Where I’ve Changed My Mind

[From my Webnote series]

See other biographical pieces here.

Our views evolve over time. My core libertarian beliefs have not changed much in the last thirty years, as I note in the preface to Legal Foundations of a Free Society, except for a couple of areas that I explicitly call out, and for some matters of terminology and usage:

In one case I now disagree with something I originally wrote; I retained the original text and added an explanatory note (chapter 13, Part III.C). And in chapter 9 (Part III.C), I note that, regarding my earlier criticism of Rothbard’s argument for inalienability: “I now think it is possible that his approach is more compatible with my own than I originally realized.” But otherwise, I today still stand by most of the original content of those articles, in terms of substance. However, as noted several places in the text, I often now use terminology somewhat differently, e.g., the term state instead of government; rivalrous or “conflictable” instead of scarce; using the word property to refer to the relation between humans with respect to owned resources, instead of referring to the owned resource itself, and so on. “I have in some cases updated the text to my current, preferred usage, but not always since it would have been too drastic and tedious.

As for the change of mind indicated above, ch. 13, “Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society,” as my Introductory Note to Part III.C explains, “In this section (Part III.C), I relied heavily on Bruno Leoni’s interpretation of Mises’s and Hayek’s views on the economic calculation problem and his related criticism of legislation by analogy to central economic planning. Subsequently, I gained a deeper understanding of the difference between Mises’s and Hayek’s approach to this issue, after Joseph Salerno initiated the “dehomogenization” debate.” ¹

But earlier in my development I did change my mind or modify my views on several issues, and in the ensuing years on some applications. Here are a few, in roughly chronological order:

• God. I initially was strongly Catholic, having been reared that way and attending 12 years of Catholic school, serving as an altar boy, and so on. When I was around 14 or 15 I started to develop serious doubts and soon became a die-hard atheist. I have not changed my view but I have become less militant and less hostile to religion, as I see now that it necessarily encodes and encapsulates much practical wisdom, and is preferable to the modern religion of statism and state worship.

Anarchy. Initially a fairly orthodox Objectivist (starting around 10th grade in high school) and thus minarchist and hostile to anarchy, by law school I was a full-fledged Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist (though I prefer the term anarcho-libertarian now). See Then and Now: From Randian Minarchist to Austro-Anarcho-Libertarian. ²

• Intellectual Property. Initially I assumed IP must be legitimate but was dissatisfied with arguments for it, when I decided to switch, as a young attorney, from oil & gas law to patent law in 1993 or so, I turned my attention to this issue and tried to come up with a better justification. The result was my complete change of mind and rejection of all forms of IP.
• Abortion. Initially pro-choice on Objectivist and libertarian grounds, I for a long time held the view that early-term fetuses don’t have rights, late-term fetuses probably do, and thus only late term abortion should be prohibited. My view has only changed a bit here: first, after becoming a parent, I started to feel more strongly that even early-term abortion is usually immoral, even if it’s not murder; and now, I believe it should not be outlawed even in the later term, at least not by the criminal law of any external legal system. (see KOL443)
• Rothbard’s Argument for Inalienability. I originally criticized Rothbard’s argument for inalienability. With a deeper understanding for the argument for self-ownership, based on the work of Hoppe and my own work, and thus for the argument for inalienability and against voluntary slavery contracts, I think Rothbard’s argument is basically correct, even if it’s incomplete and fairly sketchy, or that at least this is one way to construe it (even if his own view of contract and “implicit theft” and debtor’s prison is incompatible with his inalienability views). See LFFS, “A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability,” Part III.C.1; see also “The Title-Transfer Theory of Contract.”
• Israel. I was always strongly Israel, having written an embarrassing Randian-style defense in college, ³ and a controversial article on LewRockwell arguing for moving Israel to Utah, ⁴, but arguments in light of the recent Israel-Gaza conflict, by Hans Hoppe, Saifedean Ammous, and others ⁵, and getting more educated on the history of Israel, have made me reevaluate some my views. At this point I feel like my heart is with Israel, but my head recognizes what Israel has done and is doing cannot be justified.
• Ukraine. I still despise the commies and think Russia is in violation of international law and evil, and I still do not believe NATO is an actual threat to Russia ⁶ and I believe Ukraine has the right to join NATO and the EU, but my view on this has been softened by the anti-war types and Hoppe’s comments. ⁷
• Immigration. Not sure exactly if I’ve changed my mind but my position is more nuanced now, influenced by Hoppe’s immigration views. See I’m Pro-Immigration and Pro-Open Borders; On “Unowned” State Property, Legal Positivism, Ownership vs. Possession, Immigration, Public Roads, and the Bum in the Library; “A Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders.”
• Achieving Liberty/Activism/Economic Literacy. From a note to a friend:
  • A friend said: “I don’t think “completeness” is something a political theory could or even should ever aim for. That sounds like a religion.”My reply:This is why these people are postlibertarians and waystations: they had the wrong expectations ab initio. Of course it disappointed them if they think it is a life philosohy or somehting. One reason I’ll never be a postlibertarian is I always knew it was only one narrow slice of life and also I knew that we were unlikely to achive it. my main change of mind (Where I’ve Changed My Mind) is that I used to think the reason we have our non-free system is that not enough people are economically literate and if they would just read Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, we would have a more or less libertarian society. ⁸I no longer believe this is possible or realistic or that even if they did that it would make a difference. First, most people are not interested in our ideas. Nor will they read. Nor do they care. Nor do they have the mental capacity to focus on this or care about consistency. And anyway even if everyone read and understood Hazlitt and was totally noble–well things might be better, but you would still have socialism and statism. I think the reason we have the state is the prisoner’s dilemma type problem–the same reason a few guys can hold a crowd at bay with just a few guns–no one wants to be the first one to rush them. And in today’s democratic system everyone has an incentive to get what they can just like if there are many people sharing the tab at dinner it’s rational for each one to spend a lot since they only pay a fraction of the additional food and drinks they order.So I now thing liberty will come about only naturally, maybe after post-scarcity or post-religious-secular enlightenment, or after bitcoin or robots. Or maybe never–maybe the state (public criminality) will always be with us like private crime will always be with us. ⁹
  • Old view: “My personal view is that in the long run the only that that can work is economic literacy. Thus we need to educate people” Activism, Achieving a Free Society, and Writing for the Remnant. New view: “I used to think that. I’m more realist/pessimist now. Now I think the way we can see a libertarian world is to … wait. And hope. But there is hope. Bitcoin, AI, slow maturation of our ape species…”. And “I think liberty can be achieved but I think the way to do it is to: wait. (And maybe Bitcoin will hasten it.) We have to wait for teaching moments and for the capitalist mentality to be ingrained naturally into the zeitgeist. Just as the fall of communism in 1990 showed everyone that central planning doesn’t work and we need “capitalism,” I suspect that over time as the human race continues to improve, as technology improves, as we give up atavistic ideas like religion (which will take a while; we are still in a primitive era, despite our rocket ships), as the division of labor expands, as we become richer, as crime declines, as people become more powerful by technology and the state recedes into the background, the libertarian ethos will gradually take hold of mankind. It will be like The Golden Age of John C. Wright’s great sci-fi trilogy. … But how long it will take to get there, is anybody’s guess. As I said, bitcoin may get us there quicker. But I think there is little we can to do get there quicker. This frustrates the activist since they want to do something. I view my role in liberty as one of personal growth and understanding and a mission of helping to move theory forward—for its own sake. In the meantime I think people should just keep an open eye out for the true nature of society and the state now, and take whatever precautions they need to survive and even prosper in the face of atavism-socialism.”
    • see also KOL401 | Sazmining Twitter Space: Bitcoin & Property Rights: “the mentality is that the way to solve problems in society is to change people’s mentality by propagandizing them. And of course that’s ridiculous, right? But you can change people’s views, um, by reality. So for example, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, um, was a big teaching moment in history. Now, it didn’t teach everyone everything, and they all still wanna cling to their, well, we can do socialism a better way, but it did, it was a big stinging rebuke to everyone, and they did learn something. And now the whole world sort of knows you just can’t totally centrally plan the economy if you want prosperity. I think everyone sort of knows that, and they wouldn’t have known that in 1982 or 1973. So, and that’s because the Soviet Union hadn’t collapsed yet. And so, so my hope is that something like that is true for Bitcoin and that, that if Bitcoin actually starts getting success, even though all the people doubted it, look, it’s just like Uber or whatever, like people never would’ve imagined Uber, Netflix, these kinds of business models.”
    • Whiteness and Libertarianism:My view is that liberty may be possible. We do not yet know. If it emerges it won’t be because we (white?) libertarians were running around promoting it, but because it works and over time more and more people came to understand this. For example until the USSR fell in 1991 many people could still argue socialism was superior to capitalism. But that was a teaching moment and now millions of people are aware that free markets and private property work better and are essential to human production and prosperity. They learned this from watching history not from reading Hazlitt.

      In my view the main hope for liberty is that because the primary source for wealth is the accumulation of technological knowledge, the human race can keep getting richer every generation. The richer we get the less excuse or need for aggression/crime, and the more people can afford to be “liberal” (cosmpolitan, toleratan, empathetic) and also to devote some time to the study of economics and poltiics. Also they will be witnessing in real time the benefits of capitalism, technology, freedom, information, knowledge, individualism, tolerance, cosmopolitanism–all little teaching moments that accumulate over time. Just as we see happening with bitcoin; more and more people will adopt it as its track record gets longer and they get comfortable with it. And so on. To my mind this is the only hope for liberty, but it also means that there is little we, as activists, can do to bring it about. All we can do is hope, and wait. Which also means that what we can do is recognize this fact and devote sufficient time and attention in our lives in a quasi-free society to trying to survive and flourish in this real world. That means not expecting activism to work, at least not any time soon; accepting reality as it is working to prosper in the face of the illiberal challenges we face.

    • Similar comments in Libertarian Answer Man: Does It Matter How Law is Made?; KOL241 | Dave Smith’s Part of the Problem Show: Libertarian Property Theory; KOL187 | Anarchast with Jeff Berwick Discussing IP, Anarcho-libertarianism, and Legislation vs. Private Law (2012); Bodrum Days and Nights: The Fifth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: A Partial Report

1.  Knowledge vs. Calculation, Mises Blog (July 11, 2006) .[↩]
2. Nicholas Dykes, “The Facts of Reality: Logic and History in Objectivist Debates about Government,” J. Ayn Rand Stud. 7, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 79–140, pp. 132–133: “A devoted fan of Ayn Rand since 1963, I am sympathetic to those who uphold minarchy or limited government. For thirty years, I did the same. But when in 1992 enforced early retirement gave me the leisure to read more widely, and after a friend, the British libertarian Kevin McFarlane, suggested I should read Bruce Benson’s The Enterprise of Law, I suddenly felt one day like Keats’s Cortez, staring out over an unknown horizon with the ‘wild surmise’ that social life without government might be possible. In the years since, everything I have read has made that surmise seem more and more like the true facts of reality, “a state of affairs that is and works whether or not anybody recognises it” (Mises 1944, 113). … Sechrest (1999, 87) has noted psychological elements in the anarchy/minarchy debate. This seems eminently correct, for children are usually raised to revere their country’s history and its form of government. Thus most Britons are loyal to their monarchy and most Americans unquestioningly support the Uncle Sam they are accustomed to. As Nock ([1935] 1950, 44) observed wryly: “There appears to be a curious difficulty about exercising reflective thought upon the actual nature of an institution into which one was born and one’s ancestors were born.” It may be that this ‘inheritance factor’—unconscious, and therefore impervious to reason—has always been the greatest obstacle to the spread of ideas.” Citing Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (New Haven: Yale University, 1944); Larry Sechrest, “Rand, anarchy, and taxes,” J. Aуn Rand Stud. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 87–105; Nock, Our Enemy, The State. [↩]
3. Column: Israel: Victim of Bloodlust in Middle East?, LSU Daily Reveille, June 21, 1988. [↩]
4.  “New Israel: A Win-Win-Win Proposal,” LewRockwell.com (October 1, 2001). [↩]
5. Saifedean’s podcast; debate with Walter Block; debate with Yaron Brook; discussion with Jeremy Hammond; interview with Robert Breedlove; Hans-Hermann Hoppe, An Open Letter to Walter E. Block. [↩]
6. International Law, Libertarian Principles, and the Russia-Ukraine War. [↩]
7. “The War in the Ukraine in Libertarian Perspective,” LewRockwell.com (PFS 2023; Sept. 28, 2023). [↩]
8. I’ve said this many times in the past. E.g. Laugh at the State, Mock the Regime; “Faculty Spotlight Interview: Stephan Kinsella” (Mises.org, 2011); Argumentation Ethics, Estoppel, and Libertarian Rights: Transcript; KOL018 | “Libertarian Legal Theory: Property, Conflict, and Society, Lecture 1: Libertarian Basics: Rights and Law” (Mises Academy, 2011); others here. [↩]
9. On Taxing Harvard: Ranting about Thuggocrats and Waystation/Post-libertarians [↩]