StephanKinsella.com

My comments on the Mises blog post by David Gordon on the death of philosopher G.A. Cohen: Stephan Kinsella

Tom Palmer has made a reputation of being a dishonest smearer of good people–so much so that anyone he criticizes can be presumed to be a good guy. So his criticism here backfires.

Published: August 10, 2009 10:18 AM [continue reading…]

I find that I use a nice blog post quite often as a sort of linkable reference for use in articles and blog posts and comments. So I will throw a lot of information and references in one blogpost, and it can be supplemented from time to time. Then the links to it always link to a nice little mini-article or post with further information to back up the point being made. And I’ll do this also at C4SIF.

see Grok conversation on this and The Louisiana Civil Code of 1825: Content, Influences and Languages; Past and Future: Returning to my Louisiana Roots

Related: All footnotes!

From my friend Manuel Lora.

This is wild. I found this when my 6 year old started telling me about how the Angler fish is one of the weirdest creatures b/c of its mating ritual. He described it but it didn’t sound right, so I googled it-…-sure enough, he was right. I found this list: I think the angler should be #1 not #7. But the octopus, #1, is weird.

My good friend John Wax is an excellent artist. See his prints and artwork here.

Heroic!

Firefox extension liberates US court docs from paywall

A new Firefox extension created by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton aims to tear down the federal judiciary’s PACER paywall. It uploads legal documents to a freely accessible mirror that is hosted by the Internet Archive.

Latest pretentious terms from today’s Slate Political Gabfest (feel free to email me suggestions or leave them in the comments to the main page):

• on Martha’s Vineyard [PG 8-12-09, Plotz–as if everyone knows it’s an island]
• peripatetically [PG 8-12-09, Plotz]

• The Great Fractional Reserve/Freebanking Debate
• On Coinbase, Bitcoin, Fractional-Reserve Banking, and Irregular Deposits
• Am I a Bitcoin Maximalist?
• UK Proposal for Banking Reform: Fractional-Reserve Banking versus Deposits and Loans
• Musings on Fractional-Reserve Banking in a Bitcoin Age; Physicalist Shock Absorber Metaphors
•  Michael S. Milano, “Privacy and Fungibility: The Forgotten Virtues of Sound Money,” Mises Wire (07/05/2025)

From the Mises blog; archived comments below.

Someone asked me the proper way to view deposit contracts, in the context of a discussion about fractional-reserve banking (FRB). He noted that in my A Libertarian Theory of Contract I state that contractual obligations can either be “to do” or “to give”; and that “to do” contracts are generally not enforceable due to specific performance, but can only result in damages if non performance actually occurs. This implies that the only real enforceable obligations are “to give” something. My correspondent asked me if this means that a deposit contract is not really a contract–i.e., based on the idea that a deposit is a “to do” contract (i.e., safekeep this deposit), while a loan would be a “to give” contract (i.e., return the money at the end of the term). An edited version of my reply follows.

First, I don’t view a loan as an obligation to return “the” money. It’s just a transfer of title to a certain sum of future money (IF you own it at the time). See my Contracts paper, pp. 32 et seq.

Second: in my article I wrote: “Contractual obligations may be classified as obligations to do or to give. An obligation to give may be viewed as a transfer of title to property, as it is an obligation to give ownership of the thing to another. An obligation to do is an obligation to perform a specific action, such as an obligation to sing at a wedding or paint someone’s house. ” The purpose of noting the positive law’s obligation to do/to give classification was to show that even in the current law, it’s really all about title transfer–to set the stage for Rothbard/Evers’s title-transfer theory of contract. Actually, I don’t view contracts as really being obligations at all; they are just title transfers. If I sell you my apple for $1, then the title to my apple transfers to you, even if/while I still (temporarily) possess it. Now, I am holding your apple, and I now have an obligation to let you have it, when you demand it, but not because of a contract or obligation to do, but just because of property rights, which the contract has rearranged. Contracts change, or rearrange property titles. Once this happens, people can then have different obligations–obligations to respect the property rights of the owners. If you find yourself in possession of property belonging to another person because a contract’s title-transfer provision has been triggered, even though it was your money a minute before, you now have to respect the wishes of the (new) owner.

[continue reading…]

In this post, Tibor’s Tantrum, the blogger chastises my friend, the noted libertarian scholar Tibor Machan, for lacking a sense of proportion. This charge is unfair, but he does point to a somewhat amusing exchange in the comments to this thread.

This is funny (NOGap).

A recent MacBreak Weekly podcast had a very cool recommendation: The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time, and I learned about a nice iPhone/mobile phone app, Shoot It!, in a recent GeekBrief episode.

Forbidden City is an application for all platforms, providing an amazing “3D Virtual World of the Forbidden City in Beijing.” China and IBM apparently spent $2M developing this free application.

Shoot It! allows you to create a postcard from your iPhone from any picture in your phone, and have it mailed to whoever you want, for a modest fee. I plan to use this from now on, on vacation, instead of buying a postcard, addressing, buying a stamp, and finding a post office. The only drawback that I see is they don’t include a way to upload a picture from your computer to your account — you have to use your phone. That’s stupid. If I have a nice pic I took with a camera on vacation, I have to first put it on the computer, then sync with the iphone to get it on there, or email it to myself and save the email attachment to my iPhone photo library, and then use Shoot It!. I can’t see why they won’t let you do it from the website interface as well; but this will probably be fixed and in any event is just a minor annoyance.