StephanKinsella.com

From a twitter post. Kinsella on fie-ya.

This is why I use conflictability (or rivalrousness) instead of scarcity, ¹ since the latter term is ambiguous and has different connotations. In common usage it just means lack of abundance. In terms of praxeology and property rights it means the opposite of…

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) April 19, 2025

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1. On Conflictability and Conflictable Resources [↩]

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (10.8MB)

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 460.

I mean the title says it all. I kept getting interrupted by calls and deliveries. Oh well, what you gonna do.

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George Reisman

I’ve long been a great admirer of Objectivist economist George Reisman, author of the towering Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (1996). I devoured his book The Government Against the Economy (1979) and other writing in college and have listened to many of his lectures and courses.

I think the first time I met George was when I presented “The Legitimacy of Intellectual Property,” which later became Against Intellectual Property, at the Mises Institute’s Austrian Scholars Conference, Auburn, Alabama, on March 25, 2000. I believe he had recently split with the Ayn Rand Institute, and had reunited with his old friend Ralph Raico at the Mises Institute event. George was standing in the back of the room during my lecture and his questions to me indicated he was a bit stunned at my argument.

In any case, he had long offered for sale a 10-CD lecture set, “Reisman’s Program of Self-Education in the Economic Theory and Political Philosophy of Capitalism.” I suggested he might want to put them online so people could more easily access them. His own website, capitalism.net, was in disrepair and there was no immediately obvious way to remedy this, so I volunteered to organize the material and host it on my site, and upload it to Youtube, which I did: George Reisman’s Program of Self-Education in the Economic Theory and Political Philosophy of Capitalism.

Jeffrey Tucker and I have warned libertarians for years that their work could be lost because of copyright and standard publishing models and paywalls which can make it hard for people to access the work, or to republish or reuse it after they are gone. ¹

I discussed this with George and he has decided to free all his work, to which he holds copyright, upon his death, by means of a CC-BY 4.0 dedication and license grant, which he gave me permission to post here (pdf).

1. See How long copyright terms make art disappear; First Amendment Defense Act of 2021; Remembering Tibor Machan, Libertarian Mentor and Friend: Reflections on a Giant, Authors: Don’t Make the Buddy Holly Mistake, On Leading by Example and the Power of Attraction (Open Source Publishing, Creative Commons, Public Pomain Publishing), and Do Business Without Intellectual Property (Liberty.me, 2014); also Jeffrey A. Tucker, Authors: Beware of Copyright (also on LewRockwell.com and in his Bourbon for Breakfast) (Along with related chapters: “”If You Believe in IP, How Do You Teach Others?”, “Is Intellectual Property the Key to Success?”, “Books, Online and Off,” and “Mises.org in the Context of Publishing History”). [↩]

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Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 459.

In response to lots of froth on Twitter related to Jack Dorsey’s call to “delete all IP law,” which was echoed by Elon Musk (Musk and Dorsey: “delete all IP law”) I decided to attempt to host an impromptu Twitter Spaces about this. After overcoming some technical glitches, here is the result (and thanks to @Brunopbch, @NotGovernor (Patrick Smith), and @TrueAmPatriot86 for assists). I proposed to the space: “Fielding Questions About Abolishing Intellectual Property, about IP, and About Libertarian Property Rights”, and that’s basically what we ended up talking about. The Twitter spaces can be viewed here; I have clipped off the first 8 minutes or so of setup talk for this podcast episode.

Grok summaries and shownotes and Youtube Transcript below. [continue reading…]

Re the new book Common Law Liberalism: A New Theory of the Libertarian Society, by John Hasnas, of “Myth of the Rule of Law” fame.

[Note: this includes also his other famous paper, The Obviousness of Anarchy (2), which is also hard to find online. See Two Great Arguments for Anarchy: Long and Hasnas; also comments in Federal Judges Aren’t Real Judges]

Grok summary of two recent talks below.

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I’ve been interested in bitcoin for some time, ¹ and witnessed the BTC vs. BCH blocksize war from 2015–2017 from the sidelines. Last year I read Roger Ver and Steve Patterson’s Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC (2024) (foreword by my buddy Jeffrey Tucker, whose Atlanta Crypto-Currency Conference I spoke at in 2013). ² I found it to be well-written and organized. I was not persuaded by their case, however. Seemed like spin, whining, typical activism to me. If bitcoin can ever work, it has to work on its own, not because of flogging by activists to “use” it or “adopt” it. (Same thing with libertarianism.) ³

I was aware of another book on this topic, Jonathan Bier’s The Blocksize War: The battle over who controls Bitcoin’s protocol rules (2021), but I’ve never read it. In a Tweet, Miguel Vidal commented that “Roger Ver is deeply dishonest: he’s who tried to hijack Bitcoin. He attacked (bcash) and he failed (he had no interest in the underlying debate)” and that Jonathan Bier‘s “essay is quite well documented, fair, engaging and riveting. Highly recommend.” I noticed he had written the Prólogo (prologue, or foreword) ⁴ to the Spanish translation and he sent me a link to an a automatic English translation of his Foreword, which I append below. [continue reading…]

1. Am I a Bitcoin Maximalist?; various podcast interviews and posts. [↩]
2. KOL085 | The History, Meaning, and Future of Legal Tender (Crypto-Currency Conference, Atlanta, 2013). [↩]
3. Activism, Achieving a Free Society, and Writing for the Remnant. [↩]
4. Pat McNees, “What is the difference between a preface, a foreword, and an introduction?” [↩]

My book Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023) contains updated essays published over a 29-year period, and thus is quite lengthy—about 800 pages, including bibliography and index and about 712 page of text.

As I pointed out on the landing page, for those who just want a taste of what the book is about, I recommend the Foreword by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, my Preface, and chapters 1 (“How I Became A Libertarian”) and 2 (“What Libertarianism Is”). However, as I pointed out in the Preface, “For those who want to skip the more extraneous material and focus on the core libertarian theory chapters, I recommend chapters 2–12, 14–15, and 18.”

With this in mind, I have produced a version of the PDF with the extraneous material stripped out: LFFS—Core Chapters Only, PDF. This version is 304 pages shorter than the main text, containing 408 pages of text as opposed to 713 for the original version–so about 57% the length of the original.

As I mentioned to the folks at the CEES in Guatemala, ¹ when I spoke there earlier this week, ² which had expressed some interest in translating Legal Foundations of a Free Society—it’s so far been translated into Chinese and Portuguese, but not Spanish—this “core chapter” truncated version might be more suitable for translation since the overall length would be much shorter and result in a slimmer paper volume. Food for thought for others interested in publishing a translation.

1. Centro de Estudios Económico-Sociales, affiliated with Universidad Francisco Marroquín. [↩]
2. Speaking at APEE IP Panel in Guatemala. [↩]