring defense of basically what comes down to feudalism. I hope Block wakes up one day in his 80's and realize he wasted his whole life defending an ideology that was promoted by billionaire elites for the sole purpose of defending their property rights...

No man is an island. Except the Isle of Man. You can't separate yourself from the rest of humanity in space or time. You can't say you are not responsible for the condition of others, and at the same time insist on benefiting from the suffering of other human beings. We are all products of the past. We are all made by the same machine. You can't say your success is your own, and another man's failure is his own.

This Libertarian World sounds like Feudal Europe / Japan where you had Lords and Ladies with basically personaly armies , courts etc only without titles ( that might come with time ) . There's allways a couple of terrible people who will game any system and quite frankly this one would be incredibly easy to abuse

I get it now. Libertarian is just another word for fantasy fiction writer.

I LOVE the court breakdown! I didn't realize anarchists loved beauracracy so much!

Native Americans used to do seasonal migration so I'm pretty sure they own most of the land

Statutory rape laws arent completely arbitrary. They are informed by average neurological development and culture. We are capable of revising laws based on information rather than declaring arbitrary rules made to benefit certain people in declaring property rights.

Let a Libertarian talk long enough and they'll always end up complaining about Age of Consent laws.

One thing that always breaks libertarian's viewpoints: money. How are you going to stop people from buying the police/militias/courts/people to forge documents saying you're the legitimate owner of (property) to their benefit?

Combining this interview with the last one, in his version of Libertarianism: 1. You could employ someone to work your land for $1/hr 2. That person now owns your land.

Going to war over any property dispute doesn't really seem to live up to his "non-aggression" principle

I'm only 12 minutes in and i just couldn't be having more fun! In Block's very first topic (courts), the proposed solutions are immediate pandemonium, chaos, and post-apocalyptic. Can't wait to see what he says next!

This guy convinced me I’m not a libertarian. He shouldn’t be a professor.

Walter Block just used Ephebophilia to justify homesteading property. That's the most AnCap sentence I've ever typed.

Private courts... Competing on a court market... Like... I'm just speechless at how dumb and asinine that is. I don't think I've ever heard a more braindead political theory in my life.

people in 2020 should look back at these libertarians who got stomped on by sam, and realize how insane they actually are

Walter's explanation of the court systems is the most hilarious thing I have heard in years. It's breathtaking.

Walter Block doesn't realize he's losing and how ridiculous his libertarian-reality is.

libertarians imagine themselves playing minecraft IRL

“This isn’t feudalism, this is substantially worse than feudalism”

Very in love with the idea of comparing property rights with age of consent laws. Very cool. Very cool.

I love how the only time it feels like Walter might be remotely intelligent is when Sam asks him a question beginning with the compliment "Professor!"

This is sheer nonsense. There's really no other way to describe it.

I really have a love-hate relationship with the cop out, "that's a debate among libertarians" every time he has no coherent answer but doesn't want to concede the point.

Libertarians always fall apart within two questions. Sam's Missile Of Logic destroys them every time. The courts system sounds like Kafka.

Libertarians usually get ridiculous when taking their positions to the end point.

If only we just had courts that could make judgements of other courts. We could call it some sort of Ultimate or Supreme Court. It’s crazy that a process like that hasn’t been considered.

THERE👏🏼ARE NO👏🏼TREES👏🏼ON THE MOON👏🏼

I haven't seen this debate but I saw part 1. Walter Block doesn't grasp reality.

This Walter Block guy gets funnier every time I revisit this video. Courts on top of courts! 🤣🤣🤣🤣

this libertarian shit is absolutely ridiculous! concerning property rights... Native American: my culture says all I have to do is X to own said property. White Settler: But my culture says all I have to do is Y to own said property. To answer this dispute, the professor (assuming himself for the sake of argument to be a member of the white settler's lineage) just casually dismissed the opposing culture's assertion outright as "too bad"...meaning, his culture wins by default! LOL Doesn't this further contradict that whole Court A, Court B paradigm the professor originally setup regarding competing claims?! smfh

This is a much better debate than the first one, mainly because Block actually lets Sam get a word in this time

Native Americans hunted and gathered over large territories, so because they did not alter the land they didn't "own" it? This system of doing things is highly prejudicial to native lifeways and is eurocentric. If we went with how native peoples made their living off the land they should retain all of their hunting grounds, not just the places that they farmed.

bahaha sam's face when he was explaining courts

Listening to Professor Block is like listening to someone describe last weekend's Dungeons & Dragons game.

I really wonder if his opinion on vaccinations extended into the COVID pandemic 👀

“Libertarians believe in defensive violence, not offensive violence.” No, you actually have no say in what kind of violence rules in a system as well-devised as the imaginary state of nature. Whether I plant crops on a piece of land (an absurd, unworkable, archaic standard) or just kill the former owner, who’s going to decide which of my property is legitimate? He seems to think we’re in some kind of frontier society. The more these people explain, the less sense they make. Natives cultivated and used the entire country. Is he saying that just because population density was below an arbitrary level, we can drive them out and systematically destroy their cultures? 10 square miles i Arizona? What is he even talking about? Who decides? Illegitimate things are just allowed to happen, his talk of justice in any sense is absurd.

can you imagine a world where you consider possessions purchased with labor your private property and then wonder how private property can exist in a set of principles that are based on non-aggression in nature. i guess my question is how did you get your private property without aggression?!?!

Dude this court deal is absolutely insanity..

Jeff Bezos took my wallet, I mean *his* wallet...from me- legally. My wallet is his now. According to him, and his court, and his massive army.

In Walter blocks world, a simple petty theft results in war. And he thinks this is morally right somehow?

12:00 Sam's face during the bit about the pen being mightier then the sword is my spirit animal

All of this sounds like it boils down to "whoever can buy the biggest army wins."

Ugh. I loathe professors like this guy that love to play off their pedagogic condescension like they're the second coming of Socrates. Rather than conceding that their logic may be inferior to that of their opponent, they never acknowledge them as such-- instead, always reducing them to their "student". It's this super manipulative cerebral power dynamic that gets old pretty quick. If they were to say, "Wow. You know, those are fine points you raise--potentially inarguable, in fact, and in considering your claim, my theories may not actually stand the test of logic", they would be relinquishing their dominance as Teacher. So instead, they just pat them on the head and say "What an impressively bright student you are for asking such insightful questions! See? Now we're doing philosophy!"

Its absolutely insane this dude was allowed to teach economics

I can’t believe this person is a professor and allowed to educate college students. This whole court system and his idea of how crime should be dealt with is just completely outrageous. This system with private courts and private police agencies would be so insane and turn minor traffic tickets over a traffic ticket a potential war

There’s no difference between how a business acts and how a person acts under the law? -So basically it isn’t wrong for me to get drunk with my friends at work. Whatever I can do at home, I can do at work according to this logic.

Did I miss the part where he explained the libertarian way to provide a private court with an incentive to rule according to the law, and to make that incentive stronger than the incentive to "help" the people who pay them?

Sam's face when the other guy is talking about the age of consent is hilarious!

I was NOT ready for the Courtworld discussion, this was incredible.

What happens to land worked by slaves that was prior taken illegally from indigenous people by whites? Who gets that land according to libertarian mondo bizarro 25 court justice?

42:00: Sam: "it seems arbitrary." Block: "there is a system here if you look at it sympathetically...". THERE IT IS! Libertarian does well under sympathetic analysis. It does not survive critical analysis. Students of Walter Block should get a refund on their $.

dude getting your wallet stolen is bad enough, can you imagine having to then go through multiple courts and private police stations to get it back?

In the first debate, Walter states there are 150 countries in the world. In this debate he claims there are 250! There are 195.

This is so much better than the first one. How to make a libertarian look silly? Just let them talk.

You can tell by listening to someone that they are living in their head. This is an example of that.

His system of courts has more red tape than the current system! Good lord!

Classic Libertarian logic: we advocate for the non aggression principle....except of course when we envision a utopian society wherein marauding gangs with the most money and the biggest armies dictate and resolve matters. I can't think of anything more aggressive than arbitrating matters based solely on this type of system. If you want to see this in action, I suggest the good professor visit Somalia where they have tried this with the predictable results of chaos, bloodshed, and anarchy controlled by warlords and gangs.

Holy shit, this guy's theories fall apart as at every corner. And those people think that communism is an unreachable fantasy?

"You have to look at how the people actually farm." Block should take his own advice here, and maybe start by reading William Cronon. Native Americans in for example New England cleared underbrush in order to maintain habitat for game. Early colonists remarked in wonder at the park-like, edenic natural setting of lower New England's forests, which of course were actually the product of Native American labor. If Block were to heed the above-quoted advice, it would lead him to a very different way of looking at the extent of land improvement in America than the simplistic and untenable one he used to come up with a fraction of a percent. Citing Locke for the origin of his propertarian logic doesn't help because Locke made the same mistake he does, ignoring the changes that hunter-gatherers have always and everywhere made on the land.

"Once you own [land], you own it period." Ok, so what about indigenous Americans? "Ah yes..."

Every time he says, "That's a good point Sam, that's a debate within Libertarian ideas", what he means is "I don't have an answer for that, but that would be conceding the point, so I'm going to muddy it instead."

At least he conducted himself like an adult this time, but still full of it...

I'm Jewish but honestly he brings up Jews so frequently to totally distract from Sam's questions. The worst is that he talks about cultivating the land as a means to claim ownership to legitimize how land was taken to form Israel. I'm not anti-Israel or against its formation but that's part of the argument that justified homesteading there. The issue is that that's definitely a moment in history that has played a large part in how his theoretical views have been formed.

This man is outlining Afghanistan and its system of government. Every village or town has a warlord with its own courts and law.

If we have competing courts the one with the biggest army will win I don't support might makes right Im glad he's a professor of economics and not law or ethics.

“I’m in the distinct minority of real libertarians”

How come all of these examples are right out of the 1800s? How do we run our lives in this modern day by this philosophy? Do we all just become farmers on land and trade milk for corn?

9:07 These “courts” just feel like an extended version of “he said, she said,”.

Intelligent libertarian is an oxymoron

I like Sam's expression when this guy goes wayyyyyy off the rails!

Why am I submitting myself to the second part...

43:00 things turned quickly. 😳

There is a reason for why we are and the way we are after centuries of human coexistence. We started to exist as libertarians only to find out that it wasn't sustainable.

PolakFury Hmmm. All that talk about multiple courts? That was intelligent? It's mumbo jumbo. Utter nonsense.

The idiocy, monstrousness, and delusional mind of this PROFESSOR ruins the argument that ‘professors and universities are liberal’ on the right.

Listened to both interviews. The second wasnt as annoying. But way funnier, especially about how you own land, and people will just have shoot outs over land all the time in his utopia. The thing that got me was at the end with Typhoid Mary. Interesting way of putting it, even a broken clock is right twice a day... now I have to figure how he is correct a second time to prove that saying.

I always cringe when I hear the term "anarcho-capitalist". It's such a contradiction in terms, that flies in the face of literally all of anarchist history. What happens if the workers in your factory go on strike? "Well, I'd send in the troops/cops/private security force". There goes your anarchism then and your non-aggression principle then, since you've initiated and tried to monopolise force. "But the striking workers initiated force". Did they? Did they initiate force or did the people who monopolized land and means of production in the first place initiate force? The anarcho-capitalists claim that they eschew force and the state, but they still want to retain capitalism, the economic form that historically involved force and the state. The main problem with this kind of philosophy is that it is ahistorical. It does not care about the actual historical origins of actually existing capitalism and the actual existing distribution of property, and it doesn't notice that actually existing capitalism originated in force and the violation of the very principles which they profess to believe in as first principles!

His homesteading idea was pretty corny. So much of this libertarian paradise envisioned here is a bunch of corn, courts, and private armies and the hope everyone will play nice. I think I'll pass on this neo-feudalism, thanks. Once was enough.

Awesome, we all have our own courts!!!

The thing that fucks with my head the most about Libertarians is the fact that they, for the most part, unilaterally believe less regulation would result in better outcomes for society. Like, anyone who has spent more than 1 hour researching what happens when large corporations do not have to deal with regulation would think it was categorically insane to do so