Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 501.
This is my discussion with Mark Maresca, of The White Pillbox, about my recent travels. (Previous episode: Kinsella as “White Pill”: Maresca, “From the White-PillBox: Part 29. Achilles Heel edition 3”; KOL473 | The Universal Principles of Liberty, with Mark Maresca of The White Pillbox.)
Grok shownotes from transcript:
Kinsella reported on three recent trips: the Free Cities Conference in Próspera, the Property and Freedom Society’s 20th meeting in Bodrum, and the Nordic Bitcoin Conference in Helsinki. He liked the people at Próspera and may return, though he doubts the project will become a tech metropolis. A debate on intellectual property, moderated by Alex Voss, stayed polite but thin. He still sees most seasteading and startup-country schemes as long shots, including Liberland and unflagged floating nations, and is more interested in places like Brunei or a UAE common-law zone. The Free State Project will not free New Hampshire, and he would not move there just to live among libertarians.
What struck him is how large and segmented the liberty world has become: Austrians, the Libertarian Party, the Tom Woods crowd, Hoppe’s PFS, free cities, and Bitcoin, overlapping and feeding one another. His “way-station libertarians” are activists who arrive through a frustration, often Ron Paul, and leave. Since 2008 the movement is bigger, more anarchist, and less well read, but anarchism is now the default, and younger grounded libertarians sound more optimistic than his generation did. A working enclave would undercut the claim that without the state people descend into cannibalism. He also thinks drug legalization overpromised.
Maresca argued that the state is personnel-limited and more fragile than it looks, using a dance-floor metaphor for how fast disobedience could spread. Kinsella agreed: the Soviet collapse, COVID, BlackBerry, Kodak, and bond markets show that what looks inevitable can fail quickly. He doubts another lockdown would be tolerated, and dislikes governors taking credit for opposing lockdowns they first imposed. On Hoppe, the future is uncertain but not radically so. Praxeology constrains forecasts without guaranteeing them. Both treated rising cynicism about doctors, cops, and Congress as realism, and statism as a scam best met with mockery.
Bitcoin, he said, cannot go to zero and cannot sit still, so “up” is the logical bet, though still a long shot he would not stake everything on. Cash still works for spending, so Lightning and ease of use can wait. Fungibility is holding. Anonymity is the gap. Helsinki was Bitcoin-maxi and lighter on scammers than altcoin events. At PFS, Guido Hülsmann was the lone gold bug. Finland’s economics minister, Sakari Puisto, met Kinsella, Adam Back, Martti Malmi, and others for two hours on tax, innovation, IP, mining, and AI. A normie heard “Hoppe” as ABBA.
PFS remains the highlight: a salon plus Club Med, Hans’s wife’s family’s hotel, late starts, long lunches, and a beach day at the Kempinski. People from constrained countries can speak freely. Coming releases include the Knut Svanholm interview, the Free Cities speech, the Helsinki panel with Rahim Taghizadegan, and a PFS talk on Adolf Reinach. Next he wants to write Copy This Book, a full IP treatment. Maresca credited that work with pulling him off the Galambos view of intellectual property. Kinsella closed by showing the PFS shirt: Schwarzenegger was the Governator; he is the Kinsellanator.
My shirt (from the PFS Merch Store):
Mark’s Shownotes:
No, it’s not a new WWF hero. It’s Stephan Kinsella (the Kinsellanator) returning to the White Pillbox, to smash a folding chair over the head of statism.
Together we bob and weave across the landscape of libertarianism and the transition to a free society. And we see tangible building blocks forming, as Stephan discusses the three important conferences he recently attended: The Free Cities Conference held in Prospera Honduras, the Property and Freedom Society annual conference in Bodrum, Turkey, and The 2026 Bitcoin Conference held in Helsinki Finland.
Stephan Kinsella is an intellectual property attorney and a major contributor to libertarian thought and scholarship. His work is consolidated at his main website: https://stephankinsella.com/ Just a handful of his publications include: Against Intellectual Property: https://c4sif.org/aip/ Legal Foundations of a Free Society: https://stephankinsella.com/lffs/ The Universal Principles of Liberty: https://stephankinsella.com/principles/ Check out Stephan’s podcast Kinsella On Liberty: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast… Links to the organizations of the events he attended: The Free Cities Foundation: https://free-cities.org/ The Property and Freedom Society: https://propertyandfreedom.org/ The Nordic Bitcoin Conference held in Helsinki, Finland, 2026: https://btchel.com/ Other general items we covered: The Great Fiction, by Hans-Hermann Hoppe: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Fiction-…
Shownotes (Grok)
Transcript (Grok)
Stephan Kinsella (The Kinsellanator) Returns to Dispense Some White Pills
Mark Maresca interviewing Stephan Kinsella, The White Pillbox.
Opening
0:00:08
Announcer: You’re skeptical of the state. You’re getting over the myth of authority. But the state is still formidable. Or is it? You’ve got a front row seat in the transition to a free society. Let’s dive headfirst into the White Pillbox with your host, Mark Maresca.
Welcome and Introductions
0:00:28
Mark Maresca: Greetings all. Thank you so much for joining today. Today I’m happy to welcome back as my guest, Stephan Kinsella. Stephan, great to have you here.
Stephan Kinsella: Hey Mark, glad to be here.
Mark Maresca: In case any of you are not familiar with Stephan, he’s an intellectual property attorney and a major contributor to libertarian thought and scholarship. Just a few of his publications include Against Intellectual Property, Legal Foundations of a Free Society, and The Universal Principles of Liberty. And you can see all his work via his main website, StephanKinsella.com, which will be provided in the show notes.
Stephan, you’re back from a whirlwind tour that took you to, among other things, three major conferences around the world, and I want to hear about your experiences and your take on them today. They were the Free Cities Conference held in Próspera, Honduras, the Property and Freedom Society annual conference in Bodrum, Turkey, and the Nordic Bitcoin Conference held in Helsinki, Finland. So if you don’t mind kicking it off, just your overall impression of the first one, the Free Cities Conference.
Free Cities in Próspera, and a Near Miss at Miami
0:01:27
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, Free Cities was great. I went to their events and I think they alternate between Prague and some other city. And last year I happened to go to Prague for the first time ever and enjoyed it. And I also went back to Prague for the Liberland Christmas party.
And I happened to visit Próspera, which is in Honduras, last year when I was on the Tom Woods cruise last year. And we took a side trip to Próspera, or Roatán in Honduras. And so when I heard that the Free Cities event was in Honduras, and it was at Próspera, I thought I would go. And plus I figured it would be a short plane ride from Houston to Honduras, and I didn’t realize, well, when I booked my ticket, they said that, oh, you had to go through Miami. There was no direct flight.
So I went through Miami, saw my buddy, and interestingly I was coming home from Miami on that Sunday after the event, and everyone there, I was saying they were about to fly home through Houston to other countries. And I said, why are you going through Houston? Doesn’t it take two flights? And they said, no, there’s a direct flight.
So somehow I missed the fact that there was a direct flight. So I changed my flight on that Sunday, which was going through Miami on American. I changed it to United to go home directly. And that was the day that there was that disaster at Miami Airport, where that plane overshot the runway and hit those cars. So I’m glad that I heard from these people, because I would have been in the air on an American flight when the airport was shut down. I don’t know where I would have ended up. So I’m glad I missed that excitement.
But some people I know were there, some friends I know were there, and I did a debate, which is not my normal type of debate, against a fellow patent lawyer, an Irish patent lawyer from California, on intellectual property, moderated by Alex Voss, which went over well. We were both polite to each other. I think he just didn’t really have a good argument. It was more like just spouting the let’s-be-moderate kind of stuff, you know, like let’s not go to extremes. But, like, okay, he didn’t really have a—I honestly, I couldn’t tell you what his argument was. Something like let’s not be extreme.
Mark Maresca: Yeah. Yeah, it was more along those lines. I think prior to that you had almost hoped that he had something more meaty there, but I listened to it too, live, and was like, yeah, that’s a little more typical.
A Richer, Segmented Liberty Movement
0:04:05
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, but, well, I mean, I was interested to hear. You know, I’ve been a little bit dismissive in the past of all these libertarian seasteading projects and Project Lifeboat, because there’s always one thing after the other, and they’re usually vaporware, or they’re half the time hoaxes, like Galt’s Gulch Chile. But my impression is that, I mean, look, I do all kinds of things over the world and over the last decades, and it’s amazing to me that if you take the perspective of forty or fifty years ago, that we have such a rich international and multi-segmented liberty space.
You’ve got the Austrians, like Mises Institute. You’ve got the Libertarian Party. You’ve got, like, the Tom Woods crowd type people, who are more pragmatic and life-oriented. You’ve got Hoppe’s Property and Freedom Society, which is like European, American-oriented Austro-libertarians. And you’ve got these free cities types, who have a multitude of projects behind them. You’ve got Liberland. You have Bitcoin, Bitcoin conferences, which are a mixture of libertarians and normal people and anti-state people. And all these groups overlap to one extent or the other, and some of them are more insular, some know each other, but you keep running into some of the same characters back and forth. Some people are only part of one group.
Why Most Enclaves Are Long Shots, and Which Might Not Be
0:05:22
Stephan Kinsella: But the Free Cities thing, I still think all these projects are a long shot. But the fact that people keep searching for ways to find liberty—I mean, I guess if I had to guess, of all the projects that are out there, like Liberland is a long shot. I think the floating nations are a long shot, because you basically have to—you can’t be a pirate floating nation, otherwise you’ll get attacked. You’re not under protection of international law. And so then you have to be flagged by a country. So that’s limited.
So I kind of think, like, the Honduras project, although I don’t think that one’s gonna work either, to be honest, for two reasons. Number one, the location is just not a place where you can build a thriving modern tech metropolis, you know. You don’t have the quality of workers and that around there. And plus it’s just typical banana republic Central American, South American stuff, you know. The country goes back on their word. They create a free zone, then the commies take over and threaten it. So it’s limping along. It may make it in the end.
But I think there’s another one in Brunei that’s coming along, which sounds more promising to me because of the location and the workforce. So I could see these enclaves of liberty coming about, which are not going to be fully libertarian, but that might have more and more freedom over time. Like, there’s one in the UAE, I think, a common law thing, and then there’s the Brunei thing.
And I think the Free State Project in New Hampshire will never be totally free, at least initially, because they’re part of the US. But, you know, I think that project I could see—moving there if you want to be around liberty-minded people. I wouldn’t myself do it, because I don’t really see personally the attractiveness to living around other libertarians. Although when I travel in all these events, I do like that I’m around people that I can talk about things that other people, their eyes glaze over and they don’t understand. So there is something to be said for being around other libertarians, at least regularly, if not every day.
Mark Maresca: Right, but isn’t it also very much like life itself, where even among the libertarians you do want to end up picking and choosing? Because if you just sort of take it as a swath of people, it’s like, well, there’s a lot of folks that it’s like, well, you’ve called them way-station libertarians philosophically, because they don’t read a book, but also they’re not necessarily people that you would want to hang around with. And that’s not distinctive to libertarians. It’s just normal humanity. So yes, moving to a place where it’s like, like I agree with you, like New Hampshire, that would be iffy. But yes, we pick and choose our friends. You’ve done that, I’ve done that.
Way-Station Libertarians
0:07:51
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, the way-station libertarians. I think of, I mean, the problem is not that they’re not intellectual. That’s more of a problem, like, with Libertarian Party types. I don’t think you really need—not every libertarian needs to be intellectual. There’s different types of lifestyles or activism pursuits you can have, or interests.
But it’s more like they’re more like activist types who came into the movement because they were frustrated with something. Like, so they saw Ron Paul and they just became Ron Paulians, and then when that didn’t work they got burned out and moved on to post-libertarianism. So the way-station thing is more like, when I meet a new libertarian, I always want to be cautious, like, let’s see if they’re still around in five years, because I’ve seen too many of them, they’re passing through, doing like the stations of the cross, as a Catholic metaphor. That’s what I mean by way-station libertarians.
Mark Maresca: Right, right, right. And it’s interesting that the three conferences you attended, you know, Property and Freedom and Bitcoin and the Free Cities, those really have nothing to do at all with activism. They’re not really trying to speak to the common man in any way. They are actually all addressing in one way or another physical foundational principles or intellectual foundational principles in some way. And since it’s targeted and since it’s foundational, that’s where I think the transition to a free society is going to be able to play out best, because that’s what you need to structure a society anyway, even if it is bottom up.
How the Three Scenes Feed Each Other
0:09:17
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, I think the PFS in Turkey, that’s the more theoretical libertarian crowd, although they’re aware of, and many of them are Bitcoiners. The Free Cities thing is people trying to find practical liberty-oriented ways to advance in life, you know, by exploiting, finding things you can do. And I admire all those efforts, and, you know, that’s how we make progress partly, is by pushing, pushing, pushing, and finding, and, you know, keeping your eyes open, being alert for possibilities.
And then they’re all aware of Bitcoin, and the Bitcoiners typically came from Austrianism or libertarianism, at least a lot of them did, so they’re aware of all that too. They all feed back on each other. And now we have AI and robots coming too, and that kind of tech, and communications from Starlink and all that kind of stuff.
So we don’t really know what’s coming next, but we have lots of interesting things on the horizon, which I know a lot of people, they look at the glass-half-full side—you know, like the Flock cameras, people are upset about that, and the surveillance state and loss of privacy. But, you know, I always tend to think that technology tends to help the good guys on balance more than the bad guys. Sort of for the opposite reasons that defense is easier than offense in the game Risk, or castle Risk, you know.
Mark Maresca: Right. So I was thinking about that, and when we see something like Flock cameras, that’s a bad thing. Ooh, the state’s doing something bad. No doubt. But the state has been doing bad things forever. So to me, when you’re thinking about a trend, if you’re observing the trend from the 30,000-foot level, what matters in any trend, whether it’s mathematical or physical or biological, is what’s changing. It’s the delta. It’s not what’s the same. What’s the same is the same.
So to me, the state is the same. It’s always going to aggress. It’s always going to push its power. It’s always going to try to increase its power. All right, well then that doesn’t really factor in the equation. What factors is what’s changing. And these three conferences are examples to me of what is qualitatively different in the world, because we have never seen any—well, Property and Freedom is more intellectual, I get that. But you know what I’m saying.
Incremental Liberty, and Why Perfection Is Not the Standard
0:11:34
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, I think there’s, like, an explos—I won’t say there’s a, we’re on the cusp of an explosion of liberty, but it does seem to be that the movement is bigger, it’s richer. It’s more diverse now. It’s more, in a flash, it’s internationally spread around the world, and it’s segmented into, like, Bitcoin and the free city stuff and intellectual work and Austrian work and Bitcoin. And to me that’s positive.
You know, I kind of think that I look at the advance of liberty as, well, of course it’s always incremental, and even in the most utopian scenario you can imagine, we’ll never have a perfect society, because even if you had the state abolished, and even if you had a very libertarian society, you will still always have free will, and therefore you’ll always have crime to some degree. Right? So crime will never be abolished. Injustice will never be totally abolished.
So if you look at it that way, then any incremental move is always good, because freedom is always going to be achieved incrementally and only incompletely anyway. So I think that there’s a good chance, if we don’t kill ourselves, you know, with some kind of 3D-printed nano-manufactured virus, or AI gone rogue, which I’m not too worried about, or the robots killing us, which I’m not too worried about.
You know, I think that we have a lot of things to look—I mean, even longevity is coming along too. There’s a lot of people in these movements interested in longevity, which is another thing that’s supported by AI and by, you know, various technological developments.
The Dance-Floor Metaphor, and the Weakness of the State
0:13:19
Mark Maresca: And the other thing that strikes me—I know we got a little off on that topic from the topic of your conferences, but this is fascinating, this particular discussion. I’ve been thinking just in the last couple of days about the weakness of the state. Now we don’t think of the state as weak, but foundationally it is. And since we don’t think of it that way, even libertarians, like, we think it’s this monstrous thing with all this power, and it is. And of course the common man thinks of it as this overriding daddy-thing institution.
But really I was thinking, like, the—we love our metaphors. The metaphor I was thinking of was the dance floor. You know, a dance starts, the DJ’s there, nobody’s dancing. The first couple of people who come out there are the ones who kind of kick it off. And once they do that, and it happens within minutes, everybody’s out on the dance floor.
The state can only enforce so much because it’s limited by personnel. How many physical deployable officers are there at any given time? It’s so shockingly low, we almost would be shocked to know that. So the upside potential for that is very small. It’s very hard for them to increase that, because people don’t want to be cops. It’s a lousy job, it doesn’t pay well, it’s risky compared to the other praxeological choices they can be making. But they make those choices because that’s what they want to do.
But on the disobedience side, the disregard side, meaning the other side of, call it the workload of those employees, the upside potential for disobedience or disregard is just astoundingly enormous. So we just happen to be at this sort of razor-thin equilibrium right now, where the workload happens to match the enforcement side, the workload being whatever little slice of disobedience there is. It doesn’t take much for that to notch up. And it’s not an ancap revolution. It’s not an intellectual ideological change. It’s just people sort of getting over this myth of political authority.
Anyway, literally in the last two days I was thinking of that metaphor. I’m curious about your take on it.
Stephan Kinsella: No, I totally agree. I think that people don’t take—they say intellectually that, you know, the state rests upon the consent of the governed because we outnumber them. So that’s why the great fiction is there. But we don’t really think about, in history and in current examples, to realize that it really is more fragile than we think. In a sense there is no state. It’s just a big pattern that’s perpetuating itself.
I’m sure that when the Soviet Union collapsed in ’91, you know, a month before that, everyone there couldn’t conceive that it was about to collapse. And they thought they had infinite omnipotent power, but then all of a sudden, you know, it’s like the emperor has no clothes. All of a sudden people realize it’s just bullshit.
I mean, we’ve seen it in our own lives with, you know, during the dark days of the COVID lockdown fervor, like just five years ago or so. It seemed like this was unbelievable, but it was happening. It was almost omnipresent. But to—and maybe I’m naive, but it seems hard for me to imagine that we would go back to that, because we’ve learned a lot of skepticism about all the crap we hear from the governments and the doctors and the vaccine companies. I just don’t—and people that tolerated it last time, I think there’s a bigger portion of the population that wouldn’t tolerate it this time. And I think the powers that be know that.
But if you think about, you know, something that seems inevitable, all of a sudden, is it? The BlackBerry was so inevitable, and then the iPhone just toppled it because they were arrogant, you know. The Kodak film cameras became obsolete, like, you know, overnight. And the same thing with money. I mean, at a certain point in time the government could get away with taxing you and with printing and having people buy their bonds. But when a certain contagion effect happens, people are gonna stop buying the American bonds, and then how’s the federal government gonna finance itself, because it’s deficit-financing half of its, you know, budget right now? They won’t be able to do that. They’re gonna have to cut their budgets or increase taxes, which they can’t do.
So, you know, things can happen very quickly. I mean, if you think about the Roman Empire, it was there for a thousand years, and then, you know, finally it just collapsed, and they were powerless to stop it. There was no one left to say anything to stop it. I mean, Trump talks about things in the future. He can’t, in today’s world, change what’s gonna happen in the future. We’re powerless to stop future events from happening.
Hoppe on Prediction: Uncertain, but Not Radically Uncertain
0:17:33
Mark Maresca: Right, right, right. You said future events, and something you either tweeted it or wherever it was, it was something Professor Hoppe said, I think, about the future. He was talking about predicting or making predictions. And he had this subtle point about how, yeah, it’s true, you can’t predict the future, but you can make grounded observations and plausible observations about the future.
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, his point is to take a middle ground between radical skepticism, saying we don’t know anything about the world or about the future, and this idea that, you know, the alternative is omniscience about the future, which is sort of what’s implied when people say, oh, I know the Austrian business cycle, or I know from past trends what happened is going to continue in the future, which you really don’t know, as, like, Malkiel said.
But Hoppe says the future is uncertain because it depends in part on incomplete information, but also upon the actions of purposeful actors who have their own free will and choice and purposes. And so humans are unpredictable. And for that reason, if you factor them into your future plans, then there has to be an element of uncertainty.
So, but what he says is, although the future is uncertain, it’s not radically uncertain. That’s because it has to be constrained by what we do know for sure, which is that there are categories of action. There, you know, there’s profit and loss, there’s opportunity cost. There’s the fact that people demonstrate what they value when they act, and they can only get that one thing, and either they achieve it or they don’t.
Like all these things, if you’re aware of that, as he said, if you’re praxeologically aware of that, it would constrain what you do forecast about the future, and it would keep you from making mistakes. So if you’re more praxeologically enlightened, you would tend to make, on average, better predictions than someone else. On the other hand, that might not be the dominant factor. Someone just might have a knack, and there might be a better forecaster, like a Warren Buffett, even though they don’t have a sophisticated understanding of praxeology.
So the point is we can, we do know something about the future, but we don’t know everything. And that’s what the laws of logic and praxeology tell us. Yeah, exactly.
Mark Maresca: Exactly. I thought of it in terms of the constant crises that we look at as libertarians. So, for example, the Flock cameras, or whatever it may be, Iran. These are bad things. There’s no doubt about it. But there’s always this tendency to look at that particular example and then extrapolate that into, well, this is it. This is gonna be the thing that causes this authoritarian takeover. It’s like, all right, that’s a possible timeline. I’ll acknowledge that. It’s a non-zero possibility. But it always seems to have a common thread.
As soon as we hear about it, the naysayers, or the doomers, will immediately remove from the state actors any praxeological component. In other words, they are now the Empire in Star Wars. They can do literally anything they want. When in fact, no, they themselves are going to be responding to the conditions at hand as actors.
So a great example is COVID. I love this example. Yes, COVID started off and everybody went along with it. But one and a half, two years in, that wasn’t the case anymore, and in fact all those mandates and everything were withdrawn. Now, they didn’t conquer COVID, so we don’t have, like, a national holiday, Conquered COVID Day, and they don’t, you know, they didn’t fire off fireworks. So obviously at that point they were—and this isn’t conscious, this is just sort of, you know, unconscious—the state clearly saw the signs that this was not sustainable, and they self-backed off. That’s my point.
COVID Complicity, and Getting Drawn Back In
0:21:21
Stephan Kinsella: Well, one thing I like about that example, the one thing that also annoys me about it. So I like that, you know, the politicians like Trump and DeSantis and these states are jumping on the fact that, oh, all these guys overreacted and I wouldn’t do that again. But they sort of cover up their complicity in it. I mean, Trump was part of it, and every governor that I’m aware of was part of it, at least initially. Some were quicker to reverse course.
But I’m from Texas, and I would travel back and forth between Louisiana and Texas, two very southern, I’m sorry, conservative states. But there were signs on the billboard saying you’re entering Texas or Louisiana. I mean, there were—I had a reporter. There was all kind of crazy things that were totally fascist, and, you know, I’m sure Florida had crazy stuff too at the beginning. I don’t know of any state that—maybe there’s one or two, but almost every state where the governors are taking credit for being anti-COVID lockdowns, they were not anti-COVID lockdowns initially. So, but at least they got the message. But I just don’t like to see these guys that were complicit in the state trying to take a little bit too much credit for being opposed to it. But, yeah, that’s kind of my take on that.
But going back to these adventures, I mean, look, I’ve had these blog posts where I’ve talked over the years about I’m traveling too much, I need to stop the libertarian bullshit, but I always get sucked back into it. Like every year I fail. And I realized I’d go to these things ’cause I have friends there by now, and I have to go to where the events are. I mean, my dad says, why are you traveling so much this month? I said, that’s where the events are. Like, I’m not going for the love of traveling, but to learn things, to interact.
But yeah, so my impression is overall positive. So I did the Próspera thing, and I enjoyed the people there, made some friends. I might go back again next year. And then I went to the highlight of the year, which is always the Property and Freedom Society. This was their 20th anniversary. It was in Turkey. That’s another glorious event. Great talks.
PFS, Bitcoin Helsinki, and the One Gold Bug
0:23:19
Stephan Kinsella: And I would say that I just had a podcast this morning with Knut Svanholm, which will be released shortly. And he was—we were talking, he went to two of those with me. He went to the one in Turkey and to the Helsinki one, and he was mentioning that the contrast was that in Helsinki, it’s Bitcoin oriented, but maybe half of the people are libertarian or Austrian educated. But the main thing is Bitcoin. But whereas in Turkey, everyone there is Austro-libertarian, and a lot of them are Bitcoiners, but the main focus is liberty and libertarianism. So it’s interesting how—but they mutually reinforce each other, as you can tell.
And what was interesting was at the PFS in Turkey, there is no one against Bitcoin except one guy, who’s my friend Guido Hülsmann, the outlier, who he’s a gold—he’s an old-fashioned gold bug, so he had an argument for why Bitcoin can never really be money. But, you know, free speech, we let him talk. He didn’t persuade many people, I don’t think, but it was like the exception that proves the rule. Everyone really says, okay, like, as I think Saifedean Ammous might say, have fun staying poor. That’s what Saifedean says to his detractors.
Mark Maresca: And the conference focused on Bitcoin, or was it also alternate cryptos?
Stephan Kinsella: Which conference?
Mark Maresca: Oh, I’m sorry, the Bitcoin in Helsinki.
Stephan Kinsella: Oh, no, that was a Bitcoin maxi conference, which I like. And as I was talking to Knut about, my impression is that the shitcoiner conferences have more scammers, whereas the Bitcoin maxi conferences have less of that. So you have a mixture of people selling their wares and their services, but it’s all Bitcoin oriented. So, no, the one in Helsinki was just for Bitcoiners. So it was great.
Now, Helsinki itself is great. So normally I stay a couple days extra in Turkey after the PFS event, but because there was the Bitcoin event the next Friday in Helsinki, I went on Tuesday from Turkey to Helsinki and spent a couple days there to explore their sauna scene, which is awesome and interesting and fascinating, and to see that city, which is a fascinating city. And just really enjoyed it, enjoyed the people.
A Private Meeting with Finland’s Economics Minister
0:25:42
Stephan Kinsella: And I enjoyed, like, so there was a lot of—oh, there was an interesting thing that happened. So when I got there, I was slated to speak on Saturday morning on a panel with Rahim, who’s an Austrian libertarian economist, Rahim Taghizadegan, I’m mispronouncing his last name, and with Knut, on Austrian economics and why it’s important for Bitcoiners to understand it. So that was a good panel. That will come out shortly, and that was a really good panel.
But when I got there, but I’m not, like, a well-known Bitcoiner. I’m just known for more of the theory stuff and libertarian stuff and intellectual property stuff. But when I got there, I got a note from the organizer and he said, there’s the economics minister of Finland who would like to meet you in a private meeting. And I didn’t know why. I thought maybe he had me pegged as a Hoppe disciple, or I was being tagged along with some other group. I didn’t know why, but he wanted to meet me. He had read some of my stuff. He had been to Auburn for the Mises Institute back in 2006. He’s a fairly young guy, but he’s a very smart guy. But he is the economics minister of the country, who’s in charge of innovation policy.
And they ended up pulling into the room Adam Back and Martti, this other big Bitcoiner, and two or three other guys. And so we had about a two-hour meeting with him, when he was asking us all kind of questions about tax policy and innovation policy and intellectual property and Bitcoin and Bitcoin farming and AI, AI training.
He’s limited in power, of course, but the fact that you have a high-level government official talking to intelligent and educated libertarian and Austrian and Bitcoin people in his capital city was, I thought it was a great sign. I mean, you know, things like that might start happening around the world more and more over time.
Mark Maresca: Well, especially as the bigger empires, like the United States, you know, their debt is just killing them, and I’m sure these other countries have their versions of that, but not quite really, because they’re not empires in the way this country is. So, you know, they probably have more room for that kind of experimentation.
Normies, Democracy, and ABBA
0:27:42
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, but the one funny thing was, so, you know, I’m talking to Giacomo Zucco, who’s a well-known big coiner, who I’ve known on Twitter for a long time, but we met in person. We were having an in-depth talk about contract theory and property rights and libertarian stuff, and Bitcoin. And this woman who’s just a total normie, like she’s a European human rights lawyer from Iceland, I think. And she was listening to us talk, and we’re obviously intelligent and successful, so we’re—but we sound like raving lunatics, because we’re just bashing the state and talking about anarchy and about anarchic systems.
And she, like, she couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that she was like, well, wait, but that’s not democratic. And we’re like, yeah, we’re not in favor of democracy. And she was totally perplexed that we could be what she thought of as liberals, but we’re against democracy. Because she conflates those things, right? Because democracy and capitalism, liberalism, they all go together. She couldn’t conceive of someone. So you had those random interactions, which was always fun.
One night I was at this bar, the closing ceremony, and I was talking to some normie businessmen who were there. Now they were smart enough to realize that there’s a lot of Austrians and libertarians around. So they hear that, so they’re not fazed by it anymore. But I was talking to one guy about Hoppe and everything, and he goes, oh yeah, I know ABBA. I said, no, no, not ABBA. Not ABBA, the Swedish rock group. Hoppe. He thought for a second we had something in common, but it was ABBA, not Hoppe. But it was kind of funny. It was like, no, no, no. I don’t think you know about Hoppe. You’re talking about ABBA. Not likely.
Mark Maresca: Not likely. Not likely.
Can Bitcoin Become Money?
0:29:14
Mark Maresca: So, what’s the status of Bitcoin then? Do you foresee that it could eventually become an actual currency if there are layers that are eventually technologically put in, or do you—well, you know, what’s your take on that?
Stephan Kinsella: You know, I don’t know. I’ve always thought that, and anyone who says they know doesn’t know. They don’t really know. But I was talking to some people and I said, here’s a dilemma we have. I cannot conceive of it going to zero. In fact, I think that’s impossible, because if it fell to zero, there’s millions of us that would buy it, because, you know, we’re diehard. So it can’t go to zero.
I also can’t see it staying the same forever, because it just can’t stay the same, because it’s gonna lose momentum. So I can’t see it falling too far, and I can’t see it staying the same. So the only alternative is for it to go up to the stratosphere. But I can’t see that either, because I think the state would try to stop it. But of those three, it seems to me like the only one that’s really the logical choice is for it to go up. So when it happens and how it happens, I don’t know.
So my guess is that we’re—but I still hedge my bet. So, like, I think it’s still an asymmetric bet, personally. I think that if you buy Bitcoin now, hoping to profit on the speculation of it going up and being adopted, I think it’s an asymmetric bet, in that your odds of it going up are greater than it going down. In other words, the expected value of your bet is still greatly positive. But I still think it’s a long shot. Like, I give it one-third chance. On the other hand, how can it go to zero? So I don’t know. So I’m cautiously optimistic.
I don’t anymore think that it’ll happen next year. I think it could be a 10-year, 15-, 20-year process, but who knows? Maybe something crazy will happen in two years and it will start accelerating like crazy then. I think we’ve never seen anything like this before in the world history, in real time, and happened so possibly rapidly because of the digital nature of it, and because of the accelerating collapse of the Western systems, which seems to be coming.
So I don’t think we know what’s gonna happen. I can only hope for a soft landing in some sense, which I think is possible. So I’m still bullish on its long-term prospects, but I still regard it as speculation, and I don’t put all my eggs in one basket. That’s how I look at it.
Ease of Use, Fungibility, and Anonymity
0:31:26
Mark Maresca: Right. Our folks will often say that Bitcoin, or you can even broadly say crypto, checks most of the boxes for what should, what could qualify as money, and I’m gonna steal right now from Adam Haman’s recent essay, because he talked about Bitcoin. And, like, the checkbox list would be durability, portability, divisibility, it’s uniform, meaning fungible, it’s recognizable, and that it’s also scarce enough that it can’t be inflated easily.
I’m struck by the fact that ease of use is not exactly one of those checkboxes. And yet ease of use would almost have to be something you see if you’re gonna get the network effect.
Stephan Kinsella: I tend to think that we don’t really need to use it yet for cash, because cash still works fine for transactions, not for savings, but for transactions. So we have time to figure that out, and I think that it will eventually be figured out with some kind of system. I don’t know whether it’ll be credit cards, debit cards, Lightning, something like that. I have to believe that by the time we need to start transacting in it, that will be figured out. Ease of use. You know, the iPhone version of something, you know, easy for the average person. Not this stuff JW Weatherman talks about, about having seven Ubuntu laptops and, you know, do your own entropy and all that kind of stuff. It’s gotta be easier than that at some point. I think that’ll come.
Now, I’m not so sure that it’s fungible, because fungibility is a subjective criterion. It’s up to the market to determine whether a good has units that are divisible enough to be considered to be units of a good. I mean, even every gold molecule is not fungible unless we regard it as fungible, because they’re all distinct to some degree. So far it seems to be people are ignoring the differences between Bitcoin units and treating them as fungible, and I see no reason they can’t continue.
I do think anonymity is one thing that’s sort of missing currently. That is more important in today’s world because of government regulation, and I think in a free society anonymity would be less important, because you would have less to hide, but still people would want anonymity if they could do it. So I have to imagine some kind of second-layer solutions eventually will come along for anonymity as well. But to me those seem to be things that can develop in time, along with the rise of Bitcoin and its ultimate adoption as basically a higher level of money, this thing.
Mark Maresca: And surely, when, if they come, they being the techies, come up with that kind of thing, that certainly is a major incentive for it to continue to break through and gain that network effect. A buddy of mine once used the analogy of the Old West. You know, cowboy walks into a saloon, swings the door, orders a whiskey, reaches in his pocket and flips out that gold coin onto the bar, and, you know, bartender grabs it, there’s your transaction. When Bitcoin’s as easy to do as that, it seems like we will very much want to do that. And so I’m encouraged by the work of the techs that are doing it. I don’t know how much that’s happening in the Bitcoin space. And I don’t follow the alt currencies too much anyway, but the little I see is they are working really hard on trying to make it very much easy, just as, you know, a QR code or whatever off an app.
A Lightning Payment That Half Worked
0:34:48
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, I think so. I was at the closing ceremony, at a bar, and they had a payment terminal where you could swipe your card, also took QR codes from, like, a Lightning app. And I happened to have a Lightning wallet, which I never use, because I never spent Bitcoin. But I had two hundred dollars on it from a test a couple years ago. And so I paid for my meal with Bitcoin Lightning, and it worked fine.
But then later I went to buy a round of drinks for some friends at the bar, ’cause I had free money. I looked at it as free money, ’cause I’d never spend this Lightning wallet, so I thought, you know, I got fifty dollars left over, I’ll go buy you a round of drinks. But by the time I got back to the bar, the Lightning processor had stopped working, so it was an attempt. So I think we’re still in rough days, you know. So fifty percent of the transactions I’ve ever tried on Lightning have failed. But I think that’s gonna get better over time. I’m not too worried about it.
Mark Maresca: Oh, it absolutely will. The kind of tech folks that work on this, I come from an IT background. I was a developer myself. And that type of character, that type of mindset, that type of personality, very, very autist, that all they want is a challenge. They just live off a challenge. And just to know that someone’s putting up the gauntlet, you know, make this completely private. They’re just working on that because they don’t even have to have an ancap sensibility. They just want to do it. And that kind of mindset is never going away. So I’m very confident that some of these guys are gonna figure this out. I hope it happens in the next ten years when I’m still around, but, you know, I’m confident about that.
What PFS Is Actually Like
0:36:23
Mark Maresca: In the Property and Freedom, I want the folks to get a good feeling for what this is. And one of the things that comes to mind when I try to describe it, I think of Thomas Jefferson going to France and sitting in these salons with the intellectuals of the day and talking about the biggest, grandest issues, philosophical issues of the day. That’s what I think of when I think of PFS. Could you tell me how close that comes to the mark?
Stephan Kinsella: That’s not too far off. I mean, in fact, to go back to our previous thing, I was thinking about this. Sakari Puisto is the name of the economics minister. You know, he’s in a position of government power. He’s a prominent guy in that country. And one advantage of a job like that is, you know, you have some clout, and if you ask for a meeting with some local dignitaries or whatever, you know, they’ll sit down and talk to you. So he’s sitting there thinking, oh, we have a big Bitcoin conference, here’s some intellectuals. I could just sit down and pick the brains of three or four or five guys that I know are pretty smart and just get their ideas. And I know they’re not crazy. I might not agree, but, you know, that’s one benefit of having a position of sort of influence or power like that. If you want to, you could meet people and learn from them if you wanted to, which is what he did.
PFS, Hans—yeah, I’ve been to all kind of conferences over the years and events. They’re usually lectures. People sit there politely and they listen and all that. PFS, Hans modeled it after sort of a combination of two things. One, the old-fashioned old-world salon model, which is like a meeting of polite society, where people are elegant and have very good manners, and they’re in beautiful surroundings, and they have the leisure to talk with other intelligent, interesting, diverse people. And of course centered around core sort of beliefs of conservative, kind of traditional Western values, and sound economics, and individualism and liberty, that kind of stuff. And so he modeled it after that, and he’s only changed a little bit over the years. The first one was very successful.
And the second thing was he modeled it a little bit after Club Med, which I’ve never been to a Club Med thing, but, and maybe they’re not as popular as they used to be. But I think it’s one of these all-you-can-eat buffet type things, like you pay one fee, you walk in the door, and you don’t have to bring your wallet out and pay for things. It’s all inclusive. Sort of like when you have a country club, you just go to the country club, you don’t have to pay for things. You just charge it to your account or something like that.
But anyway, it’s been so—you just, it’s been like that ever since. Like you go into this hotel, which is owned by Hans’s wife’s family. And so it’s like a family type event. It’s a beautiful surrounding, and it’s a reasonable fee. It’s not cheap, but it’s reasonable. But it’s not about the money.
And, like, the meetings start at ten o’clock, like not that early, not the crack of dawn. And there’s a two-hour lunch break every day. And then, you know, they go to five-thirty or so, the meetings. So you have time at breakfast and at lunch and after, at the hotel, in the evening meals, to interact with different people, to have lots of conversations, to make friends, to rehash the ideas you heard people discuss in the panels or in the talks earlier that day. So it’s just a really nice blend.
And then on the final day, so it’s three days of that. So it’s Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And then on Monday there’s the boat day, or this year we changed it to a beach day. We went to, like, it’s sort of like a Ritz-Carlton type hotel called the Kempinski, which has a big beach club. It’s a private thing, and every, you know, there’s the ocean there, and activities, and you can saunter around for like seven or eight hours and just busy with people and have fun. It’s like a relaxing kind of final event. So it’s just a nice four-day event every September. It recharges your batteries. You see old friends.
You know, you can say whatever you want. A lot of people are from countries—I mean, I’m from Texas, and so I’m relatively free. And I had the luxury to only hang out with people that are not insane lefty Democrat liberal types. So I don’t have to watch what I say. Although I don’t get to talk to intelligent people all the time either. But there’s some people from, like, countries where, like, France or whatever, they gotta watch what they say. So they’re like liberated. I can talk for four days straight to people that, even if they don’t agree with me, that they’re not gonna be appalled that I’m asking this question or saying this thing, you know. So that’s really refreshing for a lot of people. It recharges their batteries, and they just love it. So it’s a great event, and I hope it continues next September.
Age, Ideas, and Nationality
0:40:52
Mark Maresca: Across the three different conferences, what’s your observation of the age stratification, youth, middle age, elder, older side? Like, well, how do they balance out?
Stephan Kinsella: I think maybe Bitcoin is younger, younger entrepreneurs. The Free Cities thing is a mixture. It tends to be younger-ish, but there’s older people, because some of the people behind it are kind of more established entrepreneur types who bring something to the table, like, you know, Titus Gebel. And then PFS, there’s always a new crowd of people, some younger people, but it probably skews a little bit older, especially because a lot of the speakers are more distinguished people with some kind of academic or intellectual type past, who, and you have to be of a certain age to have built that up. So it’s like that. But it’s not like just a bunch of doddering old geezers, like you imagine a gerontocracy or something, or like Taki’s Magazine or something like that.
They’re both a nice—and what I like about it, what I’ve always liked about libertarian events throughout my whole forty years or so of this, at the Mises Institute and other places, especially in Turkey. Number one, people care mainly about ideas, so they don’t really care what your age is. Like, no one is impertinent if they’re, like, a twenty-four-year-old guy. You know, if you have something to bring to the table, bring it to the table, and people will talk to you. People don’t put on airs and, like, lord their status over others. They talk to you because they’re interested in truth, and making friends, and exploring ideas.
And also the nationality thing. I’ve always loved that about libertarian groups, is that people don’t care about your nationality. And I have never yet seen, to my surprise, because in regular life you see people are very nationalistic, and they get offended easily if you insult their culture. So, like, if you’re at a business setting or a work setting and there’s a Frenchman and a German, you know, and an American, you have to be careful not to insult each other’s cultures too much, or Russian or whatever.
But at PFS and at Mises, you know, I can’t insult the French too much. The French guy will go, oh, it’s even worse than you say, you know? Or if someone says, oh, America’s, like, the worst warmongering country in the world, they’re not this great patriotic empire of liberty. The Americans go, yeah, you’re right. I mean, no one disagrees. We’re trying to outdo each other on how bad our countries are. We’re not offended by that. I’ve always loved that. And that’s because we’re interested in liberty and truth.
Mark Maresca: Yeah, absolutely. That’s so true.
Younger Libertarians, and the Shift in the Burden of Proof
0:43:26
Mark Maresca: The reason I asked about the age stratification is because I’ve been trying to observe the tone and tenor of the youth in the movement, but not as a broad swath, because a lot of them are enthusiastically, you know, blind to what’s possible. I’m talking really about the ones who take seriously the ideas, who have an intellectual grounding. And I contrast that group with the perspective of the youth of my time, seventies and eighties.
And one of the differences I observe is an almost grounded optimism in the modern youth. Whereas from our—we were enthusiastic, no doubt, but we didn’t see a pathway out except pure activism. It just seemed like the only way. Tell your uncle. These guys, at least again, the intellectually grounded ones, just seem to have this assumption that works, like, this is gonna happen. The state is on its last legs, kind of thing. I agree, I agree.
Stephan Kinsella: Now that you say that, I’ve never put my finger on it, but I think there’s something to that. My impression is that before Ron Paul in 2008, the movement was much about one-tenth of its current size, and more American, and more intellectual, but more minarchist. So less radical, more constitutionalist, you know, more—less anarchist, but more intellectual, but smaller.
After Ron Paul, it became more activist, and but also more Austrian aware and more anarchist. So now the prevailing—and the one danger of that is that some of them are less intellectually well read, and also some of them burn out too quickly, because they’re in it for the activist part. But even after some burnout, the movement is still much bigger.
And now the prevailing sentiment among—it’s almost happened without me noticing it, but I think you’re right. Like in the last fifteen years maybe, ever since the internet and Bitcoin and the aftermath of the Ron Paul influence, anarchism is just assumed, or it’s not scandalous to say that anymore. So anarchism is the default assumption now. And you’re not considered to be an insane, you know, contrarian if you say that.
And yeah, I think also now they’re a little bit more pessimistic too, which I would just say realistic, about the coming problems of society, and also the way that the past generations have screwed over the young people in terms of job prospects and inflation, and making it impossible to afford a house. But that’s coupled with their optimism, and that we’ve got to do something in our own lives, and we can be entrepreneurial, and we can find a way around the state, and we can do something different. Yeah, I think it’s promising to see. It’s heartening to see. To me, I’m optimistic about the movement, but yeah. Go ahead. Yeah.
Mark Maresca: Yeah. Well, I was gonna say, yes, you made me think. It’s almost like there’s been this shift in an unconscious perspective of it. It used to be, justify why you’re an anarchist. Now it’s morphing to, justify why you’re a statist. It’s like looking back at the government and saying, what good are you? Like, especially given the fact that there’s Bitcoin and free cities and 3D printing and homeschooling, all these other parallel economies and institutions that are now visibly growing.
And so long as they continue, and in particular the free cities, this is the thing that I’m most excited about, because if you can get an enclave out there that is more or less ancap, if Próspera actually ends up working and succeeding and prospering, ten years in, it’s like you’ll be looking to the state and saying, okay, they didn’t descend into cannibalism, which is the fundamental justification for the state at all. You need us because without us, we’re back in the jungle. A little bit of experience in these parallel institutions puts the lie to that claim.
One Working Example, and Who Might Try
0:47:32
Stephan Kinsella: Well, and yeah. Yeah, I’m a little bit worried that the experiment with marijuana legalization and drug legalization, I’m worried that that’s backfiring a little bit, because we made too many promises that, oh, if you legalize all this, people won’t start using more, but now, you know, there’s the smell of weed everywhere, and people are getting annoyed by the, like, goddamn it, the libertarians overpromised this.
But I do think that, you know, like if you go to Europe, they can’t conceive of not having socialized medicine. But it’s going to probably eventually collapse anyway. They’re gonna have to deal with some kind of alternative solution, whether it’s robots and AI as self-help, or privatization, or traveling to America for, for, I don’t know. I mean, there are cruise ships that have medical services. I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but.
I have always thought that if we could have one successful example on the earth of a functioning liberal society, that people will see that, oh, it’s actually possible now. The closest we have right now is, like, Liechtenstein, you know, or Monaco maybe, but they’re not, they’re too small, and they’re not replicable, right?
But if you have one of these enclaves that finally starts making it, you have to believe that eventually some country—I mean, maybe Argentina will do it, maybe. You know, there was some hope. Someone told me after Brexit there was hope that in these, like, eleven port zones that the UK had to re-establish after the European Union separation, they were trying to get the free cities people, Titus was just trying to talk one of them into doing, like, a Hong Kong type model there. But the politicians had no interest in that, because they don’t profit from it, right? So what do they care?
But one of these days some country out of desperation is going—I mean, maybe Ecuador, you know, maybe El Salvador, maybe Honduras will amp it up again. I don’t know, maybe Brunei, maybe UAE, maybe somewhere in Africa. I don’t know.
Mark Maresca: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of potential. And that’s the great thing. Just the fact that you can list those possibilities just suggests that somebody’s gonna think about it. One of the things that actually struck me in listening to the Free Cities conference feed was that there is genuine, like, entrepreneurial interest. Like, there’s financing that’s looking to get into this. Now, it’s not the financing of, say, a pension fund, obviously. That’s going to be very conservative. But there are more risk-taking type of financial groups out there that might be more amenable to these kind of ventures. And I heard several of the lectures that actually dealt with that. In other words, very much on-the-ground topics, not just the theoretical hope that we’re gonna just build a city and everything’ll be fine, but actual on-the-ground things.
Billionaires, Irrelevance, and a Shrinking State
0:50:17
Stephan Kinsella: Oh yeah, they’re trying things. I mean, one thing that has occurred to me is, you know, in today’s world we have a lot of billionaires, and we have one trillionaire now. And they tend to be, like, old-school types, or, you know, oil money types, or now the tech types who have a libertarian streak to some degree, some of them.
But if Bitcoin goes the way we hope, you know, there very well could be in ten years, you know, a thousand multi-billionaires in the world which are hyper-libertarian and Austrian aware. And imagine if you had a thousand multi-billionaires in the world, I mean, or maybe even, you know, ten billionaires, a hundred billionaires, whatever. I don’t know. I mean, there’s gonna be a lot of very wealthy people, and imagine a pool of them go to an island nation in the Caribbean and they just give them a trillion dollars to, like, carve out a completely free half of the island, or part of the island, or something. And I mean, there could be things that we can do legally with enough money and force behind these things someday. I mean, I’m thinking big, but, you know, the world is changing quickly.
Mark Maresca: Yeah, it is changing quickly. That’s exactly right. And a lot of the elements of doing something like that were discussed at that conference. It’s not just the financing, it’s infrastructure. It’s, you know, how will roads be built? I mean, they’re literally talking about all that. And it’s on-the-ground type of discussions. And you can imagine that happening with, say, a group of wealthy entrepreneurs. And here again, the state, really, it’s got its own fish to fry at this point. It’s really been somewhat kneecapped by reality, but not to the point where it’s about to fall. It’s actually the money side of that, the Bitcoin or whatever alt currency side, that seems to be the most plausible way that it’ll get kneecapped to where it just can’t function anymore, especially if the money becomes a more and more viable alternative for saving, for protection of value.
Stephan Kinsella: So that’s one thing, which will put limits on the state. And the other is if we have these amazing advances in technology because of AI and robotics, then you could imagine more and more sectors of life become less and less dependent upon the state, because the state has monopolized so many things people need: roads and food safety and welfare and health care.
You know, if you have a robot, an AI-powered robot doctor-surgeon in your neighborhood that’s basically free, you don’t need the government for health care, or for education. You know, you don’t need them for teaching maybe at some point as much. Even transportation, if we have, I don’t know, flying cars or something, you know. Or with the Boring Company making tunnels everywhere. I mean, you can’t imagine what down the road we’re gonna—so more and more things you can have independence from the state.
And so the state—my goal, my kind of fantasy has always been that the state shrivels away not because of a revolution, but just by irrelevance. Like, sort of like it becomes truncated, like the British monarchy has. And the British monarchy is still around, but they have no power, and people just get amusement out of them. So I can imagine DC becoming more and more, like, clinging to its power, and we just ignore them, and we gradually more and more don’t need them.
Cynicism as Realism
0:53:50
Mark Maresca: Yeah, I do think that one way or another it’s gonna fizzle. I think that’s all gonna be coupled with the psychology of this belief in their authority, and that that is certainly going down. I mean, you wouldn’t call it, again, an ancap ideological revolution at all. But among the common person, let’s face it, our uncles, our cousins are way more skeptical of the leadership than they used to be. It used to be that most of our relatives, if they voted, which they probably did, were Republicans. They were Democrats. Today, if they vote, they’re gonna say, yeah, I’m not sure I trust them, but I’ll go with them. Or, you know, there’s that growing sort of displeasure, that discomfort that you just didn’t have fifty years ago. That’s part of that trend.
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, I think there is an increasing cynicism, which some people think is bad, but I think it’s a good thing, because it’s realism is what it is. I mean, you know, you have people saying, oh, racism is worse, or cop abuse is worse, but it’s always been bad. It’s just we can see it now because there’s cell phones. I mean, just the advent of police body cameras is a good thing, because, number one, I think it makes the police less abusive, because now they’re on film, right? And now we can kind of see the truth of what they’re really dealing with, right?
But I think the cynicism is good, because I’m just waiting for the left to wake—the left is the worst one, the last one to go, because the left, they hate Trump, and yet they don’t hate democracy, even though democracy is what gave us Trump, right? So I’m waiting for them to wake up and go, oh, democracy is the problem. Or, oh, maybe Lincoln was wrong to keep the Union together. If Texas wants to secede, let them go. Maybe we’ll reach that point.
But I think the youth, they’re cynical. The average person is now cynical about their doctor’s advice, about vaccines. I mean, most people, they would have taken their doctor’s advice before COVID about, oh, you need to get the flu shot every year. You need to get your kids this vaccine schedule. Now there’s so many people that don’t know who to trust, which is not good in general, but it’s good given what we came from. So this lack of faith is—and so also they’re cynical about politics. They know Congress is corrupt and doesn’t work well. It’s just they need to give up their last vestige of their faith in the state in general, which is crumbling to some degree, and which I think is a good thing.
Mark Maresca: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, like you say, skepticism, cynicism, that could be bad if you’re applying it to some functional real-world, you know, situation. But you know where cynicism and skepticism is really, really, really super helpful? In a scam. You know, in a scam, in a deception. That’s where you want the most skepticism. Well, guess what statism is? At the root, it’s a deception. It’s a deception. It’s trying to convince people that they need moral leaders, when in fact we can kind of get along pretty well without them. So that makes it a scam, and to me skepticism of a scam can only be a healthy thing.
Mock the State
0:56:41
Stephan Kinsella: I think a Bastiat quote about the state, the great fiction, at which, you know, everyone lives at the expense of everyone else. And that’s why Hoppe has talked for years about the—he’s kind of always wanted to invite, like, Dave Smith or some comedian to PFS, because he thinks comedy or humor is important in the sense of, don’t take the state too seriously. Don’t give them the respect that they crave. Laugh and mock them. Call them out for what they are, mock them, don’t treat them like they belong to polite society. Mock the state, laugh at the state, because they deserve it. They deserve ridicule and mocking and mockery. And that’s what humor is good for. And humor is a good thing. Comedians are a good thing, because they keep us a little bit, you know, disrespectful of the state itself.
Mark Maresca: Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly right. We are at the hour, in fact a little over. So I want to make sure that if there’s anything else you wanted to plug or talk about, we carve out some time for it.
Coming Talks, and Copy This Book
0:57:44
Stephan Kinsella: No, I’ve nothing to plug. You can watch my channel, because I don’t have a regular podcast, as you know. I just put on there copies of interviews I’ve done with others and speeches I’ve done. But the interview I did this morning with Knut, and also the speech I gave in Free Cities, and also the panel I did in Helsinki, which is a great panel, between with me and Rahim and Knut, and also my talk on Adolf Reinach at the PFS, will, they all be coming out in the next, probably, a few weeks. So that’s what I—stay up.
In the meantime, I want to get back on—I want to start writing the book I’ve been wanting to write for a while, which is a brand new book on intellectual property, called Copy This Book, which will be my kind of comprehensive 200-, 300-page comprehensive treatment of the topic, which then you could ignore everything else I’ve written. It’ll be all in there. So that’s my next hobby for the next couple years.
Paths to Liberty, Including Rejecting IP
0:58:53
Mark Maresca: You know, I became what we would today call an ancap forever. So I was fine. So you might ask the question, what changes over the years? What do you change your mind on? Because there might not be too much. That was one of them. Because I was definitely in that Ayn Rand camp of, you know, intel—oh yeah, actually Galambos’s camp, where intellectual property is, you know, actually has a philosophical status above the rest. And that turned me around, so I’d very much appreciate you for that.
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, IP is a really good one, because it’s a big issue, which we didn’t realize was big until fifteen years ago. And it’s something we’ve gotten totally wrong. And it’s also pretty easy to see it once you sort out the principles that we have, and then you see it. So, and then it unlocks your ability to make progress in other areas. So it’s a really important one.
And what I find fascinating is that, at this point in my experience in the movement, I’ve seen people become libertarians for a number of ways. Originally it was primarily former Republicans who read Ayn Rand, okay, like, to be crude about it. Milton Friedman. Like, that was the beginning of the movement. Then there was another way, with Ron Paul, and dissatisfaction with the response to the finance crisis in 2008–2009. So Austrian economics, the debt, and the business cycle, and the banks, and all that stuff.
And then Bitcoin. So, but since Bitcoin—so I first met people that were Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. That was the first reason people became libertarians. And then, you know, they became aware of economics, and that made them more libertarian and more consistent. And then Ron Paul activism, but that was still kind of the same thing.
But then the Bitcoin thing drew in people. I think the initial Bitcoiners were crypto cypherpunk types, and also some Austrian-aware people, and some anti-Federal Reserve people. So they tended to be more Austrian and libertarian than normal, but not everyone. So the Bitcoin movement itself has created lots of libertarian and Austrian-economics-aware people. So Bitcoin has made libertarians out of people.
And every now and then I meet someone who says they didn’t become a libertarian, and then they realized I was right about IP and became anti-IP because of me. A couple times it’s been the other way around. Like they say, oh, I was just interested in the IP issue, and I read your thought on it, and I saw the light about IP, but that made me have to figure out and understand libertarianism and Austrian economics. So they became libertarian because of rejecting IP.
So you never know how an idea can lead to another exploration that can lead to a general enlightenment or awakening of a given person’s worldview, which I think is a good thing. It means there’s a lot of paths to liberty.
Mark Maresca: Intellectual paths to liberty. And there’s such an elegant tie-in too between intellectual property and the parallel institutions, because what would happen in something like, say, 3D printing or whatever, that again, using the term kneecap, it’s a kneecap to intellectual property pertaining to, you know, inventions or those kind of intellectual rights. And, like, what’s happened in the music industry, it’s technology that has basically caused it to become obsolete. And in there we can see the fundamental weakness of intellectual property.
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, I think when you have a societal change, it forces people to see kind of a conflict they didn’t realize they had in their ideas. They see, oh, I’ve been in favor of copyright, but now I’m in favor of Napster and free music, but there’s a tension. Which one do I choose? So you have to think about it, and you have to make a choice. And then the same thing is happening with 3D printing. You realize, well, what if we have 3D printers that can make an iPhone? If a patent blocks that, what do I choose? A free iPhone or patents?
And the same thing with AI. Everyone’s now seeing the benefit of AI, but they’re starting to realize that copyright might strangle it, because they can’t train without being liable for copyright infringement. So you have these growing moments where you have to choose between your cherished old ideas and an emerging technology, or you have to rethink it and maybe realize you were wrong and try to move forward, which I think is happening in rough fits and starts, which is, so, I mean, good.
Close, and the Kinsellanator
1:03:00
Mark Maresca: Yes, agreed, agreed. Okay, so I think right there we’ll wrap it up. We’ve covered a lot of great things which turn out to be good white pills, and they fit my show, so I’m happy about that. Thank you very, very, very much, Stephan, for spending time with me today on the show. Really appreciate it.
Stephan Kinsella: Thanks, Mark.
Mark Maresca: And again, folks, be sure to check out Stephan’s work linked in the show notes, and as well as all the links to the events that he attended.
Stephan Kinsella: I’ll show you the back of my shirt. This is the shirt I had made for the PFS. Kinsellanator. The Kinsellanator. Yeah, you know Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the Governator. I’m the Kinsellanator.
Mark Maresca: You’re the Kinsellanator, yes. You’re gonna have a lot more impact than he did in the long run. I promise you that. So thank you all, folks, for joining today. Again, be sure to check out Stephan’s work. Thank you for joining. Take care and see you next time.
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