StephanKinsella.com

Note All subscribers to the Libertarian Papers Facebook GROUP: I have migrated that group to this Facebook PAGE instead. Please become a fan of this instead of the old group.

I ordered an iPad a couple weeks ago and tried to order the AppleCare warranty. I then received a notice saying this had to be removed from my order because Apple had not yet received “regulatory approval” yet for my state (Texas). I just received this email from Apple:

You were notified recently that AppleCare Protection Plan was pending regulatory approval in your state and this item was canceled from your order.

We are pleased to tell you that Apple is now authorized to sell the AppleCare Protection Plan for iPad in your state.

Please reply to this email if you would like us to add AppleCare Protection Plan for iPad back to your order.

Sincerely,
The Apple Store Team

As my friend Brian Martinez noted, it’s ridiculous Apple needed the state’s permission to offer a warranty for its own product. Thank God the state is here to protect us!

The brilliantly innovative band OK Go has decided to leave its label, EMI, and and starting up its own company, Paracadute Recordings. The band’s Damian Kulash explains why in a fascinating interview with Leo Laport on TWIT. This presages the direction a lot of creators and artists will start to take as they leave the copyright-mired Old Media Dinosaurs behind.

Great Cato podcast interview by Caleb Brown with Billy Murphy of HBO’s great show The Wire on police, race, the drug war–he has some great comments on why the police have gotten worse, in part because of police mobility; why judges tend to “believe” police; and the disparate treatment given to minorities by cops and the legal system. Outstanding interview and comments.

My brother and I hosted a very nice dinner party for my parents for their 50th Wedding Anniversary in February; my wife and I assembled some of the pictures into a nice photobook using iPhoto. It’s here (35MB). Apple’s iPhoto photobooks sure come out nice–amazing. They look professional.

The photographer was John Lewis, who was excellent and reasonable in his charges–and he gave us the full digital files, which we insisted on ahead of time (other photographers balked). Below is the video I prepared using Animoto and played at the party for them and their guests–which included 3 couples who have been friends of our parents for decades who showed up as surprise guests.

During our recent Spring Break trip to Rosemary Beach with another family, the Khans, we had photos taken by a photographer we used last year–Steve Wells, who is also excellent, reasonably priced, and was willing to provide the digital files. Again, we made a photobook using iPhoto, which is here (18MB).

An LRC search yields several entries in this series:

1. My Libertarian Life by Roderick T. Long

   Jan 4, 2003 … The following story is part of Walter Block’s Autobiography Archive. My Libertarian Life. by Roderick T. Long. I’ve been fortunate enough to …
   www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/long2.html – Cached

2. It All Began With Fred Schwarz by Gary North

   Dec 16, 2002 … The following story is part of Walter Block’s Autobiography Archive. It All Began With Fred Schwarz. by Gary North …
   www.lewrockwell.com/north/north145.html – Cached – Similar [continue reading…]

From my comment to my post Machanarchy:

“Incidentally, I see in David Miller’s lengthy review of the Machan/Long book on Amazon, he highly recommends Hasnas’s and Long’s contributions to the book, which are: John Hasnas, The Obviousness of Anarchy (2); and Roderick Long, Market Anarchism as Constitutionalism. These papers are really good.”

[Update: See also Hasnas: Common Law, Anarchy, etc.: Common Law Liberalism: A New Theory of the Libertarian Society]

Hasnas is also author of the fantastic paper The Myth of the Rule of Law.

Tibor Machan in Essay on “Government” v. “State” distinguishes between state and government, and says:

Labeling an allegedly “near pure” libertarian opponent a “supporter of the state” or “a statist” does carry a painful sting. One would hope, however, that just this temptation is resisted by serious scholars.

Now, sure, if you distinguish government from state, it’s unfair to call an advocate of government a statist, just as it’s unfair to call anarchist pro-chaos. However, anarchism is anti-state, not anti-government–if we are keeping these distinctions in mind. So if you carefully distinguish government from state, so that you are advocating only government but not advocating the state, it seems to me this makes you an anarchist. That is, unless you are advocating government and the state, in which case the charge of “statism” is more accurate.

So are anarchists in favor of “government,” as distinct from the state? well, I suppose it comes down to a question of what you mean by “government”. If we all agree that libertarians should be against “the state,” and we all agree that even anarchists favor some institutions regarding justice, defense, law, then the question now is: is the government you advocate a state, or merely a private institution?

And I think we can answer this not by engaging in continually nuanced semantics but in looking at the fundamentals of libertarianism: the anarchists oppose the state because they oppose aggression (see my What It Means to be an Anarcho-Capitalist and What Libertarianism Is). If there is an agency that commits institutionalized aggression then they (we) oppose it because it commits aggression. And they have to give a name to this “agency that commits institutionalized aggression”: we call it “state”. Hoppe, in my mind, accurately defines “state” as follows:

Let me begin with the definition of a state. What must an agent be able to do to qualify as a state? This agent must be able to insist that all conflicts among the inhabitants of a given territory be brought to him for ultimate decision-making or be subject to his final review. In particular, this agent must be able to insist that all conflicts involving himself be adjudicated by him or his agent. And implied in the power to exclude all others from acting as ultimate judge, as the second defining characteristic of a state, is the agent’s power to tax: to unilaterally determine the price that justice seekers must pay for his services.

Based on this definition of a state, it is easy to understand why a desire to control a state might exist. For whoever is a monopolist of final arbitration within a given territory can make laws. And he who can legislate can also tax. Surely, this is an enviable position. [See Hoppe, Reflections on the Origin and the Stability of the State.]

So when you talk about government, the question is not how we classify it or what the best words are for state, government, etc., semantically: but rather: the question is: does the “government” that “minarchists” (?) favor engage in institutionalized aggression, or not? If not, it’s not a state, and it’s not unlibertarian. If it does, it’s merely a type of state.

Now the anarchists believe you can have private institutions provide law, justice, defense, without necessarily engaging in systematic and institutionalized aggression–that is, without being a state. Whether you want to call such institutions “government” or not seems to me to be purely semantic, esp. if we grant there is a distinction between state and government. The remaining question is simply what type of government the “minarchists” (?) favor: do they favor a government that has the authority to commit institutionalized aggression, or not? If they do, then they are pro-state, since such a government is a state. If they do not, they are anarchists, it seems to me, since private, non-state, non-aggressive institutions of law, justice, and defense is exactly what we anarchists favor.

[Mises crosspost]

Early in Atlas Shrugged there is a scene of Dagny Taggart on a train, dozing; she hears some guy whistling a tune she knows must be from the composer Halley; she asks him what it is, he says it’s Halley’s 5th Concerto. “But he didn’t write one,” she says; the boy realizes he’s let the cat out the bag and clams up. Later on she finds herself whistling or humming the tune too.

Now this is a perfect example of IP theft. It’s a derivative work or public performance–stealing the guy’s pattern without his permission! Yet Rand portrays the young guy and Dagny as good, virtuous. Therefore, she sees no problem with this IP theft.

Who to side with on this issue: left-libertarians, who advance the confused hypothesis that “left” is better than “right”; or the great Henry Hazlitt? Here is what he wrote in the preface to his wonderful novel, Time Will Run Back: “as ‘capitalism’ is merely a name for freedom in the economic sphere, the theme of my novel might be stated more broadly: the will to freedom can never be permanently stamped out.”