[From my Webnote series]

• State vs. Government: See Hoppe’s definition of the state in “The Nature of the State and Why Libertarians Hate It.” If government means the state, it’s criminal; but it clearly means something different: the governing institutions, law and order. The state has coopted government like it has coopted roads and transportation, money, education. But just as roads are not inherently statist, neither is government. We anarcho-libertarians do not oppose law and order and the institutions of “governance”; just state control thereof. We oppose our enemy, the state.
  • See also Conza, government is not the state
  • The Nature of the State and Why Libertarians Hate It
  • Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned? (transcript)
  • The Nature of the State and Why Libertarians Hate It
  • Is Albert Jay Nock a Statist Too?
• On owning property: See notes 29 and 57, and accompanying text, of “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward”
• On scarcity: “On Conflictability and Conflictable Resources”
• Coercion and aggression: “The Problem with “Coercion”“

My job here is done

[From my Webnote series]

Any free society needs law—private law based on libertarian principles. This means that there is a need to identify and clarify our basic libertarian principles, and for law to develop to implement and apply these principles. As discussed in KOL345 | Kinsella’s Libertarian “Constitution” or: State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code (PorcFest 2021), any law code that libertarian theorists devise cannot be hyper-detailed and all-encompassing.

For one thing, many of the particular rules in a given setting will depend on contractual relationships and choices. Libertarian theorists, such as Rothbard, David Friedman, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, envision various territorial enclaves whose internal legal rules are based on local preferences, custom, and contract. For example, in Hoppe’s “covenant communities”: “a libertarian world could and likely would be one with a great variety of locally separated communities engaging distinctly different and far-reaching discrimination” (“e.g. nudists discriminating against bathing suits,” as Jeff Tucker points out in Idiot Patrol). ¹ [continue reading…]

1. See Hoppe on Covenant Communities and Advocates of Alternative Lifestyles. [↩]

Murray Rothbard’s treatise, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998) is online in a couple of obscure places, and some of its individual chapters or portions is available online in separate articles. I’ve listed below those I am aware of: [continue reading…]

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.

From my substack:

Marc Victor’s Arizona Senate Run: A Lesson for Future Libertarian Party Strategy?

Stephan Kinsella

34 min ago

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.

Read more>>

UPDATE: IGNORE BELOW. SEE NOW KOL402

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.”

Final trailer:

[continue reading…]

Łukasz Dominiak, “Must Right-Libertarians Embrace Easements by Necessity?“, 34 Diametros 16 (2019), 60: 34–51.

Abstract:

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.

Łukasz Dominiak, “Libertarianism and Original Appropriation,” Historia i Polityka, No. 22 (29)/2017, pp. 43–56.

Abstract:

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.

Just came across an interesting monograph by one Ilia Schmelzer, “Against Absolute Certainty” (2013; pdf). A self-professed “independent scientist,” he also appears to advocate an ether theory in physics and a realistic interpretation of quantum theory.

Abstract of his article:

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.

He also criticizes my estoppel theory, although oddly, given that this paper was published in 2013, only cites my original 1992 Reason Papers article, ¹ and not more recent elaborations. ² See also “The Genesis of Estoppel: My Libertarian Rights Theory” and “Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide“.

I haven’t read it all yet but it may be similar in some ways to Jan Lester’s Popperian, anti-justificationist, “conjecturalist” approach in  Escape from Leviathan: Liberty, Welfare and Anarchy Reconciled. ³

1.   Kinsella, “Estoppel: A New Justification for Individual Rights,” Reason Papers No. 17 (Fall 1992), p. 61. [↩]
2. E.g., “Punishment and Proportionality: The Estoppel Approach,” 12:1 Journal of Libertarian Studies 51 (Spring 1996); “A Libertarian Theory of Punishment and Rights,” 30 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 607–45 (1997); “New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 12:2 (Fall 1996) 313–26 [superseded by “Dialogical Arguments for Libertarian Rights,” in The Dialectics of Liberty (Lexington Books, 2019)]. [↩]
3. See my criticisms in Anarchist Libertarian Jan Lester’s Argument for Intellectual Property and “Aggression” versus “Harm” in Libertarianism. [↩]

Interesting article that Academia.edu alerted me to: Octavian-Dragomir Jora,  Gheorghe Hurduzeu, Mihaela Iacob & Georgiana-Camelia Crețan, “‘Dialectical Contradictions’ in the Neoclassical Theory and Policy Regarding Market Competition: The Consumer and His Continuous Burden of Crisis,” Amfiteatru Economic Journal, Vol. 19, no. 45 (2017), pp. 544–65 [ISSN 2247-9104, The Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Bucharest; pdf]. Fascinating when mainstream articles cite and adopt radical libertarian arguments. I guess there is some value to our publishing efforts after all.

To-wit: