KOL500 | Libertad Individual Interview: Rothbard’s Framework, Legal Theory, Property Rights, Contract, Intellectual Property, Corporations, and More

by Stephan Kinsella on September 30, 2026

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 500.

Jorge Muñoz, host of the Libertad Individual Youtube channel, interviewed me recently: The Case Against Intellectual Property (Sept. 3, 2026; recorded Sept. 1, 2026). Shownotes and transcript below.

Shownotes:

Join us for a live conversation with renowned libertarian legal scholar, patent attorney, and author Stephan Kinsella. We dive deep into the foundations of libertarian legal theory, the fundamental flaws of Intellectual Property (IP), and how genuine property rights are rooted in natural rights and Austrian Economics.

Whether you are passionate about the history of patents, the legacy of Murray Rothbard, or the future of freedom in the digital age, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.

Topics discussed in this stream:

The philosophical and economic case against Intellectual Property.

How the history of patents contradicts true property rights.

Praxeology, natural rights, and the privatization of law.

State monopolies, CBDCs, and the defense of financial liberty.

The lasting impact of Murray Rothbard’s legal framework.

Books Mentioned

Against Intellectual Property by Stephan Kinsella

Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023)

Human Action by Ludwig von Mises

“Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe: An Indispensable Framework,” in Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Papinian Press and The Saif House, 2026).

The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman

The Market for Liberty by Morris and Linda Tannehill

For a New Liberty by Murray Rothbard

The Ethics of Liberty by Murray Rothbard

The Enterprise of Law by Bruce Benson

Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick

In Defense of the Corporation by Robert Hessen

Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles by Jesús Huerta de Soto (He doesn’t mention the exact title, but references Soto’s chapters clarifying Roman law treatment of commodatum, mutuum, and irregular vs. regular deposits).

It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand by Jerome Tuccille

Websites & Links

stephankinsella.com – Stephan Kinsella’s official website where he hosts his work and books for free.

The Universal Principles of Liberty

propertyandfreedom.org – The official website of the Property and Freedom Society, which Kinsella manages and where you can find work by him, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and other Rothbardian Austrians.

Specific Articles/Blog Posts by Kinsella

“Areas That Need Development from Libertarian Thinkers”

“Disentangling Legal and Economic Concepts”

“Where I’ve Changed My Mind” (Mentioning his shifts in thought regarding Bruno Leoni, F.A. Hayek, immigration, and intellectual property).

Timestamps:

00:00 – Introduction & New Book Announcements

01:40 – Murray Rothbard’s Legacy & Influence

06:05 – Kinsella’s Journey to Anarcho-Capitalism

11:27 – Why Legal Theory Matters for Libertarianism

18:07 – Debating Walter Block on Voluntary Slavery

28:32 – Debt Contracts and Future Title Transfers

35:21 – Corporations & Limited Liability in a Free Society

46:41 – Evaluating Javier Milei’s Presidency

50:01 – The Case Against Intellectual Property

56:37 – Unresolved Issues in Libertarian Theory (Banking & Bitcoin)

1:07:44 – Final Thoughts & Recommendations

Transcript

Introduction & New Book Announcements

00:00

Jorge Muñoz: Hello everyone. Today we have a very special guest. Today we are with Stephan Kinsella. He’s the author of this book that many of you know, Against Intellectual Property. And he had another book that is much bigger, that is Legal Foundations of a Free Society. And well, we had—yeah, there it is.

It’s pretty almost like Human Action.

Stephan Kinsella: Yeah. I have a Spanish copy coming out. I just got the proof of it. So it will be released in Spanish on like Amazon or something pretty soon in the next month, I think, next weeks.

Jorge Muñoz: That’s great. So when that’s live, I will upload it in the description.

And well, today we have a lot of topics to speak about. But Kinsella, maybe in the Spanish-speaking libertarian world, is better known about the intellectual property. But well, the other day there was a streaming about Rothbard’s 100th anniversary, and you spoke also about the theory of contracts. There is the book by the Property and Freedom Society, I believe, edited by you and Hoppe. Nice that I read some chapters, and that’s great.

You are in the year of Rothbard, and well, we can start with that maybe. What did Rothbard mean for you when you started, and what do you think is important about him today? Is he still relevant?

Murray Rothbard’s Legacy & Influence

01:40

Stephan Kinsella: Yeah. So I open my chapter in the book—Hans Hoppe and I decided to do this collection of essays in Rothbard’s honor because his birthday, his 100th birthday, was this year. And so we released the book on that day. And then we also had a nice—the Mises Portugal and some other groups under Manuel Ogando had a nice one-day conference with about 400 people, some Portuguese, some Brazilians, some Spanish, some Europeans, some Americans, in Porto back in June.

And in my chapter, it’s called “Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe: The Indispensable Framework,” which is using the dedication Rothbard used for a couple of his books, where he dedicated it to his wife, talking about how she was sort of the background framework for his work, because she was his sort of support system in his life. But I used it as an homage to that, but to point out, to emphasize what was the most—look, there’s lots of important thinkers that we assemble when we come to our view of liberty. But I wanted to focus on what I think are the most important three to me and to sound libertarian thinking, and that’s Rothbard, Mises, and Hoppe, with Rothbard being the central figure. Sort of he is the bridge between the two. Hoppe is sort of building upon Mises and Rothbard and integrating the two.

But what Rothbard did was he integrated radical libertarian politics and anarchism with Mises’s radical subjectivist and praxeological approach to economics and Austrian economics. So I believe Rothbard, because he made so much progress in developing ideas of liberty, libertarianism in the 20th century, as well as Austrian economics and promoting it, which are the two most essential disciplines to know for a sound understanding of politics.

Of course you also need logic and history and scientific literacy and all that, political philosophy, sociology. But the two most important would be—you know, and math too, things like that. But the two most important would be economics and political philosophy, the nature of the state and the nature of human existence.

So Rothbard—and he also was briefly in the Ayn Rand circles. And Ayn Rand, I think—look, as much criticism as Ayn Rand receives, and much of it deservedly so, because she was wrong on intellectual property, she was confused on rights, and she was not an anarchist—but still her overall worldview in general terms I think is correct, and Rothbard basically shares it, which is the four main tenets of her philosophy.

Which is objective reality: reality exists. And epistemology: that we can—we have reason; the faculty of reason and the senses allow us to know reality and to understand it—which both of which I agree with, and which I think Rothbard did too. And then her ethics was like every man has the right to live for himself. That’s rational self-interest or egoism, or she called it selfishness, which I think again just corresponds to individualism or the individual-centered view of social existence. And finally politics: she called it capitalism; we call it libertarianism. Those are all basically right.

And Rothbard built on those, integrated them with Austrian economics, and made it more radical by adopting the anarchism.

Kinsella’s Journey to Anarcho-Capitalism

06:05

So for me, you know, I became interested in libertarian ideas when I read Ayn Rand in high school back in 1979 or so, so a long time ago now. And I was really into the Objectivist philosophy for quite a while. But I kept seeing the Libertarian Party pamphlets on campus at my college, and Ayn Rand had dismissed them as not being pro-liberty. So I initially assumed she was right, but I kept reading their pamphlets and they look very similar to my Objectivist politics and economics. And so I finally started reading Rothbard and Mises and Hazlitt and Bastiat and so many others—David Friedman, the Tannehills.

And basically, you know, by the time I was in law school I had become a full-fledged Rothbardian anarchist.

Now I would say that what opened my eyes to the error of Objectivism, which is the belief—so they believe in individual rights and economic free-market economics, but they still thought that a state was justified and necessary, albeit a minimal state. But, you know, you can sense something’s wrong with that. I mean, there’s an old joke that what’s the difference between a minarchist and an anarchist, and it’s about six months.

Well, that might be true nowadays when there’s lots of YouTube videos and you can move quickly from just internet discussions and things like that. But, you know, back before the internet, things were a little slower moving. It took me six, seven, eight years to become an anarchist. But anyway, I did it because I read books like David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, the Tannehills’ The Market for Liberty, and Rothbard’s For a New Liberty. Those are the ones that really—and maybe The Ethics of Liberty, but mostly For a New Liberty—those are the key works, plus some others like Bruce Benson, The Enterprise of Law, and also even Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which at first when I started reading it I thought it was an argument in favor of anarchy. But you know, at some point in the book you realize he’s dismissing anarchy and trying to argue in favor of a minimal state or an ultraminimal state, which I think is deeply flawed, as Rothbard pointed out.

So Rothbard I think is the most significant thinker because he made the most progress. He’s the most foundational. He integrates the most sound version of economics, which is Misesian Austrian economics, radical politics of Rand and other classical liberals but with an anarchist flair—but not with a left-anarchist flair, although he was willing to criticize the state in some of the way the left does.

Now, ever since Rothbard—he did make a few mistakes because he was making so much progress. Like I think he was a little bit wrong about his—I think Hoppe says Mises and Rothbard had a soft spot for American democracy and the founding documents and the Constitution, which is understandable given what they were comparing the American system to. But Hoppe has had a more radical critique of democracy and the American founding than they did, building on their—standing on their shoulders.

And Rothbard had a little bit which he admitted later, a little bit—he called it wishy-washy defense of natural rights. He thought that Hoppe’s argumentation ethics was a big improvement. And also, you know, he might have been a little bit muddled in his revolutionary contract theory. But it was revolutionary and it was great. But, you know, I’ve tried to patch it up a little and show where I think it went a little bit wrong, but it’s such a great foundation for understanding property rights and what contracts and the law are all about.

So to my mind, he is just the single most important libertarian thinker, basically, of all time. A great man. I got to meet him one time. I wish it was more, but of course I was happy to meet him at one time in 1994, right before he died.

So that’s why, and this year is a perfect year to appreciate his work and to reassess it and to take stock of it and to see where we are as a libertarian movement. I do think that we are further along as a movement. We’re still a young movement. We’re about five, six, seven decades old. A lot of progress has been made since Rothbard’s death. But there’s more progress to be made because we’re a young philosophy. But it’s a fairly mature philosophy now.

And I think we’ve reached a point now—we might not have been there 30 years ago, but about now, about 70 years into libertarianism’s existence, I think we’ve reached a point where it’s mature enough to concisely identify and restate the principles that we believe in, which is what I tried to do late last year in my Universal Principles of Liberty document, which Hoppe and a few others helped me work on, but which I was the chief architect of, and that’s on my website at stephankinsella.com/principles.

So there’s more work to be done extending those principles, but I do think we’ve reached a significant point where the theory has developed enough where we can stand on our own feet and distinguish ourselves clearly from conservatism and socialism and egalitarianism and, you know, all these alternative philosophies. Yeah, so that’s kind of my take on Rothbard and why I love him and love his work.

Jorge Muñoz: Nice. Most people arrived to the Austrian school because of economics, basically, but you arrive—you study law, as you said, and you were a lawyer in patent law, right? That’s because you did the book. And I don’t know if you think that maybe we need more people that understand the law as you develop that kind of ambit in this tradition, right? We had maybe people like Bruno Leoni that was more liberal in that sense. But in Spain, for example, I can only think of that through the law he developed the 100% reserve deposit.

Why Legal Theory Matters for Libertarianism

11:27

Stephan Kinsella: Yes, that’s interesting. So I became a libertarian, you know, when I was just a high school student, and then in college I was an engineer. So it had nothing to do with law. It had to do with my—now, so here’s my take on this.

Libertarians come at it from different directions. Some come at it from a leftist point of view, some come at it from a rightist point of view, and some come at it from agnosticism. That was me. I didn’t have any views at all. I think nowadays more people come at it from a rightist point of view, because I think libertarianism is more compatible with conservatism and traditionalism than it is with egalitarianism.

I also think that people that tend to be egalitarians nowadays tend to be stupider and more dishonest, and there’s less—there’s no hope for them. There’s like they’re less likely to see the wisdom of sound thinking. They wouldn’t be leftists otherwise. So there’s more hope at reaching conservatives because they have at least some understanding of the natural order and hierarchy and free-market economics to some degree.

I also think there’s different things that libertarians do. Some libertarians are activists. Some are just libertarians in their own lives and they study it to be better people because—or because they find it interesting. And some are electoral activists, like Libertarian Party types. Some are activists, intellectual activists. They try to persuade others personally or in their writing, and others work on the theory. So I’m sort of a blend of those. But I think there’s room for everyone and all of them are good.

I’ve also met in my life people that came to libertarianism—I would say most people came to it in the beginning from reading Ayn Rand, from a moral point of view, an ethical point of view. Ever since Ron Paul I think a lot more libertarians exist now, and a lot of them came to it from free-market economics and the banking crisis and understanding the problem with the Fed and things like that.

I’ve met people who have read my intellectual property work and then that made them read libertarian work and become libertarians that way. That’s fairly rare, but I’ve seen that happen.

And nowadays I also have seen lots of people—I think the Bitcoin movement since 2009 or so, it started by people that were somewhat familiar with Austrian economics and maybe libertarianism. But now that it’s spread, it’s attracting people because of its crypto properties and its money properties and its technological aspects and its banking aspects. And that has made people learn more about economics, and that led them to learn more about Ron Paul and libertarianism. So the ways people reach liberty are various.

Now you mentioned—oh, so Soto. So what’s interesting also is that in the older days, like Mises, I think maybe Hayek and Carl Menger, a lot of these earlier Austrians, they actually had law degrees. And what I believe is that libertarianism is in a sense a legal theory. It’s a theory about what laws are just. So it’s hard to say that you could be a libertarian without having some view of laws. But that also doesn’t mean you have to be a lawyer.

And I get impatient as an attorney with lawyers who speak over laymen’s heads and they use jargon to try to confuse them with basically arguments from authority. I try never to do that. I try to—if I use a specialized term which I’m aware that is not common and I feel like I still need to use it, like the word estoppel, I try to stop and give it a definition and explain it to people.

And interestingly some of the most prolific libertarian thinkers, like Robert Hessen in his book on corporations, Ayn Rand, Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe, Soto—none of them are lawyers. And also Williamson Evers, who co-authored the contract theory with Rothbard. He’s a historian. So Rothbard and Evers are like historians and economists, but they came up with a revolutionary theory of law, a contract theory. For that reason, it has some mistakes because they’re not deep legal scholars, but it’s pretty impressive what they did in any case.

So all that said, I do think that if we’re going to make an advance as libertarians on theory, some knowledge of law is helpful, just like Mises and some of the other economic and political scholars had legal education which helped them. I think that understanding today’s legal systems is helpful.

But I have the sense that today’s law schools are not nearly as useful as the law schools of 50 or 100 years ago, because I think the emphasis on jurisprudence and philosophy has diminished, and law school now is all about practical things, getting a job. So I don’t know if law is as amenable to teaching you legal basics.

So I think if you want to be a good libertarian thinker—by the way, I don’t think you need to be a deep legal scholar to be a regular libertarian who understands it good enough to understand the principles and to expound it. But if you want to be a theorist, some knowledge of legal systems and the way law works is extremely helpful. But you don’t need to go to law school to get that. You can get it from reading my book or reading Bruno Leoni or reading lots of other scholarly literature, some by non-lawyers, some by lawyers.

Anyway, I find all this fascinating, and you’ve hit on something right in your question, I think.

Jorge Muñoz: Yeah, thank you. And also Rothbard says that slavery is not possible because the will of a person is, in English I believe, inalienable. You cannot like dispose of that. But also people like Walter Block had the opposite, through the libertarian mindset also. He got to the opposite conclusion. What do you think about this topic?

Debating Walter Block on Voluntary Slavery

18:07

Stephan Kinsella: Walter and I have been arguing about this for two or three decades.

Walter seizes on—he sees the merit in a new idea like my intellectual property theory. He seized upon it right away and he adopted it. He seized upon Hoppe’s argumentation ethics right away and adopted it. He says he adopts Rothbard’s title-transfer theory of contract, which is a different theory of contract. But I think he made some mistakes in generalizing from those things.

So I think he’s got a sort of inconsistent view which I’ve tried to explain to him in our debates and our discussions. Walter’s view is sort of a blend of the conventional view of contracts and the Rothbard view.

The conventional view of contracts is that the law, whether it’s enforced by the state or not—but usually we assume it’s enforced by the state—but the purpose of the law is to do justice, and one way it does that is by identifying and recognizing and enforcing property rights. Okay. So for property disputes, if someone steals something that you own, property law says that the owner owns it, and so that’s how we identify it as a crime, as trespass or theft. Or if there’s a dispute between two people about who owns a given thing like a car or a house, then property law gives principles to answer that question. And usually if it’s a just legal system, the principles would be original appropriation or homesteading and contractual transfer.

But the law has always looked at contracts as sort of a separate domain of law.

So in property law, if I strike your body without your permission, that’s called aggression or assault. If I take your car or your food without your permission, that’s called theft. So that’s—means there’s a trespass or rights violation. Another way to phrase that is to say that these rights that you’re violating, they come with a corresponding obligation to not invade them. In other words, but they’re negative obligations only. It’s an obligation to refrain from doing something.

So libertarianism says that there are rights like property rights in your body or in things, and that means everyone has a negative duty to respect it. Okay? So there’s obligations and duties, but the obligations correspond to property rights.

In contract theory, the view arose that when you make a promise to someone that they rely on, now there’s a binding obligation to have that contract respected and to have the performance done that was promised. And if it’s not done, then it’s a breach of contract. And if there’s a breach of contract, then the rights of the other party have been violated and they can sue you in court for breach of contract.

So that way of looking at it is saying that there’s an obligation for someone to perform an action, which is similar to saying there’s a negative obligation to respect property rights. So once you make that parallel, what you say is that there’s a right to a property and there’s a negative obligation to respect property rights, and there’s an obligation to perform a promised obligation under a contract. And if you don’t perform it, then you say, well, that means there’s a type of theft, and the theft is whatever, you know, whatever service.

So you have this legalistic view of contracts because of that positive-law notion of the way contracts are.

When Rothbard reformulated it, he says contracts are not about binding promises or obligations. Contracts are just the exercise of an owner of a resource, because that’s what it means to own a resource: is to have the right to say yes or no, to allow someone to use it or to have it, or to say no to them using it or having it. That’s what trespass is: someone using your resource when the owner said no, right?

You could also use that power to let someone use it or let them have it completely forever. That’d be a total complete title transfer or a sale or a gift. So that’s what a contract is. It’s just the exercise of ownership by the owner. It’s not a binding promise or an obligation. It’s just a transfer of title.

Once you understand that, all this talk about obligations goes away, which is what accompanies the positive law’s conception of contracts.

So what Walter does is he sees the merit in the libertarian view of property rights, which corresponds to negative obligations to refrain from committing trespass, and he sees the merit in Rothbard’s reformulation of contracts. But he still talks in the language of contracts being binding obligations, because what Walter says is if you have an obligation because you made a contract to perform something and you don’t do it, then that’s some kind of breach of contract because it’s like a type of—he calls it implicit theft of the thing that was transferred back in the beginning of the contract.

So I think that’s all confused and wrong.

I think that if you understand property rights based upon the kind of pioneering work—if you blend together the insights of Mises about the nature of action, the natural-rights views of Rothbard, and then Hoppe’s more clear explanation of the nature of property rights as being a response to scarcity, and then recognizing that the origin of property rights is, number one, the right to your body, which is because you control it, not because you homesteaded it, but for other things in the world you have a property right to those things because they were unowned, and an actor having a body that he already owns homesteads those things.

So if you understand all that, then you understand that—

Tell me where I was. I just had a brain fart.

Jorge Muñoz: Yeah, it was about the slavery, about the argument of Walter Block.

Stephan Kinsella: Right, right, right, right. So if you breach a contract, you’re not committing a type of theft. It’s just a question of what did the contract transfer.

So Walter, because he fails to distinguish the difference in how we have rights in our bodies, the basis of rights in our bodies and the basis of rights in acquired things, he treats them the same. Whereas Hoppe and I would say the reason I own my body is because I have the best link to it, the best claim to it. The reason I have the best claim to it is because I have a unique connection to it, meaning I can directly control it.

That’s why you started out with this concept of the will being inalienable, and Rothbard hinted at that too. So Rothbard saw that the will’s inalienable, but what he really means is that the basis of your property right in your body is your direct control of it. And just because you make a promise to someone to be their slave doesn’t mean that that’s still not the case. Like even if I promise to be so enslaved, I still have direct control of my body because I have the will to use it, which means I still have the best connection to it. So I’m still the owner, because ownership is the right to own a resource based upon the best claim to it, and the best claim is the direct right to control it.

That’s not the case for things that we acquire. For things that we acquired, they were unowned. They came to be owned because we acted to bring that into our possession and we told the world that we now intend to own it. We make a claim on it. As long as that’s the case, the original homesteader is the owner. But you can abandon the thing or give it away or let go of it because it came to you and you can undo it.

So the nature of contract is that you can sell things that you acquired because you acquired them and you can unacquire them. But that’s not the case with your body because you didn’t acquire your body. You are your body. So there’s a difference in how you treat the human body and other things.

So if you get rid of this illusion that it’s about obligations, that contracts are binding obligations, but instead it’s just the alienation of the ownership claim to a thing you own, you’ll see that you can give up that claim for acquired things, but you can’t give it up for your body—with one exception. You can give it up if you commit the act of aggression.

So if I commit an act of aggression, the victim has the right to use force to try to stop me or to retaliate against me, which means that I’ve given up some of my rights. It is possible to alienate rights in your body, but only by committing an act of aggression. That’s the essence of the libertarian non-aggression principle, which says that force against someone’s body is permissible if they don’t consent—only if they’re using force against you without your consent. So there’s a symmetry there. That’s what libertarianism is all about.

Walter forgets that because he thinks that there’s a second exception to that rule, which is that you can use force against someone’s body if they say no, if they don’t consent, if they consented in a previous time. So what that means is he simply arbitrarily decrees that the previous consent is more relevant than the current consent, which means that he’s just assuming you can’t change your mind, but he uses that assumption to justify the fact that you can’t change your mind. So it’s circular reasoning. That’s ultimately the problem with Walter’s argument for voluntary slavery, I believe.

Jorge Muñoz: Mhm. So, and related to this I have one question, because if you cannot be a slave according to this libertarian ethics, for example related to the debts, right, you can be like a debt slave kind of. Or I don’t know if you think that’s really a different thing.

Stephan Kinsella: Do you mean debtor’s prison?

Jorge Muñoz: Like no, like I mean if you are like a slave to debt because it’s like I say, okay, I will give you $1 million, then we sign a contract and I like have to work for you for the rest of my life. Will that be a kind of a slavery that is acceptable, or that won’t, for example?

Debt Contracts and Future Title Transfers

28:32

Stephan Kinsella: Well, I think that libertarian theory has not developed enough to have a clear answer to exactly how we would handle cases of extremely oppressive contracts, because we know the basic principles, but to see what would develop we would need to let it develop in an actual free society. There’s a limit to armchair theorizing.

Now my personal view is that maybe you could make an argument at some point that some title transfers are not enforceable. I think the burden of proof would be on someone making that case. But basically most of the problem you’re pointing to goes away if you understand that contracts are not binding obligations. So there’s no such thing as an obligation that comes from a contract. So you can’t be a debt slave or a slave as you say, because no one can force you to do anything.

The only question is—in other words, the Rothbard theory of contract is that all contracts are exchanges of titles to resources that are owned by the people. This can include present resources where you have present title to it. Like you and I can make a present contemporaneous exchange of a coin for a cow. You know, I give you my coin, you give me your cow. There’s a present transfer or exchange of titles.

But quite often a contract involves at least one future title transfer. So I loan you some money now in exchange for you paying me future money, like the same amount with interest, something like that. That’s a loan. In that contract, there’s two transfers. One is a present transfer of the loaned money, and the second one is a future title transfer of the same amount plus interest. But that second one is necessarily uncertain because the future is uncertain.

So in the civil law we call that a sale of a hope, and which is perfectly fine. It’s like gambling. People are entitled to gamble. They’re entitled to receive in exchange for a present title transfer a future title transfer.

Now in most cases I would say that the future title transfer operates automatically by the terms of the original agreement. So if I tell you in one year I transfer to you $1,000 plus interest, so let’s say $1,100, then if I own $1,100 of property in that future time, then all by operation of the contract, that amount of money that is in my possession is now owned by the creditor, and they can ask for it and I have to turn it over to them because they own it. I’m just merely possessing it.

But if I’m bankrupt and I don’t own it, there’s nothing to transfer. That’s why I think Walter is wrong in saying it’s implicit theft. There’s nothing to steal. The thing has to exist to be stolen.

But we can imagine that these contracts would have secondary and third default clauses which say that if I don’t have any money on the due date, then if I acquire the money in the future then that money also becomes owned by the creditor. So then the question is if I alienate everything I own in the future, like 100% of it, are all those agreements enforceable even if they make me starve to death? And I would tend to say yes.

But we can’t predict if maybe there would be like a safety-valve approach. Maybe the legal system in such a community would just—the people, your community members, they would refuse to sit on the jury and enforce that because it’s just too harsh. I don’t know. It’s hard to predict.

What I think would probably happen is that that would be a very rare type of contract, because if it was enforced, it would be a very risky thing to do. But if you did it, then you still would not starve to death because people could just—there could be a charity that gave you money or gave you food. So like even if I made an agreement that everything I own going forward forever is yours, then someone could give me food and I could eat it, right? They could give me a place to live and I could live in it. So there would be charities or ways to get around it. Or maybe there would be a type of a free-market analog to bankruptcy.

I don’t think we know yet, but I think the short answer is that in general a future title transfer can be expected to be enforceable, but we can imagine extreme situations where the legal system might break down if it’s too harsh. But I don’t think we know right now what would happen.

Jorge Muñoz: Mhm.

Stephan Kinsella: These kind—oh, by the way, one other thing. You could imagine there also could be insurance. So there might be types of insurance that—like I might have a child and I might buy this kid insurance, which is just like some parents put, if they leave their children money now, they leave it in a trust where the creditors cannot reach it if the kid is too irresponsible. You could have something like that, or you could have life insurance that makes sure that you’re always going to have enough money and enough resources to live on even if you’re foolish and you make gambles or bets that are just unwise.

So I think all these mechanisms in society would mean that a legal system that enforces contracts would work, and it would be rare that someone would alienate everything they own for the future.

Jorge Muñoz: Mhm. This kind of brings us to the debate that I thought you had with Kevin Carson about limited liability. I think I wrote something about it in your blog. Do you think that, for example, limited liability is a good thing that in the libertarian world we will have? Because, for example, I was in the Austrian conference of Madrid that organized, and I thought it was Newman that presented some paper about the problems of limited liability and how that maybe won’t be possible in a free society. But also there’s arguments that if you say that it is limited between you and me, then that’s clear it is. But it’s kind of like the argument with the banks, right, that will the banks work with fractional reserve in a free society if you have an agreement? Well I don’t know. Can you develop your point of view?

Corporations & Limited Liability in a Free Society

35:21

Stephan Kinsella: Right. So I think the corporate issue is another example of why having some basic knowledge of the law is useful, because this is a little bit tricky to sort all this out, just like the fractional-reserve banking issue is tricky, which is why the work of Robert Hessen, who is not a lawyer, but still he wrote a great book called In Defense of the Corporation in the ’70s or the ’80s, I can’t remember, and Huerta de Soto—but he has a great couple chapters on the Roman-law treatment of commodatum and mutuum, or irregular deposits and regular deposits. Oh well, well then that explains it.

So on the corporation issue, I think really the key book to read on this—and by the way, I don’t remember my disagreement with Kevin Carson. I remember I disagree with Carson and Roger Bissell on abandonment, mutualism, and abandonment. And also I disagreed with Sean Gabb, who’s a friend of mine, and he’s an English anarchist libertarian, but he also has this opposition to corporations, but again he’s also not a lawyer. Frank van Dun I’ve also disagreed with, but he again, he’s a law professor, but he doesn’t have a lot of practical sort of understanding of the legal system, I think, in the fields we’ve been discussing.

But Hessen points out that—so there’s some assumptions made by everyone because they don’t quite understand corporations. So the short answer is, there should be—in an anarchist society there would be no such thing as corporations exactly in today’s world.

We have corporations which the state allows you to create. A corporation which is a fictional person. It’s called a fictional person or a fictitious person under the law, which means it has personality, which is useful because that means that all the assets the corporation owns, which are really ultimately owned by the shareholders, all the assets are grouped together under sort of one basket. And so anyone who wants to deal with the corporation, like to sue the corporation or to have a contract with the corporation, can just have a simple way to do it.

So the corporation allows them to operate under a name. It allows them to have perpetual duration. It’s unlike a person who dies at a certain point. And it also has what’s called limited liability. And everyone assumes that these three features are privileges granted by the corporation, by the state, and therefore if you’re a libertarian you should be opposed to government-granted privileges, which I agree with. I just don’t think those are privileges, because every one of those features would be a natural result of how people would organize their affairs in collective productive action in the form of a firm or company. Call it a corporation, call it a partnership, call it whatever you want in a free society.

Because there’s nothing keeping multiple people from having a pooling arrangement where they collectively pool their assets and they agree to control them by some kind of agreement between them. They can agree to sell their shares to someone else so it can live over time. They agree to operate under a certain name. All those things you can do without the permission of the state.

And then the final one remaining is whether the shareholders or the owners or the people that are called shareholders of this corporation, as opposed to the directors and as opposed to the employees or the managers or the officers of the corporation—these are all different—and as opposed to the customers and the suppliers of the corporation. These are all different people that interact with this pool of assets.

Like for example, if you have FedEx or McDonald’s, you have the shareholders which are called owners. You have creditors who have loaned the company money. You have vendors which supply it with goods. You have customers who buy things from it. You have employees who work there and take a salary and perform actions. You have officers and directors who are appointed by the board who are appointed by the shareholders, and then the officers and directors hire the people. So it’s a complex arrangement, and there’s nothing wrong with complexity.

But the question is if there’s an obligation or a debt of the corporation caused by a contract or caused by a tort of one of the employees, who should be responsible for that?

And the libertarian answer is that in general—well, for contracts it just depends on the term of the contract. In today’s world, if I have an entity in the way or part of this contract, then the person loaning money to that entity can ask for recourse to the assets defined by the owned assets of the corporation, or they can ask for someone to guarantee it. Just like if a student asks for a student loan, the lender might ask the parents to co-sign for it. Either they do or they don’t. And whether they do or they don’t, that determines whose assets they can pursue. So the contractual debt issue could be handled by contracts.

But what about if an employee of the firm, like an agent, like a truck driver for McDonald’s, runs over someone because he’s negligent, and the truck driver is now responsible to the victim that he ran over? The question is, can that victim also sue other people that are vicariously or secondarily responsible for the actions of that guy?

And the law tends to carve out some exceptions for the rule that only the person who committed the action is responsible. So if someone else directed the action, like maybe if his boss told him to do this, maybe the boss is responsible. If the directors of the corporation were negligent in the policies, maybe they’re liable, which is why these corporations tend to have what’s called D&O, directors and officers liability insurance, because they’re working for the corporation, but they don’t want to be that liable. So they have insurance.

So the only question is, what about the shareholders? Should they be liable for torts of employees of the firm in which they hold shares? And everyone assumes that because the law calls them owners that they should be responsible, because they assume that ownership comes with responsibility. But that’s not true. Ownership is a right, not an obligation. Ownership is just a right to tell someone not to use your property. It’s not an obligation to be responsible for it. That requires another assumption of strict liability, which I think has also not been developed in the law very well.

For example, if I own a knife or a gun and someone steals it from me, I should not be liable for crimes that they commit using the gun even though I still own it. So ownership doesn’t imply responsibility. Responsibility comes from actions. And if I have someone’s gun and I shoot someone who’s an innocent victim, I’m responsible for that action, whether I own the gun or not. So action or responsibility goes to actions. It has nothing to do with ownership. It has to do with possession but not ownership. So this is another distinction.

So the point is just because the law labels the shareholders as owners doesn’t mean that they’re really owners, because they don’t really have the right to use the assets of the corporation. For example, if I own Google stock, I’m not entitled to use the Google jet for my birthday party, you know. It’s because the shareholders’ agreement specifies who can use the jet, and it’s basically the president, and he can direct the use of it. So in a sense, the president who’s the employee is kind of like been delegated the right to use it, which is like an ownership right anyway. It’s distributed ownership.

And also Rothbard and Hessen and Roger Pilon point out that the reason we assume that the corporation is responsible for torts of employees is because of this old doctrine under slavery times called respondeat superior, which is a Latin term meaning you’re responsible if you’re the controller of a slave or a servant because you direct their activities.

There may be something to this in the sense of the direct boss and the managers and maybe even the directors of a corporation. They’re the ones who control the assets and they set the policy and they set the employees out on errands and they tell them what to do. So if they give them something to do in a negligent way and it causes harm to someone, maybe you can make a case that the corporate assets and the managers should be liable along with the employee who committed the tort.

But there’s no way you could say that the shareholders are responsible because they didn’t make any decisions. They just own shares in the corporation. So in a free society, shareholders would not be responsible anyway because they didn’t perform the action and they’re not secondarily liable. So when the state has a limited-liability statute now that relieves the shareholders from liability, it’s not a privilege because they shouldn’t be liable in the first place. So that’s the basic problem with it.

And in fact, it’s worse than that. Because the state pretends to be granting privileges to these corporations by letting them form and use the name and have perpetual duration and have limited liability. All three are things or features they could arrange contractually on a free market without the state’s assistance. But the state steps in and grants it and acts like it’s a munificent provider of these privileges. Then it says, well, now because we’re granting you all these privileges, we can treat you like an entity or a person for tax purposes and we can tax you directly on your profits, which means you’re double-taxing the shareholders or the owners twice, because their corporation gets taxed for income tax and they get taxed when they get a dividend from this corporation or when they sell it, a capital-gains tax.

So it leads to double taxation and it also leads to excessive regulation of the corporations because the state says, well, because we’re giving you this corporate charter, it’s a privilege, you don’t have a right to it, we can impose conditions on this. So we can say, you know, you need to be a good corporate citizen. You need to pay income tax. You need to follow our regulations. So it really turns into an excuse to regulate and to control and to tax people organizing in the form of corporations.

You know, just like in the US the federal government taxes the people using the income-tax power and then grants it back to the states in the form of grants to say build highways, but then it says but we’re only going to give you this money if you agree to change your law on the drinking age or have a speed limit of no more than 70 miles an hour on your roads, otherwise we’re going to withhold this money. So it’s a way to control. If you pretend you’re giving someone a grant that they don’t have a right to, you can use that to control their behavior, which is what the government does by pretending to grant privileges in the form of corporate incorporation statutes.

Jorge Muñoz: Thanks. It’s a really interesting topic that I think there’s not a lot written about that. I would love to read more about this. I also wanted to ask you about the topic that is the most—one of the most controversial actually maybe in the libertarian world, and that’s Milei, and also the Israel Middle East in general. So what do you think about Milei? Is that a victory for the libertarian world, or it’s maybe a kind of poison present?

Evaluating Javier Milei’s Presidency

46:41

Stephan Kinsella: I mean I am sort of in the middle on this. I’m far more skeptical of Milei than most of his cheerleaders and fanboys. But then I’m skeptical of activism which is not realistic and is delusional too.

I tend to agree with the criticisms of Milei that I’ve heard from people like Hoppe and Oscar Grau and these guys, although I’m not deeply into it. I think as Hoppe originally said when Milei entered the scene, he’s probably far better than, you know, the alternative candidate, but let’s not delude ourselves about what’s going to happen.

And also I agree that a big problem with Milei is that he caters to the US and to Israel, which are not good. Also I think he made promises he either lied about or is unable to keep, or didn’t try to keep when he had the chance to. I don’t blame him for not doing things he doesn’t have the power to do, and he’s not a dictator.

I suspect and I’ve seen some reports that I think is the problem—the situation is declining. Some of it his fault, some of it not his fault. So I think there’s been exaggeration. I think that he probably got elected out of desperation because of just the total disaster of Argentina. And it’s probably better that he’s pro, you know, pro-Rothbard and pro-Austrian economics, or at least his rhetoric is. So it kind of was some kind of decent publicity for libertarianism.

But if it goes down in failure, it’s going to be used by people to say, well, look, libertarianism, you tried it with an anarchist libertarian Austrian in Argentina. It didn’t work, so your plans failed. So I’m afraid that’s probably going to be what’s going to happen in the end.

So I guess I don’t agree with the optimistic exuberance in favor of Milei. But that’s because, you know, we live in a statist world and there’s only so much he can do. And I don’t—again I think he had promises he could have tried to keep about shutting down the central bank there and things like that, but I’m not that deeply into it. But I’m definitely not a Milei cheerleader and I’m not a big Milei fan.

Jorge Muñoz: Thank you. And we can get into the book, Against Intellectual Property. Well, that you explain why it isn’t morally valid, the legal property that is not even property. And you have also a lot of conferences about this topic. And the most funny thing is this guy called Galambos, right? That you met one time, one Galambosian also.

The Case Against Intellectual Property

50:01

Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, I’ve encountered a few of those.

I’d say the mainstream view today is that intellectual property is a type of property, right? Which is not true. But that’s the mainstream view: that we needed to fix market failures of underproduction of intellectual goods like inventions and artistic works, which is also not true, and it’s not the function of the state or law anyway. It’s not the function of law to optimize the production of a certain type of good or service or activity in society.

But that’s the prevailing view. The prevailing view is also that the system is obviously flawed. It’s kind of broken. It needs reform. But people are not for abolition because they don’t have a principled view of things and they’ve been confused. They’ve been deceived by the rhetoric calling it intellectual property.

Patent and copyright are the two main destructive forms of intellectual property and originally were not called property rights. They were called monopoly privileges granted by the state for certain purposes, mainly to prevent the publication of some books that the church and the state didn’t want—you know, thought control—or to protect court cronies and favorites from competition so they could charge higher prices and make more money and then they would be loyal to the state and help them collect taxes or send some of the money back to the king or whatever. That’s the origin of these things.

But then when they were put into statutory law like in the US in the beginning of the US, they started being criticized in the 1800s by free-market economists who saw them as monopoly privileges which distorted the market and were incompatible with free-market economics and free trade and all that. And so in response, the industries that were reliant by then on patent and copyright, like the publishing industry and certain technological industries, they started defending intellectual property—well they started defending patent and copyright by calling them intellectual property rights. So they could use the word property rights, which had a good connotation, as a way to propagandize people, and it basically succeeded.

So that’s why everyone now basically believes it’s a legitimate type of capitalism but it’s gone too far, etc.

Now among the more serious advocates of intellectual property there are some crazy ones, and the craziest ones would be Galambos and even Rand and Lysander Spooner, believe it or not, who was really good on some things but he was horrible on this issue, all because they all get confused about John Locke’s labor theory of property and the related labor theory of value of Adam Smith and Karl Marx and Marxism, which is this fallacious view that labor is a type of substance or thing that we produce by acting or by laboring, and that’s like an ownable quantity, and then so it’s corrupted all of economics and political philosophy.

But yeah, Galambos thought that—and Rand says something similar. They both think that the most important type of property right is what Galambos called primary property, which is your ideas. Everything else is secondary or flows from that. Ayn Rand said that patents are the heart and core of property rights. This is because they rightly understood that intellectual activity is essential and we need intellectual freedom and creativity and rationality to know how to move around in the world and know what to do. But that doesn’t mean that ideas are ownable things that are property rights. That’s the mistake they made.

They got confused by the Lockean theory of what I call creationism, because it’s the idea that if you create something that’s valuable, you must have a property right in it, which is just not—they’re mixing together economics and, you know, material success and successful action with ownership of resources, which is a whole separate thing.

I mean the whole purpose of property rights is to assign owners to things that there could be conflict over, which is scarce means of action, so people can live their lives cooperatively instead of with conflict, with violent conflict with each other. It’s not that complicated. But these property rights solve a practical problem and they’re directed at the type of thing over which there could be a problem, but it has nothing to do with ideas which guide our action anyway.

Yeah. So Galambos believed in perpetual copyrights that would last forever, or primary property, and it was so crazy it was inalienable, like you couldn’t even sell that right. So that’s why luckily Galambos’s ideas are not that well known, because his followers believe in his theories but they believe that he’s dead now so they don’t have the right to spread his ideas because it’s inalienable. So luckily we don’t hear too much from the Galambosians. It’s sort of a self-defeating philosophy that his followers can’t tell people what it means.

This is made fun of in the hilarious book by Jerome Tuccille called It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand had a similar view, although she admitted that patents should and copyright should expire at some arbitrary time instead of lasting forever. But some Randians take it further. They go, no, no, no, Galambos was right. They should last forever.

Neil Schulman had a similar view. He called it logorights, which is also batshit crazy. And he thought that patent should last—or copyright should last forever and patent should last according to the likelihood of them being rediscovered by someone by some kind of probabilistic formula that I guess a supercomputer could figure out. It’s just this is all pie-in-the-sky crazy libertarian dorm-room in the end.

So yeah, Galambos is the craziest. Lysander Spooner is the craziest—Rand and Schulman. Those four people have insane views on intellectual property. And I guess if you had to pick among them, Galambos is the nuttiest.

Jorge Muñoz: So what do you think are the areas in the libertarian study world that really need more development? I don’t know if they’re maybe the ones you study, or you think other ones have the biggest—

Unresolved Issues in Libertarian Theory (Banking & Bitcoin)

56:37

Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, there’s several. I think I’ve got a blog post on my site. It’s called “Areas That Need Development from Libertarian Thinkers.” And some of them are areas I think I could work on if I have time to get to them, and I hope others will, and some of them are things that I think are maybe even beyond my capabilities some other specialist or some other genius or whatever has to do.

So the ones on there—well, one would be something I’ve kind of hinted at today. It would be having an entire restatement or perspective on the different realms of knowledge: ethical realms of knowledge, normative realms of knowledge, economic realms of knowledge, and showing how there’s been confusion and conflation between them.

So for example, quite in the Bitcoin debate people will say something like Bitcoin is the perfect form of ownership, and because you control your keys you own your coins, whatever. They’re conflating the two different concepts of ownership and possession, because they’re totally different concepts. One is an economic and descriptive concept, possession. It means just what an actor does in terms of pure praxeology. He’s got nothing to do with norms, nothing to do with other people. Even Crusoe alone on his island has to act and employ resources, which means use things to get things done and possess things.

When there’s other people in society, we want to avoid conflict. And we do that by agreeing to and establishing a socially respected set of norms, which we can call laws or other norms which give normative support to possessions. So possession leads to ownership but they’re not the same thing. One’s normative and one is possessive. One’s descriptive.

So for example this is why people get confused about intellectual property and Bitcoin.

In economics we talk about trade when people exchange things. That’s a descriptive activity. It’s only legal and normative when the law comes in and gives ownership to these things too. So there could be two types of exchange. It depends on how you use the words. Like exchange or trade or sale have different connotations whether we’re talking economically and descriptively or whether we’re talking legally, and they’re different things.

So for example, if I sell you a massage, okay, in economic terms, describing that transaction as a sale is just a way of describing the ends and the purposes and the goals and the means employed by the two actors. You’re explaining why they did what they did. It’s purely descriptive. The reason I performed an action of giving you a massage is to induce you to pay me money. The reason you transferred possession and title to your coin to me was to induce me to perform an action. So that’s an exchange in economic terms.

But in legal terms it’s just—it’s not an exchange. It’s a one-way transfer of title to the money. It’s not a transfer of title to the massage because that’s not a type of thing that can be owned. It’s just an action that could be performed.

So if you understand—and I call that in a post which I linked to in that other post called “Areas That Need Development,” I linked to a post called “Disentangling Legal and Economic Concepts.” We need to disentangle them. And I think when we do this, it’ll give you a better picture of how to analyze issues like fractional-reserve banking.

Like what’s the difference between a gold coin which is money, a descriptive economic concept, and a warehouse receipt which is a type of legally recognized claim to the ownership of that coin, and an IOU which is what a bank gives you if you loan it money, right? Which is what Soto clarifies in his book. All these things are different. A loan or a promissory note or an IOU is a legal instrument and it’s different than a warehouse receipt which is also a legal instrument. One’s an ownership claim. One is a future title-transfer claim to a debt, basically.

So if you then bring those into economics and you say okay, in our economic analysis we’re going to assume—like in economics, as Hoppe and Mises point out, you could just assume that there’s just one person acting on an island and the categories of action still apply. Praxeology still applies because Crusoe alone on his island employs scarce means to achieve ends. That’s action.

If there’s other people around he might engage in cooperative activity or in conflict with them and he might engage in trade with them. If money arises, there might be money too. So what we do is we make assumptions to make the economic analysis richer. But then your conclusion is only correct insofar as your assumptions apply.

So you can assume there’s acting people, they have purposes. You can assume that they interact with each other. You can assume that they value cooperation more than violent conflict. You could assume that they engage in trade because of the division of labor and the specialization of labor. And then you can assume that money emerges too. And you can analyze the effects of money. Then you can assume that there’s laws that give property rights in all these things. Then you can assume that the laws are unjust laws. Some of them are unjust laws. That’s what Mises and Rothbard talk about in their treatises about the hampered market economy. And then you can analyze the effects of violent intervention in the market, right, with regulation and with taxation and with things like that. And then your economic analysis becomes richer and richer but it’s dependent upon making assumptions.

Another guy that goes into this is Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, who is chronologically in between Carl Menger and then Mises. And he analyzes the status of legal concepts and how they can be used in economic analysis.

Anyway, the point is if you have a clear understanding of these things, then you could analyze fractional-reserve banking for example, or Bitcoin ownership, by reducing all these things to the possessed nature of the thing economically and the different roles of knowledge and information in action, to the role of possessed scarce means in action, and then the role of normative ownership of these things in society, right? And then different types of normative ownership of things like a loan or promissory note, which is what a fractional-reserve bank gives you when you so-called deposit money with it and they give you an IOU.

And then the fractional-reserve bankers turn around and say something like, well if you loan money to a fractional-reserve bank—well they don’t say loan. They’re not clear what they mean. You give your money to them and you’re the depositor. So they hold it. So you have your money in the bank, but then the bank loans it to someone else because the bank now owns it. So now there’s kind of two titles for the same loan. That’s how the money supply expands, right, because of the multiplier effect of the inverse ratio of the deposit, you know, the reserve requirement. Like if the bank has to keep 10% of the loan funds on hand then that results in, you know, 10-to-1 inflation, something like that.

Anyway, the way to analyze all this is to have a clear distinction in your mind between the economic and descriptive possession categories and the legal categories of ownership, which would be a warehouse receipt, which would be the case of irregular deposit that Soto describes, or a promissory note which is what a bank does when it performs credit intermediation.

If you disentangle all these things, you’ll see that the current system and even the free-market, the free-banking fractional-reserve system proposed by the free bankers is somewhat confused and possibly corrupt, because unless you distinguish these things, then you’re not clear who owns the thing.

So that’s why one of my articles I proposed that a bank can do whatever it wants as long as there’s informed consent given to the customer. If the customer wants to loan money to the bank to get interest, to allow the bank to loan the money out to its customer to perform credit intermediation, that’s fine. But then the IOU he gets is not title. It’s just a future title transfer. It’s a promise of a future title transfer. But that’s uncertain because the future’s uncertain, and it cannot be insured against because, as Mises points out, there’s a difference between class and case probability and you cannot insure against business risk and business loss. So it’s impossible to have insurance against it unless the government does it, which is illegitimate.

And so that means that having an IOU from a bank is like just having a risky bet. And that’s fine. It might pay off. It might work out. You might get interest, but the bank might go bankrupt and there might be a run on the bank, which means that it’s impossible categorically for an IOU to serve as a money substitute because it’s always going to be worth less or have a different value than the underlying asset of the gold which is promised, because it’s future gold. It’s not present gold.

That’s totally categorically different from a title to or a warehouse receipt to an irregular deposit where the gold is put in the bank and the customers collectively own that gold. The bank doesn’t own it. It’s just a trustee of it.

Once you understand all this, then you see that there are different functions in the banking. So there should be credit intermediation on the one hand, which cannot result in money substitutes. So that’s where the free bankers are wrong. Or you have deposits, regular deposits on the other hand, which also don’t lead to fractional-reserve banking. They don’t expand the money supply. It just could lead to money substitutes for me.

And then you can apply that type of analysis to the way we would deal with a Bitcoin money supply, which has some more further differences to gold because the Bitcoin is not itself ownable because it’s information stored in a distributed spreadsheet or ledger. So that’s actually not owned either. But that’s got some disadvantages and some advantages over a tangible material commodity like gold that serves as money. The digital commodity is a different type of asset, but it still theoretically could function as money and it has some advantages and some disadvantages over a gold standard. And I think overall it has enough advantages that it will become—some kind of digital medium will become the money of the future, if humanity doesn’t destroy itself first.

Jorge Muñoz: Great. I think we are out of time. So I don’t know if you want to recommend to finish this maybe some books that have changed your view or some recent lectures that you had.

Final Thoughts & Recommendations

1:07:44

Stephan Kinsella: Well, you know, my book, my chapter on Rothbard in the Rothbard book here explains what I think are some of the most important insights. Yeah, I actually have a blog post somewhere—so I have a blog post, “Areas That Need Development from Libertarian Thinkers,” but I also have a blog post—

Jorge Muñoz: This in the description.

Stephan Kinsella: Yeah. And I have another one. It says “Where I’ve Changed My Mind,” and I have listed where I changed my mind. I changed my mind a little bit on Bruno Leoni when he over-relied upon Hayek. And before I fully understood the dehomogenization debate between Mises and Hayek. So I think Leoni also relied a little bit too much on the analogy that Hayek made, or that Leoni made, between legislation, which Leoni is critical of, and Hayek’s kind of quasi-Misesian criticism of central planning of the economy. I think that that analogy breaks down because Hayek was a little bit wrongheaded in the way he described the central problem with central planning of the economy. I think Mises was more right about that. So that’s one thing I’ve changed my mind on.

I’ve also changed my mind a little bit on immigration and also on anarchy when I was—and also on intellectual property. So when I started out I was pro-IP and pro-state as a Randian. But then when I put my mind to it, I changed my mind.

And as you say, I’m most well known in some quarters for my intellectual property views. But I only turned my attention to that because it’s a difficult field to make progress in unless you have both a solid foundation of understanding of Austrian economics and radical Rothbardian-Hoppean political philosophy and anti-statism and legal theory and intellectual property law. And there’s almost no one in the world who has a good handle on all four or five of those areas other than me. And so that’s why I felt like I had to do it. I did it because it needed to be done to make progress.

But again, my book—that’s only one part of my book. My book contains other aspects of libertarian thought that I had been working on before IP, that I worked on after IP. But working on intellectual property improved my ability to understand the depths of true libertarian principles. I think you really have to get a good handle on intellectual property to have a solid understanding of the nature of individual rights. But it’s only one part of it. But you have to get that straight first otherwise you won’t make progress.

I mean, David Friedman is great, but he’s supposed to be an anarchist, but he’s still not sure about intellectual property. The same is true of Michael Huemer, and the same is true of Jan Lester, who are all kind of anarchist libertarians, but they just—and even Jan Narveson. All of them are anarchist libertarians, but they just don’t know. They run out of steam when it comes to IP. And so I think that that limits their ability to have a coherent comprehensive political philosophy.

So anyway, I would say I’ve been blogging a lot and I control the website for the Property and Freedom Society. So a lot of my work and that of Hoppe and other Rothbardian Austrians is on the propertyandfreedom.org website. So I would look there, and all my work is at stephankinsella.com, and everything I have pretty much is free and online on my website.

Jorge Muñoz: Great. All the content will be linked in the description. So thanks so much, Kinsella, for being here today with us. It has been a great pleasure. It has been a great episode of Ancast, and I hope to see you again in next episodes.

Stephan Kinsella: Thanks, Jorge.