see also Van Dun on Lawyers and the Law, Federal Judges Aren’t Real Judges, On “Unowned” State Property, Legal Positivism, Ownership vs. Possession,

From mises blog, Aug. 22, 2006

The brilliant and erudite Belgian libertarian legal theorist Frank Van Dun has a powerful, rich and provocative draft article: Comment on R.P.Murphy’s & Gene Callahan’s Critique of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics [Note: updated version, in PDF, here: Argumentation Ethics and the Philosophy of Freedom]. It’s a response to recent criticism of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s argumentation ethics.

Van Dun is well-suited to join the fray, having himself written on this topic before, as he explains in his draft comment. For more on Van Dun, see:

• Van Dun, Frank, Economics and the Limits of Value-Free Science, Reason Papers 11 (Spring 1986): 24
• Van Dun, Frank, On the Philosophy of Argument and the Logic of Common Morality, in Argumentation: Approaches to Theory Formation, E.M. Barth and J.L. Martens, eds. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1982), p. 281
• Hoppe’s “argumentation ethics“
• my New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory, 12:2 Journal of Libertarian Studies: 313-26 (Fall 1996) (Dutch version Hebben we rechten? Nieuwe rationalistische richtingen in de Libertarische Rechten Theorie)
• More materials on discourse ethics

Comments (11)

• Person
• Came across this little gem in the Van Dun reply to M/C:”…that argumentation is between one person and another, between an ‘I’ and a ‘You’, and also that the success or force of the argumentation does not depend on who is the ‘I’ and who is the ‘You’.”It just made me think about how Stephan Kinsella always tries to respond to my arguments by finding something about me, or how he claimed Murphy and Callahan “were not libertarians” and “were ethical skeptics” in his reply to them on this topic.

• Published: August 22, 2006 11:48 AM

• Richard Garner
• Suppose that a slave is instructed to go to Hoppe and argue that he, the slave, does not own himself. Where is the performative contradiction in this?

• Published: August 22, 2006 12:18 PM

• Stephan Kinsella
• Well, clarify your query. First, is it, or is it not, *genuine* argument? This matters.Second, clarify what exactly the slave is saying. Is he saying he does not actually own himself; or legally; or that he consents to the relationship with some master; or that he agrees that he “should” be dominated by the master? What exactly is the slave saying?

• Published: August 22, 2006 12:40 PM

• Richard Garner

• Well, clarify your query. First, is it, or is it not, *genuine* argument? This matters.

  Does it even need to be an argument? A slave, one day, comes up to Mr Hoppe, and says, “Mr. Hoppe, my Master has instructed me to tell you that he owns me.”

  Second, clarify what exactly the slave is saying. Is he saying he does not actually own himself;

  Sure, he is saying that somebody else owns him.

  or legally;

  Well, I had in mind, when thinking of the scenario, some period in ancient Roman history, so perhaps, yeah, we could say legally. I’m not sure of the relevance.

  or that he consents to the relationship with some master;

  Consents is a tricky question, since this might depend on whether you are using a moralised notion of consent or not. However, suppose that this wasn’t the result of some voluntary slave contract a la Nozick, but instead was imposed against the slave’s will. What difference does that make?

  or that he agrees that he “should” be dominated by the master?

  Whether he agrees or not may well be irrelevent to the question of whether or not he is a slave.

  What exactly is the slave saying?

  He is saying that he does not own himself. If he is a slave, a person owned by another person, this statement is true.

• Published: August 22, 2006 6:06 PM

• Paul Edwards
• Richard,“Does it even need to be an argument? A slave, one day, comes up to Mr Hoppe, and says, “Mr. Hoppe, my Master has instructed me to tell you that he owns me.”�?Yes. It needs to be an argument. The question is can anything other than self-ownership be justified, and a justification must take place during argumentation.

  “Sure, he is saying that somebody else owns him.�?

  What do you think this would prove? Hoppe is not claiming the slave is not considered to be a slave by his owner, by others or by the slave himself. So the slave’s confirming this fact verbally is not in question nor is it relevant. The question is: is slavery of non-aggressors justifiable? This slave’s statement of his condition of slavery does nothing to answer this question.

  “…suppose that this wasn’t the result of some voluntary slave contract a la Nozick, but instead was imposed against the slave’s will. What difference does that make?�?

  Slavery imposed against the non-aggressing slave’s will is unjustified, whereas slavery imposed against a criminal is or may be justified.

  “Whether he agrees or not may well be irrelevent to the question of whether or not he is a slave.�?

  And whether or not he is a slave is definitely irrelevant to the question of whether slavery can be justified.

  “He is saying that he does not own himself. If he is a slave, a person owned by another person, this statement is true.�?

  The statement may be true in the sense that he is treated as a slave and viewed as a slave by others and even himself. This is however, irrelevant to whether his being a slave is justified.

  I’d elaborate on why a slave saying he is a slave is irrelevant to a justification of slavery, but van Dun does this pretty well in his article. Do a search on “slave” in the text and read the surrounding paragraphs.

• Published: August 22, 2006 7:40 PM

• Stephan Kinsella
• R. Garner:First, I endorse and hereby incorporate by reference Paul Edwards’s comments to you (how’s that for some lawyer-talk!).NSK: Well, clarify your query. First, is it, or is it not, *genuine* argument? This matters.

  RG: Does it even need to be an argument? A slave, one day, comes up to Mr Hoppe, and says, “Mr. Hoppe, my Master has instructed me to tell you that he owns me.”

  Hoppe’s argument is that argumentation presupposes the libertarian ethic, and that therefore if you engage in argument and propose something non-libertarian then you are contradicting yourself.

  So the contradiction plays out only when there is (a) genuine argumentation (of the type that presupposes libertarian principles); and (b) someone who proposes a non-libertarian ethics.

  In your case, it is not clear whether this is argumentation. Apparently the Master ordered the slave to say those words, and if he is being ordered, presumably he is not free to really change his mind and accept Hoppe’s counterarguments. HOw is it an argument?

  If we somehow assume the Master gave the slave permission to be totally free to argue and to accept whatever conclusion he believes right, solely on the force of the aguments made, then I suppose it might be an argument. So. Suppose this is so, and the slave, call him “num-nuts,” says, “Master owns me.” Is this proposing a non-libertarian ethic?

  Why would it be? It might be a (legal) fact that in this community Master owns num-nuts. Num-nuts is then just stating the truth. How is this proposing a non-libertarian ethic?

  Now, let me go ahead and answer teh rest of the hypothetical you should have posed, if you had really understood argumentation ethics.

  Suppose Num-nuts says, “I am owned by Master, and this is right and good; and it’s okay for some people to own others, even if they didn’t do anything wrong to the owner.” (See why I called him Num-nuts? I think ahead.)

  In this case, it is obvious that Num-nuts’ status as a slave is irrelevant to whether there is a contradiction or not. If it is a genuine argumment, it merely means his master gave him permission to argue. And if he is a slave and says slavery is okay, he is actually consenting to his enslavement, so it’s not really enslavement! Now, you might say, well, he is not really consenting, he is forced to agree to this proposition–hey, if that’s the case, it’s not really argumentation and we are back to square one. For your hypo to work you have to assume the slave is free to say what he really believes and is not coerced. Which means, if he defends slavery, he’s not a slave. Which means, Num-nuts pro-slavery comments in the argument are no different than if the Master or some other free person utters them.

  So all we have is a person S engaging in argument, saying “Slavery is justifiable.” His status as slave is irrelevant to whether there is a contradiction or not (in fact, as noted above, he really can’t say he is okay with slavery and be a slave; he is just a willing masochist). Moreover, even if he were somehow still a slave, it still does not affect whether his statement is a contradiction or not. The only question is whether the libertarian ethic is presupposed by the activity or argumentation or not. That is the only question really. And to answer this, it is utterly irrelevant whether the parties to a genuine argument are “really” slaves, or not. What matters is whether argumentation presupposes the libertarian ethic as justified.

  NSK: Second, clarify what exactly the slave is saying. Is he saying he does not actually own himself;

  RG: Sure, he is saying that somebody else owns him.

  Since you apparently do not understand the nuances here, or are unwilling to engage them, I”ll assume here you mean the slave is merely stating a legal fact: that under the legal system, his Master has a legal right to administer force to the slave to induce him to do what the Master wants. IN this case, there is no contradiction at all because the slave is not saying he supports slavery.

  RG: Well, I had in mind, when thinking of the scenario, some period in ancient Roman history, so perhaps, yeah, we could say legally. I’m not sure of the relevance.

  Right, that’s become clear.

  RG: Consents is a tricky question, since this might depend on whether you are using a moralised notion of consent or not. However, suppose that this wasn’t the result of some voluntary slave contract a la Nozick, but instead was imposed against the slave’s will. What difference does that make?

  It makes no difference at all. What I was getting at was the nature of Num-nuts’ statement: was he merely recognizing a legal fact (he is owned), or was he endorsing it? HE apparently is only doing the former, which means he is not engaging in contradiction.

  NSK: or that he agrees that he “should” be dominated by the master?

  RG: Whether he agrees or not may well be irrelevent to the question of whether or not he is a slave.

  Well, if he agrees, he is arguably consenting so it not a slave, is he? But even if you are right: it does not matter whther it is relevant to the question of whether he is a slave, because as I explained above, it does not matter whether he is a slave or not, for purposes of determining whether his statements are a dialogical contrdiction or not. If he engages in genuine argument, somehow (whether he is a slave or not), then if he asserts a non-libertarian ethic, he is engaged in a contradiction. Why? Because the argument preuspposes the libertarian ethic as justifiable.

  If you disagree then you only disagree with the latter statement, and that is what you should focus on.

  RG: He is saying that he does not own himself. If he is a slave, a person owned by another person, this statement is true.

  Yes. And irrelevant.

• Published: August 22, 2006 8:41 PM

• Geoffrey Allan Plauche
• It seems to me that Hoppe’s argument only works, if at all, for people who think that the purpose of argumentation is only to discover truth and/or only for those engaging in “genuine” argumentation. For anyone not engaged in “genuine” argumentation – that is, for anyone seemingly arguing but really just trying to persuade others over to his or her own point of view – there would be no performative contradiction in espousing a non-libertarian point of view. Also, hypothetically, what about people who do not believe that the purpose of argumentation is only to discover truth but rather and primarily to persuade (i.e., as a more effective (in the long run) and less costly and less risky means than violence)? They already know the truth afterall (via intuition, revelation, feelings, their superior intellect, or what have you).I still don’t see why a master and his slave can’t have a “genuine” argument. Let’s say we have a particularly intellectual slave-owner and he likes to keep philosophers as slaves, to gain from their wisdom and have debates with them. It seems to me that he very well can have an argument with his philosopher slave. They could have arguments about topics that the slave-owner allows to be discussed. And even if the slave-owner allows the topic of slavery to be debated, they could argue about that. Maybe the slave-owner would win such an argument, maybe he wouldn’t; and let’s say for the sake of argument that he would lose against the superior arguments of his philosopher-slave, recognize this, and then proceeds to free all of his slaves. I’d say an argument took place. But even if he won the argument – let’s say because his philosopher-slave, for whatever reason, didn’t come up with very good arguments against slavery – I would say that an argument took place. It seems to me that as long as the slave-owner allows the slave control over his own person for the purpose of debating and it is clear to both parties that there will be no repercussions to the slave for whatever arguments he may make in the course of the debate, that genuine argumentation (and no performative contradiction) will have taken place even though during the course of the debate the slave-owner sincerely believed that he justifiably owned the slave. In short, it seems that control, not ownership, of one’s person during the course of the debate and an absence of punishment for anything that may be said during the course of the debate, are all that is needed for “genuine” argumentation.

• Published: August 24, 2006 9:41 AM

• Stephan Kinsella
• Plauche:
  

  It seems to me that Hoppe’s argument only works, if at all, for people who think that the purpose of argumentation is only to discover truth and/or only for those engaging in “genuine” argumentation. For anyone not engaged in “genuine” argumentation – that is, for anyone seemingly arguing but really just trying to persuade others over to his or her own point of view – there would be no performative contradiction in espousing a non-libertarian point of view.

   

  So what? The fact that there are uncivilized criminals is no disproof of a normative claim. Hoppe’s claim is only that one cannot actually ever justify a non-libertarian norm; and that only a libertarian norm is justified. Of course only those who care about justification–those who engage in genuine argumentation–even care about this. But so what? This comment of yours actually further bolster’s Hoppe’s case. You are basically saying that the only way to avoid the contradiction is to not genuinely argue. That in effect means that if and to the extent you are really engaged in argument, you are demonstrating your acceptance of the underlying libertarian norms and cannot contradict yourself by arguing against them.

  Also, hypothetically, what about people who do not believe that the purpose of argumentation is only to discover truth but rather and primarily to persuade (i.e., as a more effective (in the long run) and less costly and less risky means than violence)? They already know the truth afterall (via intuition, revelation, feelings, their superior intellect, or what have you).

  If and to the extent they are engaged in genuine argumentation they have to be open to hearing the other side’s reasons and potentially changing their mind based on the force of the others’ ideas alone. In any event, these people cannot atually engage in genuine argument and deny the libertarian ethic, since a genuine argument is required to justify anything, and also presupposes the libertarian ethic.

  I still don’t see why a master and his slave can’t have a “genuine” argument. Let’s say we have a particularly intellectual slave-owner and he likes to keep philosophers as slaves, to gain from their wisdom and have debates with them. It seems to me that he very well can have an argument with his philosopher slave. They could have arguments about topics that the slave-owner allows to be discussed.

  Let’s suppose a master M and slave S can have a genuine argument. If so this is only if and to the extent the Master in effect frees the slave so as to be free from the threat of coercion if he refuses to accept the Master’s propositions. The Master himself would have to recognize at least his own right to control his body, and to be able to homestead resources in order to have an argument, and to be able to survive in order to have one; and he would have to recognize the value of a conflict-free mode of interacting; and he would have to recognize the value of justifying propositions and being able to engage in the activity of justifying; and he would have to value the assignment of property rules that permit conflicts to be avoided. Given all this, Rothbardian and Austrian reasoning shows that his only choice is to accept the libertarian “first use” rule of property assignment. This is the only one that fulfills all the requirements above.

  And even if the slave-owner allows the topic of slavery to be debated, they could argue about that.

  Sure; the master would, in asserting his right to own the slave, be contradicting his other necessarily held view that the libertarian ethic is justified. So he is contradicting himself.

  Maybe the slave-owner would win such an argument, maybe he wouldn’t

  Of cousre he wouldn’t, since slavery is unjustified and unjustifiable, and becuase (and *just* because) it contradicts the ethic presupposed in argumentation as such.

  ; and let’s say for the sake of argument that he would lose against the superior arguments of his philosopher-slave, recognize this, and then proceeds to free all of his slaves. I’d say an argument took place.

  Sure. O, Happy day.

  … I would say that an argument took place. It seems to me that as long as the slave-owner allows the slave control over his own person for the purpose of debating and it is clear to both parties that there will be no repercussions to the slave for whatever arguments he may make in the course of the debate, that genuine argumentation (and no performative contradiction) will have taken place even though during the course of the debate the slave-owner sincerely believed that he justifiably owned the slave.

  The question is not whether a slave can argue. The question is this: if and when there is a genuine argument, do the participants presuppose the libertarian ethic? This is really the only question. If they do, then anyone who proposes a non-libertarian ethic contradicts himself–whether he is the slave, master, or dog-catcher.

  In short, it seems that control, not ownership, of one’s person during the course of the debate and an absence of punishment for anything that may be said during the course of the debate,

  But the participants demonstrate their *preference* for argumentation *as an activity* and they demonstrate their *preference* for this *conflict-free mode of interacting*. They demonstrate their recognition of the undeniable fact that propositions can only be justified argumentatively, and that they *should be* justified argumentatively. They recognize the value of argumentation; and the factual (conflict-free, control-recognizing) aspects of argumentation); and thus recognize the value of people having control over their properties. They recognize, moreover, the value of rules that assign ownerhsip of title to scarce resources at least sufficient to permit them to have survived long enough to argue and to control enough resources to engage in the argument. This means that they cannot advocate a property rule that “no one is permitted to use property”, because if this were followed argumentation would not be possible. Yet if they cannot consistently advocate this, they also cannot advocate any collective ownership rule, because it woudl be the same thing. They also cannot advocate that there be NO rule; and they cannot advocate a PARTICULARISTIC rule since by arguing they accept univeralizability.

  So what is left? Here we have it that no participant in genuine argument can without contradiction (a) deny the value of conflict-free interaction; (b) deny the value of rules that permit some use of scarce resources sufficient to avoid conflict sufficient to permit the participants to engage in argument and to survive long enough to have done this; (c) deny that it is good that some individuals are property owners so that the argument can proceed (even if both arguers are slaves, there has to be some independent, sovereign owner who permits the slaves to argue; if the slaves are prisoners being punished for a crime, then there is an argumentive distinction between master and slave; if not, then whatever basis underlies the presupposed ownership of the ultimate “master” consenting to the argument, must apply also to the slave(s)); (d) argue that there be no property rules; (e) argue that there be a collectivist property rule where everyone owns everyone else; (f) argue for a late-comer rule; (g) argue for particularistic rules.

  Given all this, it is obvious that the ONLY rule that is compatible with these argumenative restrictions is the unvarnished, unlimited libertarain first-use appropriation rule. For only this one is compatible with the body-ownership rule presuspposed by the arguers. Only this one solves conflicts. Only this one is not particularistic, and universalizable. Only this one avoids the nihilism of advocating NO property rule.

• Published: August 24, 2006 10:22 AM

• Geoffrey Allan Plauche
• Stephan, I think you have misinterpreted, misunderstood, or overlooked some important points in my argument.Notice that you quote the following line of mine: “Maybe the slave-owner would win such an argument, maybe he wouldn’t.”But not this one immediately following it: “But even if he won the argument – let’s say because his philosopher-slave, for whatever reason, didn’t come up with very good arguments against slavery – I would say that an argument took place.”

  I do think that slavery is unjustifiable, but that is a separate issue from the quality of the arguments put forth by the slave-owner and his philosopher-slave. The slave-owner could win an argument over the justness of slavery if his philosopher-slave provides weaker arguments than he does. You’re conflating the truth of the conclusions with the strength of the arguments and assuming, contrary to the stipulations given in my example, that the parties in the argument provide the best possible arguments for their positions.

  You say: “The question is not whether a slave can argue.”

  But this precisely is the question. If a slave can argue, genuinely argue, then genuine argumentation takes place. This question and the question you insist on are in fact related.

  You say: “slavery is unjustified and unjustifiable, and becuase (and *just* because) it contradicts the ethic presupposed in argumentation as such.”

  But I don’t see that you, or Hoppe, or Van Dun, have established this.

  You say: “Let’s suppose a master M and slave S can have a genuine argument. If so this is only if and to the extent the Master in effect frees the slave so as to be free from the threat of coercion if he refuses to accept the Master’s propositions.”

  In effect? It seems like you are talking about control here, not self-ownership. This is, I think, where you, Hoppe, and Van Dun go wrong. You conflate self-ownership with control. The slave may “in effect” be free (for the purpose of debating only) when his owner grants him the control necessary to engage in argumentation and promises that he will not be punished for speaking freely. But this does not establish that the slave must not be a slave, i.e., that he must have self-ownership, in order to engage in argumentation; it does not by itself establish that the slave must be set free in the sense of being released from his bondage in order for genuine argumentation to occur. In other words, this does not get you from the ethics of argumentation to libertarian self-ownership. Something else beyond the ethics of argumentation is needed to generalize the conditions necessary for genuine argumentation beyond argumentation to human activity in general. And something more is needed beyond that to establish that not merely control is needed but that self-ownership is true and people should therefore and on that basis be left in control of themselves.

  Van Dun is correct on page 6 of his essay that I would performatively contradict myself if I claim that an argumentatively justified conclusion is justified only within the context of argumentation itself, but this is not what I am claiming. If you or I successfully argue that libertarian self-ownership is justified, its justification is not limited to the context of our argument. I am merely arguing that the argument that the ethics of argumentation by itself establishes the justification of libertarian self-ownership fails.

  I’ll grant you that if in the course of argumentation the slave-owner finds himself unable to defeat the anti-slavery arguments of his philosopher-slave, then should he refuse to free his slave he would be engaging in a performative contradiction: namely, professing to engage in argumentation, which presupposes certain normative commitments, and then refusing to respect said commitments when he loses the argument. This performative contradiction stems not from the claim that argumentation presupposes libertarian self-ownership and that therefore he cannot simultaneously claim to own slaves and engage in argumentation without contradiction; rather, it stems from the fact, stipulated in my example here, that he has lost the argument – having failed to refute his slave’s anti-slavery argument – and then refuses to respect the commitment he made in engaging in argumentation to accept conclusions of the winning argument.

  If one wants to restrict the meaning of “genuine” argumentation to something that requires self-ownership, one has to make implicit or explicit (historically mostly implicit as far as I can tell) assumptions that are not justified by argumentation ethics itself but rather form the justificational foundations of argumentation ethics and which themselves still need to be justified. Argumentation ethics cannot stand alone. To be effective, it must be situated within a broader and deeper philosophical and ethical theory.

• Published: August 24, 2006 11:44 AM

• Geoffrey Allan Plauche
• I would like to add, by way of clarification, that I do not think that merely winning an argument is enough to bind the loser to the conclusions of the winning argument. Again, it is possible to have a true conclusion but bad arguments for it, and one could lose an argument on such grounds. It would be perverse if the ethics of argumentation entailed that those who are less intelligent, logical, educated, or are for whatever reason not good arguers, would have to accept slavery as justified if they could not refute it. There are many bad arguments for libertarianism, but their proponents are not thereby obligated to accept statism. This is yet another reason why the ethics of argumentation cannot stand alone.

• Published: August 24, 2006 12:05 PM

• Stephan Kinsella
• Plauche:
  

  Stephan, I think you have misinterpreted, misunderstood, or overlooked some important points in my argument.

  And one just “doesn’t do” this, in an argument, right? It’s not … permitted? by the … rules of argumentation? 🙂

  I do think that slavery is unjustifiable, but that is a separate issue from the quality of the arguments put forth by the slave-owner and his philosopher-slave.

  YOu can never justify that which is not justifiable.

  The slave-owner could win an argument over the justness of slavery if his philosopher-slave provides weaker arguments than he does. You’re conflating the truth of the conclusions with the strength of the arguments and assuming,

  Silly me, I would think an argument’s strength comes from its being correct.

  Could someone also “win” the side of an argument contending that A is not A; or that 1 + 1 = 3?

  You say: “The question is not whether a slave can argue.”But this precisely is the question. If a slave can argue, genuinely argue, then genuine argumentation takes place.

  Er, okay. How does that show the argument does not presuppose the libertarian ethic?

  You say: “slavery is unjustified and unjustifiable, and becuase (and *just* because) it contradicts the ethic presupposed in argumentation as such.”But I don’t see that you, or Hoppe, or Van Dun, have established this.

  In any case, it is unrelated to whether a slave is part of a genuine argumet. The identity or legal status of the participants has nothing to do with anything. Whatever is presupposed is presupposed, by virtus of its being argumentation, not because of who the participants are.

  You say: “Let’s suppose a master M and slave S can have a genuine argument. If so this is only if and to the extent the Master in effect frees the slave so as to be free from the threat of coercion if he refuses to accept the Master’s propositions.”In effect? It seems like you are talking about control here, not self-ownership.

  Ownership is just the right to control.

  This is, I think, where you, Hoppe, and Van Dun go wrong. You conflate self-ownership with control.

  Self-ownership is the right to control one’s body. If we are speaking of legal rights, then we are speaking of legal ownership. If we are speaking of libertarian (“natural”) rights, we are speaking of natural ownership. It’s just terminology.

  If the legal system permits A to own B, even though B is innocent of any crime, then the legal owner of B is A. We libertarians woudl say this is unjust, *because* A is the “real” owner of his body–by “real” we mean, he is the one who has the (moral) right to control his body, even thoguh this right is not legally recognized.

  The slave may “in effect” be free (for the purpose of debating only) when his owner grants him the control necessary to engage in argumentation and promises that he will not be punished for speaking freely.

  Okay…

  But this does not establish that the slave must not be a slave, i.e., that he must have self-ownership,

  He must have the right to control his body to participate in the debate. THe master’s granting him freedom to debate means giving him the right to control his body.

  in order to engage in argumentation; it does not by itself establish that the slave must be set free in the sense of being released from his bondage in order for genuine argumentation to occur.

  THe point is that the master has to presuppose a variety of normative principles which *imply* that he cannot justify the proposition “I should own the slave”.

  I’ll grant you that if in the course of argumentation the slave-owner finds himself unable to defeat the anti-slavery arguments of his philosopher-slave, then should he refuse to free his slave he would be engaging in a performative contradiction: namely, professing to engage in argumentation, which presupposes certain normative commitments, and then refusing to respect said commitments when he loses the argument.

  NOtice here, though, how strange and … bloodless an alienated your argument is (I think it suffers from what Van Dun criticizes as the mere “academic” way of viewing argumentation): you yourself as a libertairan have admitted you think slavery is wrong. For wahtever reason–you must have some basis for this view. and you necessarily think that it is better than any counterclaims. So the slave could just put forward your argument, whatever it is; and he would then win.

  … So… are we done, then? Have you conceded, or not? I think you are confused because you accept something yet you don’t want to accept it at the same time.

  This performative contradiction stems not from the claim that argumentation presupposes libertarian self-ownership and that therefore he cannot simultaneously claim to own slaves and engage in argumentation without contradiction; rather, it stems from the fact, stipulated in my example here, that he has lost the argument – having failed to refute his slave’s anti-slavery argument

  HE faield to refute it because he is wrong. I don’t see this as some stupid game theory exercise, wehre everything is infinitely and forever debatable and uncertain. I don’t harbor the illusion that you can “win” an argument if you are wrong. What standard are you using? Some litigator-lawyer standard?

  If one wants to restrict the meaning of “genuine” argumentation to something that requires self-ownership,

  Genuine argumentation is conflict free, by its nature. It requires each participant have control of his body–and, vis-a-vis each other, the right to control. Surely you can see this. It also requires them to be alive, and to control something more than just their bodies–some external resources. This means the participants endorse also the rule that people should be permitted at least sometimes to use scarce resources and in a conflict-free way. This implies, as I argued in last post, that only the full-fledged libertarian homesteading norm is compatible with argumentation.

  To be effective, it must be situated within a broader and deeper philosophical and ethical theory.

  Interesting–you say this statement *in the context of an argumentation*. It’s like trying to deny the significance of the limb you are standing on.

• Published: August 24, 2006 12:16 PM

Apparently Van Dun has a wealth of libertarian writing in Dutch; it’s high time we have some English translations.

***

Update: See the entry Kim Davies on the Transcendental Foundations of Ethics.

I’ve been Hoppe-ing my brains out lately. Take this cool, pithy statement about the nature of economic analysis:

Essentially, economic analysis consists of: (1) an understanding of the categories of action and an understanding of the meaning of a change in values, costs, technological knowledge, etc.; (2) a description of a situation in which these categories assume concrete meaning, where definite people are identified as actors with definite objects specified as their means of action, with definite goals identified as values and definite things specified as costs; and (3) a deduction of the consequences that result from the performance of some specified action in this situation, or of the consequences that result for an actor if this situation is changed in a specified way. And this deduction must yield a priori-valid conclusions, provided there is no flaw in the very process of deduction and the situation and the change introduced into it being given, and a priori—valid conclusions about reality if the situation and situation-change, as described, can themselves be identified as real, because then their validity would ultimately go back to the indisputable validity of the categories of action.

A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, p. 118-19.

[Mises blog cross-post]

My article, The Greatest Libertarian Books, was published on LewRockwell.com today. I reprint it below. (wayback version) For some additional suggestions, see:

Libertarian

• Hans-Hermann Hoppe on Anarcho-Capitalism
• David Gordon on Liberty
• Lew Rockwell on Reading for Liberty
• Other LewRockwell.com bibliographies
• Tom Woods, Want to Understand the World? Read These Books
• Kinsella, Top Ten Books of Liberty
  • Kinsella, Other Top Ten Lists of Libertarian Books
• Mises.org, Libertarian Books
• Jeffrey A. Tucker, Ten books to read, for free
• Jeffrey A. Tucker, 25 Life-Changing Classics (Liberty.me, 2014)
• Daniel Bier, 13 Essential Books to Shape the Libertarian Worldview
• Students for Liberty, 13 books every well-rounded libertarian should read
• The Federalist Society’s Conservative & Libertarian Legal Scholarship: Annotated Bibliography
• For libertarian fiction, see the list of Prometheus Award winners
• See others listed here, ¹ including more recent books:
  • Stefan Molyneux, Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics (2007)
  • Jeffrey A. Miron’s Libertarianism, From A to Z (2010)
  • Jacob Huebert, Libertarianism Today (2010)
  • Gary Chartier, The Conscience of an Anarchist: Why It’s Time to Say Good-Bye to the State and Build a Free Society (2011; pdf)
  • Gary Chartier, Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Power (2011; pdf)
  • Ken Schoolland, The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free-Market Odyssey (2011)
  • Gerard Casey, Libertarian Anarchism (2012)
  • Jason Brennan, Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know (2012)
  • Gary Chartier, Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a Stateless Society (Cambridge, 2012; online at zlib dot org)
  • Adam Kokesh, FREEDOM! (2014; PDF)
  • Peter T. Leeson, Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-Governance Works Better Than You Think (Cambridge, 2014)
  • David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom (2015)
  • Chase Rachels, A Spontaneous Order (2015)
  • Keir Martland, Liberty from a Beginner: Selected Essays (2nd ed., 2016)
  • Todd Seavey, Libertarianism for Beginners (2016)
  • The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism (Jason Brennan, David Schmidtz & Bas van der Vossen, eds., 2017)
  • Vin Armani, Self Ownership: The Foundation of Property and Morality (2017; 2)
  • Eric Mack, Libertarianism (2018)
  • Richard Storey, The Uniqueness of Western Law: A Reactionary Manifesto (2019)
  • Richard Ebeling, For A New Liberalism (2019)
  • Kristopher A. Borer, The Ethics of Anarcho-Capitalism (2020 [online])
  • Michael Malice, The Anarchist Handbook (2021)
    • See my post Michael Malice’s The Anarchist Handbook: Supplemental Readings
  • Jack Lloyd, The Definitive Guide to Libertarian Voluntaryism (2022)
  • Keith Knight, ed., The Voluntaryist Handbook: A Collection of Essays, Excerpts, and Quotes (2022; pdf)
  • The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism (Matt Zwolinski & Benjamin Ferguson, eds., 2022)
  • The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism, by Matt Zwolinski & John Tomasi (2023)
  • Noah Fredericks, Unnecessary Evil (tentative title; forthcoming 2025)
  • Update:
  • See also Dave Smith tweet; Walter Block The 10 Books That Have Most Influenced Walter Block
• and some older works as well such as:
  • Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition (1927)
  • Linda & Morris Tannehill, The Market for Liberty (1970)
  • John Hospers, Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow (1971)
  • David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom (1973)
  • Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)
  • Henri Lepage, Tomorrow, Capitalism (1978)
  • Samuel Edward Konkin III, New Libertarian Manifesto (1980; pdf)
  • Alan Burris, A Liberty Primer 3rd. ed. (2d ed., 1983)
  • Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (1988)
  • Anthony De Jasay, Choice, Contract, Consent: A Restatement of Liberalism (1991)
  • Richard Epstein, Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995)
  • David Conway, Classical Liberalism: The Unvanquished Ideal (1995)
  • Charles Murray, What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation (1996)
  • David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer (1998)
  • Randy E. Barnett, The Structure of Liberty (1998)
  • Edward P. Stringham, Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice (2007)

Other/General/Cultural

• A favorite that I don’t have on my other lists: T.Z. Lavine, From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest [Update: Some of the PBS series the book is based on appear to be available from American Archive of Public Broadcasting here and on Youtube]
• For those interested in law or law school, see my post Reading Suggestions for Prospective/New Law Students (Roman/Civil law focus)
• Tom Woods show, Ep. 2409 100 Books Educated People Should Read
  • Discussing Glenn Corey, How to Get a $150,000 Liberal Arts Education for Free: 100 Books to Help You Better Understand Yourself, Others, and the World You Live In
• C.H. Murphy’s 1964 Reading List for High School Students
• Jason Jewell, Cultural Literacy: A Reading List for Beginners, More Cultural Literacy: A Reading List for Beginners, and Beyond the Stories: Non-Narrative Cultural Literacy
  • • Roderick Long, Kulcherel Littorasy, Kulcherel Littorasy, Part Duh, and Kulcherel Littorasy, Part 11 (in binary)
• The Great Books of the Western World series, edited by Mortimer Adler
• National Review, Reader’s Guide for the Intelligent American
• An Incomplete Education: 3,684 Things You Should Have Learned but Probably Didn’t, by Judy Jones & William Wilson (2006)
• The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, by E.D. Hirsch et al. (2002)

The Greatest Libertarian Books

August 7, 2006
by N. Stephan Kinsella

Austrian libertarians, more than most, should be acutely aware of the impossibility of coming up with a truly objective “top ten” list. Smith’s most valued book may be far down on Jones’s subjective rankings. Nonetheless, we forge ahead because such lists can be provocative, illuminating, and interesting. So in response to “The Ten Best Libertarian Books” from the September 2006 issue of Liberty, which provoked some discussion on the Mises blog, I’ll offer my own admittedly idiosyncratic and personal choices — books or authors I consider great or notable, or that have had some significant influence in my own intellectual development.

Great Libertarian Books and Authors

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism. Topping my list is A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, as well as a host of other works, by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, our greatest living intellectual. Hoppe’s other influential works include Democracy: The God That Failed, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, and Economic Science and the Austrian Method (update: and The Great Fiction). Sure, Hoppe stands on the shoulders of giants — primarily Mises and Rothbard — but to my mind his edifice of thought is the pinnacle of Austro-libertarian thinking. Somewhat sobering is the realization that Hoppe was only forty when he wrote Capitalism. Gulp.

Ludwig von Mises, Human Action. And his other works too, including another of my favorites, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science. Arguably the greatest genius of the twentieth century, if not all of human history. Need anything else be said?

Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty. And Man, Economy and State, Power and Market, For A New Liberty, and countless other works. The Mises-Rothbard-Hoppe troika are the standard-bearers for modern Austro-libertarianism. I’m tempted to call them the Austro-libertarian trinity, but to avoid offense, I’ll refrain.

Henry Hazlitt, Time Will Run Back. Okay, okay, I know it’s not a great novel, but it’s a favorite of mine. An illuminating tale of a dictator slowly appreciating the limits of centralized socialist planning. And Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson is one I often recommend as a starting point for a novice interested in learning more about the freedom philosophy. As is my next choice —

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, ed., The Free Market Reader: Essays in the Economics of Liberty. This underappreciated selection of classic short pieces — mainly by Rockwell and Rothbard — from The Free Market is a fantastic introduction to sound economic thinking. See also the followup, The Economics of Liberty.

Frederic Bastiat, The Law. Another great introductory book. They don’t make ’em like they used to.

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom. I might now find things I don’t agree with in this magnificent book — perhaps whiffs of positivism, insufficient radicalism — but, for me, reading it was eye-opening and helped deepen my budding appreciation for libertarianism and free market economics.

Linda & Morris Tannehill, The Market for Liberty. For minarchists and mainstreamers, a mindblowing introduction to the possibilities of non-state order and liberty. David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism complements the Tannehills’ book well, as does “Imagining a Polycentric Constitutional Order: A Short Fable,” chapter 14 of Randy Barnett‘s The Structure of Liberty. Something about Friedman’s Machinery always bugged me — maybe it was the way he noted that Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson is “reputed” to be a good introductory book on economics, but “I have not read it” — as if he does not need to. From someone with degrees only in physics and chemistry, I suppose I would have expected a bit more humility; and his over-reliance on “law and economics” has always made Friedman seem just a tad too much the dilettante and Austro-cynic for my taste. Nonetheless, Machinery has to be mentioned here.

Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority. An eye-opening expose to the lies spread by contractarians and constitutionalists.

James J. Kilpatrick, The Sovereign States: Notes of a Citizen of Virginia. The works noted above are all by libertarians or proto-libertarians (e.g., Spooner and Bastiat). Kilpatrick was no libertarian but this work is probably one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read, and reading it would be immensely valuable to all libertarians today, especially those who too readily condone state centralism. See, for example, this brief excerpt on the Kentucky and Virginia Resolves, and the federal judiciary. And consider this passage, describing the Supreme Court’s illegitimate expansion of power under the guise of the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause:

It was an insidious process, conducted with the care of the cat that stalks her prey — now creeping forward, now pausing to sniff the air; now advancing, now lying still as the bird takes alarm; then edging forward again, and so, step by inexorable step, moving to the ultimate seizure. [p. 235]

Honorable Mention

There are of course many others that could be listed, but they can’t all be on the “greatest” list. Some are too recent/modern, or too narrow (e.g., too American-centric), but are still high on my list. These include Jan Narveson’s The Libertarian Idea and Loren Lomasky’s Persons, Rights and the Moral Community. There’s much to disagree with in both books, but each has a load of provocative insights.

Those who find Kilpatrick’s work of interest might also profit from Felix Morley’s Freedom and Federalism and Raoul Berger’s Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as his The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights and Federalism: The Founder’s Design. Bruce Benson’s The Enterprise of Law also seems destined to be a classic, and would be appreciated by those who like the Tannehills. I also suspect George Reisman’s massive tome Capitalism deserves to be in any “greatest” list, but I haven’t absorbed it completely enough to make this judgment yet.”

And if I were not growing increasingly distant from Rand’s thought and annoyed by many of her modern-day followers, I’d probably include on the list above Atlas Shrugged, Philosophy: Who Needs It, and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

Fiction

Speaking of fiction, other than Hazlitt’s Time Will Run Back, I just can’t bring myself to include any among the company of the “greats” listed above, but there is some I’ve found very enjoyable as well as illuminating portraits of possible libertarian societies: these include Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, of course Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night, L. Neil Smith’s The Probability Broach and The Gallatin Divergence, and my newest favorite novelist, John C. Wright, author of the sci-fi trilogy The Golden Age.

Didn’t Make the Cut

As for others that just don’t come close to making my cut: some rave about Herbert Spencer’s The Man vs. the State. Hey, I just can’t get past the annoying use of “the” in the title. Reminds me of the affectation of referring to “the calculus.” Other purportedly “great” books or authors that I just can’t seem to motivate myself to read or finish include Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine, Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom, Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (and other works), John Stuart Mill, anything by anyone who ever even flirted with Georgism or Galambosianism, “mutualism,” or “conjecturalism/anti-justificationism.”

The interested reader can find many other very interesting recommendations in the LRC bibliographies — see especially Hans-Hermann Hoppe on Anarcho-Capitalism, David Gordon on Liberty, and Lew Rockwell on Reading for Liberty.

1. See Foreword to A Spontaneous Order. [↩]

From the Mises Blog:

[Update: see also: some useful definitions from the “Mises Made Easier” glossary:

Praxeology, (from the Greek, Praxis, action, habit or practice; logia, doctrine, theory or science). The science or general theory of (conscious or purposeful) human action. Mises defines action as “the manifestation of a man’s will. Accordingly, he considers the use of the adjectives “conscious or purposeful” to be redundant. Praxeology is a manifestation of the human mind and deals with the actions open to men for the attainment of their chosen ends. Praxeology starts from the a priori category of action and then develops the full implications of such action. Praxeology aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied in its assumptions and inferences. Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience, but are antecedent to any comprehension of historical facts. EP. (Praxeology translated as “sociology”), viii, 68-124; HA. 1-3,30-36,47,51,57,64-71,174,646,648,651; UF. 14, 41-45, 64-65, 70-72.

Economics. A theoretical science which provides a comprehension of the meaning and relevance of purposive (conscious) human actions. It is not about things and material objects; it is about the meanings and actions of men. Economics is a science of the means men must select if they are to attain their humanly attainable ends which they have chosen in accordance with their value judgments. However, the valuation and selection of ends are beyond the scope of economics and every other science. Economics enables men to predict the “qualitative” effects to be expected from the adoption of specific measures or economic policies, but such predictions cannot be “quantitative” as there are no constant relations in the valuations which determine, guide and alter human actions.

For Mises’ comments “On Some Popular Errors Concerning the Scope and Method of Economics,” including Macroeconomics, see Chapter 5 of The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science.

HA. 1-3,6-10,64-69,92-93,647-48,651,653-54; TH. 203; UF. 67-69, 73; also PLG. 1-20, 23.

Catallactics, n. catallactic, adj. The theory of the market economy, i.e., of exchange ratios and prices. It analyzes all actions based on monetary calculation and traces the formation of prices back to the point where acting man makes his choices. It explains market prices as they are and not as they should be. The laws of catallactics are not value judgments, but are exact, objective and of universal validity.

EP. 88-89, 149, 208; HA. 234,327-28,646,650,652.]

Update: See also Extreme Praxeology

The Other Fields of Praxeology: War, Games, Voting… and Ethics?

[Archived comments below]

August 5, 2006 1:23 AM by Stephan Kinsella | Other posts by Stephan Kinsella | Comments (25)

Update: see this post for more on this.

***

I asked recently of some colleagues if anyone recalled where Mises said that economics or catallactics is the most developed or highly elaborated branch of praxeology, but that someone was working (at the time) on applying praxeology to the study of conflict, or war. Sudha Shenoy pointed me to the answer: in Mises’ Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science Mises writes:

Up to now the only part of praxeology that has been developed into a scientific system is economics. A Polish philosopher, Tadeusz Kotarbinski, is trying to develop a new branch of praxeology, the praxeological theory of conflict and war as opposed to the theory of cooperation or economics.[6][6] T. Kotarbinski, “Considérations sur la théorie générale de la lutte,” Appendix to Z Zagadnien Ogólnej Teorii Walki (Warsaw, 1938), pp. 65-92; the same author, “Idée de la methodologie générale praxeologie,” Travaux du IXe Congrés International de Philosophie (Paris, 1937), IV, 190-94. The theory of games has no reference whatever to the theory of action. Of course, playing a game is action, but so is smoking a cigarette or munching a sandwich. See below, pp. 87 ff.

***

Update: I stumbled across Adam Knott’s working paper, Rothbardian-Randian Ethics and The Coming Methodenstreit in Libertarian Ethical Science. Knott writes,

Specifically, praxeology has not succeeded to date, in arriving at cause and effect laws in the social-ethical realm. In the strictly scientific sense as understood by praxeology, there are no known laws of ethical phenomena akin to the various economic laws established since the beginning of economic science several centuries ago.

Not sure why Knott does not mention (if only to criticize) Hoppe’s work on extending praxeology to the field of ethics.

I’m not sure if Kotarbinski or anyone else ever completed this, or any other systematic study of a field of praxeology outside economics (and wouldn’t Mises’ and Rothbard’s analysis of intervention in the market be a type of application of praxeology to conflict?). I did find this unusual paper by Alexander Mosely, Praxeology and Cultural Convergences in the Rules of War, but this does not seem to be apropos.

Interestingly, in his Reply to Schuller, Rothbard writes:

The categories of praxeology may be outlined as follows:
Praxeology–the general, formal theory of human action:
A. The Theory of the Isolated Individual (Crusoe Economics)
B. The Theory of Voluntary Interpersonal Exchange (Catallactics, or the Economics of the Market)
1. Barter
2. With Medium of Exchange
a. On the Unhampered Market
b. Effects of Violent Intervention with the Market
c. Effects of Violent Abolition of the Market (Socialism)
C. The Theory of War–Hostile Action
D. The Theory of Games (e.g., Von Neumann and Morgenstern)
E. Unknown
Clearly, A and B–Economics–is the only fully elaborated part of praxeology. The others are largely unexplored areas.

See also MESPM, p. 74, where Rothbard writes: “What is the relationship between praxeology and economic analysis? Economics is a subdivision of praxeology—so far the only fully elaborated subdivision. With praxeology as the general, formal theory of human action, economics includes the analysis of the action of an isolated individual (Crusoe economics) and, especially elaborate, the analysis of interpersonal exchange (catallactics). The rest of praxeology is an unexplored area. Attempts have been made to formulate a logical theory of war and violent action, and violence in the form of government has been treated by political philosophy and by praxeology in tracing the effects of violent intervention in the free market. A theory of games has been elaborated, and interesting beginnings have been made in a logical analysis of voting.”

Rothbard’s mention of games apparently contradicts Mises’s disparagement of games as a possible field of praxeology; and Rothbard’s mention of the logic of voting seems a bit like public choice economics, but I am not sure. What other possible fields are there?

Arguably Hoppe’s extension of praxeological type reasoning to the field of ethics might fit under Rothbard’s category E, as Rothbard himself hinted at: regarding Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s argumentation ethics defense of libertarian rights, about which Rothbard wrote:

In a dazzling breakthrough for political philosophy in general and for libertarianism in particular, he has managed to transcend the famous is/ought, fact/value dichotomy that has plagued philosophy since the days of the scholastics, and that had brought modern libertarianism into a tiresome deadlock. Not only that: Hans Hoppe has managed to establish the case for anarcho-capitalist-Lockean rights in an unprecedentedly hard-core manner, one that makes my own natural law/natural rights position seem almost wimpy in comparison.

Rothbard, Beyond Is and Ought; see also Rothbard, Hoppephobia. Especially interesting in the context of this post, Rothbard concludes his piece,

A future research program for Hoppe and other libertarian philosophers would be (a) to see how far axiomatics can be extended into other spheres of ethics, or (b) to see if and how this axiomatic could be integrated into the standard natural law approach. These questions provide fascinating philosophical opportunities. Hoppe has lifted the American movement out of decades of sterile debate and deadlock, and provided us a route for future development of the libertarian discipline.

Interesting how Rothbard talks about possible extensions of praxeology as well as “axiomatics,” the logical-deductive approach of Hoppe that is compatible with, if not a type of, praxeology.

Notice that two of Rothbard’s books are Ethics of Liberty and The Logic of Action. Mayhap Hoppe’s use of praxeology to investigate political ethics is a case of the Ethics of Action: a unification of Austrian economics and epistemology with libertarian justice. It is no wonder that, in drawing from the economic and methodological insights of Misesian-Austrian economics, Austro-libertarian theory is so powerful and sound.

The Nature of Economic Analysis

August 19, 2006 9:18 PM by Stephan Kinsella | Other posts by Stephan Kinsella | Comments (5)

I’ve been Hoppe-ing my brains out lately. Take this cool, pithy statement about the nature of economic analysis:

Essentially, economic analysis consists of: (1) an understanding of the categories of action and an understanding of the meaning of a change in values, costs, technological knowledge, etc.; (2) a description of a situation in which these categories assume concrete meaning, where definite people are identified as actors with definite objects specified as their means of action, with definite goals identified as values and definite things specified as costs; and (3) a deduction of the consequences that result from the performance of some specified action in this situation, or of the consequences that result for an actor if this situation is changed in a specified way. And this deduction must yield a priori-valid conclusions, provided there is no flaw in the very process of deduction and the situation and the change introduced into it being given, and a priori—valid conclusions about reality if the situation and situation-change, as described, can themselves be identified as real, because then their validity would ultimately go back to the indisputable validity of the categories of action.

A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, p. 118-19.

This formulation highlights the distinction between the method appropriate to economic science and that applicable to the study of causal phenomenon (natural science).

Moreover, in view of this, what other fields of praxeology could there be that are not covered by this broad conception of economics? This type of economic analysis does not study only “cooperation,” and it of course does include the study of “conflict”–economics concerns the consequences of human action and social interaction both under a free market and on the hampered market. Wouldn’t a study of “war,” say, have to be a subset of economics itself?

Update: See also Extreme Praxeology

Update: see also:

Praxeology and Ethics: Three Philosophers Considered–Rothbard, Hoppe, Searle

October 29, 2008 2:13 PM by Stephan Kinsella | Other posts by Stephan Kinsella | Comments (1)

Adam Knott just sent me a copy of his interesting monograph, Praxeology and Ethics: Three Philosophers Considered–Rothbard, Hoppe, Searle, available at his site, Praxeology.com. Other works there include Striving and Attainment – A Theory of Social Interaction and A Praxeology of Coercion. (I mentioned some of this before in my post Extreme Praxeology.)

Update on the praxeology of war: see Joseph Salerno, Imperialism and the Logic of War Making.

Archived comments:

Comments (26) 

• Nick

  Kotarbinski’s praxeology is the only approach to praxeology widely known in Poland. Most of professional philosophers didn’t even heard about Austrian view on praxeology.

  Published: August 5, 2006 1:57 AM

• Curt Howland

  The image of a “professional philosopher” seems very silly to me.

  Like, ok, you philosophed, now grab that hammer and get some work done.

   

  Published: August 5, 2006 11:05 AM

• Student

  Check out David Friedman’s critical assessment of Hoppe’s ethical arguments. It’s even more interesting than Rothbard’s unconditional praisings and can be found in the same link.

  http://www.hanshoppe.com/publications/liberty_symposium.pdf

  Hoppe replied to counter arguments at the bottom of the document, but I don’t think he adequatley addressed all of Friedman’s comments (in fact he only addresses one of Friedman’s points, and not very well imo).

  But read the whole document and decide for yourselves.

  Published: August 5, 2006 2:30 PM

• Ike Hall

  I have long felt that sociology was ripe for a praxeological overhaul. In a perfect world, Human Action would have been the touchstone for this. From my limited readings in sociology, it seems that good studies of group interactions have lost sight of the fact of methodological individualism (if they ever used it as a tool of analysis in the first place).

  Published: August 5, 2006 2:37 PM

• gary lammert

  As somewhat of a praxeological endeavor:
  Is it possible that the macroeconomy operates according to near ideal noncomplex mathematical laws? Would this really be so surprising? Mightn’t one expect natural laws as part and integral to a very nonrandom process that is ultimately quantified in the integers 0 through 9?

  The alcove of the Economic Fractalist has posed such a hypothesis – that the global macroeconomy with its integrative money growth, money growth cresting, and ultimately money decline, that is, its credit cycle, is exactly represented by simple quantum fractal growth and decline natural laws directly reflected in the daily and weekly and yearly trading valuations of its great composite equity, bond, and commodity markets. In a prospective fashion a mathematical x/2.5x/2.5x discontinuous fractal growth has been identified that appears to represent the limits of the global credit cycle system.

  While the integrative process is a complex mixture of facilitated debt and money creation, resultant asset and commodity inflation, ultimately limited by ongoing wages, consumption saturation, and increasing debt obligations via accelerating debt instruments, e.g., ARMS -the predictable evolution of the summation quantum simple patterns strongly appear to herald major directional changes.

  Such a change occurred for the Wilshire 5000, the composite US equity proxy marker, on 5 May 2006. That day represented the secondary closing high for the Wilshire after its a 142 year credit growth cycle from its predecessor stock summation proxy indicators starting in 1858 and ending in March of 2000. 5 May 2006, the secondary high to March 2000, was marked by a minutely exhaustion gap with a closing high for the last 6 years.

  Now on 4 August 2006, another possible minutely high exhaustion gap high has occurred accompanied by a very curious sequential exhaustion gap to the low side – covering the same trading valuation territory – all within the same day.

  The x/2.5x/2.5x extended fractal evolution from the Wilshire’s lows in 2002 and 2003 to its 5 May 2006 closing high has been well described in the serial posting of EF. From the October 2005 low, the daily fractal pattern has been:

  x/2.5x/2x/1.5x or 12/30/24/18 days.

  Day 18 initiated a new fractal sequence with a 21-22 day base.:

  21/53/53 or x/2.5x/2.5x with day 53 of the third fractal growth sequence 4 August 2006.

  Interestingly day 42 – exactly 2X of the 21 day base – of the second fractal growth sequence was …. 5 May 2006.

  Was 4 August 2006 the final x/2.5x/2.5x extended lower high representing the second shoulder of the 5 May 2006 second shoulder to the March 2000 high?

  The US ten-year note has ominously inverted below the 3-month treasury for the last two trading days. Ten-year treasuries at near 5 percent in a massive deflationary environment would seem the prudent investment – and expected natural money flow move.

  As always expect the discontinuous and the nonlinear … unexpected. Gary Lammert

  Published: August 5, 2006 5:22 PM

• Peter

  Student: what do you think is so “interesting” about Friedman’s misunderstanding of Hoppe?

  Published: August 6, 2006 12:16 AM

• Paul Edwards

  Stephan,

  “the logical-deductive approach of Hoppe that is compatible with, if not a type of, praxeology.�?

  Hoppe’s argumentation ethics always struck me from the start to be a completely praxeologically based thesis. Argumentation is an action, and the entire argument seems to me to be founded in the necessary and praxeological implications of the act of arguing. It seems to me that ethics sits right beside economics as another field of praxeology. Ethics, the moral justification of assigning scarce resources, and economics, the science of understanding how men utilize scarce resources to maximize wealth production both seem to me to fall under the umbrella of praxeology.

  It seems as if you almost see it this way, but not quite, but if not quite, what am I missing?

  Published: August 6, 2006 1:56 AM

• Student

  Peter,

  What did Friedman misunderstand? Given Hoppe’s restatement at the end of the argument, Friedman seems dead on.

  The only point Hoppe halfway addresses is Friedman’s last and smallest point (that Hoppe’s argument seems to imply that no one has ever ben able to argue philosophy since there’s never been a libertarian society).

  Hoppe, totally ignores Friedman’s more imporant argument–that Hoppe’s argument rests on n two false premices. What did Friedman not get?

  Published: August 6, 2006 2:34 AM

• Paul Edwards

  Student,

  What i find very interesting about all criticisms of Hoppe’s argumentation ethics including Friedman’s, is that they carry with them a single consistent theme: an inability to accurately articulate Hoppe’s thesis as a starting point from which to launch their criticism.

  This just strikes me as very odd. What i would like to see is someone who can state the argument up front, without butchering the argument, and then proceed to defeat it fair and square. So far, all i can see are arguments that defeat pretty obvious misunderstandings of it.

  The thing that compounds the strangeness of this is that it is also sometimes libertarians and Austrians doing this. I could understand this situation for non-libertarians and non-Austrians such as Friedman, as they are not used to dealing with the rigor of praxeological arguments. But Austrians should be able to keep up with the argument at least long enough to be able to re-state it properly.

  Published: August 6, 2006 2:37 AM

• iceberg

  In Mises’s “Theory and History”, he wrote several times throughout the book that economics is just one subset of praxeology, although I do not recall him mentioning other examples of possible subsets.

  Published: August 6, 2006 8:26 AM

• Stephan Kinsella

  Paul, “Hoppe’s argumentation ethics always struck me from the start to be a completely praxeologically based thesis. Argumentation is an action, and the entire argument seems to me to be founded in the necessary and praxeological implications of the act of arguing. It seems to me that ethics sits right beside economics as another field of praxeology. Ethics, the moral justification of assigning scarce resources, and economics, the science of understanding how men utilize scarce resources to maximize wealth production both seem to me to fall under the umbrella of praxeology.

  It seems as if you almost see it this way, but not quite, but if not quite, what am I missing?”

  I tend to think you are right. I think it’s sort of a semantic issue, plus a classification issue. As far as I can tell, you are right. But I think a more precise investigation into the proper definition for, and understanding of, praxeology, would be helpful; plus an understanding of its place within philosophy.

  For example, how do you classify the endeavor of studying praxeology itself–of knowing whether a given field *is* praxeology? is this meta-praxeology? Etc.

  Published: August 6, 2006 9:36 AM

• Student

  Paul Edwards,

  But how did Friedman mis-state Hoppe’s argument? That is exactly how I would have frammed the debate, given my understanding (or misunderstanding?) of Hoppe.

  Help set Freidman and I straight. How would you state Hoppe’s argument?

  Published: August 6, 2006 10:25 AM

• Walt D.

  Stephan

  Why does argumentation imply the employment of scarce means? What is the essential difference between “Intellectual Property”, which we contend as an idea, is neither scarce nor property, and argumentation, which we contend is scarce and is property?

  Published: August 6, 2006 3:21 PM

• Stephan Kinsella

  Walt: Read Hoppe on this. He explains it. Argumentation is an activity that occurs between two or more indivuals. It is a type of action and as such necessarily involves the use of one’s body, as well as various scarce means. Intellectual property essentially tries to grant property rights in information–knowledge, patterns.

  Published: August 6, 2006 3:39 PM

• Paul Edwards

  Student,

  I wrote a small answer to Friedman’s argument here a while ago:

  http://blog.mises.org/archives/004745.asp

  which you can find if you search on this string: “If belief in a proposition is inconsistent�?.

  However, I think it would be more productive and interesting to you to read Hoppe’s many explications of his thesis and also Stephan Kinsella’s response “Defending Argumentation Ethics: Reply to Murphy & Callahan�? at

  http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=312

  to get a better fundamental understanding of Hoppe’s argument. From my perspective, the root of the issue seems to be this: what is the essence of the argument? What is the purpose of the argument, and given this purpose, what are the necessary and essential presuppositions of argumentation? The purpose of argumentation, especially in proposing ethical norms, is to arrive at universalizable “golden rule�? conclusions of which any person can in principle agree with based on the soundness of the argument alone: that is without the need for the threat of force to extract agreement. Secondly, or further, or therefore, it presupposes the conflict free use of scarce resources in one’s own body to make the argument and to evaluate the other person’s counterargument without physical conflict. It therefore presupposes self-ownership and homesteading of scarce resources because all those who use their own bodies to make argument presume to have the right to exclusive use and control of their body and homesteaded resources as only the principles of self ownership and homesteading allows for the conflict free, civilized cooperation presupposed in the act of argumentation.

  Presupposing conflict free use of scarce resources in argument, such as one’s self and other homesteaded resources and contractually acquired resources, is another way to say such assumptions are a logical necessity to render the argument meaningful. However, it does not mean that meaningless, or incoherent or self contradictory or internally inconsistent, or unjustifiable arguments, situations and states of affairs cannot arise in reality. It merely means that such situations, if they do arise, are not justifiable. So for instance, Hoppe does not set out to prove that a slave cannot argue. He sets out to show that the praxeological implication of argumentation is that participants in the argument must and do presuppose conflict free interaction, and therefore a right to exclusive control over their own bodies and also over the resources that they homestead and acquire contractually.

  Those who object to Hoppe’s thesis tend to think he is saying what we all know to be untrue: that liberty must emerge from the fact that we can argue. He is not saying this. What he is saying is that the argument merely presupposes liberty and the argument justifies only liberty. It does not make it the default state of affairs obviously.

  Published: August 7, 2006 3:00 AM

• Franklin Harris

  I shall be interested to see Hoppe’s response to Murphy and Callahan’s paper in the new JLS (http://mises.org/journals/jls/20_2/20_2_3.pdf), as they seem to restate Hoppe’s argument accurately and, successfully I think, point out severe flaws in it, concluding that it fails on its own terms. (E.g., argumentation doesn’t prove self-ownership. No one needs two kidneys to argue.) I believe a praxeological approach to ethics may still be possible, but I suspect it lies in going back to examining action as a whole and not simply one form of action (i.e., argumentation).

  Published: August 9, 2006 1:55 PM

• Stephan Kinsella

  Franklin, I don’t think H will reply, and I have already done a reply to an earlier version of the same paper, as mentioned by Edwards above.

  Published: August 9, 2006 2:07 PM

• Franklin Harris

  Stephan, and, of course, I turned up your response just seconds ago. I need to pre-Google these things.

  Published: August 9, 2006 2:17 PM

• jeffrey

  Right, I doubt Hoppe will reply. His replies to some of the same criticisms are already published in his new book on property.

  Published: August 9, 2006 2:32 PM

• JIMB

  Perhaps. But Hoppe’s argument sounds deficient — one cannot go from a physical reality (control of one’s body) to a universal ethic.

  1 – I control my body (unarguable)
  2 – I can act (unarguable)
  3 – Others have the same characteristics (unarguable)
  4 – I am can act but cannot pass the point where I infringe on the non-consentual control of another’s body

  Hmmm. I see communism fall right out of this … not to mention #4 doesn’t follow from #3.

  Published: September 21, 2006 11:26 AM

• Paul Edwards

  As i mentioned earlier in this thread: it is unusual indeed for someone who disputes Hoppe’s A-E to be capable of accurately stating it.

  Published: February 16, 2007 10:38 PM

• Bogdan

  I appreciate Hoppe’s ethics, but I think most people – like Stepahn Kinsella, for example – just don’t want to see, besides the very original approach, its serious limitations.

  Hoppe does not – and cannot – resolve the is-ought dichotomy. Control over one’s body, voice included, does not entail legitimate property. The slave can argue but he is still a slave. Legitimate ownership is a normative matter.

  Also, the fact that one argues simply entails that he owns his voice, his body – but you cannot derive, by the laws of logic, ownership of land and external factors, all that the homesteading principle implies. The jump is from statement A (I argue, therefore I own my body) to statement B (because I own my body, I have a right to homestead property)is, tough common sense, logically fallacious if considered from a purely formal logic point of view.

  P.S. Hoppe is dead wrong when he thinks government restrictions on immigration is legitimate or beneficial and Block’s critic is spot-on. I may be a cultural conservative, but as a libertarian I don’t care about any conservative-statist agenda, even if it comes from Hoppe or Lew Rockwell.

  Published: April 8, 2007 10:33 AM

• Geoffrey Allan Plauche

  “The jump is from statement A (I argue, therefore I own my body) to statement B (because I own my body, I have a right to homestead property)is, tough common sense, logically fallacious if considered from a purely formal logic point of view.”

  Actually, the non sequitur jump is from “I argue” to “therefore I own my body.” That doesn’t follow. What would follow from “I argue” is “I control my body.” You can’t deduce an ought (“I own my body.”) from that is without a teleological ethics and some additional premises.

  Regarding Kotarbinski, a while back I looked over some of his work that is in English, including one chapter on the praxeology of war, and didn’t find his brand of praxeology similar to the Austrian type. It looked more like ontology, describing phenomenalogically the concepts and strategies, etc., but not really uncovering any causal laws. I don’t think his main work on the praxeology of war, cited by Mises, is in English though, so I can’t speak to that.

  Published: December 21, 2007 1:29 PM

• Paul Edwards

  “Hoppe does not – and cannot – resolve the is-ought dichotomy. Control over one’s body, voice included, does not entail legitimate property.”

  The arguer, especially the arguer who argues about normative issues and property rights issues, must at the very least presuppose a right to engage in such discourse. It makes no logical sense to presume to put forward arguments about what one is right and not right in doing, without at the very least implying a right to put forward such arguments. This applies to all who participate in argumentation.

  But this also implies further rights: a presumed right to be alive, a right to exclusive control over one’s body, a right to appropriate for consumption what one can without violating another’s rights. Each arguer, to participate in argumentation, must logically suppose these rights.

  “The slave can argue but he is still a slave. Legitimate ownership is a normative matter.”

  But there are logical norms of argumentation independent of other facts of life. While engaged in truth seeking argumentation, even the slave must presuppose self-ownership – logically. The question of his status wrt to society and the “law”, is not relevant. The issue is logic. What must logically be presumed for the argument to take place? The answer is summed up in the libertarian ethic.

  “Also, the fact that one argues simply entails that he owns his voice, his body – but you cannot derive, by the laws of logic, ownership of land and external factors, all that the homesteading principle implies.”

  But there is more implied in argumentation than cooperative truth seeking between two independent actors. There is the question of survival, and the fact that scarce resources are required for this and that they must be exclusively controlled and consumed by particular actors. And furthermore, argumentation implies a right to this. And yet argumentation implies all of this done in a conflict free manner.

  Therefore, it is simply a fact that ownership, not only of one’s own person, but of other scarce resources, is implied in argumentation. And the only conflict free methods of obtaining ownership in such property is appropriation via homesteading and cooperative contracting with other homesteading property owners.

  “The jump is from statement A (I argue, therefore I own my body) to statement B (because I own my body, I have a right to homestead property)is, tough common sense, logically fallacious if considered from a purely formal logic point of view.”

  So to sum up, the jumps are:
  1. I argue. therefore
  2. i presume the right to argue. therefore
  3. i presume the right to exclusive control of myself but also
  4. i presume the right to be alive and also
  5. i presume a conflict free cooperative existence (during argumentation)
  6. i can propose no actions contrary to the presuppositions, therefore
  7. i must presume a right to homestead and own property and
  8. i must presume a right to voluntarily contract with other homesteading and contracting property owners.
  9. all propositions in contradiction to the above must logically be ruled out.

  Published: February 1, 2008 5:15 PM

• Paul Edwards

  “P.S. Hoppe is dead wrong when he thinks government restrictions on immigration is legitimate or beneficial and Block’s critic is spot-on. I may be a cultural conservative, but as a libertarian I don’t care about any conservative-statist agenda, even if it comes from Hoppe or Lew Rockwell.”

  This quotation from Hoppe’s “The Economics and Ethics of Private Property” p71, should do something to underscore that Hoppe’s views on immigration are often misunderstood.

  “Each new period of peace means a higher level of governmental interference as compared with the previous one: internally in the form of increased restrictions on the range of choices that private property owners are allowed to make regarding their own property; and externally, as regards foreign relations, in the form of higher trade barriers and of increasingly severe restrictions on population movements (most notably on immigration and emigration). Not the least because it is based on increased discrimination against foreigners and foreign trade, any such peace contains the increased risk of the next international conflict, or pressures the affected governments into negotiating bi- or multilateral interstate-agreements aimed at cartelizing their respective power structures and thereby jointly exploiting and expropriating each other’s populations.*

  * FN:
  “The most vicious of such agreements is very likely that of restricting entry for non-criminal persons wanting to immigrate into a given territory — and the chance for those living in this territory to offer employment to them — and of extraditing them back to their home countries.”

  Published: February 25, 2008 1:21 AM

• Adrian Brenes

  I recently gained access to Arnold Kaufmann’s The Science of Decision-making: an introduction to praxeology, a work originally written in French which in page 10 atributes the term “praxeology” to Kotarbinski. Since the book is available through Amazon, maybe it can be an easy way to know more about the Kotarbinskian tradition.

  Published: October 25, 2009 3:02 PM

From Mises blog. Archived comments below. See also “Other Top Ten Lists of Libertarian Books”, appended below.

As I noted in that article,

Something about Friedman’s Machinery always bugged me—maybe it was the way he noted that Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson is “reputed” to be a good introductory book on economics, but “I have not read it”—as if he does not need to. From someone with degrees only in physics and chemistry, I suppose I would have expected a bit more humility; and his over-reliance on “law and economics” has always made Friedman seem just a tad too much the dilettante and Austro-cynic for my taste.

I remember one other thing I had seen that bolstered this impression: his Blogger profile states: “I am an academic economist who teaches at a law school and has never taken a course for credit in either field.”

And see https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2007/11/civil-immunity-blackstone-and-legal.html: “I am a law professor but not a lawyer.”

Almost like he’s bragging about it. So he’s not a real lawyer or even law professor, he’s not a real economist and to the extent he is he is just logical positivist like his father, running around talking about how “Von Neumann proved” that value is interpersonal and cardinal. ¹ He wrote one influential book, The Machinery of Freedom, which, admittedly, helped me switch from minarchist to anarchist. But I have no reason to think of him as a deep legal or economic expert, or physics expert for that matter.

Top Ten Books of Liberty

Update: My article, The Greatest Libertarian Books, appeared on LewRockwell.com on Monday, August 7, 2006. See discussion here.

***

In my article, I mentioned:

Something about Friedman’s Machinery always bugged me – maybe it was the way he noted that Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson is “reputed” to be a good introductory book on economics, but “I have not read it” – as if he does not need to. From someone with degrees only in physics and chemistry, I suppose I would have expected a bit more humility; and his over-reliance on “law and economics” has always made Friedman seem just a tad too much the dilettante and Austro-cynic for my taste.

I remember one other thing I had seen that bolstered this impression: his Blogger profile states: “I am an academic economist who teaches at a law school and has never taken a course for credit in either field.”

***

The September 2006 issue of Liberty has the feature “The Ten Best Libertarian Books”: “Milton Friedman, Lew Rockwell, David Boaz and Liberty’s editors and contributors celebrate ten intellectual achievements that helped to produce the modern libertarian movement.” Yes, Lew Rockwell is in there (with an essay on Mises’s Human Action). Here are the ten:

• Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
• Rand, Atlas Shrugged
• Mises, Human Action
• Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
• Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty
• Rand, The Fountainhead
• Nozick, Anarchy State and Utopia
• Mises, Socialism
• David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
• Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine

Not a bad list, if a bit predictable. There are some I’d take off, or move to a much lower place, and others I’d include. I would remove both by Hayek: I could not finish either. I found Serfdom obvious and boring, and Constitution just boring. But I’m probably in the minority on this assessment; and Serfdom did have a big influence. I would also take out The Fountainhead; Atlas is enough. And I’d remove Paterson too; again, another one I could not get through. Too many metaphors; too nonrigorous. This is the worst choice for the list, in my view.

A glaring omission from the list is Rothbard. For A New Liberty should be there, if not Ethics of Liberty and Man Economy and State. Also, Hoppe’s A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism should definitely be there.

Other possible candidates for the list? How about The Law by Bastiat? The Tannehills’ The Market for Liberty? Even Bruce Benson’s The Enterprise of Law. And perhaps a couple that are not explicitly libertarian but are very good on the issues of federalism and constitutionalism, such as Kilpatrick’s The Sovereign States or Felix Morley’s Freedom and Federalism.

And there are many more, such as some listed in the bibliographies at LRC–see especially the bibliographies by Hoppe, Gordon, and Rockwell.

So, Misesians–what are your top 10? The Comments Field awaits you!

Archived comments

Archived comments:

Comments (29)

• Chris Pruden

  Someone mentioned it in the previous top-10 books thread, and I’d also have to put The Moon is a Harsh Mistress(Heinlein) on the fiction list.

  Published: August 7, 2006 3:44 PM

• sp3tt

  “Top Ten Libertarian Fiction (not counting Rand)”

  Well, I guess one could include Heinlein and Frank Herbert. Except for those two though, I haven’t heard of much libertarian fiction.

  Published: August 7, 2006 3:44 PM

• Person

  *can’t stop myself*

  *can’t stop myself*

  How about “Top ten profit-earning books by libertarians who reject the validity of copyrights”:

  1) Defending the Undefendable — Walter Block

  2) Democracy — Hans Hoppe (note sure: he’s careful to remain silent on it, and his derivation property rights excludes them)

  3) Chaos Theory — Robert P. Murphy (again, remains silent, but has praised “Against Intellectual Property”)

  4) Studies in Mutualist Political Economy — Kevin Carson.

  5) The Moon is a Harsh Mistress — Robert Heinlein (sp?)

  6) ???

  Stephan, if you have a book, I’ll list it.

  Note: One book on this list isn’t actually good, but I listed it anyway.

  Published: August 7, 2006 4:02 PM

• Stephan Kinsella

  sp3– um, I mention some other libertarian fiction in my article. How can you not have heard of Schulman and Smith?

  Person:

  Interesting. I suppose you are trying to imply some kind of hypocrisy, of something, which is of course ridiculous. This would be akin to telling Clarence Thomas he has no right to object to affirmative action since he “benefitted” from it (a racist assumption, BTW).

  I suppose Block objects to copyright, but not sure where he wrote this. Hoppe does reject copyright, as I do; he told this to me, but not sure he’s written on it.

  Re Murphy: yeah, not 100% sure; but was his book a “best seller”? Carson… he rejects IP? It may be on the grounds that he accepts the idea that it’s property and *therefore* rejects it; while I reject it because I think it is *not* property.

  Where do you get the idea Heinlein was against copyright?

  “Stephan, if you have a book, I’ll list it.”

  Oh, I don’t have any best sellers, though my books all make a profit, e.g. International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide; and Digest of Commercial Laws of the World–but I’m just the editor of the latter, not the sole author.

  I may publish a semi-popular book railing against copyight and patent, and I do hope it sells well. Maybe even make the mainstream bookstore shelves and have a mainstream, big publisher.

  “Note: One book on this list isn’t actually good, but I listed it anyway.”

  Which is that, P-dog?

  And how about some real best-sellers, Tom Woods’ Politically Incorrect Guide to History, and Tom DiLorenzo’s Lincoln books–both very big sellers, and I would think both authors are probably anti-copyright (I’m not sure, but they are both smart enough to understand the argument, and honest (that’s why they are paleo-libertarians) so they probably are).

  Published: August 7, 2006 4:13 PM

• John Markley

  For libertarian fiction, I’d include:
  1. John C. Wright’s Golden Age trilogy
  2. Poul Anderson, Mirkheim (Lots of the Technic history stuff, really)
  3. Poul Anderson, Orion Shall Rise
  4. Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky
  5. James P. Hogan, The Multiplex Man
  6. Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
  7. J. Neil Schulman, Alongside Night

  Published: August 7, 2006 6:10 PM

• Anonymous

  The list of Prometheus Award winners would be a good start in constructing a list of libertarian fiction. Over the past several years, I’ve discovered that the list of nominees each year makes for a pretty good reading list.

  Published: August 7, 2006 8:50 PM

• Scott Fields

  James P. Hogan has strayed away from mainstream libertarianism, though he still has written some of the best Sci-Fi or political thriller libertarian books out there.

  Voyage to Yesteryear

  The Mirror Maze

  Some other notable authors and their respective works would be the following:

  H. Beam Piper – Lone Star Planet

  F. Paul Wilson – (The LaNague Trilogy)

  L. Neal Smith – EVERY BOOK HE HAS WRITTEN!

  Published: August 7, 2006 9:22 PM

• Radical Sceptic

  ‘Top Ten Libertarian Books You Have Never Heard Of’

  Well the one that should be right at the top of that list is ‘Escape from Leviathan’ by J.C. Lester. A work of extreme anarcho-libertarian political philosophy. Provides a pure theory of liberty and property rights that manages to avoid all the errors inherent in Rothbard, Narveson, Hoppe, David Friedman etc. This is the book that Nozick would have written if only he had been a bit brighter and better read.

  This book, published by Macmillan in 2000, is woefully neglected. Libertarian scholars who endlessly work themselves into confusion about natural rights, consequentialism and other supposed justifications for liberty and property would do well to read and study this brilliant and liberating solution.

  Published: August 8, 2006 10:28 AM

• Person

  Stephan:

  Re Murphy: yeah, not 100% sure; but was his book a “best seller”? … I don’t have any best sellers,

  Where did I say “best seller”? I believe the term I used was “profit-making”, i.e. such that monetary proceeds of the book exceeded monetary production costs. (for the picky: I’m using the accounting, not economic sense of profit) I thought you were going to start reading my posts. 🙁

  And for anyone who’s watching: Block et. al could have turned off their IP rights in their books or otherwise not made it artificially hard to get, Clarence Thomas could not have turned off affirmative action. (And the assertion that he benefitted is wrong, anyway.)

  Published: August 8, 2006 10:46 AM

• Stephan Kinsella

  Person:

  Why not come out and directly and clearly say what you mean, rather than leaving it between the lines. Are you saying that anti-copyright people are *substantively incorrect* — *because* they have published books that profit? What exactly is your argument? Are you saying we are “hypocrites”? If so, make the argument, and explain its relevance.

  “And for anyone who’s watching: Block et. al could have turned off their IP rights in their books or otherwise not made it artificially hard to get,”

  HOw do you “turn off” IP rights? Please tell me. Second, are you saying that if a publisher of the works in question somehow did disclaim copyright, that means the book would not have sold or made a profit? What exactly is your point?

  Are you saying that an author can just instruct the publisher to disclaim copyright protection? Surely you are aware that this is ridiculous. If any author told his publisher he insists on removal of copyright protection, the publisher would say, “No thanks, we’ll pass on the project.” So waht you are saying (I guess?) is that any author who opposes IP has to sabatoge any publication opportunity by any legitimate publisher, and only self-publish for free on the Internet? I.e., are you saying that copyright opponents, because we are NOT getting our way (because there ARE copyright law), have to not only put up with bad law, but shut up too? Whereas, the copyright advocates who ARE getting their way–getting to have laws that force others to go along with their desires–get to have this AND they have the right to talk about it? How convenient.

  Published: August 8, 2006 11:27 AM

• Person

  Stephan:

  What exactly is your argument? Are you saying we are “hypocrites”?

  Yes. Yes, you are a hypocrite. You claim it is morally wrong to stop someone for ordering his property in a particular non-aggressive manner, yet threaten others with physical force for choosing to do so. Your actions contradict your stated preference. And it doesn’t matter that you delegate this to another, blah blah blah. (“you” here refers to those on the list I made above)

  HOw do you “turn off” IP rights? Please tell me.

  An IP attorney is asking me this??? When do I get to charge your rates? How about:

  “This work is in the public domain.” or “Author grants permission to copy this work at will.”?

  Are you saying that an author can just instruct the publisher to disclaim copyright protection?

  Yes.

  Surely you are aware that this is ridiculous. If any author told his publisher he insists on removal of copyright protection, the publisher would say, “No thanks, we’ll pass on the project.”

  Er, yeah, for a typical book contract. That’s … kinda the point.

  So waht you are saying (I guess?) is that any author who opposes IP has to sabatoge any publication opportunity by any legitimate publisher, and only self-publish for free on the Internet?

  That does not follow. Be creative for a minute here. You could set up some contract in which they can charge whatever they want, market the book, not assert copyright, and then you pay them any amount below $X that they fail to earn through selling the book. That way, you’re essentially paying them to market the book, while they take a chance on being able ot make additional profit. You could also simply pay a printer to make the copies and then pay a bookstore to hold it, and then sell it at a low enough price as to make it affordable, while also encouraging people to download it for free.

  Yes, adhering to principles (i.e., refraining from what you believe to be aggression) can make it more difficult to get your word out. But — that’s just the utilitarian in you complaining.

  I accept your apology for adding “best-selling” to my post.

  Published: August 8, 2006 11:46 AM

• Paul Edwards

  Radical Sceptic,

  There’s even a book review on ‘Escape from Leviathan’ here:

  http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/17_4/17_4_4.pdf

  Published: August 8, 2006 11:47 AM

• Stephan Kinsella

  Person:

  “Yes. Yes, you are a hypocrite.”

  So? What if this were true? How does this fact imply my claim that copyright is unjustified, is incorrect? Stick to substance.

  “You claim it is morally wrong to stop someone for ordering his property in a particular non-aggressive manner,”

  Did I say it was “morally wrong”? Where?

  “yet threaten others with physical force for choosing to do so. Your actions contradict your stated preference.”

  Not so; but even if it did, so what? So what?

  “How do you “turn off” IP rights? Please tell me.

  An IP attorney is asking me this??? When do I get to charge your rates? How about:

  “This work is in the public domain.” or “Author grants permission to copy this work at will.”?”

  Doesn’t do it. (I think the EFF or open source movements disucss how difficult it is to dedicate a copyight to the public domain) NEXT.

  “‘So waht you are saying (I guess?) is that any author who opposes IP has to sabatoge any publication opportunity by any legitimate publisher, and only self-publish for free on the Internet?

  “That does not follow. Be creative for a minute here. You could set up some contract in which they can charge whatever they want, market the book, not assert copyright, and then you pay them any amount below $X that they fail to earn through selling the book. That way, you’re essentially paying them to market the book, while they take a chance on being able ot make additional profit.”

  This is idiotic. THe wordl does not work this way. It’s take it or leave it. Period.

  “You could also simply pay a printer to make the copies and then pay a bookstore to hold it, and then sell it at a low enough price as to make it affordable, while also encouraging people to download it for free.”

  Right. I could do lots of things to be a martyr, for the sake primarily of a bunch of ingrates who don’t desrve it. No thanks.

  “Yes, adhering to principles (i.e., refraining from what you believe to be aggression) can make it more difficult to get your word out. But — that’s just the utilitarian in you complaining.”

  NO; it’s the face without pain or fear or guilt. I didn’t make this unjust world, and I’ll be damned if I’ll accept the moral obligation to harm myself above and beyond the amount already foisted on me by you statists.

  “I accept your apology for adding “best-selling” to my post.”

  Dude you have got to relax.

  Published: August 8, 2006 12:03 PM

• Person

  Er… WHAT?

  Stephan Kinsella, is it the real Stephan Kinsella who’s actually using your account in your last post? When you disavow your theory of property — claiming you never said it was morally wrong to stop someone from arranging his property in a non-aggressive manner, when you make bizarre Rand allusions in a criticism of intellectual property, when you complain about taking up the moral obligation not to aggress against others, I have to make reasonably sure I’m speaking to that Stephan Kinsella before trying to sort through your latest.

  Published: August 8, 2006 12:14 PM

• Stephan Kinsella

  Person: “When you disavow your theory of property — claiming you never said it was morally wrong to stop someone from arranging his property in a non-aggressive manner,”

  I speak precisely. Where did I say it is *morally wrong*? Show me.

  “when you make bizarre Rand allusions in a criticism of intellectual property,”

  What?

  Published: August 8, 2006 12:16 PM

• Person

  Stephan:

  I speak precisely.

  Prove it.

  Where did I say it is *morally wrong*?

  Where did you say what was morally wrong?

  Show me.

  Show you what?

  What?

  Huh?

  ***

  See, I can play your game too.

  Published: August 8, 2006 12:22 PM

• Stephan Kinsella

  Person: re morally wrong: you are misstating my views. I speak of rights and justification.

  Published: August 8, 2006 12:33 PM

• Person

  Stephan: no, you don’t.

  Feeling it yet?

  Published: August 8, 2006 12:36 PM

• David J. Heinrich

  Person’s argument seems not to be that Kinsella’s argument against IP is wrong, but rather that Kinsella is a hypocrite. Presumeably, Person accepts Kinsella’s argument against IP. On that assumption, here’s a brief analysis…

  (1) Free people don’t accept responsibility for situation’s they didn’t create. It is not the fault of Stephan Kinsella that we live in a State-run world, where the ideal libertarian way of profiting from books isn’t available as a viable option.

  (2) You’re argument wouldn’t allow libertarians to use public roads. Come on, this is ridiculous.

  (3) Here’s what Stephan is doing: he gets money from a publisher to provide them with a book. They then pay him money later on in the form of a certain percentage of the proceeds they make from selling the book. The fact that they copyright the book is irrelevant; the interaction between them and Kinsella is non-aggressive.

  That said, I’m not so sure I agree with Kinsella completely on what he refers to as “intellectual property”. Certainly, contracts are only binding on those who agree to them, and that places practical problems on copyrights, but it hardly means they’re illegitimate in a narrowly defined sense. Furthermore, I argue that “No tresspassing” signs are valid, as would be Walter Block’s hypothetical “Killing Park” (where you put signs on the entrance to a park saying it’s a free shooting range, and anything and anyone on it is a potential target). Thus, I don’t see why you can’t place a copyright notice on the page of every book; thus, anyone opening it would know that it was covered by copyright contract, and that as a contingency of them reading it, they can’t copy it (at least not for redistribution).

  This is very similar to Kinsella’s argument for limited liability; anyone doing business with a corporation knows that the “Inc” or “Corp” or whatever it is means that they only have claim to the company’s assets — asset’s under the control of the corporation — and not to any of the assets of the shareholders (that is, shareholders cannot lose more than their initial value invested). I don’t see why the same doesn’t apply to copyright.

  There are also restaurants that don’t have prices listed on the food; yet, it’s presumed that you have to pay for it, at least what would be considered a reasonable amount, given the quality and quantity of foods (e.g., $12 for a hamburger would be reasonable; $1000 wouldn’t).

  Published: August 8, 2006 12:40 PM

• Angry Person

  Hijacking my name — that’s a new low.

  Published: August 8, 2006 1:00 PM

• Person

  Person:

  “Stephan: no, you don’t.

  Feeling it yet?”

  Now now, if you don’t stop being silly, I’ll stop deigning to give you the pleasure of my replies. Kindly warning.

  Second, re the other “Person” post, I deleted it and warned the poster.

  Heinrich:
  “Person’s argument seems not to be that Kinsella’s argument against IP is wrong, but rather that Kinsella is a hypocrite. Presumeably, Person accepts Kinsella’s argument against IP.”

  Ha ha ha ha. Got him. Seriously, now, PErson, the point is: stick to substance. Drop the hypocrite talk unless you can tie it to some *substantive* point.

  “(1) Free people don’t accept responsibility for situation’s they didn’t create. It is not the fault of Stephan Kinsella that we live in a State-run world, where the ideal libertarian way of profiting from books isn’t available as a viable option.”

  Yes; I’ve also written on this: The Morality of Acquiring and Enforcing Patents, and Letter to an Anonymous Patent Attorney, avialable here.

  “(3) Here’s what Stephan is doing: he gets money from a publisher to provide them with a book. They then pay him money later on in the form of a certain percentage of the proceeds they make from selling the book. The fact that they copyright the book is irrelevant; the interaction between them and Kinsella is non-aggressive.”

  And actually, they don’t copyright the book. The copyight is automatic. You have a copyright in your message to me you just wrote. I write a book. A publisher prints it and sells copies to customers. They pay; the publisher pays me. Everyone is happy. No one is coerced. Who is being harmed? Some pirate publisher down the road who “coudl” publish a pirate copy if there were no copyright law? But it’s not our fault there are copyight law. And do we have some affirmative duty to “get rid of” a right the law bestows on us, even though it’s very difficult and costly to do it? It’s just ridiculous, this whole infantile idea.

  “I don’t see why you can’t place a copyright notice on the page of every book; thus, anyone opening it would know that it was covered by copyright contract, and that as a contingency of them reading it, they can’t copy it (at least not for redistribution).”

  Because first, at most, this gets you the right-to-reproduce. But this is only one part of the copyright bundle. For example how would you get the derivative right? No way. And without this, copryright is much less valuable.

  Moreover, again, even if you could imply an agreement between the third party and the author, by virtue of the third party’s holding the page or seeing the notice, suppose the third party goes ahead and reprints it on the internet (sand notice). HOw are FOURTH parties supposed to be bound?

  Finally, this argument presupposes that information is property. I deal with this at length elsewhere.

  “This is very similar to Kinsella’s argument for limited liability; anyone doing business with a corporation knows that the “Inc” or “Corp” or whatever it is means that they only have claim to the company’s assets — asset’s under the control of the corporation — and not to any of the assets of the shareholders (that is, shareholders cannot lose more than their initial value invested). I don’t see why the same doesn’t apply to copyright.”

  Because in the corporate context the second party’s awareness of the corporation’s status is relevant in answering what he *consented to* when dealing with the corporation. This argument does not presuppose that info is a rivalrous resource.

  Published: August 8, 2006 1:23 PM

• David J. Heinrich

  Stephan,

  “the point is: stick to substance. Drop the hypocrite talk unless you can tie it to some *substantive* point.”

  I think Person’s point is that making profit off of copyrighted books is wrong. I think this is an incorrect argument. When directed as a charge of hypocrisy against you, it isn’t substantitive; however, when generalized (as I have stated it), it seems to be a relevant issue.

  “And actually, they don’t copyright the book. The copyight is automatic. You have a copyright in your message to me you just wrote. I write a book. A publisher prints it and sells copies to customers. They pay; the publisher pays me. Everyone is happy. No one is coerced. Who is being harmed? Some pirate publisher down the road who “coudl” publish a pirate copy if there were no copyright law? But it’s not our fault there are copyight law. And do we have some affirmative duty to “get rid of” a right the law bestows on us, even though it’s very difficult and costly to do it? It’s just ridiculous, this whole infantile idea.”

  I agree with this in it’s entirety. And thanks for the legal correction. We certainly don’t have any affirmative duty to “get rid of” our copyrights — irrelevant of the expense — because such would violate the non-aggression axiom (all positive duties not voluntarily accepted violate the NAA).

  “at most, this [placing a copyright notice on every page] gets you the right-to-reproduce. But this is only one part of the copyright bundle. For example how would you get the derivative right? No way. And without this, copryright is much less valuable.”

  That’s a good point. However, I’m not sure why you couldn’t just say, in addition to “copyrighted” also that you have the right to make sequels (or 2nd, 3rd, etc editions) that could be reasonably considered “derivatives”.

  Moreover, again, even if you could imply an agreement between the third party and the author, by virtue of the third party’s holding the page or seeing the notice, suppose the third party goes ahead and reprints it on the internet (sans notice). How are FOURTH parties supposed to be bound?

  They most certainly wouldn’t be in that case. However, the person putting it online would be. At the very least, this measure is a measure that would make it more likely that the person viewing the book would be aware of, and hence consented to, the copyright / derivative-right notice.

  Finally, this argument presupposes that information is property. I deal with this at length elsewhere.

  I don’t see why you have to think information is property to have this argument. There’s no reason why you can’t sell something — e.g., a book — with only certain use-rights.

  I think that two consenting parties can make whatever kind of contract they want to — so-long as it doesn’t violate the rights of anyone else — and that performance of that contract can be enforced. I know that you disagree with this position (e.g., your argument against life-long servitude contracts), but I accept Block’s argument that you can, indeed, sell yourself into slavery. This is just a specific instance of enforcing performance.

  It seems to me, then, that if you think it is legitimate to enforce performance of a contract, then you can legitimately contractually create something resembling (although not as powerful as) what we today know as “copyright”. If you don’t think it is legitimate to enforce performance, then such is not possible.

  Published: August 8, 2006 1:58 PM

• Stephan Kinsella

  Heinrich maneuver:

  >I think Person’s point is that making profit off of copyrighted books is wrong.

  Actually I don’t think so. I think he is in favor of IP. Maybe he think’s it’s wrong for ME to make profit since I oppose IP–but this is also wrong.

  >I think this is an incorrect argument. When directed as a charge of hypocrisy against you, it isn’t substantitive; however, when generalized (as I have stated it), it seems to be a relevant issue.

  Yes; but he is not against IP. He is against me being against IP.

  “That’s a good point. However, I’m not sure why you couldn’t just say, in addition to “copyrighted” also that you have the right to make sequels (or 2nd, 3rd, etc editions) that could be reasonably considered “derivatives”.”

  Because you are trying to bind third parties to some complex agreement, and this requires an actual agreement, not just a stamp on a book page.

  >They most certainly wouldn’t be in that case. However, the person putting it online would be.

  But if you agree with me here, then you have lost. Once you find some third parties who are free to disregard the copyright, the copyright is gone.

  > At the very least, this measure is a measure that would make it more likely that the person viewing the book would be aware of, and hence consented to, the copyright / derivative-right notice.

  I disagree anyway with the use of notice to bind third parties. Even if I find a book on a park bench that was set down by its purchaser, i am not bound by a notice. Suppose you walk around town with a large sign on your head: “Notice: I reserve the right to remember what color shirt I’m wearing.” Why does that notice “bind” third parties who see you?

  “I don’t see why you have to think information is property to have this argument. There’s no reason why you can’t sell something — e.g., a book — with only certain use-rights.”

  I disagree. You can have co-ownership of a book with someone. Sure. And that can limit the purchaser’s right to do things with it. But it does not imply that this private arrangement afects third parties. It’s very similar to the way trade secrets work. A and B agree that B will not divulge any of A’s secrets. If he does so, he can be sued for damage. Suppose one of Coca-Cola’s employees publishes the formula for coke tomorrow on the internet. Yes Coke can sue him. But can they stop other cola companies from using this recipe now? No.

  The only way to justfiy stopping people from using this info is to say the info is property owned by coke.

  >I think that two consenting parties can make whatever kind of contract they want to — so-long as it doesn’t violate the rights of anyone else — and that performance of that contract can be enforced. I know that you disagree with this position (e.g., your argument against life-long servitude contracts), but I accept Block’s argument that you can, indeed, sell yourself into slavery.

  Yes, but even if you can, it does not affect third parties who become aware of the information–wehther it be a trade secret, a word-pattern (book), or recipe or machiene design (patent-invention).

  > This is just a specific instance of enforcing performance.

  No. To have patent and copyright you have to have specific performance of third parties. Not just of the parties to the contract.

  >It seems to me, then, that if you think it is legitimate to enforce performance of a contract, then you can legitimately contractually create something resembling (although not as powerful as) what we today know as “copyright”.

  I realy doubt it.

  Published: August 8, 2006 2:19 PM

• Manuel Lora

  “Suppose you walk around town with a large sign on your head: “Notice: I reserve the right to remember what color shirt I’m wearing.” Why does that notice “bind” third parties who see you?”

  This is a good point that has recently come under fire when it comes to software agreements that supposedly bind you. The problem, in my view, is that the agreement comes after you purchase the product and have opened it and are about to install it. Normally this is not a problem with ordinary products like furtinure or electronics, but stores (most likely due to government and software company pressure) will not allow you to return software that has been opened, even if you tell them that you didn’t agree to the EULA since it was impossible for you to see what it was.

  You HAVE TO open the box and start installing before you agree. Granted, I guess you could go to a web page and read it, but then you’d have to have that option before you buy it (at the store, etc). That doesn’t seem to be happening.

  Published: August 8, 2006 2:40 PM

• David J. Heinrich

  Stephan,

  LOL @ “Heinrich maneuver”.

  It seems our disagreement is over two things: (1) Enforcing performance of a contract; (2) Implicit contract.

  A corporation’s “Inc” symbol implies an implicit contract, that anyone doing business with them only has claim to the assets of the corporation. Property owners can post signs on their property specifying acceptable behaviour. Why can’t someone do the same for books that they sell to others, with a copyright notice on every page? On Halloween, can we not leave a bowl of candy outside our houses, and write a sign saying, “only 1 [or 2] candy-bars per tricker-treater”? At the Mises Unviersity, for their copier machines, they have a sign requesting 5 cents per copy, with a cup next to the copier machine — isn’t this legitimate? (Sure, enforcement is on the honour system, but that has little to do with whether or not the contract is valid). So, why not the same for physical books? Books are, after all, physical things that are undoubtedly property. The person just walking by in the park, after all, has no right to open up a book to begin with — it’s someone’s private property!

  I think that implicit, or one-party stated contracts for use of a physical resource, are perfectly valid. No-one has to open up a book they find in the park or in someone’s house. If they do, I think written indications within the book can place limits on what they can do subsequently. This is different from me walking down the street, yelling, “Anyone listening to my talk has to give me $5,” because people can’t avoid listening to my talk. Likewise, it is different from me going up to someone’s house and re-painting it, then demanding payment (because, as repainting it, I stated my payment terms). I do not think the kind of contract I suggest puts the onus on the accepting party to affirmatively reject the contract, in the same way that the prior examples do.

  However, even if you don’t think putting a notice at the bottom of every book-page will do it, there seem to be other ways to accomplish the same thing. Firstly, let’s recognize that hardly no-one has to worry about anyone typing up their book and putting it online. This is not a practical concern. Concerns include using a photo-copier, or scanning the book into a computer and then having some software translate it. It seems to me that such could be prevented by agreement with the producers of photocopiers, document-scanning devices, and document-scanning (and OCR) software. Furthermore, I think that contractual terms with defense agencies could also take care of this.

  PS: Also note, I’m arguing for something that is somewhat weaker than “copyright” as we know it today. Absent agreements with protection agencies — whereby those who accept their terms are also bound — you couldn’t enforce performance on 3rd parties who didn’t agree to the contract.

  Published: August 8, 2006 3:51 PM

• nskinsella

  David,

  “It seems our disagreement is over two things: (1) Enforcing performance of a contract; (2) Implicit contract.”

  Well. I will accept arguend the right to compel performance; and I grant that there can be implicit agreements.

  >A corporation’s “Inc” symbol implies an implicit contract, that anyone doing business with them only has claim to the assets of the corporation.

  Well, I would say, that the use of “inc” makes it clear what the parties consented to. It is a contexual clue. It makes it clear that the lender (say) knew that he had security and recourse only to the corporation’s assets, not those of the shareholders. So there is simply no (conditional) title transfer from shareholder-to-lender. The “Inc” is just one way of making this clear.

  > Property owners can post signs on their property specifying acceptable behaviour.

  And this is a slightly different matter. The owner of property has a right to decide who uses it. He can keep people out, or let them use it, or let them use it for limited times for limited purposes. The sign helps make it clear what consent (permission) he is extending.

  Notice: in both cases, the person “bound” by the notice or sign, is bound *because they enter a contract* with the other person. The property-owner has a right to refuse to deal with the second party; he witholds this consent until and unless teh second party agrees to certain terms.

  >Why can’t someone do the same for books that they sell to others, with a copyright notice on every page? On Halloween, can we not leave a bowl of candy outside our houses, and write a sign saying, “only 1 [or 2] candy-bars per tricker-treater”?

  Well, let’s be clear about this. Halloween: you can. It is your property. You are giving people implicit and limited permission (license) to enter your property, and to take candy. You are permitting them to take only part of your candy not all of it. If they take more than this, they are stealing.

  But this does not apply to a notice on a page. It only works if the ideas on teh page are property. That is why I keep saying IP even by contract presupposes the ideas are property. If some book purchaser posts his copy on the internet, or leaves it on a park bench, I don’t *need anyone’s permission* to read it! It’s just lying there, as if it’s abandoned. The reason conditions above work is they are a condition of giving you something you don’t already have. In this case, the book-finder does not need any permission.

  > At the Mises Unviersity, for their copier machines, they have a sign requesting 5 cents per copy, with a cup next to the copier machine — isn’t this legitimate?

  Yes. It’s conditioning use of the copier in a certain way. But Mises I. alreayd owns the copyier, and has a right to prevent you from using it.

  Even many attorneys don’t realize this but the entire concept of license (permission) *depends on the licensor having the right to exclude*. The concept of a license *means that* you are *granting permission* to someone to do something they otherwise would not have the ability or right to do.

  Likewise, you cannot say that the notice on teh page of a book binds the finder, unless you first say that the book owner *has a right to deny you the right to copy the information* or read the book–whcih is question begging. If I see a book on teh ground, for all i know it may be lost or abandoned. No one has a right to stop me from picking it up, or reading it. Since they don’t, they can’t condition my reading it on agreeing to certain conditions.

  I suppose you could argue that it would be common knowlege that book publishers retain ownership of books and do not consent to anyone (even a stranger finding it) reading it UNLESS he aggrees to copyright-like-terms first. But the problem with this is several. First, it’s way too much a stretch. And second, many books do not have a copyright (the author would not care). How could I find out, without first reading it; by then, I hve the idea, before I agreed to any terms. Third, even if you could bind the third party finder of the book, this only works *because the physical book is owned* by the publisher still; but *not the information*. So if someone does publish the WRODS in a new book, or on the Internet, then fourth parties reading this cannot at all ever be bound, unless you say the property right is *in the information*. Which is wrong, and questionbegging.

  >So, why not the same for physical books? Books are, after all, physical things that are undoubtedly property. The person just walking by in the park, after all, has no right to open up a book to begin with — it’s someone’s private property!

  How do you know? Maybe it’s abandoned. Maybe it’s left there by a proselytizer. Maybe the author is seeding them like those Christian comics on your windshield. Or maybe the owner would not mind if you browsed it, much like people sometiems borrow each others’ newspapers?

  >I think that implicit, or one-party stated contracts for use of a physical resource, are perfectly valid.

  Only, in this case, if you say that my opening and viewing a lost book is *necessarily* trespass. But it is not. Books are not special; they are just objects. Are you saying that if things are lost or abandoned, no one else ever has the right to use them?

  >No-one has to open up a book they find in the park or in someone’s house. If they do, I think written indications within the book can place limits on what they can do subsequently.

  Perhaps. Even if so, however, as i said, “fourth parties” who merely see *the information* are not bound.

  >This is different from me walking down the street, yelling, “Anyone listening to my talk has to give me $5,” because people can’t avoid listening to my talk.

  Can anoyone today avoid knowing who Mickey Mouse is, or Superman, or the plot of Star Wars, or Romeo and Juliet? This is common konwledge. Yet people are restricted from acing on this knowledge by copyight law.

  >Concerns include using a photo-copier, or scanning the book into a computer and then having some software translate it. It seems to me that such could be prevented by agreement with the producers of photocopiers, document-scanning devices, and document-scanning (and OCR) software. Furthermore, I think that contractual terms with defense agencies could also take care of this.

  Maybe. But once it leaks out, like a trade secret, it’s destroyed. Even if it was leaked in violation of rights.

  >PS: Also note, I’m arguing for something that is somewhat weaker than “copyright” as we know it today.

  I bleieve that what you are arguing for, really, is nothing more than trade secret law. And that this cannot be used to generate a simalacrum of copyright.

  Published: August 8, 2006 4:17 PM

• Curt Howland

  Radical Sceptic, I just looked up Escape From Leviathan. $80? Ouch! Not that I expect my local library is going to have a copy, but that’s the only way I’m going to read it.

  That’s with a 20% discount on Amazon, too. Maybe there’s a used copy on abebooks…

   

  Published: August 11, 2006 2:28 PM

• M E Hoffer

  CH,

  There’s an eBay seller offering the book for U$D 25 +S&H

  http://cgi.ebay.com/Escape-from-Leviathan-by-J-C-Lester-2000_W0QQitemZ250005999374QQihZ015QQcategoryZ378QQcmdZViewItem

  http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Escape+from+Leviathan%22&hl=en&lr=&start=10&sa=N

  Published: August 11, 2006 10:02 PM

• Cy

  Fe Fi FOE Comes (novel) by William C. Samples

  nom on www.goodreads.com for Libertarian Fiction, Best ScFi, Best Book

  sales at Amazon other book stores

  Published: January 19, 2009 12:37 AM

1. Money Prices Not a Measure of Value; Richard Epstein’s Takings Theory of the State; KOL237 | Intellectual Nonsense: Fallacious Arguments for IP—Part 2 (Libertopia 2012); Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward, n.35. [↩]

See also:

• The Trouble with Libertarian Activism
• The Trouble with Milsted
• Engineers’ Syndrome

From the Mises Blog, Aug. 2, 2006

Archived comments below.

C.P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures” and Misesian Dualism

TAGS Philosophy and Methodology

I hate it when I send someone an email with attached files, and they send the same ones back to me when they reply. I understand some email systems, like Lotus Notes, often have default settings that for some reason attach files when when you reply–why, I have no idea, as there is almost never a reason to do this. It is so annoying.

Related:

• Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023)
• Kinsella et al., The Universal Principles of Liberty (Aug. 14, 2025)

I was a libertarian anarchist decades before I ever heard of Stephan Kinsella. But still, you helped to clarify the principles in my mind. I regard you as the clearest, most consistent, and best proponent and explainer of libertarianism.

— Jim (@JimeeLiberty) August 21, 2025

From the Mises Blog, July 31, 2006

Archive comments below

Hoppe and Intellectual Property: On Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

TAGS Monopoly and CompetitionPhilosophy and Methodology

Archive comments:

Comments (14)

• Geoffrey Allan Plauche
• My major problem with Hoppe’s argumentation ethics is that, unlike the Rothbard passage cited in the beginning of the post above, it operates on a sort of Kantian realist philosophical foundation and without a broader moral framework while attempting to provide the entire backbone of a political theory. Rothbard’s account of discussion and life takes place within the context of a broader ethical framework, namely a teleological and neo-Aristotelian/Thomist one. The philosophical foundations matter. I think Hoppe’s argumentation ethics may have some merit, but only if fitted within a neo-Aristotelian philosophy and ethical and political theory.

• Published: July 31, 2006 8:29 AM

• Geoffrey Allan Plauche
• Notice, also, that Objectivists can make a similar performative contradiction argument. (I can’t recall if Rand does explicitly, although she probably argued something like this at some point.) The fundamental alternative for man is the choice between life and death. Once you’ve chosen life, and the fact that your still alive and acting to further your life demonstrates that you’ve so chosen, then you are obligated to live your life according to Objectivism. To do otherwise is a performative contradiction. This is because a human life is one that is rational and Objectivist ethics is the most rational of ethics and most conducive toward living a human life.(Not that I endorse such an Objectivist argument, by the way; I disagree with the Objectivists who think that the choice to live is pre-moral.)

• Published: July 31, 2006 9:17 AM

• Stephan Kinsella
• Plauche:Your critique that Hoppe’s argument “operates” on the wrong “foundation” and does not have the proper, broad “moral framework” just seems too vague, general, and loosey-goosey to respond to. All I gather from this is, “I like Rothbard better than Hoppe.”Re Objectivism: Um, sure:
  

  “[A]s Rand maintains, all ‘oughts’ are hypothetical, based on valuing one’s life ….”The point is not that one has to be alive in order to act to achieve anything. The point is that being pro-life is what makes end states qualify as values. Only choosing to hold one’s life as a value gives one the stake in one’s actions that is required for the whole issue of evaluation to arise ….

  Contrary to biological determinism, one does not have to pursue any goals or proclaim anything to be of value. But contrary to subjectivism, if one does, the action or proclamation logically depends on implicitly accepting one’s life as one’s ultimate value….

  The issue of justifying choices arises only in the context of having already chosen to live. The choice to live is not extra-moral, but pre-moral; it is a precondition of all moral evaluation.

   

   

   

  Harry Binswanger, Life-Based Teleology and the Foundations of Ethics, The Monist 84, 99-100 (1992). As Ayn Rand states:

  Life or death is man’s only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.

  Ayn Rand, Causality Versus Duty, in Philosophy: Who Needs It 95, 99 (Signet 1984).

  See also the Wikipedia entry on Objectivism:

  Central to Objectivist ethics is the concept of “value.” Rand defines value as “that which one acts to gain and/or keep.” At the most fundamental level, the pursuit of values arises out of need; specifically, the need to determine what an individual should pursue in order to maintain his life if he so chooses to live. Rand does not hold that values are “intrinsic” — that there are values an individual must pursue regardless of his wishes. And, she does not hold that they are “subjective” — that there are values that should be pursued because an individual says they should be pursued. Rather, she believes that values are “objective.” By this she means that there are values that should be pursued if one chooses to value his life. For example, food would be an objective value; in other words, it would be “objectively” true that food is required for survival. For Rand, all moral imperatives are hypothetical. There are no “categorical imperatives” as in Kantianism which an individual must perform regardless of his desires. In Objectivism, imperatives are conditioned on an individual choosing to value his life. They do not exist for an individual unless he makes this choice. Rand says, morality is a “code of values accepted by choice.” According to Leonard Peikoff, Rand holds that “man needs [morality] for one reason only: he needs it in order to survive. Moral laws, in this view, are principles that define how to nourish and sustain human life; they are no more than this and no less.”[12] Objectivism does not say there is moral requirement to choose to value life. As Allan Gotthelf points out, for Rand, “Morality rests on a fundamental, pre-moral choice.”[13]

   

• Published: July 31, 2006 9:48 AM

• Paul Edwards
• “All I gather from this is, “I like Rothbard better than Hoppe.””And on the question of Hoppe’s thesis, even Rothbard liked Hoppe better than Rothbard.Funny that.

• Published: July 31, 2006 11:44 AM

• Person
• Stephan, if I post in this thread, will you delete all of my posts in this thread once I back you into a corner and/or follow your posting style? I just want to make sure I’m not wasting my time first. Thanks.

• Published: July 31, 2006 12:29 PM

• Stephan Kinsella
• Person, just keep it intelligent and civil; on point, and serious. If you veer from these standards I’ll delete you. If you don’t, I wont. ‘kay?BTW: since you believe in IP–I hereby claim a logoright in my “posting style”, and forbid you to “use” it. Use your own posting style, please.

• Published: July 31, 2006 12:42 PM

• quasibill
• Question from someone who admittedly hasn’t read the source material thoroughly, so a mere reference to where the answer can be found is all that I require:How does Hoppe (or Kinsella, or whoever supports the argumentation ethics) respond to the likely Georgist (or even strict Lockean) extension of the theory? Specifically, how can you draw the line prior to the space (and therefore the ground) you occupy, at least to the extent that you must, somewhere, have that space, in order for the doctrine to be universally applicable?

• Published: July 31, 2006 1:14 PM

• Curt Howland
• Wow. And all I want is an ice-cream cone. Guess we all have to start somewhere.

• Published: July 31, 2006 2:25 PM

• Paul Edwards
• quasibill,Do you mind re-phrasing that question?

• Published: July 31, 2006 2:55 PM

• quasibill
• Paul,I don’t mind re-phrasing it, I’m just not sure I can 🙂 My problem is, as I noted, little familiarity with the source material. Furthermore, I’m asking a question from a perspective I don’t necessarily share. However, it seems to me that if you posit that you require self-ownership to engage in an honest debate (if you’ll permit that admittedly not totally accurate paraphrase), you also, by current limitations, require ownership of a given space on planet earth – at least somewhere. In other words, you require the existence of some place that you can exist where you are allowed to make your argument. If all habitable (in the most basic sense of surviving outside of several hours) land on Earth is currently owned, and in a hypo, all owners claim that you cannot advocate the right to bear arms on their property, is there a contradiction under Hoppe’s theory for the person who has just attained majority and owns no property?I’m not sure if I’ve even asked the question properly this way, but it’s at least a start. The fundamental question I’m trying to get at involves the Georgist or strict Lockean concern over real property.

• Published: July 31, 2006 3:10 PM

• Stephan Kinsella
• Quasibill, have you seen my elaboration on Hoppe in my Defending Argumentation Ethics? It’s available at www.stephankinsella.com/publications.

• Published: July 31, 2006 4:56 PM

• Paul Edwards
• Quasibill,“I don’t mind re-phrasing it, I’m just not sure I can 🙂 My problem is, as I noted, little familiarity with the source material. Furthermore, I’m asking a question from a perspective I don’t necessarily share.�?That’s cool, i get you. And I think you’ll find it a very worth-while thing to investigate at some point. I found it to be pretty mind bending to work it all through and took me several iterations to get it well enough so I felt I could comfortably argue it.“However, it seems to me that if you posit that you require self-ownership to engage in an honest debate (if you’ll permit that admittedly not totally accurate paraphrase),�?

  Or more precisely that from a praxeological analysis of the act of argumentation, i.e. the purpose of argumentation, to truly debate, one presupposes both listener and proposition maker are self-owners.

  “you also, by current limitations, require ownership of a given space on planet earth – at least somewhere. In other words, you require the existence of some place that you can exist where you are allowed to make your argument.�?

  You presuppose this right to stand and right to exclusive control over your body (right to yourself) while in the act of argumentation. “Presuppose�? is the key word. The word cannot be over emphasized and in fact, to me it seems, so much confusion over Hoppe’s thesis arises from overlooking the importance of the term. What it means is that regardless of one’s true circumstances, whether one is about to be murdered for stating the wrong premise, the wrong reasoning or wrong conclusion from the listener’s perspective, as one makes this argument that may ultimately end his life, one necessarily and regardless, still presupposes that while he makes the argument, he has a right to his body, his standing space, and his survival. It follows not from observing true empirical circumstances, but rather from what it necessarily implies to truly perform the human act of argumentation. Its praxeologically deduced.

  “If all habitable (in the most basic sense of surviving outside of several hours) land on Earth is currently owned, and in a hypo, all owners claim that you cannot advocate the right to bear arms on their property, is there a contradiction under Hoppe’s theory for the person who has just attained majority and owns no property?

  “I’m not sure if I’ve even asked the question properly this way, but it’s at least a start. The fundamental question I’m trying to get at involves the Georgist or strict Lockean concern over real property.�?

  Instead of taking my swing at it, I’ll just cut and paste Hoppe’s answer to what seems to me to be a similar question at http://www.hanshoppe.com/publications/econ-ethics-appx.pdf titled “FOUR CRITICAL REPLIES�?.

  “…What about newcomers in this situation, who own nothing but their physical bodies?
  Cannot the homesteaders restrict access to their property for these newcomers and would this not be intolerable? I fail to see why. (Empirically, of course, the problem does not exist: if it were not for governments’ restricting access to unowned land, there would still be plenty of empty land around!) These newcomers come into existence somewhere – normally one would think as children born to parents who are owners or renters of land (if they came from Mars, and no one wanted them here, so what?; they assumed a risk in coming, and if they now have to return, tough luck!). If the parents do not provide for the newcomers, they are free to search the world over for employers, sellers, or charitable contributors – and a society ruled by the homesteading ethic would be, as Conway admits, the most prosperous one possible! If they still could not find anyone willing to employ, support, or trade with them, why not ask “What’s wrong with them?” instead of Conway’s feeling sorry for them? Apparently they must be intolerably unpleasant fellows and had better shape up, or they deserve no other treatment. Such, in fact, would be my own intuitive reaction.�?

  Does that answer address the essence of your question?

• Published: July 31, 2006 5:19 PM

• quasibill
• Stephan,I’ve seen it, but, as yet, I haven’t had a chance to sit down and really give it the time required for a meaningful read. It’s on my list. I was just hoping to “shortcut” to the one issue that seems to jump out at me. Alas, it appears that I’ll have to do it the old fashioned way!Paul,That quote from Hoppe, while informative, doesn’t really address my issue. I’m going to have to do some more reading, apparently, before I can make sense of the fundamental uneasiness I’m feeling right now.

  My last crack before deciding to just do it the right way and RTFAs is this:

  Does Hoppe claim that his ethic extends to ownership beyond the arguer’s body? If so, how are the lines drawn? I have no problem with the theory as far as self-ownership is concerned. However, I think that moving beyond self-ownership into ownership of other objects brings another value into play, whereupon the possibility of a conflict (in theory, if not in actual practice) arises – I agree that the land monopoly I posit is highly unlikely to arise in reality. However, it is possible, in which case self-ownership conflicts fundamentally with land ownership, and the “proper” resolution of the conflict depends on a balancing test, and not deductive reasoning. And as a result, the extension beyond self-ownership can’t be universally true, as it wouldn’t be true in a possible (though unlikely, I agree with Hoppe’s quote) circumstance.

  Like I said, no need to reply if I haven’t made myself any clearer – I need to read the source material anyway.

• Published: August 1, 2006 7:48 AM

• Stephan Kinsella
• Quasibill, here is an excerpt from my paper summarizing HHH’s argument:
  

  The universalization principle filters out many possible norms, but many possible, mutually incompatible, and nonlibertarian candidates remain (“anyone who drinks alcohol will be punished”).

   

  “However, there are other positive norms implied in argumentation aside from the universalization principle. In order to recognize them, it is only necessary to call three interrelated facts to attention. First, that argumentation is not only a cognitive but also a practical affair. Second, that argumentation, as a form of action, implies the use of the scarce resource of one’s body. And third, that argumentation is a conflict-free way of interacting.” (TSC, p. 132; emphasis added)

  Participants in discourse cannot deny the existence of scarcity (discourse is a form of action, after all, and action implies scarce resources, in one’s body and in external objects) nor the possibility of conflict over these scarce resources. They also value the ability to participate in argument (they are engaging in it, after all) and thus its practical preconditions, namely the ability to actually use scarce resources in order to survive (for argumentation is not possible without survival). And because argumentation/discourse is cooperative, civilized, peaceful activity, and because “justifying means justifying without having to rely on coercion” (TSC, p. 133), participants in discourse necessarily value being able to use scarce resources in a conflict-free way. One adopting a civilized, peaceful stance and trying to justify a norm cannot coherently advocate non-peaceful norms. In fact, the very attempt to justify a resource allocation norm is an attempt to settle conflicts with regard to the use of that resource. Thus, a participant in discourse could never justify the proposition that there is no value to being able to use resources, or that conflict should not be avoided, or that cooperation and peacefulness are bad things. Valuing the avoidance of conflicts also presupposes the value of attempting to find rules that make conflict avoidance possible. I.e., property rules.

  Accordingly, participants in discourse, in particular those seeking to justify proposed norms, implicitly recognize the value and legitimacy of assigning specified property owners to specified scarce resources – for reasons that are universalizable and that make conflict-avoidance possible. However, property rights make conflict avoidance possible by establishing perceivable boundaries to property indicating the property’s borders and who the owner is, and by basing the assignment on universalizable rules that could be accepted as fair by all potential arguers. For this reason, the assignment of property rights has to be based on some objective link between the claimant and a particular resource.

  What all this means is that anyone ever attempting to (argumentatively) justify any norm is already presupposing a host of norms and argumentative rules. The substantive presupposed norms rule out many proposed norms, even if they are universalizable. For example, a rule such as “no one should ever be able to use any scarce resource” could never be justified. It is incompatible with the speaker’s evident value for the ability to use scarce resources, because he has to use (and be able to use) the scarce resource of his body in order to engage in any activity, including argumentation. And he, or someone, had to be able to use other scarce resources such as food, shelter, etc., so that the arguers are alive and able to argue (remember, discourse is a practical affair, and requires the speakers to be alive, to have control of their bodies and their standing room, etc.).

  In addition, a rule specifying that all resources, or even some resources, should have no owner at all, simply does not allocate ownership in the scarce resources at issue, i.e. it does not fulfill its function of conflict-avoidance. Unless property rights are allocated to someone, conflict over each scarce resource is possible; that is the nature of scarcity. (As a practical matter, most such rules also imply that, if a given resource should not be “owned,” then some person or agency is authorized to prevent others from using the thing. In which case the rule is in reality assigning ownership to the agency with control, and would need to be justified. For example, the public forests are said to be “unowned” but the federal government prevents homesteaders from moving in. Clearly here the federal government is asserting ownership. The necessity of justifying this cannot be avoided by the fiction that the property is not owned.)

  There is no way any norm can be justified that does not seek to assign ownership of every scarce resource to particular owners, based on an objective link between the owner and the owned resource. No rule could ever be justified if it refrains from deciding who owns a particular resource, or if it specifies that no one owns a resource. And any justification offered has to be universalizable. The reasons for all these requirements should be clear by now.

  Universalizability has been discussed. Particular owners must be assigned to each and every scarce resource – this is what any theory of property – any ethic – has to do. There must be an objective link between the owner and the resource, so that conflicts can be avoided, and also to comply with universalizability. “Every” scarce resource must be owned by someone, for conflict-avoidance and other reasons given above.

  To this point the case is fairly general, and only establishes the framework for examining various competing norms. The libertarian insistence on objective links between resources and owners, and its particular view of what constitutes such objective links, is what completes the case.

  Then, the following section in the paper shows “that libertarianism is the only theory of rights that satisfies the presuppositions of discourse, because only it advocates assigning ownership by means of objective links between the owner and the property. This link, of course, is first use, or original appropriation. Only the norm assigning ownership in a thing to its first user, or his transferee in title, could fulfill this requirement, or the other presuppositions of argumentation.”

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

• Published: August 1, 2006 8:01 AM

[Update: see also:

• On the Non Liquet in Libertarian Theory and Armchair Theorizing
• Roman Law and Hypothetical Cases
• On Pushing the Button–the problem with magic
• The Problem with “Fraud”: Fraud, Threat, and Contract Breach as Types of Aggression (July 17, 2006)
• Stalking and Threats as Aggression
• Fraud, Restitution, and Retaliation: The Libertarian Approach
• Konrad Graf, “Action-Based Jurisprudence: Praxeological Legal Theory in Relation to Economic Theory, Ethics, and Legal Practice,” Libertarian Papers 3, 19 (2011), Part III, “Practice: The Armchair and the Bench”
• See also discussion of the flagpole hypo in The Liberty Magazine Polls: 1988, 1999, and 2008: Flagpoles, Parental Obligations, Private Nukes

From the Mises Blog, July 27, 2006:

The Limits of Armchair Theorizing: The case of Threats

A correspondent recently wrote me with a few libertarian puzzles/conundra. An edited version is below:

When are threats of aggression punishable by law? Just how immediate, credible and serious must a threat be if it is to be considered a law violation under the libertarian legal code?

[Note: In The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard said: “It is important to insist, however, that the threat of aggression be palpable, immediate, and direct; in short, that it be embodied in the initiation of an overt act. Any remote or indirect criterion—any ‘risk’ or ‘threat’—is simply an excuse for invasive action by the supposed ‘defender’ against the alleged ‘threat.'”]

Let us consider each of these three elements in turn: immediate, credible and serious.

1. Immediate

If I say I am going to kill you now, that is more immediate than if I say I am going to kill you in 1 or 10 years. Certainly, in the first case, I am legally entitled to plug you, if I can get a bead on you, before you shoot me. But what about the future threat. Here, I think I am also entitled to take violent action against you. (I think in one of his recent books Randy Barnett takes this position.) [Yes: see page 65 of my review of Barnett’s book, discussing his principle of “extended self-defense”]

Consider the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie by Islamists, both in the UK where this author was located, and also from several Muslim countries. Should the British Authorities have arrested anyone making this fatwa threat? (Stipulate, arguendo, that the UK govt is legitimate.) Certainly, this was an immediate threat; on that ground alone such arrests would have been justified. Yet, this govt did no such thing.

2. Credible

How credible does the threat have to be, to warrant the use of aggression against the issuer? Suppose I say, “If X shows up in town, I’m gonna strangle him with my bare hands.” I happen to live in Podunk, Montana, and the chances of X showing up are just about nil. Would X, or the forces of law and order, be justified in punishing me for making such a threat. (By the way, what is the proper libertarian punishment for a threat that is not carried out?) Many such threats have been uttered against the President of the U.S. throughout the last few decades, and perhaps even centuries. The govt police take a very negative attitude toward these threats. It is against the law to make such threats (what law?). Are they justified, on libertarian grounds, in adopting this position (again, we stipulate for argument’s sake that the US govt is a legitimate one, and so are those – the FBI – who attempt to uncover such threats and punish those responsible for them.)

3. Serious

When my children were in the orchestra, the conductor wore a t shirt saying, “tune your instrument correctly, or die.” Or if a professor giving an exam writes on the blackboard, “use a fake name or I’ll kill you.” (assume the professor likes to mark exams anonymously.)

These are easy cases. It is patently obvious in both cases that no real threat has been made. Anyone using physical force against the conductor or the professor in these cases wouuld be entirely unjustified. These are jokes.

But then, there are jokes and there are jokes. If A waves a toy pistol at B, a watergun, for example, and B shoots A with a real gun, libertarian law is likely in the extreme to side with B; to hold him innocent of murder. To consider his act one of self defense. There are exceptions here of course. If this is part of a play, or a movie, and A and B are actors. The script calls for A to aim a gun at B, all parties know that A’s “gun” is a fake, and, yet, B kills A. This is downright murder.

Similarly, at a track meet, were someone to kill the man firing the starter’s pistol this would be murder, no matter how realistic this weapon looks. (But suppose someone from Mars did this, in the honest but mistaken belief that the starter was aiming at someone in the stands, and the Martian was just trying to save that innocent person’s life.)

Is this entire train of thought just another example that there are grey areas in the law, continuum problems, which have no real solution?

My reply: See my recent post, The Problem with “Fraud”: Fraud, Threat, and Contract Breach as Types of Aggression. In that post, I tried to briefly summarize my approach to:

1. Why fraud is aggressoin
2. Why threats are aggression
3. Why breach of contract is agggression

I did this because most libertarians just sort of assume these are all types of aggression without knowing exactly why.

Now, re threats, and indeed all these matters, I am leaning toward a view something along these lines. In any real-world attempt to have a libertarian system, to have justice, there will be real, fallible people trying to adjudicate disputes. Juries, judges, whatever. There is a necessarily real-world, and imprecise, and compromising, aspect to justice, of necessecity. I think such decent, libertarian citizens/jurors would attempt to be guided both by more abstract principles of ethics and justice (such as those developed by theorists), and by local custom and established precedents and applications of the more general principles to more concrete situations; and they would also, of course, apply their own intuitive sense of justice and take into account as many contextual factors and nuances as possible, to try to make the best decision.

Given this, I am increasingly suspicious of the ability, or of at least the usefulness, of answering very particular concrete situations solely by armchair reasoning. First, the number of possible questions you can answer is infinite.

Second, even if you answer one, any real-world situation might have a more rich set of relevant facts that means your principle might not apply.

Third, you can never know ahead of time what body of “established” principles will have been built up and relied upon. For example, it seems to me that as a general matter, in any society there is going to be some understanding of tacit or implicit consent–e.g., today, it is not presumed to be trespass for you to knock on my door to ask me an innocuous favor or question. But how can we say ahead of time what customs in this regard will be in effect in any given society, any more than we can say ahead of time how language will develop or various actions will have various commmunicatory aspects (that is, you can imagine a silent sale: a guy buys a cup of cofffee and hands over a dollar for it, with no words being spoken; becuase of social context, the interaction and actions of the parties convey meaning, just as if they spoke in words; etc.).

I addressed some of this in a previous article, Knowledge, Calculation, Conflict, and Law, reviewing a book by Randy Barnett:

Barnett first maintains that there are limits to the ability to deduce specific legal precepts from abstract principles of justice (natural rights), in part because many sets of legal precepts are consistent with the general parameters of the abstract principles of natural rights (pp. 109–11). He argues that a common-law type decentralized legal system, unlike law professors and philosophers, can develop legal precepts because, in such a system, they gradually develop and evolve from the outcomes of thousands of actual cases.

Yet, Barnett does not provide a rigorous argument showing where are the exactlimits of the ability to deduce concrete rules. He evidently feels that the more abstract principles can, for some reason, be established by armchair theorists. If denizens of the ivory tower can do this, why can they not deduce or establish more concrete rules by simply considering more and more contextual facts? In the Roman law system—a somewhat decentralized legal system superior in many ways to the common law—Roman jurists (jurisconsults) helped develop the great body of Roman law by providing opinions on the best way to resolve disputes. These disputes were often purely hypothetical or imaginary cases, in which the jurists asked: “under such and such a possible or conceivable combination of circumstances, what would the law require?”25 It is conceivable that a large part or even all of the legal code existing in a given society can be “deduced” in this fashion, and then these rules applied like precedents to actual controversies as they arise. As a libertarian (and, I confess, a lawyer), I must say that I believe I would be more comfortable living under a set of concrete rules deduced by libertarian philosophers than the (perhaps more concrete) set of rules developed under the actual common law.

Barnett first maintains that there are limits to the ability to deduce specific legal precepts from abstract principles of justice (natural rights), in part because many sets of legal precepts are consistent with the general parameters of the abstract principles of natural rights (pp. 109–11). He argues that a common-law type decentralized legal system, unlike law professors and philosophers, can develop legal precepts because, in such a system, they gradually develop and evolve from the outcomes of thousands of actual cases.

Still, Barnett’s argument in favor of a common-law system makes sense, even to libertarians who favor a deductive approach to rights (Hoppe [A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism] 1989b, p. 131; Rothbard [The Ethics of Liberty] 1998; Kinsella [A Libertarian Theory of Punishment and Rights] 1997, pp. 607–45). Legal rules must be concrete in the sense that the rules must take into account the entire relevant factual context. Since there are an infinite number of factual situations that could exist in interactions between individuals, a process which focuses on actual cases or controversies is likely to produce the most “interesting” or useful rules.26 It probably makes little sense devoting scarce time and resources to developing legal precepts for imaginary or unrealistic scenarios. If nothing else, a common-law type system that develops and refines legal precepts as new cases arise serves as a sort of filter that selects which disputes (i.e., real, commonly-encountered ones) to devote attention to.

Barnett thus makes a convincing case that, in a decentralized legal system such as the English common law (or the early Roman law, the Law Merchant, and even modern arbitral systems)—especially one in which judges or arbitrators attempt to apply fundamental notions of justice to concrete situations—it is reasonable to expect a body of concrete legal concepts and precepts to develop, which are more or less compatible with fundamental notions of justice.27

26 This is analogous to Mises’s method selecting certain empirical assumptions (e.g., assuming there is money instead of barter) to develop “interesting” laws based on the fundamental axioms of praxeology, rather than irrelevant or uninteresting (though not invalid) laws. See Mises ([Ultimate Foundations of Economic Science], 1962, p. 41; [Epistemological Problems of Economics], 1981, pp. 14–16, 30–31, 87–88; [Human Action], 1966, pp. 65–66).

(See also my Punishment and Proportionality article, at note 20 and accompanying text:

“The conduct of individuals can be divided into two types: (1) coercive or aggressive (i.e., actions that are initiations of force) and (2) non-coercive or nonaggressive. This division is purely descriptive, and does not presume that aggression is invalid, immoral or unjustifiable; it only assumes that (at least some) human action can be objectively classified either as aggressive or nonaggressive.20

20 Other divisions could of course be proposed as well, but they do not result in interesting or useful results. For example, one could divide human conduct into jogging and not jogging, but to what end? Although such a division would be valid, it would produce uniteresting results, unlike the aggressive/nonagressive division, which produces relevant results for a theory of punishment, which of necessity concerns the use of force. See [Mises,[Ultimate Foundations of Economic Science], 1962, p. 41; [Epistemological Problems of Economics], pp. 14–16, 30–31, 87–88; [Human Action], 1966, pp. 65–66)] (explaining that experience can be referred to to develop “interesting” laws based on the fundamental axioms of praxeology, rather than irrelevant or uninteresting (though not invalid) laws).)

In an email discussion with someone, I made the point that one reason debtor’s prison is impermissible is that failure to repay a loan is not theft, is not a crime, since if the debtor is penniless, there is no property to steal. So I distinguished between taking property without consent, or failure to have money to repay–one distinction is that the former is intentional, whereas the latter is not.

My correspondent said default may seem disanalogous to theft because the person’s inability to pay may not be his fault; but if you adhere to a strict-liability restitution theory, then there can be theft regardless of fault or intention.

My reply: Ah. So you don’t think intent matters. A negligent killing is as culpable as an intentional one? I think you have to have a continuum; this is what would permit you to say mere behavior–a muscle spasm–is not actionable. I am sure you would carve that out. But then you have a discontinuous theory, that seems strange.

His reply was that if the wind blows him onto my property, there is no intent but it’s still trespass, and I can insist he leave (and if he refuses, then that’s the intentional act). He also said that if I have a muscle spasm (not even an action, really, just behavior), and break your vase, then I have to pay. So intent does not matter; there is an obligation to repay (restitution) no matter what.

I wrote, Right. I know this view. I’m skeptical of it. Plus, I’m not quite convinced that just b/c you have the right to eject me that means I committed trespass in getting there. Further–suppose the wind blows me up in the air, onto your ship at sea. I am not 100% sure you have the right to push me off thereby killing me.

He wrote, well, maybe it’s not trespass; but that the reason he can’t kick me off is proportionality concenrs.

My reply:

Yes; but would you say the proportionality concerns are the *same* in the case of someoen who accidentally ends up on your property and someoen who intentionally does? I bet I could come up with cases where you’d say the concerns are different.

And imagine, say, A is thrown on your boat, and B is an intentional trespasser. The boat will sink w 3 people. Surely it’s more just to cast B overboard than A; it is not neutral. Espcially, if B is a kidnapper who *carries* his victim, A, on board.

I think you have to imagine how a libertarian jury would hand the cases. Say, you have a house boat w/ a dinner party. The boat breaks free in a storm. You can’t now “disinvite” your guests, it ti would mean their deaths. Now you can seay that there are all kind of implicit contracts, whatever, but the bottom line, if you kick them off, the (libertarian) jury will likely convict you of murder.

Now suppose some robbers break in while the boat is heading out to sea. You subdue them; then you just cast them over. Is it disproportionate? Maybe. Would a (libertarian) jury be as likely to convict you? Of course not.

You see the implications of this I assume.

Now in the pastI’ve given Walter block the Hulk example, since he thinks (like you, I think) that IF you have the right to use force against someone in self-defense, this implies they are a criminal. But if the Hulk hurls A at B, B might be entitled to swat A aside with a bug club, to avoid getting killed, even if this kills A. But this does not imply A is a criminal, just because it seems “analogous” to the fact that I am entitled to kill a criminal who is trying to attack me. I am entitled to kill the criminal because he is committing a criminal act; B is entitled to kill A for
different reasons. And these differences are not trivial: AFTER a crime, the victim has a right to hunt down and do something to the criminal (punish, restitution, whatever). But after the Hulk hurls A at B, if A and B survive, B is not entitled to hunt down A and try to punish him or get restitution from him.

N’cest pas?

digg it for me: New Israel”-Move Israel to Utah: a Win-win-win solution?