StephanKinsella.com

Anthony, right on. Your’e right about King Obama. After briefly, foolishly slightly getting my hopes up about an Obama victory, he proves himself to follow the rule that every President is worse than the last. I’m already–gag–missing Bush. Here are just a few links to back up some of your contentions–Obama has taken the Bush positions on habeas corpus, wiretaps, and the State Secrets Privilege, and also is bad on  marijuana legalization, while his pig trough keeps expanding, and his maniacal, hypocritical, smug supporters call for censorship of unpopular speech.

[Cross-posted at LRC]

As reported on Volokh: Court Strikes Down Random Drug Test Policy for All Public School Employees: in Jones v. Graham County Bd. of Educ. (N.C. Ct. App. June 2), the N.C. Court of Appeals applied Article I, Section 20 of the North Carolina Constitution (similar to the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure) to overturn the Graham County Board of Education’s “Alcohol/Drug-Free Workplace Policy”. Let me get this straigth: a state court overturned a bad state law based on a state constitution? B-b-b-but how can this be? No bad law can ever be stopped without the intervention of a benevolent, centralized federal court system! Surely this will upset the Libertarian Centralists.  (Hat tip Skip Oliva)

[Cross-posted at LRC.]

Court Rules Convicts Have No Right to Test DNA reports that “The Supreme Court said Thursday that convicts have no constitutional right to test DNA evidence in hopes of proving their innocence long after they were found guilty of a crime.”

This should be no surprise. After all, ignorance of the law is no defense–this makes sense when law is restricted to malum in se; but it’s perverse when it applies to artificial crimes, malum prohibitum offenses (see also Mencken on this). And if the state can convict you of a malum prohibitum offense–one in which you are not really guilty of any real crime–then it should also be no surprise that actual innocence of committing even a genuine crime–malum in se–is not a defense.

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Reply to BrainPolice, “Why I Reject ‘Self-ownership’ Redux“:

Self-ownership is not incoherent, and indeed is crucial to libertarian theory, if it’s understood properly–if it’s understood simply to mean the idea that each person, as opposed to others, has the right to control his own body. (See my How We Come To Own Ourselves, A Theory of Contracts: Binding Promises, Title Transfer, and Inalienability and Defending Argumentation Ethics, for more detail). As for the disparaging remarks about Hoppe’s theory above, I am reminded of Rothbard’s great Hoppephobia, where he wrote:

The Lomasky review is an interesting example of what is getting to be a fairly common phenomenon: Hoppephobia. Although he is an amiable man personally, Hoppe’s written work seems to have the remarkable capacity to send some readers up the wall, blood pressure soaring, muttering and chewing the carpet. It is not impolite attacks on critics that does it. Perhaps the answer is Hoppe’s logical and deductive mode of thought and writing, demonstrating the truth of his propositions and showing that those who differ are often trapped in self-contradiction and self-refutation.

I agree with Todd Andrew Barnett: Maher is not now and never was a libertarian–not even close to it. Why he insists on self-describing himself this way is a mystery, but it’s inaccurate. He is smart but ignorant and thinks he knows more than he does; he thinks that snideness and condescension equals intelligence. He thinks he’s better than Bush and his ilk: he’s not. He’s for drug legalization: whoopee. I recall he was cold on Bush; then warmed up when he thought the Iraq war might work; then got cold again. He’s for higher taxes, for Obama, for socialized medicine. He’s vile and crude, and unjustifiably snide and condescending. And he’s no libertarian.

Maher: you’re out!

Free Life Commentary * Issue Number 184 * 18th June 2009
Book Review by Sean Gabb

Organization Theory
Kevin A. Carson
Booksurge, 2009, 642pp, $39.99

I will begin my review by stating its main conclusions. These are that Kevin Carson has written one of the most significant books the libertarian movement has seen in many years. I do not agree with everything he says Mr Carson has said here. I do not suppose any libertarian will unreservedly accept what is said. Even so, I doubt if there is a libertarian who can read this book and not, in some degree, have his vision of a free society enriched and even transformed by it.

Summarising an argument that is worked out over more than six hundred pages is not easy. However, Mr Carson begins by observing that, while economic theory seeks to analyse the behaviour of individuals and small groups within a market system, the economic reality is a world dominated by large corporations within which prices are largely administered and there is an absence of competition.

The rest of Gabb’s review is here.

They are spreading gobs and gobs of pro-liberty and sound economic writing. They are publishing machines. See Tucker’s post, Huge literature avalanche, “Have a look at this. Too many to name.”

Here is one of the comments:

“You guys are geniuses for giving away this stuff for free. I know so many people (including myself) who have become little masters of Austrian economics thanks to your free resources here. You probably even make more money that way–I’ve bought more books from the bookstore after finding out about them through your Literature section than I probably would have bought had you not had free literature to download.”

And another: “Someday, we’ll look back (or our kids will look back) and say that giving these books away for free was a “key” decision in the spread of the ideas of the Austrian School.“

Sheldon Richman notes in IP Debate Breaks Out at FEE that “At a recent FEE seminar, a debate over intellectual ‘property’ broke out spontaneously among Ivan Pongracic (second from right), Paul Cwik (second from left), and me (left, where I belong). Who won?”

There is no doubt that in just 10 short minutes Richman completely dominates with his clear and concise thinking on this issue (as he did in Sheldon Richman on Intellectual Property versus Liberty). Pongracic and Cwik just re-hash the standard arguments, which are full of holes (as Cwik did in his presentation at the 2008 Austrian Scholars Conference, on the IP panel on which I was a discussant; Cwik’s argument was incredibly weak (as several audience members noted to me), as the IP argument has to be; Cwik’s working paper, “Is There Room for Intellectual Property Rights in Austrian Economics?”, is available here).

[Mises cross-post]

After some problems, not to speak of the whole Mark Skousen debacle, the venerable Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) seems to be on the right track.

But an interesting PC episode has been on my mind recently. The November 1996 issue of The Freeman contained a Book Review (2; 3) by Hans-Hermann Hoppe of The Failure of America’s Foreign Wars (edited by Richard M. Ebeling and Jacob G. Hornberger).

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Republished as “Legislation and Law in a Free Society,” Mises Daily (Feb. 25, 2010). See archived comments below.

For a more in depth treatment of these issues, see “A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023).

***

From the Archives:

“Legislation and Law in a Free Society,” 45 The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty 561 (September 1995)

Legislation and Law in a Free Society
By N. Stephan Kinsella • September 1995 • Volume: 45 • Issue: 9

Mr. Kinsella practices law with Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis in Philadelphia. This article is adapted from a longer essay forthcoming in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, which contains detailed references to the authors and works cited here.

Libertarians and classical liberals have long sought to explain what sorts of laws we should have in a free society. But we have often neglected the study of what sort of legal system is appropriate for developing a proper body of law.

Historically, in the common law of England, Roman law, and the Law Merchant, law was formed in large part in thousands of judicial decisions. In these so-called “decentralized law-finding systems,” the law evolved as judges, arbitrators, or other jurists discovered legal principles applicable to specific factual situations, building upon legal principles previously discovered, and statutes, or centralized law, played a relatively minor role. Today, however, statutes passed by the legislature are becoming the primary source of law, and law tends to be thought of as being identical to legislation. Yet legislation-based systems cannot be expected to develop law compatible with a free society.

Certainty, which includes clarity of and stability in the law, is necessary so that we are able to plan for the future. Often it is thought that certainty will be increased when the law is written and enunciated by a legislature, for example in the civil codes of modern civil-law systems.

As the late Italian legal theorist Bruno Leoni pointed out, however, there is much more certainty in a decentralized legal system than in a centralized, legislation-based system. When the legislature has the ability to change the law from day to day, we can never be sure what rules will apply tomorrow. By contrast, judicial decisions are much less able to reduce legal certainty than is legislation.

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From the Archives…

Book Review (of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (1993)), The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, November 1994.

?  ?  ?

Book Review: The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
By N. Stephan Kinsella • November 1994 • Volume: 44 • Issue: 11

Boston/Dordrecht/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers • 1993 • 265 pages • $59.95

In 1989, Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe published A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics (Boston/Dordrecht/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), arguably the most important book of the decade, if only for the revolutionary “argumentation ethic” defense of individual rights presented in Chapter 7, “The Ethical Justification of Capitalism and Why Socialism is Morally Indefensible.” Hoppe continues to produce a significant assortment of articles elaborating on his argumentation ethic and the epistemology that underlies it, as well as on his impressive economic writings.

His new book, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, is a collection of many of these related writings published up until 1992.

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