StephanKinsella.com

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An odd gmail glitch just placed an Aug. 12, 2009 email from Tibor Machan at the top of my gmail inbox, with this note: “Hi, Stephan: Perhaps you would like to use the attached discussion note, ‘A Brief on Left-Libertarinaism,'” and containing his short article. This was sent to me around the time I started Libertarian Papers and was obviously meant as a submission to that journal. I vaguely recall seeing it and dismissing it as too light or poorly written for the journal. In any case, it appears not to be published online so here it is, with no edits (since I cannot ask Tibor to approve).

A Brief on Left Libertarianism—Is it an Oxymoron?

Tibor R. Machan*

[sent to Stephan Kinsella Aug. 12, 2009] [continue reading…]

[From my Webnote series]

• KOL418 | Corporations, Limited Liability, and the Title Transfer Theory of Contract, with Jeff Barr: Part II
• KOL414 | Corporations, Limited Liability, and the Title Transfer Theory of Contract, with Jeff Barr: Part I
• Corporate Personhood, Limited Liability, and Double Taxation
• “Classificationism, Legislation, Copyright”
• The Non-Aggression Principle as a Limit on Action, Not on Property Rights, StephanKinsella.com (Jan. 22, 2010)
• IP and Aggression as Limits on Property Rights: How They Differ, StephanKinsella.com (Jan. 22, 2010)
• Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023): ch. 15, “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” Part IV.H, ch. 2, “What Libertarianism Is,” the section at n.52, “Property as a Right to Exclude”; also ch. 8, “Causation and Aggression,” text at n.3
• Causation and Aggression
• The Libertarian Approach to Negligence, Tort, and Strict Liability: Wergeld and Partial Wergeld
• On “Unowned” State Property, Legal Positivism, Ownership vs. Possession, Immigration, Public Roads, and the Bum in the Library

more later, for now:

I see two mistakes in your reasoning. First, you are accepting the relevance of the state’s arbitrary classifcation scheme–calling someone an “owner” or not, an employee or not. [continue reading…]

Dear Mr. Kinsella,

I am writing to you from Iran, where I closely follow your work on libertarian legal theory. I would deeply appreciate your insights on a unique digital dilemma here that highlights the messy collision between property rights, state coercion, and a captive market.

Amidst a total international internet blackout in Iran, a privately owned book-review platform has flourished. While it is 100% private property, it is the unintended beneficiary of a state-enforced captive market; because the regime has blocked all global competitors (like Goodreads), this platform enjoys a monopoly privilege it never sought. [continue reading…]

[Cross posted at Propertyandfreedom.org]

From The Editorial Board, “Old McDonald Had a Race Preference: A lawsuit settlement helps end discrimination at the USDA,” Wall Street Journal (May 22, 2026):

One of the worst sources of race preferences has been the federal government, so cheers to the news that some discriminatory programs have been sent out to pasture. The Agriculture Department recently settled a lawsuit and agreed to end race and sex preferences in federal farm programs.

Adam Faust is a Wisconsin dairy farmer who found his Holstein milking operation harmed by USDA programs that used race or sex preferences to allocate financial benefits. The Dairy Margin Coverage Program, which farmers use to cover fluctuations in milk prices, charged him a fee that wasn’t paid by farmers USDA designated as “socially disadvantaged.”

[continue reading…]

Note: I do not use Grok or AI to cheat or write for me, but only as a tool for research and assistance, summaries, and so on. Here is the summary of a Grok discussion I had trying to clarify some issues, so asked it to prepare the summary in the form of a blog post.

***

A few days ago at the Libertarian National Committee event (LNC 2026) in https://www.lnc2026.com/, I was having a lively discussion with two fellow libertarian lawyers. The conversation started with a practical question: Could the Libertarian Party amend its bylaws to prohibit certain behaviors, and would applying those new prohibitions to past actions (or ongoing situations) potentially violate ex post facto principles?

That initial discussion about internal party rules and fairness quickly evolved into a much deeper exploration of U.S. constitutional law, common law crimes, the Ex Post Facto Clause, historical legal development, and broader libertarian theory about legislation, malum in se vs. malum prohibitum offenses, and anarcho-capitalist systems. One of my friends brought up the Ex Post Facto Clause and argued that it effectively requires all crimes (or prohibitions) to be created by clear, prospective legislation or rules. He believed allowing non-statutory or judge-made rules would violate constitutional protections against retroactive punishment. He thought pure common law crimes only really existed in pre-U.S. England, and that modern American law had moved past that. [continue reading…]

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For some reason I gets lots of … ambitious and interesting … submissions sent to me … independent scholars. See e.g. Extreme Praxeology and some comments below. I’m sort of fascinated by these types. They are a bit like the ones who always have a new scheme for a new libertarian nation or persuasion gimmick or trick ¹ —they seem so earnest and so determined to systematically deduce the entire universe from scratch, often in a totally amateur way that attempts to reinvent the wheel without knowing much about the first wheel.

Anyway, the latest is “independent researcher” José Ángel Deschamps Vargas, “AI Alignment from First Principles: Why Current AI Cannot Be Conscious, Why Strong AGI Requires Consciousness, and Why This Resolves the Alignment Problem” (also at https://nicomaco.org/), which claims to “Derive AI alignment from first principles using 5 performatively undeniable axioms, producing 568 propositions through strict deduction …” Shades of Wittgenstein! 🙂 (I have in mind his ambitious Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.) Here is some abstract of sorts that accompanied the paper:

This paper presents a formal solution to the AI alignment specification problem through two independent axiomatic frameworks — SINTESIS (philosophical) and Coherencia (physical) — that converge on the same result: coherence as the necessary condition for persistence. It derives five necessary conditions for artificial consciousness, proves that strong AGI requires consciousness, and demonstrates that the feared dangerous AGI cannot exist because the capabilities that would make it dangerous require the consciousness that would make it responsible. All seven recognized alignment sub-problems are resolved within this framework. The specification is derived from 5 performatively undeniable axioms through 568 explicit derivation steps.

[continue reading…]

1. Libertarian Nation and Related Projects; Using International Law to Protect Property Rights and International Investment; KOL480 | The Liberland Constitution and Libertarian Principles (Liberland Prague, 2025). [↩]

Dear Mr. Kinsella,

I wrote the same to prof. Hoppe and I hope to hear your opinion as well.

My name is Augustin. In my research and pondering, I got stuck with a limit in the libertarian ethics that left the question of whether it truly permits the survival of mankind (as any ethic should be able to do in all conceivable scenarios) unsolved.

I observed the following dilemmas:

1. If everyone suddenly decides to commit suicide, the non-aggression principle has nothing to oppose it.
2. If everyone peacefully stops having children and goes on living for themselves — humanity goes extinct.

[continue reading…]

I’ve long been fascinated with scholarship and publishing, ¹ and with the concept of a Festschrift ever since I came across Rothbard’s (see below). I became more interested in this when I helped produce Hans Hoppe’s first Festchrift in 2009. As I wrote recently in yet another such work (my Preface to the a recent Gedenkschrift for Rothbard (a Gedenkschrift is a type of Festchrift, as is a Liber Amicorum): [continue reading…]

1. New Publisher, Co-Editor for my Legal Treatise, and how I got started with legal publishing; All footnotes!; On the Role of Commentators and Codes and the Oracles of the Law; Some favorite law review papers; Watson, The Importance of “Nutshells”; Reading Suggestions for Prospective/New Law Students (Roman/Civil law focus); Book Recommendations: Private, International, and Common Law; Legal Theory; Gender-Neutral Language, Reverse Racism, and Law Review Strategies. [↩]

Q (lightly edited):

Hi Stephan,

This is [], teaching economics at a university in [China]. I love reading Hoppe’s and your articles and books. I am currently reading your great book Legal Foundations of a Free Society.

The book From Partisan Banking to Open Access: The Emergence of Free Banking in Early Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts ¹ tells exactly how bankers and politicians form cronyism relations after the Independence. The book collects data and shows that 70% of bank directors were legislators. I attach the book with this email and hope you would enjoy it. [continue reading…]

1. Qian Lu, From Partisan Banking to Open Access: The Emergence of Free Banking in Early Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Palgrave, 2018); see also Qian Lu and John Joseph Wallis, “Banks, Politics, and Political Parties: From Partisan Banking to Open Access in Early Massachusetts,” NBER Working Paper 21572 (2015); revised version, “Banks, Politics, and Political Parties: From Partisan Banking to Open Access in Early Massachusetts,” in Naomi R. Lamoreaux & John Joseph Wallis, Organizations, Civil Society, and the Roots of Development (2017); Qian Lu, “From Partisan Banking to Open Access – A Study on the Emergence of Free Banking in Early Nineteenth Century Massachusetts,” University of Maryland Dissertation (2014). [↩]

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Max Hillebrand, The Praxeology of Privacy: Economic Logic in Cypherpunk Implementation (2026)

Amazon description: [continue reading…]

[Cross-posted at PFS and HansHoppe.com]

Libertarians around the world are this year celebrating Murray Rothbard’s 100^th birthday. At the PFS we published a book in his honor, Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Papinian Press and The Saif House, 2026) on his 100^th birthday, March 2, 2026.

And next month, on June 27, 2026, comes the event “100 Years with Rothbard” (permalink) in Porto, Portugal.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe Philosopher and Economist | Author of “Democracy: The God That Failed” and “The Great Fiction”

Stephan Kinsella Austro-Anarchist Libertarian Legal Theory | Author of “Legal Foundations of a Free Society”

Anxo Bastos Professor of Political Science | Author of “I Grew Up Without the State” and “Small Is Possible”

Saifedean Ammous Economist and educator | Author of “The Bitcoin Standard” and “Principles of Economics”

This event, organized by Manuel Ogando, is sponsored by several Portuguese libertarian groups: Mises Portugal, Catalaxia, Don’t Trust Verify (bitcoin podcast), ZugaTV (libertarian podcast), and Golpe de Estado Podcast (ancap podcasters), and features a number of speakers including, most prominently, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Rothbard’s most intimate associate, partner, friend, and student for the last decade of his life. Other speakers include Stephan Kinsella, Anxo Bastos, Saifedean Ammous, and others. Possible topics: Hoppe: “What did I have to un-learn on the way to become an anarcho-capitalist”; Kinsella: “Rothbard’s Greatest Hits.”

The event will also feature the presentation of the European Portuguese translation of Kinsella’s Legal Foundations of a Free Society and, possibly, the Spanish translation as well, and also the hardcover edition of Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment.

I am very much looking forward to this event.