This is my appearance on the Mark Edge show. Shownotes:
Mark Edge invites libertarian legal theorist and retired patent attorney Stephan Kinsella to unpack the stunning April 1st memo from the Mises Institute announcing that Hans-Hermann Hoppe — their longtime Distinguished Senior Fellow and arguably the most important living Rothbardian — is no longer affiliated with the Institute.
Kinsella walks through the backstory: his own 2013 resignation, the recent departures of three Mises presidents, a private memo Hoppe and Guido Hülsmann sent the board over governance issues, tensions surrounding Javier Milei, and the “Quo Vadis” essay that preceded Hoppe’s termination.
Kinsella also previews the new book he and Hoppe co-edited celebrating Murray Rothbard’s 100th birthday, the upcoming Rothbard celebration in Porto, Portugal (June 27), and the Property and Freedom Society meeting in September.
Jan. 8 1996. We moved to Philly in 1994 from Houston and lived in an apartment in beautiful Chester County, until wife insisted we buy a house. So in 1995 we bought our first house in Newtown Square, Delaware county.
We were snowed in for a few days because of this crazy blizzard. I got bored after being shut in for a couple days. Our back yard sloped down fairly steeply to this wooded creek area, so on Monday, as we were working from home, I dug some trenches and rigged a makeshift sled out of cardboard and got my wife and her low-IQ cocker spaniel, Muffy, to sled down it. I dressed Cindy in my snow skiing pants and jacket. I later MacGuyvered a white trash sled out of thick plastic and a trash can lid. I remember we saw our neighbors a couple days later when we emerged and they had assumed we were gone because we stayed home for 3-4 days and waited for the roads to be cleared. You can take the boy out of Praireville, but you can’t take the coonass out of the boy. I think Big Daddy’s accent was thicker back then.
Wife was bitching that I paid someone $90 to blow our driveway, but it was very long. I remember another time, after the driveway was covered in snow, well the builder had for some reason put both hot and cold taps in our garage, so I got the bright idea to run a hose to the drive way and turn on the hot water, thinking that would melt all the snow. It made a 2 inch hole and did nothing. Oh well. Yet another lesson learned in Yankeeland. Another time I threw a cup of hot water on car’s driver side window to clear off the ice and snow but of course it immediately froze. Good thing I moved back to God’s country (Texas) a year later.
Jeffrey Tucker sits down with Stephan Kinsella…libertarian attorney, author of the seminal 2001 essay “Against Intellectual Property“, and the massive treatise “Legal Foundations of a Free Society“…for a provocative discussion on why defamation (libel and slander) law should be rejected as just another form of intellectual property right.
Kinsella argues that reputation is not ownable property. What others think of you cannot be controlled or turned into a legal entitlement. Defamation law, like patents, copyrights, and trademarks, rests on the flawed idea that the state should protect intangible “rights” through force. He explains how these laws create chilling effects, perverse incentives, and actually amplify the harm of false speech rather than reduce it. [continue reading…]
Interesting article by Ancap Joker, “Who owns my body?,” Substack (Apr 07, 2026). I paste it below with a few interspersed comments. I think it’s pretty good, basically in the right direction. I have a couple of suggested quibbles/slight changes. [continue reading…]
This is April 1, but this is not an April Fool’s Day joke (I despise April Fool’s Day jokes).
In response to “Mises Institute: Quo Vadis?,” Property and Freedom Journal (March 25, 2026), Professor Hoppe has been removed as a Distinguished Senior Fellow (~2000–2026) with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, as indicated in the following email exchange. Hans was appointed Senior Fellow early in his association with the Mises Institute, which began when he moved to the US to study with Rothbard in 1985, and elevated to Distinguished Senior Fellow around 2000 or so. Hans remains the only person to have ever received this distinction from the Mises Institute; it now has no one with this designation. 1
In response to all this, Hans asked me to post this image:
Hans Hoppe, Walter Block, and I are examples of three people unfellowed by the Mises Institute for three completely different and indeed incompatible sets of ideological reasons.
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comment: “As Nathan Goodman reminds me, the Mises Institute still lists me as a senior fellow on *my* page. However, I’m not on the page that lists senior fellows. This is really indicative of the failure to keep the website adequately updated. Whatever Jeff Tucker’s failings, he was the one who held the website together, and website management went straight to hell after he left.”
Nathan GoodmanDaniel Bastiat Although Kinsella’s views are closer to Hoppe’s views than I’d like, they’re mostly better. It seems to me that it’s more a matter of personal loyalty than of ideological affinity.
One problem is the term scarcity can be ambiguous because it has two meanings: one, the common meaning, is lack of abundance. Two, the technical economic meaning, is rivalrous or lack of superabundance. This is why I sometimes use conflictability to describe the second meaning as…
Congrats to these honorees. A few months ago, a good friend of mine and LSU Law classmate, Tony Tramontana (I went backpacking in Europe with him and our friend Paul Comeaux the summer of 1991 during law school—see pix below), 1 an LSU Law Dean’s Council member, and who knows of my work, asked if I minded if he submitted my name for the “Legal Innovator” award. He thought my career might fit the bill according to 2026 LSU Law Distinguished Alumni Awardscriteria. I figured it was a long shot, but said go ahead and helped him gather some materials. I was not selected. Congrats to Mr. Pinkerton. [continue reading…]
David Friedman’s recent Made in Ancapia interview has this clip:
Me encanta
David Friedman sobre Javier Milei:
✒️| “Sería bueno para el libertarismo si resulta que tener un presidente libertario que empuja las ideas de la libertad hace a un país rico. (…) Le deseo suerte.” pic.twitter.com/h0CrzLmdlP
My close, personal association with the Mises Institute goes back more than 40 years, to 1985, only three years after the Institute’s founding. In the course of the years I have given dozens upon dozens of lectures. I have been awarded its Schlarbaum Prize and the Rothbard Medal. For a decade, I served as editor of its Journal of Libertarian Studies. I am the MI’s only long standing Distinguished Senior Fellow. Only two years ago, in 2024, I was a featured speaker at the Institute’s Human Action Conference, and my 75th birthday was celebrated at the occasion. In the same year I sent this congratulatory note to Lew Rockwell at the occasion of the festivities organized in honor of his own 80th birthday:
Dear Lew, to your 80th birthday I send you my best wishes and want to say thanks for by now almost 40 years of friendship and intellectual camaraderie.
I know you are too humble to say this, but I can certainly do it: You rank among the most brilliant commentators and analysts of the present age and you are the world’s greatest living promoter of sound economics in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard and, more generally, of liberty, peace, common sense, and reason.
Looks like the chapter “How Movements Turn Into Rackets” in Douglas E. French, When Movements Become Rackets and Other Swindles: The PFS Trilogy, Stephan Kinsella, ed. (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press and Property and Freedom Society, 2025) might need an update or supplement at some point….
A European Portuguese translation of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), Fundamentos Legais de uma Sociedade Livre, is being prepared now by Manuel Ogando. It is expected to be completed in time for presentation at the following event:
“100 Years of Rothbard,” Porto, Portugal, June 2026. Sponsored by several Portuguese libertarian groups: Mises Portugal, Catalaxia, Don’t Trust Verify (bitcoin podcast), ZugaTV (libertarian podcast), and Golpe de Estado Podcasto (ancap podcasters); also featuring Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
There is a Brazilian Portuguese translation already, but apparently the languages are different enough that different versions are necessary. That other one is Fundamentos Legais de uma Sociedade Livre.
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