StephanKinsella.com

I was sent this query:

I have a question about a situation. Suppose person A buried radioactive waste in an area where no house was built. A month later, person B builds a house in the area, lives in it, and suffers radiation damage from the radioactive waste in the ground. Is this a crime in your view? Has A committed a crime of negligence here since he unintentionally caused damage to B?

My answer: [continue reading…]

Someone asked Hans-Hermann Hoppe for any of his recommendations as to texts, articles, books and the like on science of law, norms, crime, legal responsibility, philosophy of law, which are linked to Austrian and praxeological thinking–writings on a philosophical legal level.

I was cc’d on this corresponded and provided the following answer. [continue reading…]

I came across this interesting piece: C.L. Swartz, “Libel,” in Charles T. Sprading, ed., Liberty and the Great Libertarians: An Anthology on Liberty: A Hand-book of Freedom (Los Angeles: The Golden Press, 1913), p. 526. It is short, so I reprint in full below. But he hits on the essential point: speaking words does not (normally) cause an invasion. Thus it cannot be penalized by law. (For more on this see Murray N. Rothbard, “Knowledge, True and False,” in The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, [1982] 1998), Walter E. Block, “The Slanderer and Libeler,” in Defending the Undefendable” (Auburn, Al.: Mises Institute, [1976] 2018), Kinsella, “Causation and Aggression,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Papinian Press, forthcoming 2023), and idem, “Defamation as a Type of Intellectual Property,” in A Passion for Justice: Essays in Honor of Walter Block (Addleton Press, forthcoming).) [continue reading…]

Q:

dHi Mr. Kinsella,

I have a question about property rights concerning dead people. How would a Rothbardian theory of property justify the will of a dead person? Is the will a genuine contract or is it void?

More specifically, I’m engaging in a conversation and someone said that a will is not per se a genuine contract because dead people don’t own things. And if dead people don’t own things, then how can it be said that there’s a transfer of property titles from the deceased person? Should the deceased person have to put in the will that they transfer the property titles to the heirs some moments before their official death?

I’m stumped on this one.

[continue reading…]

[From my Webnote series]

As I argue in my Legal Foundations of a Free Society (LFFS), and as Hans-Hermann Hoppe has argued in his work and in the Foreword to my book, it is the fundamental fact of scarcity, and the possibility of conflict that this fact gives rise to among human actors—conflict over their bodies or other, external scarce resources that serve as means of action. Thus, for civilized humans—those who prefer to live in peace and cooperation with each other rather than violence and destructive conflict—they favor property norms, or laws, to assign unique owners to each contestable, or “conflictable,” resource. ¹ Humans can only decide which norms are justified in the course of discourse, in which, as Hoppe argues, all participants undeniably presuppose the value of prosperity, peace, cooperation, as it is an operative presupposition of the very activity of argumentation. (I discuss this further in LFFS.) [continue reading…]

1. “On Conflictability and Conflictable Resources.” [↩]

Related:

• “All that is not permitted is forbidden”

Libertarians are used to thinking in terms of natural law and natural rights. In terms of principles, reason, and justice. That is, that we can use our reason to arrive at ethical or normative conclusions that will allow us to evaluate existing positive law. Laws “exist,” or are in force, in a given legal system; but some are bad, some are good. Some are just, some are unjust. That is, we can identify some legal rule as law, whether good or bad law, and we can then criticize the bad laws. The legal positivists, such as H.L.A. Hart, were right about the former point, and the natural-law lawyers, like Lon Fuller, were wrong. It is possible to identify a law as existing, in-force law, as positive law, even if it is unjust. But the extreme statist and legal positivists are wrong to claim that the only law is that announced by a sovereign which implies that there are no external, “higher law” grounds from which to criticize existing positive law. The natural lawyers are right, here. Libertarians have no problem with accepting the legal positivists’ contention that an unjust law can exist and can be recognized as an existing law, since we believe in a higher law—our libertarian principles—which means we do not condone an unjust law simply by recognizing that is law. ¹

[continue reading…]

1. See my post Higher Law. [↩]

Note: An updated and revised version of this article is included as chap. 20 of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023).

***

Stephan Kinsella, “Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order. By Anthony de Jasay. London and New York: Routledge, 1997,” Q. J. Austrian Econ. 1, no. 1. (Fall 1998): 85–93. Revised version published as “Review of Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order, by Anthony de Jasay,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (forthcoming 2023).

Note: Updated and revised version included as chap. 12 of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023).

***

“Reply to Van Dun: Non-Aggression and Title Transfer,” J. Libertarian Stud. 18, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 55–64. (Summary of this JLS issue.)

This article is a reply to Frank van Dun, “Against Libertarian Legalism: A Comment on Kinsella and Block,” J. Libertarian Stud. 17, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 63–90, commenting on Kinsella, “Against Intellectual Property,” J. Libertarian Stud. 15, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 1–53 and Walter Block, “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Blackmail,” J. Libertarian Stud. 15, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 55–88. Block’s reply is “Reply to ‘Against Libertarian Legalism’ by Frank van Dun,” J. Libertarian Stud. 18, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 1–30.

From Facebook:

Libertarian Answer Man time:
Deepfakes, Revenge Porn, etc.

Someone asked me if I had written or had any thoughts on the issue of whether AI and applications like deepfake videos or photos could be a rights violation, for example if it is used to make a fake video of someone depicting them doing things that they actually did not do. This could be done to titillate some audience or even for financial gain, and/or to tarnish someone’s reputation, for revenge, and so on. Apparently some states are considering legislation to ban deep-fake porn, and so on But new laws in California and the demand for new legislation against Deep-fake pornography make me take pause at the unintended consequences this may have on artwork, film, political cartoons and expression itself.

[continue reading…]

Note: Updated and revised version included as chap. 10 of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023).

***

“Inalienability and Punishment: A Reply to George Smith,” J. Libertarian Stud. 14, no. 1 (Winter 1998–99): 79–93.

Revised version in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (forthcoming 2023).

As reported at Mises.org, Yuri Maltsev, the great anti-commie Soviet defector, libertarian and Austrian scholar, editor of Requiem for Marx, has passed away. David Gordon has some nice words about Yuri there. Other obituaries/comments:

• See links to some other recent pieces in this twitter thread,
• ForeverMissed page with comments from his sister.
• Tom Woods’ comments pasted below
• Jeff Tucker’s touching reminiscence

I was friends with Yuri for years, since the mid 1990s from Mises Institute events. He also attended the first Property and Freedom Society Annual Meeting in 2006 and others as well, such as:

• Alexander Solshenitzin on Politics and Economics (PFS 2008)
• Of Customs and Condoms. Moving from One Empire to Another (PFS 2011)

At the inaugural PFS meeting in 2006, I brought my sister, Crystal, and she delighted in meeting Yuri. I told my wife and son stories about Yuri and they laughed and laughed. He was really a joyous and life-loving man. Yuri regaled me with so many tales over the years. He became a legend in my family just from my stories about him. I recall my son clapping in glee at my re-telling of some stories from Yuri. He would have me repeat my imitations and mimicry of Yuri and his tales.

Yuri, Andy Duncan, and I were invited to speak at Mises Brasil in São Paolo in 2017, and we three had a great time together. ¹ I recall we spent one late night in my hotel room eating sardines of some kind from Yuri’s stash, with our fingers, since we had no utensils. Late at night, as we delved into “deep” matters like grad students in a dorm room, he told me one of his biggest philosophical influences was an obscure and eccentric Russian philosopher, Pyotr Chaadayev, in particular his Philosophical Letters & Apology of a Madman, which I did obtain, but have not yet found the stamina to dive into. Maybe it’s time I take the leap. At the same conference, Andy and I tried to talk Yuri into eating a bit healthier to lose weight, to as to live longer. Not that we were any models of physical fitness. But we wanted Yuri to slim down and get healthier, and to live longer. He listened to Andy’s hortations with patience and promised to look into it. But, … it was not to be.

He told us funny stories about how he would fly weekly from Wisconsin to DC on a Sunday or Monday to teach his weekly class at the US Naval Academy in Maryland, and he would often fly with then-Congressman Paul Ryan, whom he ended up getting to do an occasional lecture for some of his classes. He was always joyous and, like Ayn Rand, hated communism and what it had done to his country, Russia; he loved America, a bit too much, perhaps, but it’s understandable.

[continue reading…]

1. My talks there were: KOL222 | Mises Brasil: Intellectual Property Imperialism Versus Innovation and Freedom and KOL221 | Mises Brasil: State Legislation Versus Law and Liberty. [↩]