StephanKinsella.com

[From my Webnote series]

As I argue in my Legal Foundations of a Free Society (LFFS), and as Hans-Hermann Hoppe has argued in his work and in the Foreword to my book, it is the fundamental fact of scarcity, and the possibility of conflict that this fact gives rise to among human actors—conflict over their bodies or other, external scarce resources that serve as means of action. Thus, for civilized humans—those who prefer to live in peace and cooperation with each other rather than violence and destructive conflict—they favor property norms, or laws, to assign unique owners to each contestable, or “conflictable,” resource. ¹ Humans can only decide which norms are justified in the course of discourse, in which, as Hoppe argues, all participants undeniably presuppose the value of prosperity, peace, cooperation, as it is an operative presupposition of the very activity of argumentation. (I discuss this further in LFFS.) [continue reading…]

1. “On Conflictability and Conflictable Resources.” [↩]

Libertarians are used to thinking in terms of natural law and natural rights. In terms of principles, reason, and justice. That is, that we can use our reason to arrive at ethical or normative conclusions that will allow us to evaluate existing positive law. Laws “exist,” or are in force, in a given legal system; but some are bad, some are good. Some are just, some are unjust. That is, we can identify some legal rule as law, whether good or bad law, and we can then criticize the bad laws. The legal positivists, such as H.L.A. Hart, were right about the former point, and the natural-law lawyers, like Lon Fuller, were wrong. It is possible to identify a law as existing, in-force law, as positive law, even if it is unjust. But the extreme statist and legal positivists are wrong to claim that the only law is that announced by a sovereign which implies that there are no external, “higher law” grounds from which to criticize existing positive law. The natural lawyers are right, here. Libertarians have no problem with accepting the legal positivists’ contention that an unjust law can exist and can be recognized as an existing law, since we believe in a higher law—our libertarian principles—which means we do not condone an unjust law simply by recognizing that is law. ¹

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1. See my post Higher Law. [↩]

Note: An updated and revised version of this article is included as chap. 20 of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023).

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Stephan Kinsella, “Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order. By Anthony de Jasay. London and New York: Routledge, 1997,” Q. J. Austrian Econ. 1, no. 1. (Fall 1998): 85–93. Revised version published as “Review of Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order, by Anthony de Jasay,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (forthcoming 2023).

Note: Updated and revised version included as chap. 12 of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023).

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“Reply to Van Dun: Non-Aggression and Title Transfer,” J. Libertarian Stud. 18, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 55–64. (Summary of this JLS issue.)

This article is a reply to Frank van Dun, “Against Libertarian Legalism: A Comment on Kinsella and Block,” J. Libertarian Stud. 17, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 63–90, commenting on Kinsella, “Against Intellectual Property,” J. Libertarian Stud. 15, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 1–53 and Walter Block, “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Blackmail,” J. Libertarian Stud. 15, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 55–88. Block’s reply is “Reply to ‘Against Libertarian Legalism’ by Frank van Dun,” J. Libertarian Stud. 18, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 1–30.

From Facebook:

Libertarian Answer Man time:
Deepfakes, Revenge Porn, etc.

Someone asked me if I had written or had any thoughts on the issue of whether AI and applications like deepfake videos or photos could be a rights violation, for example if it is used to make a fake video of someone depicting them doing things that they actually did not do. This could be done to titillate some audience or even for financial gain, and/or to tarnish someone’s reputation, for revenge, and so on. Apparently some states are considering legislation to ban deep-fake porn, and so on But new laws in California and the demand for new legislation against Deep-fake pornography make me take pause at the unintended consequences this may have on artwork, film, political cartoons and expression itself.

[continue reading…]

Note: Updated and revised version included as chap. 10 of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023).

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“Inalienability and Punishment: A Reply to George Smith,” J. Libertarian Stud. 14, no. 1 (Winter 1998–99): 79–93.

Revised version in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (forthcoming 2023).

As reported at Mises.org, Yuri Maltsev, the great anti-commie Soviet defector, libertarian and Austrian scholar, editor of Requiem for Marx, has passed away. David Gordon has some nice words about Yuri there. Other obituaries/comments:

• See links to some other recent pieces in this twitter thread,
• ForeverMissed page with comments from his sister.
• Tom Woods’ comments pasted below
• Jeff Tucker’s touching reminiscence

I was friends with Yuri for years, since the mid 1990s from Mises Institute events. He also attended the first Property and Freedom Society Annual Meeting in 2006 and others as well, such as:

• Alexander Solshenitzin on Politics and Economics (PFS 2008)
• Of Customs and Condoms. Moving from One Empire to Another (PFS 2011)

At the inaugural PFS meeting in 2006, I brought my sister, Crystal, and she delighted in meeting Yuri. I told my wife and son stories about Yuri and they laughed and laughed. He was really a joyous and life-loving man. Yuri regaled me with so many tales over the years. He became a legend in my family just from my stories about him. I recall my son clapping in glee at my re-telling of some stories from Yuri. He would have me repeat my imitations and mimicry of Yuri and his tales.

Yuri, Andy Duncan, and I were invited to speak at Mises Brasil in São Paolo in 2017, and we three had a great time together. ¹ I recall we spent one late night in my hotel room eating sardines of some kind from Yuri’s stash, with our fingers, since we had no utensils. Late at night, as we delved into “deep” matters like grad students in a dorm room, he told me one of his biggest philosophical influences was an obscure and eccentric Russian philosopher, Pyotr Chaadayev, in particular his Philosophical Letters & Apology of a Madman, which I did obtain, but have not yet found the stamina to dive into. Maybe it’s time I take the leap. At the same conference, Andy and I tried to talk Yuri into eating a bit healthier to lose weight, to as to live longer. Not that we were any models of physical fitness. But we wanted Yuri to slim down and get healthier, and to live longer. He listened to Andy’s hortations with patience and promised to look into it. But, … it was not to be.

He told us funny stories about how he would fly weekly from Wisconsin to DC on a Sunday or Monday to teach his weekly class at the US Naval Academy in Maryland, and he would often fly with then-Congressman Paul Ryan, whom he ended up getting to do an occasional lecture for some of his classes. He was always joyous and, like Ayn Rand, hated communism and what it had done to his country, Russia; he loved America, a bit too much, perhaps, but it’s understandable.

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1. My talks there were: KOL222 | Mises Brasil: Intellectual Property Imperialism Versus Innovation and Freedom and KOL221 | Mises Brasil: State Legislation Versus Law and Liberty. [↩]

Interesting findings in Walter J. Ong’s classic work Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 30th anniv. ed. (Routledge, 2012), pp. 50–51:

(1) Illiterate (oral) subjects identified geometrical figures by assigning them the names of objects, never abstractly as circles, squares, etc. A circle would be called a plate, sieve, bucket, watch, or moon; a square would be called a mirror, door, house, apricot drying-board. Luria’s subjects identified the designs as representations of real things they knew. They never dealt with abstract circles or squares but rather with concrete objects. Teachers’ school students on the other hand, moderately literate, identified geometrical figures by categorical geometric names: circles, squares, triangles, and so on …. They had been trained to give school-room answers, not real-life responses.

[continue reading…]

[From my Webnote series]

• State vs. Government: See Hoppe’s definition of the state in “The Nature of the State and Why Libertarians Hate It.” If government means the state, it’s criminal; but it clearly means something different: the governing institutions, law and order. The state has coopted government like it has coopted roads and transportation, money, education. But just as roads are not inherently statist, neither is government. We anarcho-libertarians do not oppose law and order and the institutions of “governance”; just state control thereof. We oppose our enemy, the state.
  • See also Conza, government is not the state
  • The Nature of the State and Why Libertarians Hate It
  • Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned? (transcript)
  • The Nature of the State and Why Libertarians Hate It
  • Is Albert Jay Nock a Statist Too?
• On owning property: See notes 29 and 57, and accompanying text, of “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward”
• On scarcity: “On Conflictability and Conflictable Resources”
• Coercion and aggression: “The Problem with “Coercion”“

My job here is done

[From my Webnote series]

Any free society needs law—private law based on libertarian principles. This means that there is a need to identify and clarify our basic libertarian principles, and for law to develop to implement and apply these principles. As discussed in KOL345 | Kinsella’s Libertarian “Constitution” or: State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code (PorcFest 2021), any law code that libertarian theorists devise cannot be hyper-detailed and all-encompassing.

For one thing, many of the particular rules in a given setting will depend on contractual relationships and choices. Libertarian theorists, such as Rothbard, David Friedman, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, envision various territorial enclaves whose internal legal rules are based on local preferences, custom, and contract. For example, in Hoppe’s “covenant communities”: “a libertarian world could and likely would be one with a great variety of locally separated communities engaging distinctly different and far-reaching discrimination” (“e.g. nudists discriminating against bathing suits,” as Jeff Tucker points out in Idiot Patrol). ¹ [continue reading…]

1. See Hoppe on Covenant Communities and Advocates of Alternative Lifestyles. [↩]

Murray Rothbard’s treatise, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998) is online in a couple of obscure places, and some of its individual chapters or portions is available online in separate articles. I’ve listed below those I am aware of: [continue reading…]