In my youth I was fond of the occasional shenanigan (or travesura, as my friend Juan Carpio might call it). When I was in my undergrad degree at LSU, from 1983–87, I decided to play one of my pranks. At the start of each school year you register and get your student ID, parking pass, and so on, and also take photos for the LSU “Gumbo” yearbook. For the Gumbo Yearbook, Class of 1985, in Fall 1984, when I was starting my second year of college, I realized they did not check you identity when you had your yearbook photo taken. So I convinced several of my friends to swap names for the photos. Thus, my picture is shown under the listing for Garett Juneau, whom had worked with as a stockboy at Bon Lieu Supermarket; Chris Kershaw is shown for Kevin Kinchen (both former Catholic High School classmates); Stephen Zachary, another CHS classmate, is shown for Norman Kinsella (that’s me); Keith Jarreau is shown under Stephen Zachary’s name, and so forth. [continue reading…]
I have read your work on intellectual property and I also read Dr. F. Hayek’s essay on intellectuals and socialism. I did not think they were connected until now. A friend of mine when I presented your arguments against intellectual property to him expressed it thus, [continue reading…]
I’m writing to you because I want to know what you think about my liability theory and if it’s consistent with Rothbardian natural law, and I remember in your Causation and Aggression paper [Causation and Aggression], you said libertarians have not fully fleshed out a liability theory.
So here’s the thing. I believe a lot of Austro-libertarians are holding contradictions in their view because they claim to be praxeologists in law but they allow unintentional behaviors into their liability theories. This never made much sense to me. I believe that the only genuine behavior that is liable under libertarian legal theory is if it was intentional, i.e., an action. [continue reading…]
I received an email from one Jared Lewis, attaching his draft paper “Philosophical and Ethical Underpinnings of Tautological Natural Rights” (July 8, 2025). He asked me for my comments his argument, about natural rights theory and the use of thresholds or scalar attributes (e.g., intelligence), build on the Rothbardian view that rights must be grounded in clear, non-arbitrary principles; “whether this commitment rules out any ethical system that bases rights on gradable traits—whether in definition or implementation.”
My comment: “since you asked nicely and professionally unlike so many clueless libertarians, sure. But if it’s too much to take in perhaps we could chat via zoom. Send it on.”
He sent it. As I was in a hurry, I ran it through Grok, which I used to write a quick email reply. I then Grok for its review of my email to Lewis. Below is my letter to Lewis, plus both Grok analysis. Enjoy. (I will not append his paper here as it is a draft and he did not (yet) consent to my posting it.) [continue reading…]
This paper addresses a critical ambiguity in the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), a cornerstone of libertarian philosophy that prohibits initiating force against others. While effectively guiding two-party interactions, the NAP lacks clarity regarding third-party bystander intervention. Utilizing formal logic and set theory, this study identifies a logical NULL state inherent in traditional NAP formulations, which leaves bystander actions undefined. To resolve this, the paper introduces a modified NAP (MNAP), explicitly permitting voluntary, consent-based bystander intervention. The proposed refinement enhances the practical applicability of the NAP in complex multi-agent scenarios, offering libertarian societies a coherent framework for ethically and legally addressing immediate situations of aggression through consensual collective action.
I am [], greets again. I hope this message finds you well. Sorry to bother you, but I would like to ask you a question regarding “use-based property” and argumentation ethics.
We know that capitalists own means of production, often through inheritance. However, if we cannot determine historically who first acquired these means, or whether the property was originally obtained through theft, it is usually justified under the principle of homesteading. My question is: if we cannot provide ontological evidence for the ownership of scarce resources, and if a resource is not in active use, would such ownership be illegitimate? [continue reading…]
Someone snarkily suggested I read Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. As if I hadn’t. Just because I’m not a Hayek fan. In my view, other than his Capital theory (Pure Theory of Capital, which I hear is good but have never read; I think Hoppe said maybe only 3 people have read and… pic.twitter.com/nkqHuMLDWV
Brian Doherty, “100 Years of Murray Rothbard: Remembering America’s most radical and definitive modern libertarian intellectual,” Reason (3.2.2026): “He was friend or foil—and often both over the course of his contentious life—to pretty much every other libertarian thinker and activist in the second half of the 20th century. He was an (informal) student of Ludwig von Mises during Mises’ days at New York University. When I interviewed Milton Friedman the year Rothbard died, I learned that Friedman continued to worry over Rothbard’s critiques for decades, despite being a more famous and respected Nobel winner. Rothbard’s critiques of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty were considered a subterranean scandal in the movement until published long after his death. Rothbard considered the canonical libertarian work positively “evil” both for arguing for anti-statism on strictly utilitarian grounds and for giving intellectual permission to far too wide a range of government actions.”
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