Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 492.
This is my interview by Matthew Geiger of the Carl Menger Institute for Menger Institute Podcast #6 (recorded June 11, 2026). Shownotes and transcript below.
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Podcast Show Notes
Episode Title: Stephan Kinsella: From Patent Attorney to Anarcho-Libertarian Theorist – Property Rights, IP, Bitcoin, and the Future of Liberty
Guest: Stephan Kinsella – Retired patent attorney, prolific libertarian writer, anarcho-libertarian legal theorist, and key figure associated with the Mises Institute and Property and Freedom Society.
Episode Summary:
Matthew Geiger sits down with Stephan Kinsella for a deep, wide-ranging conversation covering Kinsella’s personal journey into libertarianism, the philosophical foundations of libertarian thought, the critical importance of property rights, the case against intellectual property, generational challenges, technological disruption, foreign policy critiques, and an optimistic long-term vision for human freedom.
Topics & Timestamps
Introduction
0:00
Matthew Geiger welcomes listeners to the Menger Institute podcast and introduces Stephan Kinsella as a retired patent attorney and libertarian writer. Kinsella expresses his excitement about the conversation.
How Stephan Kinsella Discovered Libertarianism
0:19
Matthew Geiger asks Kinsella to share his personal story, including his work with Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Kinsella recounts growing up in a conservative Louisiana household with little political or economic knowledge. A librarian gave him The Fountainhead in high school, sparking his interest in philosophy, individualism, and free-market economics. He read voraciously, quickly became a libertarian, then an Austrian, and eventually an anarchist during college and law school. He practiced oil & gas, international, and eventually patent law for 30 years while pursuing libertarian theory as an avocation, attending Mises Institute events since 1995.
Libertarian vs. Anarchist: Definitions and Preferences
2:17
Matthew Geiger asks about the distinction between calling oneself a libertarian versus an anarchist. Kinsella explains different axes of libertarianism (activism vs. theory vs. personal conduct) and argues that libertarianism is a consistent extension of classical liberalism centered on self-ownership and Lockean property rights. He details why the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) is actually a shorthand for a deeper cluster of property rules — homesteading, contract, and rectification — rather than a standalone axiom. He makes the case that the most consistent libertarians are anarchists, while minarchists are libertarians with an asterisk, and classical liberals are close intellectual cousins but not true libertarians.
Matthew Geiger on Labels and Consistency
10:19
Matthew Geiger shares his own thoughts on the dilution of the term “libertarian” and his preference for “anarchist.” He discusses taking the label back from the left and echoes Hoppe’s view that the state is always socialist. Geiger and Kinsella agree that the most principled position is anarcho-libertarianism (or Austro-libertarianism), which recognizes the natural emergence of hierarchy, authority, norms, and social consequences in a free society — things many modern libertarians mistakenly reject.
Younger Generations, Cultural Shifts, and Advice
13:23
Matthew Geiger asks about cultural and political trends among younger generations, referencing Javier Milei’s popularity, and requests advice for them. Kinsella sympathizes with Gen Z and Millennials, blaming previous generations for poor education, inflation, debt, and making normal life unaffordable. He advises libertarians to adopt a long-term perspective, read Albert Jay Nock’s Isaiah’s Job, focus on being part of the “remnant,” maintain balance in life (career, finances, family), and avoid burning out on short-term activism. He also reflects on how the libertarian movement has grown larger, more international, and more radical since the 2008 Ron Paul campaign, though newer adherents tend to be less well-read.
Optimism About Technology, Fragmentation, and the Future
21:40
Matthew Geiger expresses optimism about technology, the internet, AI, and the erosion of state monopolies on force and information. Kinsella shares a cautious but ultimately hopeful outlook. He discusses the benefits of media fragmentation (less centralized propaganda), the logic of Bitcoin succeeding on its own merits rather than activism, and why liberty, if achieved, will be because it is natural and inevitable. He touches on the Fermi paradox and great filter while maintaining long-term civilizational optimism.
Foreign Policy, Economics, and IP Imperialism
31:59
Matthew Geiger circles back to connections between culture, foreign policy, and monetary policy, critiquing U.S. aid to Israel and mercantilist justifications. Kinsella delivers a sharp analysis of Pax Americana, dollar hegemony, the military-industrial complex, and how the U.S. exports inflation while benefiting certain industries. He describes “IP imperialism” — patents and copyrights — as tools that allow Hollywood, Big Pharma, and defense contractors to extract wealth from the rest of the world.
Stephan Kinsella on Decentralization, IP, and the Future of the State
36:14
The conversation continues with Matthew Geiger noting decentralization in music production. Kinsella explains how technology (internet, streaming, piracy) has already weakened copyright and predicts 3D printing, robotics, and AI could eventually undermine pharmaceutical patents. He launches into a passionate critique of intellectual property as one of the most anti-libertarian, innovation-harming policies in existence. He envisions technology enabling greater self-sufficiency, causing the state to gradually wither away like the British monarchy — becoming largely ceremonial while private enterprise and civil society take over most functions. Kinsella ends on a hopeful, if long-term, note about humanity maturing beyond tribalism and primitive superstitions.
Closing Thoughts and Resources
55:08
Stephan Kinsella promotes the Property and Freedom Society’s annual conference in Turkey, the new book Rothbard at 100, and his “Universal Principles of Liberty” project (a concise statement of libertarian legal principles). Matthew Geiger thanks Kinsella and expresses interest in attending future events.
Links & Resources:
- Stephan Kinsella: stephankinsella.com
- Property and Freedom Society: propertyandfreedom.org
- Rothbard at 100 (pre-order available)
- Mises Institute
Episode Length: Approximately 58 minutes
This episode offers a rich blend of personal history, rigorous libertarian theory, sharp cultural commentary, and forward-looking optimism. Highly recommended for anyone interested in Austrian economics, property rights, critiques of intellectual property, and the future of freedom.
Transcript
Introduction
0:00
Matthew Geiger: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Menger Institute podcast. We have a very special guest. We have with us a retired patent attorney and libertarian writer, Stephan Kinsella. Welcome to the Menger Institute podcast.
Stephan Kinsella: Thanks for having me. Yeah, I’m very excited to talk to you.
How Stephan Kinsella Discovered Libertarianism
0:19
Matthew Geiger: I want to begin, I think, with how you got into libertarianism, your work with Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and yeah if you could tell us your story.
Stephan Kinsella: Well I am, as you mentioned, retired. I did patent law, I did various types of law for about 30 years in private practice in the US: oil and gas law first and then international law and then patent law. So I’ve done a variety. In the later part a lot of high-tech law. But on the side, I also did a lot of libertarian writing and thinking because I’ve been interested in it since about high school.
I am from Louisiana. I just came from a conservative household but had zero political or economic knowledge or even historical knowledge. But a librarian gave me The Fountainhead to read in high school and I read it and that got me interested in philosophy and free market economics and individualism. So I started reading voraciously and very soon became a libertarian and then of course reading the Austrians like Mises and Rothbard and the others pretty soon became an Austrian libertarian and then an anarchist. And I’ve been like that since college or law school.
In law school and after I started trying to expand or develop the theories I’ve been reading to make some progress where I thought I could. And so that’s sort of been my avocation all these years as a lawyer and now it’s my main hobby or interest. So that’s how I got interested in it and I started attending Mises Institute events in 1995 and did that for many years.
Libertarian vs. Anarchist: Definitions and Preferences
2:17
Matthew Geiger: This may be a question of semantics but you say libertarian and I want to know what your distinction is or preference for describing yourself as libertarian or anarchist.
Stephan Kinsella: Yes, I’ve always been, so in my view there are two types of libertarians in the sense of your interest. One is activism, that is being part of some movement trying to make change, and then the other is just being interested in the ideas, and then the other is just being a libertarian, like acting in a peaceful way and following those rules. But I’ve always been interested in the theory, like the arguments for rights and for law, things like that. But of course I’m also interested in achieving such a world. And so that’s where the activism side comes in. And that part breaks down into two parts. You could say intellectual activism and political activism.
So the political is like joining the Libertarian Party, trying to get people to vote the right way. And intellectual is just trying to spread the ideas which is sort of what you do as an intellectual anyway. You’re trying to spread the ideas. Now as for what the word libertarian itself means, there are some people who you would call them libertarians, but they reject that label now because they say they don’t like it or whatever. I don’t think you can pick and choose words. I think words have a meaning. It’s a conventional meaning and libertarian is about as good a word as we have to describe the political philosophy of strong individual rights and limited or no government. It’s basically a more extreme or more principled or more consistent version of classical liberalism.
People have come up with alternatives to try to sell it, but that’s the activist in them coming out. They’re like, “Oh, people don’t like libertarianism, so let’s give it a different name. Let’s call it market liberalism or let’s call it voluntarianism or blah blah blah.” I just get tired of this. You can’t play these tricks to get liberty. At least in my view, and I’m too stubborn to give up a word until they totally steal it from us like they did the word liberal in the early 1930s. I don’t think we’ve lost the word libertarian yet, although it does have some connotations. But one reason I joined the Libertarian Party for the first time about eight years ago was some of us thought, look, if they’re going to be out there calling themselves libertarians, we should at least make sure that they field libertarian candidates and they espouse the right principles.
In my view, libertarianism refers to anyone that holds a systematic consistent understanding of individual rights as rooted in self-ownership and property rights like Lockean property rights and contract and the implications of that which is radical or no state. I think the most consistent libertarian is an anarchist. And so I think you can call minarchist libertarians but with a sort of an asterisk like they’re libertarians but they’re not fully consistent libertarians. And I’m sure the minarchist libertarians would think that we anarchists might be libertarians but we sort of go too far or something like that. Now I would not call classical liberals libertarians. I think they’re like close cousins or antecedents. But so I think the modern libertarians started around the 1960s with Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman, Leonard Read and these guys, basically an American phenomenon but with Ayn Rand who was a Russian and Mises too to some degree.
That’s how I define it and what I’ve tried to do over the years is not only extend the philosophy but be precise about definitions. And one thing that slowly dawned on me, the intuitive appeal to me of Ayn Rand’s view of rights in The Fountainhead, well, in Atlas Shrugged, let’s say, is that the only way to violate rights is by force. To me, that’s the key to it all. But the more you think about it, you realize that’s not a foundational or fundamental principle. It’s more like a derivative principle because to know what aggression is and it’s not an axiom, it’s a principle.
It’s called an axiom because some Ayn Rand followers used her sort of idiosyncratic terminology where she referred to what we would call a priori principles or intelligible truths or apodictic principles. She called them axioms, which is a little bit, I think, crankish because in math, an axiom is just an assumed or presumed starting point like in Euclidean geometry or whatever. It’s not something that’s uncontestably true, but that’s how she meant it. She meant it to be something that’s undeniably true, which is what Mises meant by a priori axioms like human action and the associated axioms. In any case, it was originally referred to as the non-aggression axiom, but then soon it started being called the non-aggression principle, NAP, which I think makes more sense. Or some people that are more consistent say the ZAP, the zero aggression principle.
But in any case, it occurred to me that look, it’s obvious that you can’t like it was a little bit strained to say, okay, if I attack you, that’s aggression, but if I walk on your lawn, that’s also called aggression. But it’s not really the right use of that word aggression. What it is is it’s an extension of it by something we call metonymy. And you realize that you can only determine whether an action is aggression if you know who owns the thing that’s being aggressed against.
So, like if two people are fighting over a watch, then you don’t know if I’m trying to take your watch, the watch that you’re holding, we don’t know if it’s theft or if it’s restitution because it depends on who the owner is. So, the more fundamental or foundational principle is property rights. And those property rights and here’s the other thing. A lot of libertarians say that, oh, we libertarians believe in private property rights and socialists don’t. Well, it depends on what you mean by private property rights because every legal system, every political system has an explicit or implicit view of property rights. It’s just the question is how the system determines who the owner is. There’s always an owner. In an absolute monarchy or dictatorship or theocracy, the state is the owner of most of the resources. In socialism, the state is the owner, but there is an owner.
So what distinguishes libertarianism from every other political philosophy is our rules for determining who the owner is. And those rules are basically the common sense natural rules that are implicit in Locke and in Western theory but just more consistently applied. And those rules are basically self-ownership in the case of your body as the presumption because you could lose it if you commit aggression. But the presumption is that every person is the owner of his body. And then in the case of other resources in the world that were previously unowned but can be used as scarce means of action to be causally efficacious, we determine the owner of those things in accordance with homesteading. That is the first user is the presumptive owner or the contractual transferee, someone who got it by contract. And then there’s one more about rectification. But those four rules are basically the property rules which is what we’re referring to when we say we’re against aggression or the non-aggression principle. So the non-aggression principle is like a shorthand metonymy that refers to our cluster of property rights principles.
Matthew Geiger on Labels and Consistency
10:19
Matthew Geiger: That was a great analysis. My personal opinion as far as using the terms or labels libertarian and anarchist is that libertarian seems to be growing and with even the national Libertarian Party but at the same time it’s also becoming diluted in a sense and it’s like less pure about the idea of the non-aggression principle and becoming a little bit libertine and I personally like anarchist and the idea that we’re taking it back from the communists. Well and like Hoppe points out that the state is always socialist and socialism is always the state and by the same token anyone who’s not a libertarian is to some degree or in some sense a statist and a socialist. So libertarianism is ultimately about private property rights rooted in self-ownership and private property rights. And so by that idea the most principled libertarian is an anarchist.
So you could say we’re anarchists but the problem terminologically is that there are different types of anarchists. There are left anarchists and there are mutualists and Proudhon, Georgist. And I think actually, if you want to be precise, I don’t think they’re actually anarchists because their views actually ultimately imply either true chaos, which they say they’re not for, or it implies some type of state, or some kind of institutionalized aggression against private property rights. Like if you have a Georgist single tax, you have to have collective action to basically infringe property rights of landowners, which is what the state does. But then it turns into a semantic battle about what’s the right label. So, to avoid fighting all the time, I usually say I’m an anarchist and I’m an anarcho-libertarian. And sometimes I’ll say I’m an Austro-libertarian because that sort of implies that we’re not left libertarians. We recognize the importance of hierarchy and authority and norms that would naturally emerge in a free society and which are essential to a free society and which are good things. Diversity and differences and elites and authority and rules and law are good things.
A lot of libertarians seem to be attracted to libertarianism because they sort of have a rejection of authority in general. And I guess a lot of them are not libertarians for the right reasons or they’re not long-lasting libertarians. They move on or they’re only libertarians for the results that they don’t have to listen to the teachers or their parents or society’s rules about how to dress or whatever. In a free society, you would certainly have even more restrictions on your behavior by social customs and consequences. It just wouldn’t be part of the law.
Younger Generations, Cultural Shifts, and Advice
13:23
Matthew Geiger: I do want to ask you kind of off this what you see in the younger generations culturally, politically for example with Javier Milei, say what you will about his Zionism, but he was very popular with the younger people who face this inflationary society. And I feel like the younger generations today in the United States who do live under more of an inflationary environment. Yeah I guess even a question of like what advice would you like to give the upcoming generations?
Stephan Kinsella: Well, I guess the advice would be different for libertarians or just young people in general. So my son is just well, he’s libertarian leaning, but he’s part of that generation that’s just coming out of college now. And the younger generation is facing lots of problems and they get unfairly mocked and ridiculed for being playing video games and living in their mom’s basement and not having ambitions. Well, the preceding generations did that to them. They sent them to shitty schools. They have made life impossible to live on a normal salary. Employment sucks. Inflation is rampant. And there’s this debt burden that’s growing in the west and in the US because of the greatest generation, our great-grandparents, our grandparents, their parents, all these generations have screwed them over and now they’re making fun of them for suffering from it. And then they’re also not that educated because of the schools and so they don’t quite know what the solution is, they don’t have a good understanding of economics. So I understand them being reactionary and distrusting things and not doing what was expected in the past like buying a house and getting married early and having a lot of kids and getting a mortgage and a picket fence and having a silver pattern and a china pattern and a piano in the house. Those things are different and previous generations have loaded them with this. So I don’t blame them at all. I feel bad for them. Of course, the solution is liberty, but we’re going to have to go through some pain to get there. Although, I don’t even see that happening, but that’s what we would have to do.
As for libertarians, I think it’s a mixture. Every generation from what I can tell of regular people and libertarians, they always have this rosy view about the way things used to be and they complain about the young people or whatever. I think that’s just nonsense. Society has always changed and always will change. There’s always dynamism. Things are always better in some ways and worse in other ways. Personally, I still remain roughly optimistic about the future. I think technology is overall good. AI is going to be interesting. Robotics, all these things that are coming are kind of interesting.
In the libertarian movement, I came in sort of in the second wave of it. The first wave was very tiny. The joke is that in the beginning days in the 60s and 70s all the libertarians could fit into like Murray Rothbard’s apartment or something like that in New York. Then it became bigger in the late 70s and 80s when I was part of it and it was bigger and in a sense it was much smaller than the movement is now. The movement now is not just American, it’s international and it’s much bigger and it’s also in a sense I believe it’s more radical than it used to be. And that’s partly because the movement was growing steadily after the beginning phase. You had Reason magazine and you had the Libertarian Party and you had the Foundation for Economic Education, the Mises Institute. And you had a growing appreciation for Austrian economics and then a growing sort of radicalism that more of them were anarchist.
But I do think in the beginning until around Ron Paul’s first run for president as a Republican in 2008, most libertarians were fairly intellectual and fairly well read, but also probably mostly minarchist. Like maybe 1/4 were anarchist and the rest were minarchist. But they were more intellectual, more principled, and they had more staying power. They were here for the long haul because they had read the works of Ayn Rand and Rothbard and Mises. They had read almost everything from Laissez Faire Books catalog and on the other hand there was less to read back then but a lot of people had read the vast bulk of the key works in our movement. When Ron Paul came along and then after that maybe others and the internet too all these things started happening around 2008 and the numbers expanded radically. And after the 2008 financial collapse too. So the numbers of libertarians expanded radically. I’d say it was maybe five times as much as it used to be, maybe 10 times.
And they were also more radical in the sense of a lot of them were influenced by the Mises Institute and Rothbard. So they were more radical, more Austrian-aware and in more numbers, but at the same time they were a little bit less well-read and more activist-minded. They were joining the party, trying to make change, voting for Ron Paul, that kind of thing. And so a lot of them burned out because they thought if you just get involved, we’ll have a libertarian president and freedom. Of course, that didn’t happen. They were promised that. And then five years later, now they’re alt-right or they’re post-libertarians or they’ve moved on or they got bitter and disappointed. So, they had less staying power and also they consume their media now on YouTube videos and TikTok and podcasts and if they even read at all. Although they’re smart enough to pick up the basic ideas. So, I do think there’s a big difference there and I don’t know if it’s good or bad. I think it’s good in some ways and bad in other ways, but it’s interesting to note it and I think we need to be honest about it.
As for advice, I think the only advice is stick with it no matter what. Be in it for the long haul. Be in it to be on the right side of history. And people should probably read Albert Jay Nock’s Isaiah’s Job. It’s about the remnant. It’s about helping to preserve the flame of liberty and the ideas of liberty and maybe expand it even if it’s not having much of an effect right now, but for your grandchildren or for future generations because we should care about liberty in general, not just for ourselves and not just for our neighbors and our children and not just for our countrymen and not just for the current generation but for future generations. It could be a long-term project. There’s nothing wrong with being part of the right side of history in that regard. That’s how I look at it. And I think if you have that long-term perspective, you won’t burn out. You won’t get impatient when you don’t get your way right away. And you also will not make mistakes where a lot of people put all their eggs in one basket and they don’t save for the future. They don’t get a normal job because they’re focused on getting liberty and they think they won’t need to or something like that. The whole purpose of liberty is for humans to have a good life yourself and others but it’s possible to have a pretty good life even though we don’t have full liberty and so I think you need to have a balance in your life. You could be a good person interested in liberty try to understand liberty try to spread the ideas of liberty as you can but also work to be a moral person and have a sound life and to have a good standing in the community, have a sound financial standing so you can support other people and weather the storm of the coming financial collapse and all this kind of stuff. So, that’s how I look at it. Like having a balance in life, but not losing hope because your hope is realistic.
Optimism About Technology, Fragmentation, and the Future
21:40
Matthew Geiger: Yeah, that’s fantastic advice. I’m optimistic because I see the increase in wealth and knowledge in real time with the internet, the post technological revolution, and we’ll see what AI does in the long run. I’m optimistic on AI. And also how this monopoly on force and deception is dwindling. And I think liberty and freedom is inevitable at a certain point. And this pressure that’s coming from the state, it just won’t last. And how everything’s connected like with Congressman Massie not taking money from AIPAC and then losing. People are like, “Oh, this is sad.” But at the same time, if he decides to run for president, even though I don’t know if it matters who wins in a presidential race, that energy and ideas can reach a lot more people. Kind of like the Ron Paul movement, even though he didn’t win.
Stephan Kinsella: Sure. Although, I’m kind of an outlier among all my friends who are big Massie fans. Maybe I’m just too before his time. I’m just not a Massie fan. Number one he’s strongly pro intellectual property and he’s not a libertarian. He doesn’t call himself that. He says he’s not a libertarian. So yeah he’s constitutionalist to some degree. I mean, like I guess it’s more just this recognition of, wow, we have a debt problem and why do we send $3.8 billion to a foreign country? No, he’s definitely good on that stuff and so was Ron Paul. And I admire that. And yeah, I know the general phenomena you’re talking about is the reason why some younger people are getting woken up to this kind of stuff. If he gets defeated, they learn from it. They see that. They go, “Oh what’s going on? There’s some kind of weird influence from Israel or the establishment.” I’m optimistic, too. Which is one reason why I’m always skeptical of people that get too much into activism because it’s like Bitcoin. I have a cautious optimism for Bitcoin.
I do think that so for example you hear people that complain about the monoculture in the US has been lost in the old days say before maybe around before 2000 it was a monoculture in the sense there were three networks everyone watched the same shows and so they were they could unite around things but on the other hand that made it easy to centralize the message being given to the people right now we’re fragmented and everyone, no one watches the same shows. They watch their own things. They’re siloed. And then you have these brain dead lefties who they don’t even understand how Trump could win because they don’t know any conservatives. They’re surprised by that because they’re in their little bubbles. But the good thing about that is that means that there’s less centralized control of information. I do think cell phones and encryption and social media and the internet and YouTube is good because it means that the emperor has no clothes as much anymore. People can now see that. So I think that these pro Bitcoin activist types. It’s like why are you trying to encourage people to buy and hold it? Look, if Bitcoin works, it’s going to work because it’s inevitable that we need to have a sound money that’s not censorable and that’s not controlled by the state. And that’s going to be something digital. There’s no doubt that eventually that will happen. And it needs to be not centralized so that it can work. And so, it’s probably going to be one digital currency, maybe Bitcoin, probably Bitcoin. But if it works, it’s going to work not because of libertarian or crypto advocates who are trying to persuade their uncles to buy it, but because it has a logic of its own. And I think the same is true of liberty. If liberty is going to work, it has to be self-sustaining. And it’s almost like if liberty is ever achieved in a substantial sense, like in 500 years or 100 years or whatever, it will be because it was natural and inevitable, not because of libertarians that were pushing for it. I mean, they can take some credit, but it’s not really because of their activism.
So you know, on the other hand, and I’m like a skeptic of all this aliens, UFO stuff. I think it’s very possible we’re the only life in the universe or the galaxy. We just don’t know. But the Fermi paradox, where are they? Like why aren’t we hearing from them? And which you think you would hear something by now if life was common. But one theory is that life is not that rare, but whenever it happens and reaches a level of intelligence, then there’s a runaway problem that always snuffs life out. You know, there’s the great filter problem. There’s nanotechnology or there’s robots or AI or nuclear weapons or biotechnology or 3D printing that makes plagues and something happens and that might be coming. I don’t know. But if that doesn’t come, and I hope it doesn’t come, and I don’t have any strong reason to think it will, if I had to bet, I do think that someday we will have a sound money like based in Bitcoin, and someday we will have substantial freedom, partly because of that. I don’t know how long it’ll take, but I do think that someday we’ll reach that point, or at least I hope so. But in the meantime, we need to carve out oases of liberty and prosperity as we can in society and be part of the good side, not the bad guys. Part of the Rebel Alliance, not the Empire in Star Wars. But I’ve heard theories that those are the wrong sides. But you get my point.
Matthew Geiger: Yeah. Even just today, this morning, I was at a cafe and I was doing my reading. And the guy across from me, he was a senior fellow and he was doing the New York Times crossword and reading it and enjoying his coffee as well. And it’s just like, I don’t know what that guy’s political perspectives are, but it’s so apparent that, people of older generations, let’s say, of that monoculture, will read the New York Times and be like, “Well, look, it says here in the New York Times.” And when you’re like, but the New York Times people are also people of a certain ideology pushing a certain opinion and that’s the framework I think that is so much more fertile and acceptable for understanding for the younger people relatively to the older generations which also gives me a lot more optimism.
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah. And I also think that especially among libertarians who had a strongly negative reaction to the COVID lockdowns and mandates and all that at least eventually they did not quickly enough according to my friend Jeff Tucker but eventually they were against it but I think that has led to a welcome correction. Maybe it’s an overcorrection. So at the current point in time no one knows who to trust on anything. It seems and in a way that’s sad but in a way I think it’s probably overall good. So when people say that Epstein killed himself they don’t even I do think he killed himself but I understand why people are skeptical of that because you can’t trust the people that said that because they’re not trustworthy people. And when people say you should take the vaccines that we’ve been telling you, it’s like people start thinking like, well, I started being skeptical of the COVID vaccine, but then they start rethinking, well, what about all the other vaccines? Should I take the flu vaccine every year like they’ve been telling me all these years? So, now there’s probably a big wave of skepticism about vaccines in general and even other things and the nutrition schedule, the food pyramid of the FDA and things like that. So there’s a skepticism of all that and people are not trusting the so-called authorities and I think that’s good.
Now I do think that in any healthy advanced cosmopolitan modern society you’re going to tend to have civilized widely shared norms and values: prosperity, pro-peace, tolerance, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, individualism, diversity, all those things that does need to be there. It should not be part of the law, but any healthy society would have that and probably is easier to achieve that in smaller polities, right? Smaller states. I won’t say racially homogeneous or something but smaller states where you know micro states says that we should have a world of 100,000 Liechtensteins or something like that I do think that would be a far better model and it’s probably harder to achieve in a crazy large raucous country like the US with its crazy history but we still have a core of attachment among neighbors and friends and in the civic community to our ideals and to prosperity and technology and some type of individualism and I think that’s all good and that’s always been there and when we say things are getting worse when we see police brutality and stuff I think that’s nonsense. I think it’s always been bad because the state has always been a bunch of thugs. It’s just that we see it more now because the cell phones are out there all the time now. And that’s a good thing that we see it. And the cops are now wearing body cameras on their body armor, which is good because it makes them probably be a little bit more polite and less crooked and then people can see what’s going on when they do misbehave.
Foreign Policy, Economics, and IP Imperialism
31:59
Matthew Geiger: I guess I kind of want to circle back to this connection between culture and foreign policy and monetary policy or economics. I was listening to a right-wing conservative guy trying to explain why the US sends foreign aid to Israel. And he said, “Well, because the money under those contracts go back 70 to 100% of it needs to be spent on military manufacturers of armaments. So, it helps the economy. It’s running all these jobs.” And it’s like, “Oh, wow.” Like, that’s a mercantilist delusion that you can make prosperity by paying someone to dig a hole and then fill it. It’s three layers of deception, but they’re peeling back one. So, it’s a little bit more honest. I mean, it’s like the same thing with the Marshall Plan or the myth that World War II got the US out of the Great Depression. It’s this idea that if you and so the Marshall Plan, the idea was well, everyone thinks that the US bailed out Europe after World War II. And what it really was was it was partially a transfer of American taxpayer funds to European governments, but then they were forced to spend the money back on the military-industrial complex and other suppliers in the US. So it was a transfer of wealth from taxpayers in the US to European governments and to certain American interests in the US, the military-industrial complex, let’s say.
So, there’s a transfer of wealth. And also, I think there’s another thing my friend Jeff Tucker and I have talked a lot about. Something that I think is not widely recognized and it’s a little bit simplified but I think the model we have now of the world ever since World War II this Pax Americana for the last 70 years or so is basically the US has hollowed out its ability to produce things because of increasing regulations and taxation and socialism making us less productive. So we’ve made ourselves we competed we priced ourselves out of the market. That’s why China and other countries sell us things more cheaply because they have lower labor costs. Now we can get away with that for a while because number one the US established the dollar as the world reserve after Bretton Woods which allowed us to keep exporting our inflation to the rest of the world. So in a sense it’s the US consumer and the US citizens who are benefiting from the sort of inflation tax paid for by the rest of the world and the rest of the world uses the dollar and they soak up our issuance of bonds and that money is used to pay our military to police the world. So it’s almost like the US has become a mercenary big nation where we use our brute force to police the world with our navy and our nuclear umbrella and all that stuff and in exchange our vassal states pay us tribute in the form of using our dollar and so it’s almost like every and so then the US government officials when we say oh NATO is not paying its fair share and they’re taking advantage of us. It’s like it’s not really clear who’s taking advantage of who. It’s almost like there’s the military-industrial complex in the US and there is the pharmaceutical industry and Hollywood and the music industry. The three big industries in the US that are beneficiaries of American style patent and copyright. So it’s IP imperialism and military imperialism for the benefit of like these four big entities in America: Hollywood, the music industry, mostly Hollywood and the pharmaceutical industry and the military-industrial complex and so the whole rest of the world is paying the price for that. American consumers and Europe and Asia and everyone. I mean, that’s very simplified, but I think there’s something to this bizarre and the problem is it’s got to break down at some point as we’re seeing the limits even of this massive American power in Iran and China’s coming to the fore. Russia is pretty strong for a medium power. And then the debt is going to have to collapse at some point and the US government surprisingly is foolishly somewhat behind Bitcoin even though I think that’s going to ultimately spell its doom. I hope that’s going to happen but I hope it’s a soft landing not a Mad Max world transition.
Stephan Kinsella on Decentralization, IP, and the Future of the State
36:14
Matthew Geiger: I think I totally agree. We have our proxy states for the military-industrial complex in Israel and Ukraine. So, the money goes back to the US manufacturers. And I do think Bitcoin will help alleviate a financial transition and I think that will ultimately lead to more secessionism. But I’m curious to ask you about this music industry thing because from what I see with music now, you have bedroom producers, people able to produce their own music, record their own music in their bedroom and upload it to streaming services and compete with top artists. So there is some decentralization happening there which is really cool.
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah. So I think what happened was and I’m being really crude in my overview but I do think it’s like the military-industrial complex and all of its associated suppliers and industry and then the pharmaceutical industry is the big one relying upon patents and then Hollywood and music are on the decline for a couple reasons. Number one, they’re relying on copyright. And unlike patents, the technology of the internet and torrenting and encryption and streaming, all that stuff has made it impossible to stop piracy. You can still stop it on an institutional scale, like the big companies can sue. They know who to sue. So if you’re a cable company or Netflix, they have to get a license and they have to do it the right way. But there’s tons of piracy behind the scenes. No one buys music anymore or CDs or DVDs for movies. So technology has largely neutered copyright and you can get a pirated book anytime you want. So it’s impossible to stop information. So copyright has largely been neutered by technology. I hope and think something like that might eventually happen to patents in the pharmaceutical industry when 3D printing matures. That might take 50 years to really get to the point where you could print a drug or print an iPhone in your basement on your $2,000 3D printer. But I could see or have a robot do I mean, who knows what’s going to happen with the intersection of robotics and AI and 3D printing. Those three things could combine together at some point.
But in the meantime, the pharmaceutical industry does take advantage of the rest of the world. The US now using its monopsony power with buying with Medicare and Medicaid insisting that they’re not going to pay more than the most favored nation price of any other rich country. So I think what they’re trying to do is make price controls in socialist countries like in Europe just raise the prices they have to pay or the pharmaceutical companies raise the prices they’re charging them so that they can still charge a relatively high price in the US. So it’s again bilking the Europeans at the expense of keeping propping up the monopoly prices of US pharmaceutical suppliers. This whole thing is crazily complex and all of it is so complex that no one understands it they get away with it. No one understands patents. No one understands the FDA regulatory process. So they believe the propaganda. They used to believe the propaganda that you have to be in favor of innovation. So you have to be in favor of the patent system. And if you get rid of the patent system, you get rid of innovation. I think over time people are starting not to believe that or they’re starting not to care. If you have someone who wants a Chanel purse, they don’t have a lot of moral qualms about buying a $20 knockoff. If they want that, they can’t afford the real thing. They might if they can get away with it, they’ll do it. There’s no moral opprobrium against doing that stuff anymore.
Matthew Geiger: Let’s talk a little bit about the pharmaceutical or socialized medicine. I am a fan of Yuri Maltsev, the late great Russian economist, and his talks on socialized medicine were just so eye opening, but also about how that’s what socialists are aiming for is the central monopoly on the provision of medical care because then they pretty much own you and they choose like what you’re going to receive and whether you get it or not or whether you get to live or not. And that’s definitely a big fear, but as you’re saying, like could we 3D print drugs and undermine so much of the pharmaceutical industry? Like if we could 3D print homes, what that would do to the housing business?
Stephan Kinsella: Correct. That’d be amazing. Or if you have robotic surgeons or robotic doctors guided by AI and they could actually do procedures. I don’t want to be too utopian and too what Rothbard called the space cadets. He made fun of the space cadets. But I do see the potential for which is one reason by the way that I hate intellectual property especially patent law because the reason the human race is richer and we keep getting richer is because we keep unlocking secrets of the universe. We keep unlocking what we call recipes or technological recipes or causal scientific knowledge about the way the universe works. And every time we do that, we have more knowledge that we can use to decide how to get something done more efficiently with less resources or a grander task or something like that. So we’re richer because we have more knowledge, not because we have more stuff. We have more stuff because we have more knowledge that lets us make better stuff out of the stuff we used to have. The matter is the same. The atomic scale is still the same. The ball of resources on the earth is still the same. Basically, it’s our knowledge that keeps changing. And that accumulates from person to person, from day to day and over time into what Hayek calls the fund of experience.
And this is why I have such a passionate hatred for intellectual property, especially patent law, is it intentionally impedes the transmission and development of such knowledge by making it illegal to use or copy or build on knowledge for a period of time. It’s like you put a damper on competition. In fact, some of the advocates say that we don’t want to have dog eat dog or unbridled competition. I mean, they literally sound like characters out of Atlas Shrugged. And these are supposed free market economists like William Shughart from the Independent Institute which is allegedly a libertarian organization. These guys are dinosaurs. They’re stuck in their stupid classical liberal founders worship. And because it’s in the Constitution, then they think it’s great. And because they like innovation, they think that the government granting monopolies on it is good. It’s just unbelievable. People still believe this. Why don’t you just keep your mouth shut if you don’t understand something? Only talk about what you really understand. But then they’re undermining their entire standing and case for liberty and free markets and private property by advocating what is one of the most evil and destructive and socialist things that mankind has ever come up with: intellectual property.
And I was reading Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature a little bit yesterday and Rothbard was writing about how the people who were big businessmen went to the government to kind of cartelize and monopolize to regulate themselves and how so many people still today think that like oh yeah this is what you get when you have a capitalist society is it takes over the government and it’s like man it’s the government that’s facilitating all this. And I’ve been dealing with a lot of communists and socialists recently, and they’re just all saying the same thing. Laborers want to take back what they’ve created. And I heard something recently which struck a chord. There’s a saying that history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. But then the guy said, “Well, it only rhymes for about two generations.” In other words, people remember the lessons that they saw in their parents generation and maybe their grandparents generation. Which is why after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and in Czechoslovakia and Hungary and in the Baltics, Poland, East Germany, they hated communism. They hated socialism. And then their kids hated it cuz they were young and they remember what their parents say and then maybe their kids hate it. But the kids born 20 years ago now they’re two generations past that and now they’re like, “Yeah, we need to take back workers rights.” It’s like they’re going to repeat what their grandparents just suffered through defeating. So, it’s sad, but I think that’s the way people have to keep learning lessons again.
Matthew Geiger: I’m hoping that the market and the internet will just keep us from really trying to attempt socialism again all the way.
Stephan Kinsella: Well, that’s the one good thing about competition. As long as you have not one world government or one world state and you have a bunch of like that’s one good thing about the US is you have the states you can move from state to state and it sort of keeps the competitive pressure keeps the excesses from one state at bay or if it doesn’t then they suffer and they just lose people and they finally decline. So at least there’s a natural selection or evolution that happens that way. And so if the US just keeps adopting the wrong policies then the country that happens to adopt the right ones like Singapore or Hong Kong or whatever then they become the new power center and people gravitate in that way and they learn their lesson and that becomes more strong. But the problem that Hoppe pointed out a long time ago is there’s this paradox. And the paradox is that when you have a state, especially a modern democratic state, especially of a large country, then the ones that happen to settle upon free market policies internally like the US did, they tend to be more powerful militarily because the state has a richer tax base to skim off of. And then they take those resources and they use that to build their military and then they become more imperialist because if you have it you’re going to use it. So paradoxically the countries that are more liberal internally tend to be more bellicose externally. Which kind of explains why the US is so imperialistic even though we’re held up as the exemplar of free markets and individualism because internally we do have still a kind of a cowboy free market mentality but they use that wealth that that idea has produced to fund the military and to go abroad seeking enemies to destroy for the benefit of the non-productive class who’s in charge and who’s not rich on their own merits.
Matthew Geiger: Yeah, I think definitely empirically that’s the case, but I’m hoping with the younger generations who recognize like, oh, there’s no more monopoly on information and we don’t need to fight these wars.
Stephan Kinsella: And look, if you think about it, a country like the US and probably most countries, they’re operating on a deficit because they just can’t afford what they do on pure taxes alone. So they deficit finance, they finance themselves by inflation and by floating bonds. Well, when Bitcoin becomes the refuge, the final refuge, the most liquid asset and real estate and stocks and art is not used as the primary store of value and that gets sucked up by Bitcoin. That starts becoming the reserve currency, no one’s going to buy US government bonds because at a certain point they’re going to know that they won’t be redeemed. And so when if the government can’t sell their bonds anymore, they have to live on their budget. They cannot deficit finance. So, if Bitcoin was the standard tomorrow, then the US government would instantly have about a 30% revenue or budget cut. They would have to. So it would right away go back to Bill Clinton era or Obama era budget.
And not only that if self-driving cars and AI doctors and robots and 3D printing and self farming methods and being more independent on your own. If all these things start happening, then all the things the government uses as an excuse to control us, like you need us, we’ve monopolized education, we’ve monopolized transportation, we’ve monopolized safety standards for food, and we’ve monopolized health care. So you have to obey us and abide by our laws and pay your taxes when you don’t need the government for those things anymore. Like, I don’t need the government for food because I can grow it and my robots can tend it. And I don’t need the government’s medical system because I can 3D print my drugs and have my AI tell me what the treatment is. I’m being a little utopian, but when that starts happening more and more, people are more self-sufficient. And it’s like, I don’t care if the government doesn’t give me all these things. You might not even need social security benefits and things. So then the government’s so this is my hope my optimistic utopian hope is that the government it’s never going to wither away on its own but it might wither away almost like the British monarchy has like the British monarchy is not really a government anymore it’s just the husk the ceremonial remains and they have their property and they just live off their own rents they’re not supported by the taxpayer really to any meaningful extent and they don’t have any significant power, but they’re there sort of like a last resort and all that. They’re there as a museum piece and as a curiosity piece. I could see the US government or these other big governments kind of doing that over time when the private sector regains its place as the majority supplier of private goods and self-sufficiency and law and order. And that’s kind of my utopian hope for the way we’re going to experience because I always tell my friends that humanity we came out of the trees too soon. So the reason we’re not as advanced of a race as we think we are. We think we’re advanced because we have spaceships and we have lasers and we have computers and we have some smart people, but really we’re just like apes who just came out of the trees and we’re dangerous and we’re liable to kill ourselves because we still believe in tribal superstitions and God and religion and we fight wars over religion and Israel is about these idiot tribal people fighting over a piece of dirt in the location like that matters because it’s in a couple of stupid books. This is primitive crap this is not going to be a thing in 200 years or 500 years I think or a thousand years when we start reaching maturity and grow up out of our infant stage. So, I’m hoping that in the future we’ll have kind of this will all be just like noise from the past and so I guess I need to freeze my head and wake up in a thousand years and see what happens.
Matthew Geiger: Yeah, civilization is definitely young and I do think that the next major step for human freedom will be the separation of state and money production and that’s what’s funding so much of the wars and the crap ideology that we have today. And yeah, I think if DC becomes a museum piece, it’s going to be a pretty ugly museum, but we just won’t have the reverence that we did a 100 years ago for it. And that would be amazing. Just like if you’re going to another country’s capital, seeing their government buildings and you’re just like this is all fake.
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah. Or when you go to Athens and you see the ruins of the Parthenon and stuff, it’d be like maybe we’ll preserve it better here. But that’s my hope. That’s my hope that that will gradually happen. Technology will make the state, not just technology, but all of this will, the maturation of the human species will make the state wither away. Yes, definitely. Well, with the time remaining, I want to ask you if there’s anything else you would like to say.
Closing Thoughts and Resources
55:08
Stephan Kinsella: For people that are interested in all this stuff, I’m doing an increasing amount of work with the Property and Freedom Society, which is what Hans-Hermann Hoppe started in 2006. We have an annual meeting there every September in Turkey. And that website has lots of good material and we published a book on April 2nd this year on Murray Rothbard’s 100th birthday called Rothbard at 100 and it’s a collection of essays by people who knew him and people who didn’t on his thought and his life and that’s a really nice compilation and we did it digitally on his birthday and we’re about to release the print version. It’s going to be a very nice volume published by the Mises Institute’s safe house and we’re releasing that in about two weeks in Portugal. There’s a conference in Porto Portugal on Rothbard celebrating Rothbard on June 27th which I’m going to which Hoppe is going to. So, keep your eyes open for that in case it is recorded. But in any case, the Rothbard at 100 book is available for pre-order now. If you just go to propertyandfreedom.org, you’ll see a link for it. You can order it there from the Mises site or from Amazon. So that’s what I’m working on. And then I just keep working on various writing projects trying to expand libertarian theory in different areas which I think it’s still undeveloped: intellectual property, various aspects of libertarian legal theory. Libertarianism is a young discipline and a lot of progress has been made but there’s still areas that have not received adequate treatment. So, in a way, it’s a good thing. The low-hanging fruit was already taken up by Rothbard and others, but there’s still medium-hanging fruit for scholars and thinkers to keep working on it to develop. So, there’s progress to be made, which is a good thing.
Matthew Geiger: Excellent. That sounds fantastic. And I’ll make sure to include the links to Property and Freedom Society and your website. I would really love to attend some of the Property and Freedom Society conferences in Turkey. That would be really cool. Maybe one day we can talk offline about how to do that. And one other thing I did work earlier last year with a guy named Max and it’s something I’m pretty happy with. I did it with a team of people including Hoppe and Alexander Fusillo and David Dürr and Max. I was the primary author but it’s called the Universal Principles of Liberty. It’s sort of my attempt to have a non-legislated, non-comprehensive, non-detailed, but sort of elegant and concise restatement of the fundamentals of libertarian principles of justice and the legal principles that we believe in. So, if you just go to my website, stephankinsella.com, and there’s a link at the top for the Universal Principles of Liberty. That’s a really good condensed statement of our fundamental principles of property, rights, and justice.
Matthew Geiger: Amazing, Stephan Kinsella. Thank you very much. Thank you so much.
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