KOL361 | Libertarian Answer Man: Oaths: With Kent Wellington

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 361. A nice young man, self-described as "generally an anarchist? But also a statist (monarchist? ie 'the kingdom of heaven') in the spiritual sense" had some questions for me since he doesn't have a lot of people to bounce his ideas off of. I agreed to do it if we could record it, in case anything interesting came out of it. You be the judge. A variety of topics came up, primarily his interest in the problem of "oaths" as the root evil in the modern world, and related/other issues like the nature of contracts, usury as evil, Pournelle's "iron law of bureaucracy," Jesus, and the evils of the Uniform Commercial Code (something to do with Babylon), and Galambos. Transcript below. https://youtu.be/EEj137ADBzY TRANSCRIPT Libertarian Answer Man: Oaths: With Kent Wellington Stephan Kinsella & Kent Wellington Oct. 17, 2021 00:00:03 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Okay, hey, this is Stephan Kinsella, Kinsella on Liberty.  This is another one of my episodes where someone asked to talk to me about something.  And I said yes, if I can record it in case there’s anything of interest to listeners.  So this is Kent Wellington who briefly informed me he’s not exactly a libertarian but just has some questions.  I don’t really know what you want to talk about, but Kent, why don’t you introduce yourself, however you want to do it, and then we can start? 00:00:27 KENT WELLINGTON: Hey there.  My name is Kent Wellington, and I just have been very anti-IP since I was a child really.  And when I realized that Mr. Kinsella was the one who wrote one of my favorite books, Against IP, I was really taken aback.  And then I was like, wow, I should reach out to him and just try to have a conversation with him because I’ve sort of been in the – what do you say – I’ve just been up in the towers on these topics for a long time, like my whole life. 00:01:14 And I’ve never – I never really get to talk about these topics with anybody one on one, and I just saw his – that he puts his email out there, so I was like, I’ll just email him, see if he’ll – he’s willing to talk to me for even a minute.  So that’s what we’re doing right now, and I have some very different takes, I guess, what I think are some novel takes but maybe aren’t, and I’d love to be proven wrong, or I just wanted to throw some things at you regarding contracts, IP, anarchism, a few different things.  Mainly, I guess my main hypothesis is – so I’m very into the quotes from Jesus on oaths, and I believe that, without – so I think that oaths are the key social mechanism of the state.  Do you – what do you think about that?  Are oaths not the key social mechanism of the state? 00:02:41 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Oaths?  O-A-T-H? 00:02:44 KENT WELLINGTON: Yes, oaths, yeah. 00:02:46 STEPHAN KINSELLA: I’m not sure I know what that means.  What do you mean? 00:02:51 KENT WELLINGTON: So oaths are – if you want to become a doctor in the US, at least a professionally recognized doctor, you have to take the Hippocratic Oath.  Others are – so our whole professional society is filled with oaths, which are really these sort of mystical activities, and our secular world is filled with these oaths.  To become a lawyer, you need to take the bar oath.  To become a politician, you just swear in.  You need to take an oath of office.  There’s a bajillion oaths you need to take in modern society if you want to partake in modern society. 00:03:42 And so Jesus – and I’m not necessarily getting religious here.  You can just say that in one of the most popular books in the world, which the Bible is, well, the biggest guy, the most important guy in the book, in the New Testament, Jesus, in his biggest speech, the Sermon on the Mount, he says take no oaths at all.  Instead, just say yes or no.  Anything beyond this comes from the evil one.  So my interpretation of that is that anything beyond you giving your word,