StephanKinsella.com

Cato’s David Boaz, last August, in comparing South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (now embroiled in sex scandal) to Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, noted that while Palin had more buzz, Sanford had far more Serious Experience. “Like Palin, Sanford is a social and economic conservative. … He has four children and a modern political wife who worked on Wall Street for six years and has managed his campaigns.”

Palin’s only advantage over Sanford for the McCain campaign?–“she’s a woman.”

Boaz concludes:

Mark Sanford would have been an experienced executive who has already dealt with national and international issues and a great next leader of the Republican party. Sarah Palin? We’ll see.

Boaz is probably right that Sanford would have been the better choice–it would be great for him to be VP right now.

[Hat tip Skip Oliva]

[cross-posted at LRC]

• The State is not the government; we don’t own property; scarcity doesn’t mean rare; coercion is not aggression

In Comments on Scott McPherson’s “Stephan Kinsella Needs to Take A Nap”, I noted that “The libertarian supporters of the state sure seem to get annoyed when you point this out.”

And now Scott McPherson petulantly demands, in Is Albert Jay Nock a Statist Too?

Anarchists claim that anyone who advocates “aggression” is a statist. I have written a number of commentaries over the last decade, so perhaps I’ve overlooked something, but could someone please refer me to where in any of them I have advocated aggression?

You’re the one saying you oppose anarchy, which means you support the state. If you do, you support the aggression the state necessarily employs. The state taxes and monopolizes the institutions of justice–it uses force (violence, aggression) against innocent people (taxpayers; customers; competitors). Please explain why this is not aggression. Don’t say “but how would anarchy work?” That does not mean what you advocate is not aggression–it just means that you favor aggression for some reason (as all advocates of criminality do). (See What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist.)

If you are not for the power of a state to outlaw competition, compel membership, or tax, then fine, but you are an anarcho-libertarian like us, in this case. Which is it?

“I’m with Nock, that noted anarchist, when I say that I want a government, and that a government limited to the protection of my rights is possible. That may make me naïve, or foolish – but it doesn’t make me a statist.”

Yes, it does–if you advocate a state. If you merely are mistaken and are really advocating a stateless government that does not commit aggression, then you are not a statist, and are instead an anarchist. You’ll have to tell me which you are.

Update: see also The State is not the government; we don’t own property; scarcity doesn’t mean rare; coercion is not aggression.

Heh. An oldie from a goodie on LRC in 2004, which spawned this Not-reason attack, Kinsella Wants to License Breeding and a thread on anti-state.com.

License to Breed
Posted by Stephan Kinsella on September 29, 2004 01:09 PM

Court: Deadbeat Dad Can Have More Kids — The Ohio Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned a judge’s order that a man avoid having more children while on probation for failing to pay child support.

The court ruled 5-2 in favor of Sean Talty, saying his sentence was too broad because it did not include a method for lifting the ban if Talty caught up with his child-support payments.

Talty, 32, has seven children by five women. He was required to make “reasonable” efforts to avoid conception during his five-year probation after being convicted of not supporting three of the children.

Well it may not be the predominant libertarian view, but if I had to side here, I’d go with the lower court. This guy should be banned from having children. I’m sure this’ll give the chattering punks at Not Reason and libertines something else to chatter about.

I am tempted to favor banning anyone without a job from having kids, but I guess that’s over the line.

[continue reading…]

Swiss offer millionaires a haven away from the poor. See my 2004 LRC post Immigration Idea:

How about this compromise: we remove all barriers to immigration except one: we charge a fee. I propose we charge somewhere between $1 million and $10 million per family. That way you guarantee you get fairly decent (non-criminal, educated, successful, civil, etc.) quality immigrants.

If, say, 100,000 families (about 400,000 people, say) immigrate per year and pay $1 million each, that’s $100 billion per year.

which was roundly excoriated at Not-Reason.

[From my Webnote series]

See: Kinsella on Libertarianism and Gay Marriage (by Grok) (2025)

Update: See also

• Gay Marriage, LewRockwell.com (Feb. 12, 2004)
• “The” Libertarian View on Gay Marriage, LewRockwell.com (June 2006)
• Second Thoughts on Gay Marriage, StephanKinsella.com (Nov. 9, 2006)
• McElroy and Peron on Gay Marriage, StephanKinsella.com (July 16, 2009)
• Is Gay Marriage a Constitutional Right?, Mises Economics Blog (Jan. 8, 2010)
• California Gay Marriage Law Overturned: What Should Libertarians Think?, The Libertarian Standard (Aug. 4, 2010)
• Libertarian Answer Man: Promise and Marriage Contracts, StephanKinsella.com (March 11, 2024)

Like everyone, my political and ethical views have evolved over time. From a somewhat racialist milieu in rural Louisiana, I consciously rejected racism when I was in my young teens. From a devout Catholic youth I became a secularist and freethinker at a fairly young age. From libertarian-conservative hawkish Reaganism at 18 I quickly became a die-hard libertarian minarchist, then an anarchist. My initial conservative and Randian pro-American exuberance has given way to a much more critical view of America’s baleful effect on world history and my rosy view of its founding has been replaced with skepticism, disdain, scorn, and regret. On abortion, initially militantly pro-choice in the Randian fashion, over the years my aversion to it has grown deeper and deeper to where I see at least late-stage abortion to be tantamount to murder (though I still don’t favor its being outlawed by states). ¹ On affirmative action, my conservative and libertarian overboard “meritism” has given way to a more contrarian view. My initial attraction to natural rights and natural law type arguments slowly shifted to a more realistic and focused transcendental type approach. ² On intellectual property, despite my initial–but hesitant and troubled–assumption that it was legitimate, after struggling to find a better way to defend it than arguments such as Rand’s and those of utilitarians, I finally rejected it after realizing it is indeed incompatible with property rights. ³ And though I initially praised centralist libertarian ideas such as the Lochner-type caselaw praised by some libertarians I later came to develop a radical skepticism of the wisdom and legitimacy of trusting a central state to monitor state actions. For one more example, despite initially accepting the Hayekian knowledge arguments, I became more skeptical of their coherence in the wake of the Austrian “dehomogenization” debate.^*

And so it is with gay marriage. My views evolved from mild ambivalence and recommendation of civil unions (see Gay Marriage, Feb. 2004; “The” Libertarian View on Gay Marriage, June 2006) to an increasingly pro-gay marriage position (Second Thoughts on Gay Marriage, Nov. 2006). And it’s become even clearer to me now; I’m no longer reluctant. [Update: see my post California Gay Marriage Law Overturned: What Should Libertarians Think?; see also David Boaz, “Op-ed: Libertarians Have Long Led the Way on Marriage,” The Advocate (June 25, 2015); “Libertarian David Boaz on Gay Marriage” (Youtube); also Justin Raimondo, Gay Marriage; Charley Reese, Worried About Gay Marriage?; Lew Rockwell, Mises on Gay Marriage; Butler Shaffer, Gays Have Always Been Free To Marry; Daniel McCarthy, lose/lose; ]

Why am I for gay marriage? First, I’ve never been even slightly homophobic, despite the assumptions of prejudiced “enlightened” liberals (after all, I am from the South!). So that didn’t play into the gay marriage issue for me. I was initially somewhat opposed to gay marriage, but not for the standard reasons about it “damaging” the “institution of marriage” and all that malarkey, but because I feared (a) it would instantly grant more positive rights to gay couples, and (b) it was the thin end of the wedge and would be used to argue next for anti-discrimination law being applied to gays, which I of course did and do oppose. ⁴ I still agree with these concerns, but they are not dispositive.

The basic case for gay marriage is this: in a private order the state would not be involved. Contracts would be enforced by the private legal system, including contracts incidental to consensual regimes such as marriage. Marriage would be a private status recognized socially, with contractual and related legal effects: co-ownership defaults, joint liability presumptions, guardianship assumptions, medical decision and visitation rights, alimony or related default considerations upon termination, and the like. Initially religions and societal custom would regard only heterosexual unions as marriage, but eventually, with secularization of society, gay couples would start being more open, and referring to their partners as spouses, and have “wedding ceremonies.” At first mainstream society would be reluctant to accept homosexual unions in the concept or term “marriage,” but I suspect that politeness, manners, increasing exposure to and familiarity with open homosexuals (co-workers, family members), and increasing cosmopolitanness and secularization of society would result in an initially grudging including, finally more complete inclusion, perhaps always with a bit of an asterisk among some quarters. Or maybe not, but I think so. In any case the contractual regimes associated with any type of consensual union would be recognized and enforced legally, whether between hetero couples, homosexual couples, spinster sisters, frat buddies, group unions, whatever. The hetero couples, and perhaps one-man-many-wife groupings, would be referred to as marriages, the members as husband and wife. Perhaps the partners in a homosexual union would be referred to as married and spouses; perhaps not. I think so, eventually, but it’s irrelevant. There would be no legal battle; capitalist acts among consenting adults would be given legal effect, no matter what the accessory union is named.

But. The state is involved. Even now I think the state should not be involved in marriage, even if it insists on monopolizing the legal system. Ideally, the state should get out of the marriage business and enforce whatever contractual arrangements are ancillary to voluntary unions, whatever the members, whatever society, calls these various unions. [continue reading…]

1. Update: For a more recent presentation of my views, see KOL443 | Abortion: A Radically Decentralist Approach (PFS 2024). [↩]
2. See Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), chs. 5 & 6. [↩]
3. Legal Foundations of a Free Society, Part IV; Stephan Kinsella, You Can’t Own Ideas: Essays on Intellectual Property (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023). [↩]
4. E.g., as argued in 10 Years of Gay Marriage and Nothing Bad Happened, it led to the transgender movement and so on (see grok). See also Asmongold, This is not a meme anymore..  [↩]

From LRC in 2003:

Grow Up, Canada

[Posted at 09/02/03 10:30 PM by Stephan Kinsella on LewRockwell.com ]

From a 2004 LRC post:

Re: The Trouble with Feser (on Libertarianism)

A friend wrote me about the left-libertarians (see comment on Roderick Long’s “POOTMOP” Redux; Comment on Chartier’s Socialism revisited; The new libertarianism: anti-capitalist and socialist; comment on Kevin Carson’s post “Socialism: A Perfectly Good Word Rehabilitated”), with their bizarre obsession with localism, “bossism,” and the like:

I don’t think they’re that big of a problem for us. I doubt they’ll attract the bulk of libertarians, but “allies” against the state are useful. Let them form their own communes after the state is smashed if they like. Then you’ll probably see a migration from their communes to our territories.

I agree with all of this. They won’t attract any libertarians; they seem well intentioned but a bit clueless–they seem not even to realize that almost no one knows what they are talking about re “bossism,” “wage slavery,” localism, etc.

My comment on Marginal Revolution:

“I am pro-copyright, but once again the default settings make it too hard for successful negotiations to occur.”

Advocates of the abomination that is copyright should not be surprised at this. Maybe it is cause to re-think one’s support of artificial, special-interest legislation created out of nothing by a department of a criminal state. As I noted here, referring to a $1.92 million verdict against Jammie Thomas for “illegally” sharing 24 songs, “The pro-IP libertarians ought to hang their heads in shame. If they support this result, it’s unthinkably evil. If they oppose it–well, they really can’t, can they, since this is the result of having a state-run IP system–of having a state at all. Every IP advocate is a minarchist; you cannot have IP without state legislation. But once you have a state and empower it to “make” law artificially, you can’t complain about the law it does make–especially if it is IP law and you support IP. As Mises said, “No socialist author ever gave a thought to the possibility that the abstract entity which he wants to vest with unlimited power—whether it is called humanity, society, nation, state, or government—could act in a way of which he himself disapproves.”

Gary:

I think there is good reason to use “socialism” to mean something like opposition to:

1. bossism (that is to subordinative workplace hierarchy); and
2. deprivation (that is, persistent, exclusionary poverty, whether resulting from state-capitalist depredation, private theft, disaster, accident, or other factors.

Okayyy. But libertarianism is not against “bossism”, and therefore socialism in this sense is at most compatible with, while orthogonal to, libertarianism. [continue reading…]

A report by Joe Mullin on the sad plight of Fotki and other photo-sharing sights being targeted by patent-wielder FotoMedia. When will IP supporters realize asserting patents is, in the words of the Fotki’s Igor Shoifot, “evil.”

[cross-posted at AgainstMonopoly]