Improving the American Constitution | Yaron Brook Show
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All right, everybody. Welcome to your own book show on this Sunday, March 16th. I hope everybody's having a fantastic weekend. I am. And a lot of shows this week. God. Yeah, a lot of shows. But we're heading towards a period where there are going to be a lot fewer shows. So, you know, this is makeup time. Today we're going to talk about the Constitution or at least...

wishes in terms of how I would, I don't know, improve it, but we'll get to that. I think that's a little too ambitious or a little arrogant. But anyway, we'll get to that. We'll talk about that. Tomorrow, I'll be traveling, so no shows tomorrow. Tuesday, I'll be traveling, so no shows on Tuesday. I'll be in North Carolina giving a talk at the business school at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, Wilmington,

on the morality of finance. So I'm looking forward to that. If you're in the area, I hope you come. Definitely come up and say hello. If you are there and you're a listener to your own book show, it's always fun for me to meet people who are listeners to the show who I don't know and who I do know both. Then I'll be back for a few days, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And this Saturday, I fly to London.

And I'll be there for a week, and then I go to Scotland for a day, and then I go to Israel for almost a week. So I'll be gone two and a half weeks on that trip. And so, yeah, we'll be constrained in terms of shows during that period of time. We'll do as many shows as we can. So I figured I'd add a show today just to kind of make that up to you guys. Let's see. Anything else we need to cover? Yeah.

Yes, those of you who still have not heard yet about this, I do have a seminar that I'm doing in London on the 29th of March, so two weeks from today. It'll be on how to apply the objectivist ethics, or really how to apply egoism, how to be an egoist, and how to apply it to your life, in your relationships, your relationships,

love life, sex life, and in your career, and in just the time you spend, and how you spend it in life, just life, how you do life. So I encourage you to sign up for that if you're interested, if you're in the UK. Still got some space. Quite a few people are ready, you know, quite a few people already signed up for it. So we've got, we're definitely doing it.

And, you know, this will be along the lines of Yvonne's Rules for Life or my series on being an egoist and the application of philosophy. But if you're interested, you live in the UK, you want to fly to the UK for this, then come and do it. It'll be fun. Now, Colleen...

The day before yesterday? The day before yesterday, I think on Friday, suggested, hey, why don't you do one in the U.S.? So here's the thing. I'm seriously considering doing one in Denver, Colorado. I don't know how many of you are in Denver, Colorado. But if you're in Colorado, near Colorado, willing to travel to Colorado, I'm thinking of doing it in May. I think it turns out to be May 8th. May 8th.

which is a Thursday. So it is a work day. It's not a weekend, but it's kind of the day that I can do it. And whoops, what did I do there? So May 8th, something from 1 to 5, 12 to 4, 1 to 5, maybe in the morning. I'm open to suggestions, but if you are interested and you would come to Denver or you are in Denver and would like to do it in Denver,

then, yeah, then sign up. And that is not sign up because there is no place to sign up. Let me know. Yaron at yaronbrookshow.com. Yaron at yaronbrookshow. I need to get a sense of whether there's enough people to do it. Yaron at yaronbrookshow.com. That would be May 8th. May 8th in Denver, Colorado. All right?

And those of you asking about the Midwest, there will be Midland, Michigan, doing a talk there on Tuesday, April 29th, which I think is open to the public. So if you want to come up, there's Northwood University. And then I think I'm doing one at the—God, Jennifer knows what the name of the institute is. I can't remember the name. The Mackinac Center, the Mackinac Center in Midland, Michigan.

Michigan. So Northwood and then Mackinac. I think both are open to the public. So certainly, well, I'm not sure which one is open to the public. I think Mackinac is open to the public. I don't know about Northwood because I think I'm teaching classes there rather than giving a talk. So I'm not exactly sure. All right. Let's see. What else did I want to say? We all good here? Don't forget...

to sign up for the event in London. You can do that on my website, you're on bookshow.com. Scroll down March 29th, click on the link to register, and you can register and pay and do all that stuff. Patrick says, come to Canada, you're on. Winter is almost over. I'm happy to come to Canada. Somebody has to invite me. Like, it's not enough to say, come to Canada, you're on. You have to say, I've got this group at the University of Toronto. We'll host you. I've got a businessman luncheon that will host you.

and all of that. So any of those, yeah, I would, I would, I come when I'm invited and where somebody provides a venue and people for me to speak to, people for me to speak to. So Patrick, we could do in the fall, happy to come to Canada, just get a university group or some business group or somebody to host an event.

And I will come. And I will come. All right. Enough of all this logistical stuff about traveling around the world and going all over the place. Let's talk about the Constitution. And let me say a few things as a preamble. The Constitution is a preamble. So does the show. The American Constitution is an extraordinary document. It is, I think, the second most important document in human political history.

It has stood the test of time over 250 years, less than 250 years, but almost 250 years. And it has, I think, kept this country relatively free during that period of time. It is a document written by some of the most brilliant men in all of human history, people who thought deeply about politics,

people who thought deeply about political philosophy. They thought deeply about what they wanted to create and what kind of country they wanted to establish. And in that sense, it is a marvel of a document. It is a, you know, all the thinkers that worked hard to put this document together, from Madison to the rest of the people in the Constitutional Convention, Madison, I think, being the most important there,

had a deep understanding of history, of different political systems and how they'd been tried, of what kind of worked and what didn't. And so everything they put in this document is really thoughtful and intentional. And they knew what they were doing. And if you're going to revise any of it, you have to be as thoughtful and as knowledgeable and as much of a deep thinker as they were.

One of the things that's clear to me is there are very few people today who could do that. And I wouldn't want anybody to touch the Constitution today because they'll mess it up in terms of the kind of thinking that is necessary to put this together. Now, I'm sure there are people within, I think, the objectives world that could do it. But what do you need in order to really, if you're really going to reform the Constitution today?

You need not only a deep understanding of what the Constitution as it is, what it says, what it stands for, what it represents, how it's been applied. Ever wanted to stay on vacation longer? Us too. With Vrbo's long-stay discounts, you can stay longer and save more on select properties. Gotta love a win-win. Book the perfect summer getaway today with Vrbo Private Vacation Rentals. Your future self will thank you later.

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how it's being distorted, deformed, where it's being misinterpreted. You have to have a deep understanding of the law and constitutional law, and you have to have a deep understanding of kind of what kind of law would be better. If you're going to improve, what would you do better? How would you do better? And for that, again, you need to really, and, you know, when I've asked kind of the

The lawyers within the objectivist movement, the people who deal with constitutional law and other aspects, you know, yeah, why don't you write a new constitution? They laugh at me. It's like, that's a life project. That is huge. That would really require, you know, fundamental, some deep thinking, and it's a big project. And it's not clear what the purpose would be right now to do such a thing, but it is a big project.

And the reality is the Constitution of the United States, as it's written, is pretty damn good. Pretty damn. Now, I am not a legal scholar. I am not a constitutional scholar, certainly. And I am not a philosopher of the law. So whatever I have to say about improving the Constitution is going to be in broad brushstrokes in terms of what I would like to see in a Constitution that I think will

would make it, that I think would make it more internally consistent and more consistent with what I think was the intent, I think, of most of the founders or some of the founders or the intent of the idea of the Constitution as I understand it. And a lot of this just comes from 250 years of seeing it in action.

and seeing what the weaknesses are and where it's been attacked and where it falls apart and where it has not actually worked, where it has not actually done what it is supposed to do. So that's kind of the context of this. There's no question in my mind that after 250 years, anything can be improved.

You just have more information, more knowledge, more concrete, more knowledge about the ways in which things could be messed up. The founders knew a lot because they studied history, but they had not lived through capitalism. They had not lived through the era of anything like the 150 to 200 years that followed. And a lot of things happened that are very, very different from what happened in history.

One cannot learn everything from history. One has to be alert to learning from the present and learning from the more current history, the things that happened more recently. So what do I think is the biggest problem with the Constitution, again, as I see it? It's that it's not explicitly anchored to the Declaration of Independence. It's not explicitly anchored to the idea that

The purpose of government, the role of government is to protect individual rights and that's it. Now, I don't know if the founders fully understood that that was the sole purpose of government. They came very close to that, but whether they fully understood it, I don't know. Maybe that can only happen after Ayn Rand. But if you were to reconceive of the Constitution or redo it or tinker with it, that would be my main concern.

How do I make it clear in the document? And I'm not going to tell you how, because I don't know. This is what you would need legal thinkers, legal philosophers to do. How do you make it clear in the document that the purpose of government, the purpose of all the structure, everything that is done here is for the purpose of protecting individual rights and then indeed protecting

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The protection of individual rights is the sole purpose, the sole function of government. Now, some of this, I think, the founders thought was implicit because it was in the Declaration of Independence. It's quite clear in the Declaration that that is how they view the role of government. It is man has rights, unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

and to secure that, to secure these rights, governments are established, instituted among men, deriving their power from the consent of the governed. So it's that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men. That, I think, should be in the Constitution, should frame the Constitution, should be in the preamble to the Constitution. And then, and I know this is kind of weird, but then what it really needs is

a definition of rights, a definition of rights, so that it's unequivocal what exactly the authors of the document mean when they say to secure these rights, what that means, what that implies. And not defining rights as a list of rights, like is somewhat attempted in the Bill of Rights, but even there they know that's wrong. So they have a Ninth Amendment that says...

You know, it's not just these rights, you know. Here's the ninth: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Right? So they know, but what do we mean by rights? This is a politically contentious issue. Now, it might be very, very—maybe it was very well understood by the people at the time,

Maybe it was very well understood by the intellectuals at the time. They knew what they meant by rights. The people knew what they meant by rights. Everybody understood rights at the time in a similar way. And it's quite reasonable that they couldn't predict, you know, the Kantian progressive revolution that happened that basically steals the concept of rights, steals it completely, and completely distorts it and perverts it, and ultimately...

you have a concept and a philosophy that nobody really understands. Nobody knows what they're really talking about. So I'd say the most important thing to me in a new constitution would be find the role of government as the protection of individual rights and to be clear on what that meant, to be clear on what that meant, to articulate what rights mean, and then maybe have something like a Bill of Rights, which then, in a sense, concretizes rights.

concretizes what is meant by rights, what rights the people, individuals have, and in what ways can they be abridged and what ways and, and, and how explicitly we want to prevent the government from doing that. So, um, you know, that I think would be the number, you know, the number one thing that I would argue for. And, um,

Look, here's another, I think, important point, kind of as a preamble to all this. No constitution, no constitution can survive a culture whose ideas reject its foundation. Again, no constitution can survive the philosophical ideas that reject its foundation. So no matter how well they would have written a constitution, it would have been undermined.

When justices of the Supreme Court who are responsible for interpreting and understanding the Constitution lose that understanding because their fundamental philosophy is counter to it, they're not going to interpret it right, they're not going to do it well, or what will happen is the Constitution will be scrapped and some other document will replace it. I mean, imagine if FDR had faced a situation where everything that he wanted was

was deemed, you know, for the right reasons and deep down unconstitutional. Not just the things that the Supreme Court at the time actually did rule as unconstitutional, but really everything. What would have happened in America? I mean, most of the people would have said, why is the Supreme Court stopping the president from trying to stop this horrific depression? How does the Supreme Court have the power to

to prevent the president and Congress from doing and relieving the pain that we're experiencing. Now, maybe if we'd stuck to the Constitution, that pain would have never happened because maybe there would have never been a Federal Reserve because that would have been ruled unconstitutional. And maybe if there was no Federal Reserve, there wouldn't have been a Great Depression, and maybe none of this, all of this would be void. But the point is, if people really want something, they'll find a way to get it. They'll

Uproot the existing constitution or replace it with something different. And some Latin Americans, countries have had multiple constitutions, multiple constitutions. They keep changing them. They keep replacing them. And so, again, I don't think that the bad stuff that's happened in this country, the move away from liberty and freedom and individual rights in this country is primarily the fault of

the Constitution wasn't written tightly enough, accurately enough. No, not at all. Not at all. The blame is in the fact that the intellectuals in America, the philosophers and intellectuals of America, post founding, did not have the capacity, did not have the ideas to defend the existing Constitution and the existing Declaration of Independence and see the connections between the two. And as a consequence,

The people lost all understanding of the meaning of the Constitution. The people lost a sense of what the Declaration meant. And then it's no surprise that the judges who go to the same universities where the intellectuals teach, who are undermining the Constitution, that the judges lose all connection to the real meaning of these ideas and what the founders actually meant. So no matter what would have been written, we'd still be in bad shape.

It's also true, though, that on certain issues, we are much, much, much, much, much better off for having a constitution than not. And maybe if the constitution had been tighter in certain places, we would be a little better off. I mean, I think that the best example of this is freedom of speech. We have a First Amendment. It's clear that the government cannot censor

Courts have mostly understood this, not always, not consistently, but they mostly understood this. I'd say in more recent time, they've understood this better than in the past. And as a consequence, the United States has more free speech, more free speech than other countries in the West that don't have a First Amendment, where it's just dependent, where it's just dependent on, you know, a majority majority.

on democracy. And I think that's true of a lot of the freedoms we still have today. We have those freedoms not because the people in America appreciate those freedoms, not because people in America understand those freedoms, not because our politicians get it and want to preserve those freedoms. A big part of why we have the freedoms that we have today in the United States is because we have a Constitution that is still respected, not because it's understood necessarily,

But respect that, okay, it's a founding document. This is what America is, and we'll do it. And of course, we're seeing that president after president after president, Congress after Congress after Congress, challenge that, tweak it, push it, try to stretch it to the limit. And the court is overwhelmed with trying to rein it in to the best of their understanding. A constitution that was clear on what individual rights mean, I think would make it easier to preserve democracy.

the true meaning of the Constitution. A Constitution that was explicit about individual rights would also allow, I think, you know, who knows what would happen in the crazy world of today. You know, one of the amazing things that I find when you watch the proceedings of confirmation hearings for judges, Supreme Court judges, is how anti-intellectual most of the discussion is.

It doesn't really go to what do you think the Constitution means. Almost never, never a discussion of rights and what they mean. It's a lot of concretes. Pro-abortion, against abortion. How would you rule on this? How would you rule on that? Very concrete bound. Very anti-intellectual. Very disappointing.

I mean, if I were a senator, I would want to know, how do you understand the Constitution? What do you understand the Constitution to mean when it says X, Y, Z? What is the power of the president? What is the power of Congress? And what does the Bill of Rights mean? What is the Second Amendment or the First Amendment, Fourth Amendment? And what does the Ninth Amendment, most importantly, mean? What does it mean that there's still unenumerated rights that are held by the people? What are those rights? How would you define those rights? How would you find those rights?

I mean, that would be an unbelievable conversation. That would be exciting to listen to. And I think in modern times, very, very, very depressing. It would tell us. It would give us the information we need in order to make an evaluation of the people who are going to be Supreme Court judges. So I think that if we had more of that, more legal philosophy, definition of rights, examples of rights,

what they mean, how they applied, I think that would force the conversation. It would surface it to the, bring it to the surface. Or if the Constitution somehow referred back to the Declaration,

This is the context? I mean, some presidents understood this. I know Lincoln, for example, definitely understood the relationship between the Declaration and the Constitution. The Declaration says the purpose of government, the Constitution, is an articulation of the structure based on that. Given the purpose of protection rights, this is, to the best of our knowledge, the best way to structure government. And by the way, in terms of the structure of government, I really have no qualms with the Constitution. So...

Rights, finding them, being clear on what they mean. And then as part of that, and being clear about the role of government-protecting rights, as part of that, I think it would be good to articulate, in a sense, to concretize what we mean by the government-protecting individual rights and not involving itself in other things.

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over the last 200 years, areas where the government is infringing on our rights and has infringed on our rights in ever, you know, in ever increasing manner. So, I mean, you could start with, you know, something like education or, you know, or actually let's start with something else. Let's start with education is related, but let's start with religion. The one area that the founders understood was

that there was a real danger of an erosion and where the state could and would intervene and in a way that was destructive to how they viewed individual rights was in the area of religion. You have to understand that the Enlightenment arises out of a period of religious wars. The Enlightenment is an era in which

Part of what's driving all the thinkers to think about political philosophy is how do we prevent the absolute slaughter that happened during the Thirty Year War and during many of the other wars that inflicted Europe in the pre-Enlightenment era. And they recognized, and it was clear to them, that much of the motivation for the slaughter was religion. And they wanted to make sure that

that this is one thing that they protected us against. And that is why, you know, Amendment Number One in the Bill of Rights is Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. I mean, that is powerful stuff for the 17th century—for the 18th century. I mean, today we can take it for granted

That was an era in which most people were religious. Overwhelming majority of people were religious. And not just in America, but Europe was even more religious than America was. Every country in Europe had a state religion. While there were no religious wars, there was still religious antagonism between Catholics and Protestants in various parts of Europe. So the founders wanted to make clear that with regard to one set of ideas, you cannot...

restricted, you cannot prohibit it. I think if they'd lived through the 20th century, they would have said, huh, it seems like people kill each other not just over religion, but over ideas more broadly. Now, they already recognize this, and this is why the rest of the paragraph, the rest of the First Amendment is, or abridging the freedom of speech, or the press, of the press, or the right of the people peacefully to assemble,

and to petition the government for redress of grievances. So they say you can't restrict a freedom when it comes to ideas and the expression of those ideas. So what Congress here creates is a separation of state and religion, which is even more explicit than Virginia Constitution, but is pretty explicit here. Religion has no role in government. But there's a sense in which ideas have no role in government. All ideas. Governance is not...

an advocate for capitalism, or an advocate for socialism, or an advocate for anything. It's an advocate for individual rights. People can hold whatever ideas they want. As long as they don't violate other people's rights, they can apply those ideas in their lives. So I would have liked to see a more explicit recognition of Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of any kind of ideas, including religion. Government should separate itself from the realm of ideas.

And maybe that would make it easier then to see the need for another separation, a separation of the state from education. Now, the funny thing is that, you know, Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers, was really the first to, on the one hand, articulate these rights and agree with these, in a sense, separations of state from religion rights.

but then founds a state university run by the state, the state of Virginia. Now, not by the federal government, but I don't think that is the principle. The principle is one should not mix government with education. And yet the first mix we see in America is a mixture of government with education. That's in the founding of the University of Virginia. So some, I'd like to see in a revised constitution, if you will,

some kind of language that makes it clear, even though if you define individual rights properly and you define the role of government as only protecting individual rights, this should be obvious, but it's good to articulate it explicitly that there should be a complete separation of state from education. The state has no role in education, has no role in ideas and in religion, and has no role in education.

It doesn't have a perspective on it. It doesn't have a role in it. It doesn't think it's good or bad. Any particular education is good or bad. It doesn't have a position, and it doesn't, as a consequence, fund it, regulate it, control it, limit it, restrict it. And that, by the way, not just should apply to the federal government, but to state governments as well. And that would be interesting. Should a federal constitution state explicitly these particular things, state governments cannot abridge either.

So, for example, if we have a Congress should make no law respecting establishment of religion, does that apply to the states? What about if you separate state from education? Can that apply to the states? It should. What else should we separate? So we've separated ideas. We separate education. Here's a big one, and a big one primarily because this is where we've seen more violations of education.

rights, more violations of, I think, original intent than anywhere else. And that is when it comes to economic activity. I'd love to see some kind of statement in the Constitution that says that Congress should make no laws respecting the production, trade, and consumption of goods. Something like that. Some amendment, some provision that

that separates, here's another separation, government from economics. And I think it would do more than just Congress shall make no law respecting the restrictions on production, trade, and consumption. But then it should have something about government should not establish a central bank, government should not engage in any restrictions on money, on the establishment of money, government should set a denomination for currency,

which taxes are paid. Other than that, it has no role in money. So, you know, regulation, what are regulations? They're establishing restrictions on production. They're establishing restrictions on trade. They're establishing restrictions on consumption. By the way, would a provision like that prohibit tariffs? Yes. Tariffs are explicitly a restriction on trade and consumption. The Constitution should make tariffs impossible.

by limiting the government's ability to restrict those things, to regulate those things. And regulate, of course, is another one of those words that have changed its meaning over the decades, centuries. You know, what does regulate actually mean? Does regulate mean control? That's how we interpret it today. Is that how they meant it?

When they say to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the several states, is it to make it regular or to control it? But then they also say to coin money, which they should never have allowed. This is already an intervention in the economy, right? They should never have been allowed that the government would coin money. To regulate the value thereof, again, shouldn't have been allowed. Regulate is control. So all these regulates should not have been in there.

And then the whole issue of collecting taxes, duties, imposts, and excises is problematic. It's, again, a violation of rights. So separation of state from the economics, but with a lot of thought given to how does that apply to trade among people in the state? How does that apply to trade with others? Maybe something about

national security, state of war, something like that. Congress can, in extraordinary measures, at a time of war, restrict the trade with the enemy as the only exception. Because it is an exception because it's there because the purpose is still to protect individual rights. There should be a provision in terms of how to raise revenue without violating rights. That would be part of...

a new amendment to the Constitution, right, to the Bill of Rights. So, yeah, so separation of state from economics, very essential, very needed. The realm in which rights are violated the most these days is in the realm of economic activity, in the realm of production, in the realm of trade. And you need to have it clear in the Constitution that that's not allowed. And I would say a fourth separation

that really comes out of our experiences in modern times, and certainly what's going on right now, but really that's been going on for the last, I don't know, 80, 90 years. And that is a separation of state from science. A separation of state from science. A clear articulation of the fact that the state doesn't have a position on science, an opinion on scientific truth. It doesn't have a view.

about what science is correct and what is not, it doesn't have a... it doesn't fund science. And again, here you would have to have one caveat, one exemption. And you'd have to be very clear on it because this is a... anytime you have an exemption, this is where you could have abuse, right? That is, the exemption should be for national security for defense.

So it'd still be possible under this constitution, this new constitution, to have a Manhattan Project and to have ongoing a Defense Department

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I don't know whether it's research into missiles or whether it's research into today, even into hacking and cybersecurity and things like that. I don't know how you do this, but somehow the burden has to be very high to convince that this is indeed a national security issue. The government doesn't have to buy, doesn't have to do research into police equipment. It just has to buy it.

when it comes to national defense, there are big projects that would not happen because there's no use for them unless the Defense Department is buying them. So for me, the most important of these is, again, defining rights, making clear what it is, making clear what the purpose of government is. I would get rid of ambiguous language like in the preamble to the Constitution, which says promote the general welfare. That has led to

Again, what do they mean by the general welfare? And what they meant, which might have been securing rights for individuals, look at the Declaration of Independence, that's what we meant, is not what people today or what people in the interim have meant. So I'd love to get rid of ambiguous language like that and make it more explicit about rights with a definition and articulation of what it is. And then four separations from ideas, i.e. religion, there's one idea, or e.g. religion, separation from ideas,

Education, which is related to ideas. No public schools, no public education, no government-funded education, no government loans for education, no government grants for educational institutions, no government involvement in education, no national standards, no tests, no DEI requirements, no Title IX, no affirmative action, no involvement of the government.

In the educational process, as long as there's no violation of individual rights. I mean, it's fine to say you can't beat your students because that's a violation of their rights. You can't torture them. I mean, there's a bunch of things you can say about, but mostly education should be private and left to parents and teachers and administrators and entrepreneurs to determine. Complete separation of state from economics, other than protection against fraud, fraud,

And the articulation of the essence of property rights and the boundaries thereof. And that, again, should be part of the role of government. Part of the role of government is to help define property rights in different realms. And I think Section 8 of the Constitution articulates some of that. It also articulates things that are not, shouldn't do it. Like, for example, establish post offices and post roads. No, I mean, that should all be

private sector. And then finally, and nobody could have foreseen that this would be an issue, that this would be a problem until more recent times, I'd say climate change and then everything going on today about with MEHA, you know, Make America Healthy Again and all of that, complete separation of state from science. The government has no role in science.

Those would be the major changes I would make. I would make, I would highlight the Ninth Amendment. Again, this idea that whatever rights are being articulated, whatever separations are being explicitly said, this is not the limit. And I would spend a little bit more time saying the standard is individual rights are

and our understanding of individual rights, and that, you know, over time, we could say, "Oh, we need another separation," or, "We need to make sure the government doesn't intervene in this," that wasn't explicitly said. Just like we probably wouldn't have imagined science as being one of the separations needed, or even economy back in 1776,

Although right off the bat, right, right off the bat after the Constitution is passed, they start regulating banks even before the Constitution is passed. They start regulating banks. So certainly at the state level, they were regulating the economy and banks and things like that even right at the beginning. So maybe you could have already seen that that was going to happen. But the extent of it, I don't think anybody foresaw. But certainly science, I don't think they would have foreseen anything.

That could have been added, and there could be things in the future that should be added. But again, if the focus is positive, protect individual rights, and here's what rights are. Freedoms. Freedom of individuals to live their lives pursuing their values using their mind free of coercion, force, and authority. That's really, you know, once you have that, and once you articulate the understanding of that,

I mean, if I were writing a constitution today, I would footnote constantly Rand's article on man's rights, because that's what you want them to get. You want them to get the two articles from Wayne Rand that are crucial here, man's rights and the nature of government. And you want them to get, in the future, when they're interpreting the Constitution, 100 years from now, you want them to get that these are the foundations. This is what it's based on. These are the ideas that are being re-articulated.

into a legal document called the Constitution. That, to a large extent, is missing. All right, I think those are the main things I would do. You know, something explicitly saying, and I think it's in there, but nobody takes it seriously. It's in the Tenth Amendment. The power is not delegated to the United States by Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, or reserved for the states, respectively, or to the people.

I think, I mean, I think that the two things here, I don't think that is highlighted enough. And I think too much power is left to the states. I think the states need to be, these separations need to be, it needs to be explicit that these separations apply to the states. Now, let me, I mean, there's one, of course,

elephant in the room, if you will, that I haven't even touched on. And that is, of course, the Constitution should not permit slavery. Slavery is exactly a violation of rights. It's exactly what neither the federal government should be allowed to do or state government should be allowed to do. That is, this idea that no rights should be violated should apply to the federal government and through the federal government to the states.

So once you define rights, that is the definition that holds not only for the federal government, but also to state governments. And that is what should have made slavery impossible once the Constitution was passed. So...

Malcolm says, I don't know if complete separation of state and education will ever exist. Many free market people still think it's a state's business if a child is being educated wrong. Yeah, but this is exactly why many free market people are, in the end, unprincipled and useless. Sorry. But you can't be... I mean, put aside free market. You can't be an advocate for individual rights. You can't be an advocate for individualism and think that the state...

should be responsible for defining what wrong education is. So it's because free market intellectuals are so utilitarian, so unprincipled, so compromising, that it's very hard to fight side by side with them and actually make progress towards real freedom. But real freedom, real freedom requires the separation of state from education. Complete.

And if that can't happen, then nothing else will happen. That is, if you don't understand why the state should have no role in education, then I don't think you understand why the state should have no role in economics. Because the reason the state should have no role in economics is not some utilitarian economic argument. It's not that it's more efficient if the state stays out of it. It's, again, an argument from the perspective of individual rights, from the perspective of freedom.

How do you make an Airbnb a Vrbo? Picture yourself in a vacation rental. You're wondering why you earn loyalty rewards with hotels, airlines, coffee shops you visit, even your local ice cream spot. But this vacation house gives you nothing. When all of a sudden,

Look at that. You've earned loyalty rewards. Now it's a Vrbo, where each stay earns you rewards towards your next stay. Want a vacation rental with rewards? Make it a Vrbo. One key cash is not redeemable for cash and can only be used on Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo. A principled argument for individual rights and freedom leads to, yeah, the state should not be intervening in the economy. And that leads to the best economic outcome possible. But you don't start with the best economic outcome.

You start with the issue of how individuals should live in order to have the opportunity to be the best human beings, the best people possible. And to be the best that we can be as human beings, the one thing we need is freedom. The one thing we need, from government at least, is the extraction of force, the extraction of violence, the extraction of coercion from human society.

And then it's our responsibility to embrace the things that lead to happiness, that is reason and a morality of egoism. That can be imposed from the top, and it should not be in the state-run curriculum. The curriculum should be determined by teachers, entrepreneurs, and teachers. And parents, sorry. Teachers, entrepreneurs, and parents. In the marketplace. Schools are no different from a marketplace perspective than any good school.

Neither is healthcare, neither is any of the things that today the market, the government intervenes in and regulates and controls and owns to a large extent. All right. That is my, I want to thank Troy for funding the show. Troy sponsored the show. So thank you, Troy. Who's Australian? He's not even American with American constitution. But thanks, Troy, for sponsoring this. And I'm curious to see if in the questions you guys bring up

Other issues relating to the Constitution and maybe your ideas on how it should be reframed or restated, that would be a great use of a super chat, is to present your own views about this topic. And then I can comment on them. But yeah, again, this is something that one day, when relevant or when getting close to being relevant—

philosophers of law will have to sit down and actually write a constitution, actually do it from scratch. I mean, on the basis, I think, of the existing constitution, but updating the language and updating the references and updating the issues and integrating, I think, the ideas that I've articulated here into a proper legal document, which is not easy, not straightforward at all, will be a great, you know,

Great, great, great, huge achievement. But too early. It's too early today. It's just too early. I mean, it doesn't have many practical uses. And somebody really doing it, we need some real giants of legal philosophy to do it. Constitution 2.0. I like that.

All right. Thanks, everybody. Again, thanks to Troy making the show possible and getting me thinking about this. And I've thought about it for a long time, but getting me to articulate it to you in one session. That was great. I enjoyed it. Hope you did too. Let's see. What else do we want to... Yes. No, I mean, Cato Institute cannot do this. Sorry, as much as I respect certain things about the Cato Institute, the Cato Institute does not have

a philosophical grounding to do this. They understand, to some extent, the existing Constitution. They have a constitutional center there. But they don't have a proper understanding of political philosophy and a proper understanding of the moral foundations of that political philosophy to actually write a good Constitution. Their Constitution would be better than this one, but it wouldn't be the right one. Wouldn't be the right one. And most, again, most

People at Cato are utilitarians. And this is not a smear. This is what they would think. You need an objectivist philosopher who understands individual rights. I think most people, I think a lot of people at Cato, I don't know how many, individual rights are kind of a useful concept, but it's not that important. Utilitarians don't think individual rights are that important.

You need a rights perspective, and to have a rights perspective you really need to have a morality of individualism. You need to understand that individual rights are moral concepts, come from morality, and then you have to have the right morality to underpin them. And that morality is egoism. It has to be an individualistic morality. And so you cannot be religious and do this right.

You cannot be a Kantian. You cannot be an altruist and do this right. There are absolutely such things as rights. Just like there's such thing as justice. And just like there's such thing as love. These are abstract concepts, but they are absolutely rights. And if you don't have a concept of rights, and if you don't understand the concept of rights, and you can't articulate the concept of rights, and you don't understand where it comes from and what it's established on,

You cannot touch the Constitution, leave it as it is. It's better than anything else that'll come about. I mean, outside of objectivism, the concept of rights is completely messed up. Ayn Rand is the real heir and completer of the Enlightenment project in political philosophy, in moral philosophy. But you have to have the right moral philosophy to be able to have the right political philosophy. I mean, the idea that there are no rights-only agreements

That idea is the destroyer of freedom. That idea is the destroyer of rights and of liberty and of freedom. All right. Okay. If you want to ask questions, make a comment, suggest something, the Super Chat is open. So feel free to jump onto the Super Chat and...

and do that. We are way behind on our goals for today. Today's just like any other show. We have goals. Our one-hour goal, we're still about $100 short of our first-hour goal, and we're already on the second hour. So it would be great if we can at least achieve our first-hour goal. That would be amazing. Daniel here has really set the tone. It's his first Super Chat ever. I think that's what YouTube tells me.

And he has already done $50. That's amazing. So thank you. Let me just thank some stickers before we go to Daniel.

Brady, thank you for the sticker. I think I saw a few others. You too can just support the show with a sticker. You don't even have to ask a question. You can come in and just drop a few bucks. And if enough of you drop a few bucks, we can make our goal. So please consider doing that. Remember, value for value. This show is made possible by you.

viewers like you couldn't do this without the financial support you guys provide. Don't get any grants from anybody. We have a couple of sponsors, but that's not a lot of money. The main money, overwhelming amount of money, 95% of the money comes from you guys. Without you, this could not happen. So please consider supporting the show right now with a sticker or a super chat. And for those of you who would like

and can do it, please become a monthly supporter of the show on Patreon. You can go there, any amount, on a monthly basis. You don't have to think about it. And I love it because I don't have to think about it. It's regular income and it's very predictable. And it's what sustains the show. So I appreciate that. But for now, those of you here on YouTube, those of you who are on Twitter, come on over to YouTube and you can ask questions and you can support the show online.

Please, please consider doing that value for value. And two other things I'd ask you to do. One is like the show before you leave. And second is if you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing. Just subscribe. That way YouTube will let you know when shows are coming on. All right, let's start with Daniel, who again, first Super Chat question. So this is great. $50. That's amazing. $50.

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson gives a progressive vision of abundance with a communist view of technology and social progress. A ploy to capture the term for central planning. Suddenly it's a way for them to capture the term for the left. And I think though that there are people on the left, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson among them, and Derek Thompson often writes about

very good stuff, I think, in Atlantic about progress and about the need for progress and the need for economic growth. But people like Norris Smith and others who really do believe that we need economic growth, that economic growth is good and abundance is good and we want to have more abundance. I think they really believe that. I think Ezra Klein believes that. I think Dara Thompson believes that. But they are gravely mistaken whether those mistakes are consequence of just errors of knowledge or

or whether those mistakes are a consequence of evasion and not wanting to be too radical, or of altruism, could very well be evasions resulting from altruism, they really do believe that central planning, or at least some central planning, elements of central planning, are needed in order to reach abundance. So, for example, I think a lot of these people, Klein and Thompson, Noah Smith, and others,

really believe, and I think that they honestly hold this, although again, within the scope of what they're willing to look at, they believe that government is necessary for scientific progress and therefore for technological progress. So I don't think Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson would say we should nationalize Silicon Valley. But what they do say is we should be investing a lot more government money

into scientific research that then can be spun off into, you know, projects of Silicon Valley. I mean, they would argue, and there is some, maybe not much, but some reason to do this, that, you know, something like the internet is a product ultimately of the government. The government set up the first communication between computers and set up the first web. And they would argue that

Nothing would happen without the government, that this was a necessary thing. And indeed, more of that should happen. And the way to achieve more of that is for the government to spend more money on science without them rejecting markets for certain things. So they, again, utilitarian thinking, they think government is necessary for certain things, i.e.,

like NASA and, you know, what they view as the Internet. That was never the intent of the people who started it. Nuclear research, other things. And that's what you need government for. And the private sector then can commercialize it and make it more efficient, more productive. Markets are good for that. They also, to their credit, I'd say, think that, like, local government should be massively deregulating so that we can build more.

but they don't extrapolate that to other ways in which we should deregulate. And I think the key here is they come at everything from welfare state utilitarian perspective. And what they ignore and what they don't talk about at all, what they don't relate to at all, is rights, is the idea that there are such things as individual rights and that the government violates them when they regulate.

that it violates them when it taxes money and spends them on research. They don't see that. They don't care about that. They don't philosophically, don't relate to that at all. So I think they want abundance. Remember, and this is, in a sense, they are a, what do you call it? You know, kind of a backward look at the old left, right?

the left of the 40s, 50s, 60s, early 60s, before the new left replaced them. The old left, the Marxist left, the real Marxist left, not that modern nihilistic left, the old Marxist left, Marxism believed in progress. Marx's utopia is a utopia of abundance. It's we have everything we need, and we can do whatever we want because our material stuff is taken care of. How exactly, he never tells us, but

Marx is pro-abundance. Marxism is pro-abundance. It doesn't have an idea how to get there. So what Klein and Thompson are doing is resurrecting an old left, a left that believed in industrialization, believed in abundance before it was taken over by nihilists and environmentalists and haters who focus on hate. They believe that abundance needs change.

the state, i.e. state investment, state regulation, state control, state central planning to be achieved. And they're wrong in that. They are harkening back to the age of the left being Marxist versus the modern left, which is anti-progress, anti-achievement, anti-wealth, anti-industrialization. I'll take them over the new left any day, right?

So I don't think it's quite that they're trying to capture the term. It's more that there's a way in which they believe that that is what they want, even though a lot of their prescriptions for it are destructive to abundance. Central planning is clearly destructive to abundance. Thank you, Daniel. Thanks for the first Super Chat. Hopefully the first of many.

Andrew, what are the false premises behind the claim that if government didn't provide X service education, then there would be no X or inferior X? There seems to be a very low opinion of humanity, implicitly in that. Yeah, there's a low opinion of humanity. There's a low opinion of markets and how they work. There's a lack of understanding of markets and how they work. But there's also...

You know, an implicit egalitarianism there, that is, government is the only one that can make sure everybody gets it and everybody gets the same, and the rich don't get a better product than the poor. Because the reality is, in a free market, it's quite likely rich will get a better education, at least in some dimensions, than the poor will. The rich schools will have swimming pools and football courts and football fields and baseball fields, and they'll have a better experience than the poorer schools.

And that is offensive to anybody who believes in egalitarianism. So I think it's a lack of understanding of how that works. And also a certain reality that, and this is unfortunate because of how it evolved. Well, the first schools in America were not government schools. Most of them, because they weren't government schools, were schools run by churches, religious schools or schools...

Maybe they didn't focus on religion, but they were managed by religious orders. So if you wanted a secular education, it seemed like the only one available was from the government, and then the government steps in. And what happened very quickly in the late 19th century and then into the 20th century is the government monopolizes education, and it crowds out private capital. And just at the point where private education probably would have taken off,

where private education became feasible because the middle class, there was a middle class now, people had money, they could pay for their kids' education. You could even have enough money in the hands of some people so that you could create scholarship funds for poor kids to attend private schools. Just when that could have bubbled to the surface, where entrepreneurs could have started schools and charged money and kids would have come, it's about the same time the state decided to get involved.

and basically crowded out that private education. Said, "No, don't do that. We'll do it. We got it. We got to cover it. Don't worry about it." You know, and there are other things like, you know, there's a lot of places around the world where healthcare is the same thing. And again, underlying the healthcare argument is, if you had private, rich people would get better healthcare than poor people. That's true. People don't see in their mind that rich people eat better food.

Rich people drive nicer cars. Rich people live in better homes, bigger homes, nicer homes. But when it comes to healthcare and it comes to education, egalitarianism kicks in and we demand that everybody get the same. So is egalitarianism really driving it? And education, as I said, markets never really developed. So what you got from the beginning was public education and people think, therefore, that it's just like just that. And with healthcare...

There were enough challenges with the private, because the private sector was never truly private. There were distortions and perversions starting suddenly with World War II in America, so that a healthy private market never developed in healthcare. And the government stepped in and started taking over big chunks of it or by giving tax breaks to businesses, created the incentive for them to buy insurance and perverting the market very, very quickly and very, very easily.

So those are the kind of reasons. But I think the basic premise is egalitarianism and the idea that markets can't provide these services, the economic idea. All right, I'll ask again. Stickers, stickers so we can make our goal. We're now, what are we, you know, we've got another $60 short of our one-hour goal, which would be nice to reach. Somebody should come in with a sticker for 50 bucks. That'd be great. Richard, thank you.

In defining rights, it bears repeating that a right applies only to individual action or speech. It's not an entitlement from the government, such as a right to health care housing. Yes, exactly. So that's the kind of thing that needs to be explained in a definition of rights, in an explanation of what we mean by rights. Now, of course, there's a sense in which you do have a right to health care. You have a right to

to receive whatever healthcare you can negotiate with those who provide it. And you get to choose who to negotiate with and who not to negotiate with, who to engage in their service and who not to engage in their service. That's what it means to have a right to healthcare or right to housing. You have a right to go out there and buy and engage in trade with whoever is willing to trade with you. And that's the sense in which the right is only a right to action.

not to stuff, not to an outcome, just to the act of pursuing. No, William, the government should not deal with water or electricity or any other thing or roads or canals or anything that you might have difficulty wrapping your head around. This is what it means to think in principle. The government is not protecting individual rights by dealing with water. It is not protecting individual rights by dealing with electricity.

So it has no business there, other than if somebody's violating property rights, or somebody is committing fraud, or somebody is polluting the water in a way that makes people sick, or killing people with their electricity. Government has no role other than protect individual rights. Well, that's tough if you don't have a choice. It's not the government's job to provide you with choices. First of all, you have a choice to move

You have a choice to live without. You have a choice to dig your own well. You have lots of choices. And the fact that you can't conceive today of having choices around those things is just a lack of imagination. Markets provide for choices in ways that are hard for us to imagine when we allow markets to actually function. But markets don't function with regard to water.

not in terms of the private ownership of water at the source or the private ownership of the pipes and the ability to provide you with multiple sources. Yeah, of course you have a choice to dig a well on your property. You don't have a right to somebody providing you with water. Figure out how to get water to your property. No, I'm absolutely 100% serious. If you can't figure out how to get water to your property or how to buy water for somebody who provides the water,

then you won't have water. This is what it means to think in principle. And your lack of ability to imagine that two providers of water would build pipes into your neighborhood, into your home, is your lack of imagination. But that's the point. I don't know exactly how you solve problems in the marketplace. I leave it to the market. And electricity?

When originally electricity was put in place, there were competitors of electricity. It's only when the state came in and, in a sense, forced monopolies onto these things, was electricity then restricted to one provider. You can call it silly all you like, but it is reality. There's no such thing as a natural monopoly, and there's no such thing as the government should provide you with fill-in-the-blank. It just isn't.

Mary Mary says she owns a property where water is delivered. But you have a right to have a pipe delivering water to your property. And indeed, development would have happened in a different way. Developers would have thought about how to provide people with alternatives for electricity and for water as they develop neighborhoods if there wasn't a state monopoly over these things. Imagine one big tunnel that is dug under water

neighborhoods that, which they do today with cable and other things, where you can put whatever kind of pipelines or whatever kind of cables that you want. I mean, I remember the days, do you remember the days where nobody could conceive of how you could get internet unless the government guaranteed the internet, right? William C. says, I have two or three water providers. Well, there you go. So what do you, what's so silly? You have already two or three water providers. So what does the government have to be involved here?

Choose. You should have two or three electricity providers. You have multiple providers of internet service, even though I remember in the 90s, everybody thought it was a monopoly. It could only be one. It was the telephone. It all came on the telephone line. And whoever owned the telephone line had a monopoly. Having two or three water providers is relatively free market. A lot of people don't have two or three.

because it hasn't been allowed. So going back to Richard, yes, you're not entitled to anything. You're entitled to be left free. But even if you only have one, it doesn't mean you're entitled to it. You don't pay your bill, they'll cut your water off. And if they jack up the prices, they jack up the prices. And then people will start thinking about how to create alternatives. But no, a free market is, government doesn't guarantee you any economic product.

Any economic product. Doesn't guarantee you water. Doesn't guarantee you electricity. You're not tied to anything. You have to pay for it. You don't pay, you don't get it. And you have to pay what the market bears. All right. Tom, I recommend restoring the lost constitution by Professor Randy Barnett. He'd make a good interview guest. Yeah, Randy's really good on the constitution and he's really good on interpreting the constitution. He's a bit of a...

I mean, he's a bit of an originalist and he is an anarchist. I think the best book about thinking about the Constitution is Tara Smith's book. I forget its name now. But Tara has a really good book, kind of on legal philosophy that would go into a Constitution. I'm just looking up the name of the book. Where is the actual book? Yeah, it's A Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System.

So a lot of that kind of her thinking about the Constitution, but how to think about the Constitution, how to think about, in a sense, it's opening the Constitution. That's what judicial review is, you know, is there. I highly recommend it. You can find it on Amazon. God, it's expensive on hardcover, but you can get it on Kindle for a pretty good price. So Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System by Tira Smith. If you're interested about these topics,

Tom, if you've read Barnett, you should definitely read Tara Smith. She's critical of certain aspects of Randy's content, but also positive on a lot of other things that Randy's done.

Michael, Trump still went through with a few hundred deportations despite a judge pause. His lunacy is getting dangerous, but I don't see anyone in Congress having the balls to impeach. No, nobody's going to impeach him in Congress. Forget about that. That's not going to happen. Let's see if he continues and let's see what the court does next.

and how people respond to it. But yeah, you know, he's got people like Elon Musk standing next to him saying, we should just impeach the judges that reverse your decisions. You should be able to do whatever you want. Andrew, how do you ground in reality the proper meaning of rights to life as against the right to be given the things one needs to live?

Well, the proper grounding in reality is to really think about why we need rights. What is the concept of rights? What purpose does it serve? What purpose does it serve? And to understand that, we have to understand the nature of human beings and really, before rights even, what human beings require, what human beings need when they come into society, when they are in a group.

in a social context. So we should start with the nature of human beings. And one has to understand that the nature of human beings is to be rational. Rationality is what makes us human. It's what makes the pursuit of values possible. It's what makes human success at living possible. So human success at living requires rationality, requires reason. Now, what does reason require? Reason requires the absence of force.

That is, when we come into interaction with other people, the thing that can obstruct our ability to think and to act on those thoughts, to pursue our values, to achieve our values, and therefore to achieve our happiness, is force and coercion. That is the enemy of the individual, the enemy of an individualist, the enemy of an egoist, the enemy of a rational animal, because it is the enemy of reason. It obstructs our ability to reason.

So rights are a way to formalize that, the way to formalize the idea that a rational being needs to be free of coercion and force in order to be able to pursue his happiness, in order to be able to use his mind in pursuit of his happiness. That's it. And the whole idea of getting things you need to live, well, that automatically should be suspicious because the only way you could get them

is if they're taken from those who produce them. And that means those people don't have a right to live free of force and coercion. They are now just tools for me to live. Well, that means rights are not universal. But rights are universal. Just as human nature is universal. So rights can't... It's a contradiction, the idea that you have a right to other people's stuff. That's an immediate contradiction. The only right you have is to be left alone. So...

The engagement with other people requires an understanding that coercion is banned, that there is no coercion. And that is what the concept of rights captures. And if somebody violates that, if somebody doesn't want to agree, "Oh, I think coercion is great. I'm going to go rape and pillage." Okay. Well, we have a mechanism, a police that captures you and throws you in jail forever.

Because we don't need your agreement to do that. We don't need your agreement to put you in jail. You have violated rights, the fundamental necessity for human coexistence. Richard, how could you tighten the Constitution to completely prevent buying and selling government influence? Well, I don't think you really can. What you can do is restrict the influence government has so that there's nothing to buy. There's nothing to buy.

If I, you know, can't give subsidies because that's a violation of the principle of separation of state from economics, why would you lobby me? If I can't give out favors, why would you lobby me? So the only thing is government contracts, and government contracts even there would be limited. Government would be relatively small, and the main contracts would be defense contracts, and you could have something in there about, you know,

the illegality and the wrongness of bribery. But that could be in legislation afterwards in terms of exactly how to procure defense contracts without corruption. And you can't have a bulletproof anything, right? So corruption is always possible. But if we reduce the influence of politicians, you reduce the need to lobby them. The ability to lobby them, the purpose of lobbying them, it's gone. They have no power. Make politicians impotent.

And then you don't have to worry about the influence of lobbying. All right, Mary Bins, the Federalist Papers resemble experimentation. Isolate variables, aspects of the Constitution, and test them against the objections of the public forum.

Yeah, I mean, they were partially to do that. They were partially to educate the public. They were partially to test them against each other. That is, the Federalist Papers are debates between some of the people, you know, engaged in writing the Constitution.

And they were testing out their theories against one another. But yes, and against the public. So I think that's right. And you think about how beautifully written they are, how intellectual they are, how deep they are. That is right. Williams says defense is another good example of an industry we don't have a choice in. It's the only industry. Government is a monopoly over the use of force. Government is a monopoly over the use of force.

The only thing should be monopolized in our world is force. That means policing and military. That's it. That's it. Now, the government chooses between different arms manufacturers. So the arms manufacturers still can be in a private market, in a free market. But you as a citizen, the only choice you have is to stay in this country or leave.

But in this country, the government has a monopoly over the use of force. You cannot take a gun and go and enforce the laws. You can't hire a private security firm to go and enforce the laws. Only the government can enforce the laws. That is the only, the one and only monopoly that exists. And it's a state-granted monopoly, and it's the whole purpose of a state. There's no purpose of a state other than to be the monopoly over the use of force.

And that's what it really means to have individual rights. It means to have an entity that protects your rights. And in order to protect those rights, it has to have a monopoly over the use of force. And they're held accountable through voting. That's what you have a constitution for. That's why a constitution has a separation of powers. That's why it limits the power of each branch of the government.

That's why each branch of the government is supposed to correct the other branches of the government, look over and check on the other branches of government. And then ultimately, since all those branches of government ultimately rebound to a vote by the population, that is what holds them accountable. A constitution and voting. Hector, you're on most of the U.S. didn't have a high school diploma for a long time. That's right. And for a long time, that wasn't needed.

Today, more and more, it is needed. Maybe not the high school diplomas that are being granted out there, that is garbage, but a proper high school diploma, a high school diploma that actually represents a teaching of skills, of knowledge, knowledge that is necessary in order to function in the modern world, that I think is required. We live in an information technological age, a computer age, where certain basic knowledge needs to be there.

Jacob, how much of the Constitution was filled in by case law within the first five decades of the country? Would you change or alter this structure? Well, I mean, the more explicit the Constitution had been about rights and what they meant, the less you would have needed that filling in. So part of that would be taken care of that.

But yeah, I mean, I think the Constitution needed to be more explicit about certain things so that it relied less on that case law. And I don't know how much of it. I'm not a scholar of the history of the Constitution. And so I don't know how much of that I would revise today. I'd have to know a lot more about what was decided in those first five decades and how much of it was good and how much of it was bad.

Ian, you focused on the things that documents should forbid, but I think it would be more important to be very explicit that the government is not allowed to do anything that isn't explicitly listed as okay. Well, I don't know if that's true, though. The government is there to protect individual rights, and it might be that because of technological advance or because of something else, there are certain things that the government in the future will have to do to protect rights that

that we didn't think of, that is not listed. So I think the real crucial part is to gain an understanding of rights and to gain an understanding of what it means for the government to protect rights. And then it needs to do whatever it needs to do in order to protect those rights. And here's some examples of things that it can do. I don't know that you need to go through a whole constitutional amendment in order to do that. I'm not sure that's right.

I don't think that's a particularly efficient way of doing it. So here's a bunch of things that the government needs to do. But for example, there's no way the founders could have imagined a Manhattan Project. There's just no way they could have imagined that. And if you'd had a separation of state from economics and state from education and state from science, then how do you get the Manhattan Project? And they wouldn't have put in there, I don't think, national defense and da-da-da-da-da because they couldn't have thought of it.

And now it was essential that in a state of war that the government do this. And not as a violation of the Constitution, like let's say Lincoln, certain things that Lincoln did during the Civil War, which he understood as violations of the Constitution, but were necessary. And they were wrong, what Lincoln did. But not as violation of the Constitution, but yes, consistent with the Constitution, but things that couldn't have been predicted. Manhattan Project being an example. Tom.

To play devil's advocate, do we need the state to support science as a facet, as its role in defense? No, outside of very narrow fields, which can explicitly and equivocally be linked to defense. Otherwise, there's no limit to it. I mean, biotech, cancer cures. I mean, so it has to be clearly linked to defense.

munitions, missiles, satellites, even, things like that. But it has to be, it's very, very slippery slope. And look how defense is being used today to do tariffs, to do a million things that the government intervenes in. Andrew, would egoism be an explicit part or just implicit basis for proper constitution? A right to pursue one's own happiness is a very abstract statement, though powerful, I think. I think it would be

I mean, even a right to pursue your own happiness does not necessarily imply morality of egoism. I mean, it does. It's the only place it could come from, but it doesn't, you know, people can still be altruists and still call for that in some bizarre way. So I would say that it's implicit.

The better understood egoism is in the culture, the more likely the Constitution is to be adopted, accepted, and preserved. And that is where the focus of the teachings need to be, because once you get egoism, the rest is relatively easy. Freedom is easy for an egoist, the concept of freedom. The reason we struggle so much for freedom is because altruism does not lead to freedom. So we are constantly having to figure out how to

advocate for freedom from a perspective that is not consistent with it. And that's why the culture struggles so much with the concept of freedom. Steven says, should punitive damage be allowed in contract cases? I don't know. Probably not or yes, but they should be pretty obviously capped. That is, if somebody is violating a contract on purpose,

There should be a penalty above and beyond what is lost, the economic value that's lost. But that penalty can be a million X. So, you know, these juries that find gazillions of dollars punitive damages, there has to be some limit. So there has to be some constraints on that. I'm not against punitive, i.e., you did this on purpose. You should pay for that more than just, you know, you should pay damages.

But it can be just a way to penalize whole businesses and penalize, take from the rich and give to the poor. The whole legal structure and legal liability and laws of liability and laws of lawsuits need to be changed and need to be rethought. What's your view of AEDPA? I don't know what that is. If you're protecting rights at the state level, shouldn't it be easier to appeal to

death penalty sentences. Yeah, I mean, I think it should be easy to appeal death penalty sentences. I think it should be easy and fast and quick. I'm not particularly in favor of the death penalty, so I'm fine with doing away with the death penalty. But yeah, I think it should be much easier, much faster to appeal and to get a final answer about death penalty. I think the fact that they drag on for years and years and years is ridiculous, really, really ridiculous.

Objectives claim that psychologizing is wrong. I can't see how it is desirable or even possible to avoid inferring what another person's mentality is based on their actions. What objectivists do, and objectivists do it all the time. I think the point is that one should judge people based on their actions. And sure, you can infer somebody's mentality, but I don't think one should...

Give them a pass on judging their actions based on their mentality or penalize them more given their actions based on their mentality, based on their psychology versus what they explicitly say. So again, I encourage everybody to listen to Ankar Ghate's talk from a year and a half ago at Ocon or two years ago from Ocon on psychologizing. I thought it was very good.

Esoteric dichotomy. Hey, Iran, yesterday you mentioned a vision of a cybernetic future where human integrates technology and we enhance and modify. Super inspiring. Thank you. I think that's the way we're going to evolve. I think it's a mistake to see humans and robots as two separate entities that I think ultimately there'll be a good division of labor between the two. And there'll be an integration division of labor between the two.

All right, everybody. Thank you. Thanks to all the Super Chatters. I appreciate the support. And thank you. Thank you again for Troy for making the show possible and for sponsoring it. And I will see you guys on Wednesday. Remember, no show Monday, no show Tuesday, Wednesday.

In the meantime, those of you who'd like to support the show on a regular basis, Patreon, patreon.com, put in your own book show, and you can do it. I get almost every day, I get one new supporter on Patreon. That is a great pace that I hope we can keep to. You know, one a day would be amazing. So you, you be the one for today. You. I can see you right there. All right. Thanks, everybody. I will...

Talk to you on Wednesday. Bye, everybody.