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.”
From Robert’s Episode notes: “Stephan Kinsella is an American intellectual property lawyer, author, and deontological anarcho-capitalist. He joins me for an in-depth conversation about the book “A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics” by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.”
I was a guest last night (Oct. 25, 2022) on the Libertarian Podcast Review … podcast, ep. 70, with hosts Tyler Janke and Garbage Mane Andy. We discussed… well… Hoppe.
They’re like—why are you always the one called on to defend Hoppe? I’m thinking—I dunno, you tell me.
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.
Stephan Kinsella shares his views on libertarian attacks on Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Hoppe’s actual positions on immigration and monarchy, and the differences between libertarian universalism and decentralization.
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