A short story I wrote in high school, 1980-82 or so. Around the time I decided to stop hunting.
The Dawn of Knowledge
The boy impatient clicked the safety of his 20 gauge shotgun on and off. As he struggled down the trail through the weeds and briers in an open patch of the forest, he tore his arms and legs constantly against the unrelenting pull of the briers’ spindly appendages. He stumbled clumsily into a branch, causing a downpour of dew to drench him. He nervously blazed down the trail, knowing with a pessimistic confidence that the rabbit would cross the trail ahead of him. The negative mood was enhanced by the dour expression of the sun behind clouds smeared with dirty yellow. The barking of his dogs seems so close that he knew the rabbit had already passed. But, as he buried his way around an end in the crude path, the rabbit, ears back and fleeing for his life, sped across the trail from the right. [continue reading…]
A short story I wrote in high school, 1980-82 or so.
The Basset Hound
The Basset Hound leisurely trotted down the center of the railroad tracks. The sky was vast, pale, and blue, and curved down an left and right to meet the green lines of trees in the forest. The wind was dry and brisk and smelled of pine. The only sounds were the few sounds of the forest, the wind rushing past his long, drooping, soft ears, and the clicking of his toenails on the rocky gravel between the planks in the tracks.
A hawk soaring over caught the corner of his eyes, and before his brain had time to recognize and identify it as harmless, curiosity or instinct or fear gave him a small jolt into running. Normally, he have just have increased his speed for a step or two until the signal “slow down again—false alarm” reached his legs. But, as in most dogs, his life was very simple and moment by moment.
The new heat and invigoration felt good, so he kept running. He increased his speed even more. The heat and the fantastic sensation of sucking, almost viciously, the delicious air into his lungs, along with the engagement and thrill of the perfect and ecstatically painful act of running, caused him to run faster and faster,
The heat was building up. The planks rushed past, and he was breathing in quick, desperate gulps. The roar of the wind grew louder and louder, too loud. A sub-conscious feeling crept into his awareness; the running didn’t only feel good, it had some other purpose also. but the dog was so involved in running, breathing, and enjoying life that he paid no heed to the intuitive little signals being given to him,
There was a pounding all about, and then something definitely went wrong, too strong to be ignored. In the midst of this rare and strange experience, a whistle could be heard in the background. As he cocked his head instinctively to place the source and identity of the out of place sound, the train, with a thundering, cataclysmic climax, came rushing over him.
The Libertarian Party1 has long been controversial among libertarians, since its founding in 1971. Should it have a broad tent or a purist message? Minarchist or anarchist—or both? Should it try to elect candidates, and water down its radical principles to do so, or run purist, principled candidates to use their platform to get the message out?
One problem the LP in the United States has always faced is that unlike the parliamentary systems in European and other countries, in which minority parties can form coalitions with others, the US system tends to be a binary winner-take-all system. In this system even libertarian-sympathetic voters know that the LP candidate cannot win so and they don’t want to “waste their vote”. So the LP candidates rarely get a significant percentage of the votes cast.
I’ll be speaking at next year’s Austrian Economics Discord Conference: “Inflation, Money, and the State,” Austrian Economics Discord Server (Jan. 7–8, 2023); my talk is “Inflation: Its Causes, Effects, Parallels and Death in a Bitcoin World.”
The present paper investigates the question of whether right-libertarians must accept easements by necessity. Since easements by necessity limit the property rights of the owner of the servient tenement, they apparently conflict with the libertarian homestead principle, according to which the person who first mixes his labor with the unowned land acquires absolute ownership thereof. As we demonstrate in the paper, however, the homestead principle understood in such an absolutist way generates contradictions within the set of rights distributed on its basis. In order to avoid such contradictions, easements by necessity must be incorporated into the libertarian theory of property rights and the homestead principle must be truncated accordingly.
The article is devoted to the problem of the structure of libertarian theory of justice. It tries to present a map of the main concepts and principles of this theory and to investigate its possible justifications. It explains such fundamental concepts as original appropriation, homesteading, labour theory of property or first possession theory of original appropriation. The article shows merits and drawbacks of alternative libertarian principles of justice in first acquisition and proposes a sketch of an original justification for the first possession theory of original appropriation.
I criticize Hoppe’s concept of argumentation ethics, which is used to give a “Letztbegründung” (final, incontestable proof) of libertarian ethics and Austrian economics, from the point of view of Popper’s critical rationalism.
I also evaluate various arguments against Popper in libertarian literature and find them misguided: They criticize only an empiricist straw version of Popper’s [critical] rationalism.
I argue that the libertarian theory – ethics as well as economy – have to be based on critical instead of classical rationalism.
It is also argued that both business people and companies “give up” the right to complete freedom when engaging in cartelization and the restriction of production because such behaviour violates the rights of potential consumers. We encounter here a great misunderstanding of rights: the producers have their property (as property owners or mandated managers) and possess all the rights associated with it, including the absolute right not to use their property at all; consumers have full rights over their property, including the absolute right to spend or not their own money. In the most common approach, freedom is the right of a person to dispose of his body (self-ownership), of what he firstly appropriated from nature through processing (homesteaded) or obtained voluntarily. And no other arrangement can be argued as being non-contradictory, for each act of argumentation involves mutual recognition of the selfownership along with the ownership of the other belongings of the participants, qua “teleological extension” of their persons, necessary to the full comfort of the dialogue (Hoppe, 1993; Kinsella, 1996).
For example, back in 2019, Magness tried to link Hoppe’s views on immigration and race to his PhD adviser Habermas (see this 2019 Facebook post and his article Racial Determinism and Immigration in the Works of Ludwig von Mises). As I pointed out in the comments to the FB post, however, the critique was confused. More on this in the Appendix below.
Later, Magness started ramping up his accusations and insinuations, such as this tweet: [continue reading…]
This is the third in a sub-series of the White Pill essays examining some of the State’s vulnerabilities. This installment continues the discussion about the State’s weak spots presented in the previous two essays, and identifies some human White Pills – people in the anarchist space actively striking at some of these Achilles Heels 1. [continue reading…]
I have had a private freewheeling libertarian email discussion list for many years, and many private memes have emerged. I used to gaslight someone by adding “No offense, John” after a comment that I wanted to signal was an implicit insult or critique of their views. So now they all say “No offense, Kinsella” or “NOK” whenever they disagree with me or when they gather on occasion, since I used to criticize “artificial gatherings” instead of “organic” (even though I attend many “artificial gatherings” a year, so now they’ll get together and say “artificial gathering alert, NOK” or something like that).
Perhaps we should combine the “Holdeen Trusts” idea with a pool of bitcoin with donations by liberty advocates, to build a HUGE monetary warchest to finance something, like tax-free government or a powerful libertarian advocacy group. Suppose we get libertarians to donate, say, $1M, or $10M, now to this project, and within 10 years it grows to $200M or even $2B. It could be a VERY powerful and well-funded libertarian advocacy group. Or it could generate huge annual revenue (say, $200M a year) to fund all the basic operations of a minimal government in a pretty sizeable region, which could become a radically free market haven or zone.
We could do it in stages: get a small amount invested first, say, $100k. Let that grow to a couple million in a year or two. Then take that money and hire all the right lawyers and accountants and set up a transparent trust that could then take in the $1M or $10M in donations over the next 2 years or so, which could then grow to $2B or more in the next 8. If we start this now, phase I now, Phase 2 in 2 years, and then reap the harvest in 10 years from now, we could be up and running in just a decade with a powerful engine for liberty.
Instead of waiting 50 or 100 or 300 years as with the conventional Holdeen Trust concept, with the unique moment in history with Bitcoin, we could do it in a mere decade.
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