You're listening to the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church and the Libertarian is Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard of course is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow here at the

Hoover Institution. He's the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at NYU, and he's a senior lecture at the University of Chicago. And Richard today, I'd like to discuss the topic of your column this week, which you've titled,

The Dire Consequences of Afghanistan.

With the removal of American support, the Afghan government has fallen to the Taliban in a mere days.

And so I'd like to start with a quotation

that you have in your column.

You write, if a withdrawal plan will cause chaos,

the simple choice is not to withdraw, period.

Better to stay for as long as it takes, perhaps forever.

And Richard, I'm going to remind you that you are in fact the eponymous libertarian of this show.

So how does a libertarian support a foreign intervention, especially when a direct threat to national interest

doesn't appear to be present.

That's right.

Well, I mean, the first thing to understand

is that when you're thinking about the use of force,

there's two ways to think about it. The first of those is the ways in which it is obligatory and the other ways in which it turns out to be permissive. They overlap in complicated cases, but here's the basic distinction. If somebody is coming at you or some of your

citizens as a government you're duty bound to protect them. If somebody comes

after somebody else in the world you're not duty bound to protect them but you're certainly entitled to come in just

the way of it turns that A is beating up B. C could come in in order to prevent A from beating up

C. B that is you always are going to allow people to intervene to prevent aggression

...