Thumbs Down on Leland Yeager

by Stephan Kinsella on March 8, 2026

Elaborating on a tweet:

Maybe Yeager was good on some things. I never read his fluttering veil stuff. But I always thought he was a confused bitter lightweight and dilettante, and a dishonest asshole. Here’s why:

· He was apparently wrong about fractional reserve banking and bought into the stupid…

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) March 5, 2026

I met him skulking around Mises Institute conferences in the old days when I used to attend. Had a few online interactions, and read some of his commentary. I eventually developed a negative assessment of this guy. Quick summary as to why, elaborating on the tweet above.

Maybe Yeager was good on some things. I never read his monetary theory, his “The Fluttering Veil” (1997). I don’t plan to, given what I’ve seen from him. Cochran says he was “One of the more important monetary theorists of the mid to late 1900s.” ¹ Doesn’t seem plausible to me. Plus, I’m a Misesian Austrian, not a Hayekian, and not a freebanker.

I eventually developed the impression he he was a confused bitter lightweight and dilettante, and a dishonest asshole. A few examples.

Freebanking

He was apparently wrong about fractional reserve banking and bought into the stupid “stickly wage prices downward” pseudoscience. See, e.g, Jonathan Newman, “There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Sticky Price,” Q. J. Austrian Econ. Vol. 28, Issue 2 (October 30, 2025): Yeager yammering on about this dumb “sticky prices” concept the freebankers trot out to support their ponzi scheme based on the confused idea that money is wealth and and implicit view that a sound money economy has market failure: “The article shows that Leland Yeager’s (1986) examples of symptoms of monetary disequilibrium based on sticky prices indicate not disequilibrium in the market-clearing sense, but the lack of a double coincidence of wants.”

For more on this debate, see The Great Fractional Reserve/Freebanking Debate. For some of my (admittedly amateur) musings on this sticky nonsense, see On Coinbase, Bitcoin, Fractional-Reserve Banking, and Irregular Deposits; A Tour Through Walter Block’s Oeuvre, at n.65.

Hayek/Knowledge/Dehomogenization debate

The Great Mises-Hayek Dehomogenization/Economic Calculation Debate (Feb. 8, 2016)
Leland B. Yeager, Mises and Hayek on Calculation and Knowledge, RAE, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1994)
Salerno, Reply to Leland B. Yeager on Mises and Hayek on Calculation and Knowledge, RAE, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1994)
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Socialism: A Property or Knowledge Problem?, RAE, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1996)
Yeager, Calculation and Knowledge: Let’s Write Finis, RAE, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1997)

Not going to elaborate, but as I recall he took the Hayekian side of this, which I disagree with. For more why, see my “Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), Introductory Note in Party III.C, now disagreeing with my previous adoption of Leoni’s Hayekian knowledge-based analogy between the criticism of central economic planning and of legislation.

Self-ownership

Yeager had a ridiculous scientistic atheist objection to self-ownership. See, on this, Yeager and Other Letters Re Liberty article “Intellectual Property and Libertarianism”; and Kinsella, “How We Come To Own Ourselves,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), at n.1.

On Rothbard and Hoppe

He also dishonestly claimed Rothbard had recanted his support for Hoppe’s argumentation ethics before he died, a blatant, pathetic, desperate lie. See Kinsella, “Dialogical Arguments for Libertarian Rights,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), n.15.

Defamation

And now it turns out dude was bad on libel/defamation law. From Defamation as a Type of Intellectual Property:

I also note that Leland Yeager also criticizes Rothbard for his views on defamation. In Ethics as Social Science: The Moral Philosophy of Social Cooperation (Edward Elgar: 2001), pp. 277–78, he writes:

Rothbard (1982), like Block, tries to deduce all sorts of specific judgments from a few axioms about rights. These include the right of self-ownership, the right to property acquired through the Lockean process of mixing one’s labor with hitherto unowned resources, and the right to property acquired through voluntary transactions. The concept of property right, including property in one’s own body, appears fundamental. Rights are violated only by actual or threatened physical aggression or by fraud, which resembles force and threats in essential respects.

Rothbard deduces that people have a right to commit libel and slander (a right rather different from my conception articulated in Chapter 10). Anyone has a property right to print and disseminate anything he wants—even deliberate falsehoods about another person. Neither the victim nor anyone has a right to the integrity of his reputation, for that would imply a preposterous right to control thoughts in the minds of other people. From the right to commit libel and slander Rothbard derives a right to commit blackmail; for a blackmailer has a right to engage in an agreed and therefore presumably mutually beneficial transaction whereby he forbears from an act that he would have a right to commit. As for invasion of privacy, well, no one has any right to privacy except the right to have one’s person and other property free from physical invasion or trespass. If the blackmailer obtains his sensitive information by stealing letters or tapes or by bugging his victim’s home or office, the theft or trespass is the actual offense, not the blackmail as such. If, however, the blackmailer obtains his information from old newspapers or other legally available records or by buying it from old associates of the victim (provided they have not contracted to maintain confidentiality), no rights are violated. On the contrary, to outlaw blackmail or the spreading of false libels against someone’s person or product would itself be an aggressive violation of rights, for outlawing something means using force or the threat of force to suppress it.

Boycotts, including secondary boycotts, are a legitimate exercise of free speech and of property rights. Contracts should be legally enforceable only when nonperformance constitutes a straightforward or implicit theft of property (or, one might add, in the spirit of Rothbard’s position, when nonperformance constitutes a physical invasion of person or property, if that is conceivable).

Rothbard arrives at his remarkable conclusions by trying to squeeze all issues into his property rights framework and by sharply distinguishing between physical and nonphysical (such as verbal) aggression. Such a sharp distinction between the material and the nonmaterial seems odd, incidentally, coming from an economist of the Austrian school, which puts so much emphasis on the subjective aspect of commodities and of human affairs generally.

Other than this, Yeager was wonderful, I suppose. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play>