Not a normal answer man segment since this was not an unsolicited query, but rather from a private discussion with some libertarian friends.
We were discussing Hedge fund ordered to pay bonus to trader who made 97% of its revenues. In this case a London trading firm indicated the trader would likely get a discretionary bonus if he hit a $10M target; he ended up far exceeding this and making 97% of its revenues that year.
Still, the boss told him he would not give him a bonus because they were not happy with negative publicity from a dispute with the SEC from previous employment activities. He sued and one. I said ULTIAAO, “unlibertarian things I almost approve of.” One friend disagreed, saying the contract said the bonus was discretionary so that settles it. [continue reading…]
Moreover, as noted in “A Libertarian Theory of Contract” (ch. 9), n.1, property rights can be conceived of not as a right between a human actor and an owned object, but rather as a right as between human actors, but with respect to particular (owned) resources.
As Judge Alex Kozinski writes:
But what is property? That is not an easy question to answer. I remember sitting in my first-year property course on the first day of class when the professor … asked the fundamental question: What are property rights? … I threw up my hand and without even waiting to be called on I shouted out, “Property rights define the relationship between people and their property.”
Professor Krier stopped dead in his tracks, spun around, and gave me a long look. Finally he said: “That’s very peculiar, Mr. Kozinski. Have you always had relations with inanimate objects? Most people I know have relations with other people.”
That was certainly not the last time I said something really dumb in class, but the lesson was not lost on me. Property rights are, of course, a species of relationships between people. At the minimum, they define the degree to which individuals may exclude other individuals from the use and enjoyment of their goods and services….[53]
[53] Alex Kozinski, “Of Profligacy, Piracy, and Private Property,” Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y. 13, no. 1 (Winter 1990; https://perma.cc/Z8AD-634V): 17–21, p. 19. See further references in “A Libertarian Theory of Contract” (ch. 9), n.1.
Re ch. 2, Appendix I, “Property as a Right between People,” and ch. 9, n.1, see Gerard Casey, “Can You Own Yourself?“, Research Depository UCD Dublin (Dec. 2011): “legal (or jural) relations obtain between people in relation to things (in the limiting case, themselves) and not directly between people and things”. See also Eric R. Claeys, Natural Property Rights (Cambridge U. Press, 2025), §4.2, p. 77, “property is a law of things inasmuch as it consists of social relations between people regarding separable resources.” Citing Henry E. Smith, “Property as the Law of Things,” Harvard Law Review 125 (7) (2012): 1691–1726. Also Jeremy Waldron, The Right to Private Property (Oxford 1988), pp. 26–27 (“Consider the relation between a person (call her Susan) and an object (say, a motor car) generally taken to be her private property. The layman thinks of this as a two-place relation of ownership between a person and a thing: Susan owns that Porsche. But the lawyer tells us that legal relations cannot exist between people and Porsches, because Porsches cannot have rights or duties or be bound by or recognize rules. The legal relation involved must be a relation between persons—between Susan and her neighbours, say, or Susan and the police, or Susan and everyone else.“).
See also Sprankling, op cit., §1.01: “In general, the law defines property as rights4 among people5 that concern things. [4. While property is commonly discussed in terms of “rights,” perhaps “relationships” would be a better term. See §1.03[C], infra.]”
Sheldon Richman opened my naive eyes to many ugly truths about the US Constitution. 1 His great book, America’s Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited (Griffin & Lash: Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2016; pdf) was published a few years ago. It was actually published under a CC-SA license but still unavailable online. As all books should be free and online, 2 I nudged Sheldon to send me the file, and tidied it up a bit, so here you have it.
Jeffrey Tucker’s Foreword and Sheldon’s Introduction are below. Enjoy! [continue reading…]
If a debtor, pursuant to a secured loan agreement (mortgage), decides not to continue making payments on the loan despite their ability to do so, is this theft? The lender has the ability to foreclose on the property in the event of default. [continue reading…]
Steve Mendelsohn, a patent attorney friend from my days in Philadelphia, sent me the essay below about his kosher eating habits (posted with permission). As I may have recounted somewhere before, 1 when I moved to Philly in 1994 Steve, as a slightly more experienced patent attorney at my firm, befriended and mentored me. I remember when he took me to get my first Philly cheesesteak at Charlie’s Waterwheel below ground on Sansom. But they were just called “steak” sandwiches; I asked where’s the cheese, and Steve said, oh, it’s kosher. [continue reading…]
Duncan Whitmore has replied to me again, so here is my response. Our exchange began with trade but has become a dispute about foundations. The surface topic is free trade versus a limited, strategic use of protection. Underneath that is a fight over what makes a liberal order possible, and what keeps it alive once the slogans have faded. Mr Whitmore argues as a principled libertarian. He takes property rights as natural rights, from which politics should withdraw save to avert plain evils. I argue as a contingent libertarian. I take rights as a settlement adopted by a community for chosen ends: prosperity, peace, continuity, and the minimal unhappiness compatible with survival. That difference explains why he treats tariffs as an outrage in themselves, while I treat them as tools that may sometimes be justified to repair the conditions that let liberty breathe. [continue reading…]
Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History: Addendum: EP34 Atomic Accountability.
Dan visits with Professor Alex Wellerstein, whose new book about Truman and the dropping of the atomic bombs will challenge everything you think you know about the subject.
Current AI Models have 3 Unfixable Problems Sabine Hossenfelder
Grok: Sabine Hossenfelder argues that current generative AI models (large language models, diffusion-based image/video generators, etc.) have three fundamental, essentially unfixable limitations that prevent them from ever reaching artificial general intelligence (AGI).
They are purpose-bound by design – These models are trained to detect statistical patterns in specific data types (text tokens, image patches, video frame relations). They lack the ability to perform abstract, general-purpose reasoning that can be applied to any domain or task. Scaling them up will not magically create true abstraction.
Hallucinations are manageable but inevitable – LLMs don’t retrieve facts; they generate the most statistically plausible continuation. When the training data contains little or no information on a topic, they confidently produce nonsense. Hossenfelder notes that recent OpenAI research suggests rewarding models for saying “I don’t know” when confidence is low could largely mitigate the practical problem, even if it never eliminates hallucinations entirely. She considers this limitation acceptable rather than fatal.
Prompt injection is fundamentally unsolvable – Because LLMs treat all input (system instructions and user prompt) the same way—token sequences—they cannot reliably distinguish instructions from data. Adversarial prompts can always override intended behavior (“ignore previous instructions…”). Workarounds (formatting rules, external filters, better system prompts) are fragile and will never make the models fully trustworthy for critical tasks.
Hossenfelder also emphasizes a related deep flaw: current models interpolate well within their training distribution but cannot reliably extrapolate or handle truly out-of-distribution scenarios (evident in bizarre failures of video generators and the inability of LLMs to produce genuinely novel ideas). In her view, these architectural limitations mean today’s deep-learning paradigm is a dead end for AGI. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that have bet everything on scaling LLMs will face serious trouble when the expected massive revenues fail to materialize. True general intelligence will require entirely new approaches—most likely some form of abstract world models, neurosymbolic reasoning, or a “logic language” that can represent concepts independently of specific modalities. Until then, she quips, the fastest path to human-level machine intelligence may be humans simply getting dumber.
There are three collections I’m aware of, of people notable enough for inclusion in such but not major enough figures to warrant their own biographies (e.g. Rothbard, Mises).
Walter Block, ed. I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians (Mises Institute, 2010). The only one online (my entry is in this one, “How I Became A Libertarian“). 1 Thanks Jeffrey Tucker and the Mises Institute’s once-great open publishing policy. 2 (After Tucker and Doug French left Mises in 2011 or so, the Mises Institute has has unfortunately switched from CC-BY to the useless and restrictive CC-NC-ND, which is worse than nothing.) See what open publishing does? It preserves knowledge.
As I note here, the latest PFS book has just been published by Sebastian Wang and his Hampden Press, co-published with the Property and Freedom Society.
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