StephanKinsella.com

As I’ve recounted in various biographical pieces, ¹ in college (LSU) I dabbled in writing letters to the editor to local newspapers and the student newspaper, and then columns for the LSU Daily Reveille as well The Wonderland Times, an underground student newspaper published briefly around that time. ²

As I mentioned in The Genesis of Estoppel: My Libertarian Rights Theory:

When I was younger I was interested both in STEM topics as well as philosophy, but had almost no views on political or economic topics. I was basically tabula rasa. Reading Ayn Rand in high school catapulted me into deeper interest in philosophy, political theory, economics. I ended up going to LSU and studying electrical engineering (started in 1983), but I was also devouring this other kind of material “on the side.” I started getting the itch to have conversations or interactions on these topics with others, but it was hard to find anyone to talk about them with. Frustrating. You can’t find engineering students who care about this stuff. And there was no Internet back then. This itch is probably one reason I eventually gravitated towards law school. I gradually realized I would not be satisfied being a practicing engineer. I liked using normative and verbal and legal type reasoning and argumentation too much, plus the scholarship opportunities a law career can offer. I liked writing. Engineering would not have suited me—it would have been too stultifying and boring. [continue reading…]

1. See The Genesis of Estoppel: My Libertarian Rights Theory, Alan D. Bergman, Adopting Liberty: The Stephan Kinsella Story (2025) and others here. [↩]
2. See The LSU student press: an annotated bibliography (part 3); Streakers, R-rated movies and chickens: A century of shenanigans in the LSU student press. [↩]

[From my Webnote series]

Not yet organized—

• See links at On “Unowned” State Property, Legal Positivism, Ownership vs. Possession, Immigration, Public Roads, and the Bum in the Library
• A Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders, LewRockwell.com, September 1, 2005
• I’m Pro-Immigration and Pro-Open Borders
• Switzerland, Immigration, Hoppe, Raico, Callahan
• Reply to Neverfox on immigration: “Whatever Mileage We Put On, We’ll Take Off”
• Boudreaux on Hoppe on Immigration
• Transcript: “Liberty Forum Debate vs. Daniel Garza: Immigration Reform: Open Borders or Build the Wall?“, by Stephan Kinsella, Daniel Garza, and Jeremy Kaufman, New Hampshire Liberty Forum, Manchester, NH (Feb. 7, 2019) [KOL258]
• Kinsella on Anarchy Time Discussing Immigration
• Discussion with Bieser on Immigration

In response to this LewRockwell.com blog post, Immigration Idea (2; about selling citizenship, and No Treason’s Chattering Punks), and Hoppe’s article on immigration, these threads sprang up (my reply: Palmer on Hoppe, Hoppe on Coase, and Re: Palmer on Hoppe):

• Stephan Kinsella Ought To Shut His Stupid Cake Hole (No Treason)
• Yet Another Problem With Hoppe’s Immigration Column (No Treason)
• Hoppe: “The best one may hope for…” (no-treason)
• Heroic market anarchist takes on market anarchist (Anti-State.com)
• Gary North, Lew Rockwell, and the Politics of Stoning Heretics and Homosexuals to Death (Tom Palmer)
• An Immigration Policy that Would Exclude Its Author (Tom Palmer)

• immigration (15) posts
• Immigration Threads and Posts

Tweets

https://x.com/NSKinsella/status/1434617199570964484

No trolling. I mean: I have said “I’m Pro-Immigration and Pro-Open Borders”–pretty explicit, no? Just b/c I think Raico and Hoppe make arguments worth pondering doesn’t mean I am closed borders. Some of us are tolerant enough to hear differing views https://t.co/gZvXS5lzd1 /1

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) September 5, 2021

https://x.com/NSKinsella/status/1434618580667092994

favor immigrants over citizens (forced integration). This is why Hoppe’s approach is radical decentralization tending towards anarchy so that both problems evaporate; or in the meantime, a policy that wd reduce forced exclusion by permitting immigrants who have an invitation. /5

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) September 5, 2021

https://x.com/NSKinsella/status/1770500516298068282

In the meantime we can recognize that in the current US system, immigration policy will violate rights in two ways: forced exclusion (for people who want to invite outsiders but are prevented) and forced integration (because of state roads, antidiscrimination law, welfare, voting…

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) March 20, 2024

https://x.com/NSKinsella/status/1434599843926847492

I think in our current system, imposing stricter immigration controls violates rights (what Hoppe calls forced exclusion) and opening the borders violates rights (forced integration). In the US system, I tend to think we should increase the number of legal immigration.

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) September 5, 2021

https://x.com/NSKinsella/status/1379588048531427338

Hoppe is for anarchy in which there would be no INS etc. He simply points out that with a welfare democracy, there are costs to whatever immigration policy is adopted: either forced exclusion, or forced integration. Both are costs imposed by the state’s existence.

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) April 7, 2021

[From my Webnote series]

Related:

• God as Slaveowner; Conversations with Murphy
• Post-scarcity, Superabundance, Money, and Star Trek Space Cadets;
• On Conflictability and Conflictable Resources; Voluntaryism and Voluntarism
• Nobody Owns Bitcoin

From a twitter post. Kinsella on fie-ya.

This is why I use conflictability (or rivalrousness) instead of scarcity, ¹ since the latter term is ambiguous and has different connotations. In common usage it just means lack of abundance. In terms of praxeology and property rights it means the opposite of…

— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) April 19, 2025

*** [continue reading…]

1. On Conflictability and Conflictable Resources [↩]

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 460.

I mean the title says it all. I kept getting interrupted by calls and deliveries. Oh well, what you gonna do.

[continue reading…]

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (10.8MB)

George Reisman

I’ve long been a great admirer of Objectivist economist George Reisman, author of the towering Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (1996). I devoured his book The Government Against the Economy (1979) and other writing in college and have listened to many of his lectures and courses.

I think the first time I met George was when I presented “The Legitimacy of Intellectual Property,” which later became Against Intellectual Property, at the Mises Institute’s Austrian Scholars Conference, Auburn, Alabama, on March 25, 2000. I believe he had recently split with the Ayn Rand Institute, and had reunited with his old friend Ralph Raico at the Mises Institute event. George was standing in the back of the room during my lecture and his questions to me indicated he was a bit stunned at my argument.

In any case, he had long offered for sale a 10-CD lecture set, “Reisman’s Program of Self-Education in the Economic Theory and Political Philosophy of Capitalism.” I suggested he might want to put them online so people could more easily access them. His own website, capitalism.net, was in disrepair and there was no immediately obvious way to remedy this, so I volunteered to organize the material and host it on my site, and upload it to Youtube, which I did: George Reisman’s Program of Self-Education in the Economic Theory and Political Philosophy of Capitalism.

Jeffrey Tucker and I have warned libertarians for years that their work could be lost because of copyright and standard publishing models and paywalls which can make it hard for people to access the work, or to republish or reuse it after they are gone. ¹

I discussed this with George and he has decided to free all his work, to which he holds copyright, upon his death, by means of a CC-BY 4.0 dedication and license grant, which he gave me permission to post here (pdf).

1. See How long copyright terms make art disappear; First Amendment Defense Act of 2021; Remembering Tibor Machan, Libertarian Mentor and Friend: Reflections on a Giant, Authors: Don’t Make the Buddy Holly Mistake, On Leading by Example and the Power of Attraction (Open Source Publishing, Creative Commons, Public Pomain Publishing), and Do Business Without Intellectual Property (Liberty.me, 2014); also Jeffrey A. Tucker, Authors: Beware of Copyright (also on LewRockwell.com and in his Bourbon for Breakfast) (Along with related chapters: “”If You Believe in IP, How Do You Teach Others?”, “Is Intellectual Property the Key to Success?”, “Books, Online and Off,” and “Mises.org in the Context of Publishing History”). [↩]

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 459.

In response to lots of froth on Twitter related to Jack Dorsey’s call to “delete all IP law,” which was echoed by Elon Musk (Musk and Dorsey: “delete all IP law”) I decided to attempt to host an impromptu Twitter Spaces about this. After overcoming some technical glitches, here is the result (and thanks to @Brunopbch, @NotGovernor (Patrick Smith), and @TrueAmPatriot86 for assists). I proposed to the space: “Fielding Questions About Abolishing Intellectual Property, about IP, and About Libertarian Property Rights”, and that’s basically what we ended up talking about. The Twitter spaces can be viewed here; I have clipped off the first 8 minutes or so of setup talk for this podcast episode.

Grok summaries and shownotes and Youtube Transcript below. [continue reading…]

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (52.1MB)

Re the new book Common Law Liberalism: A New Theory of the Libertarian Society, by John Hasnas, of “Myth of the Rule of Law” (2) fame.

[Note: this includes also his other famous paper, The Obviousness of Anarchy (2), which is also hard to find online. See Two Great Arguments for Anarchy: Long and Hasnas; also comments in Federal Judges Aren’t Real Judges]

Grok summary of two recent talks below.

[continue reading…]

I’ve been interested in bitcoin for some time, ¹ and witnessed the BTC vs. BCH blocksize war from 2015–2017 from the sidelines. Last year I read Roger Ver and Steve Patterson’s Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC (2024) (foreword by my buddy Jeffrey Tucker, whose Atlanta Crypto-Currency Conference I spoke at in 2013). ² I found it to be well-written and organized. I was not persuaded by their case, however. Seemed like spin, whining, typical activism to me. If bitcoin can ever work, it has to work on its own, not because of flogging by activists to “use” it or “adopt” it. (Same thing with libertarianism.) ³

I was aware of another book on this topic, Jonathan Bier’s The Blocksize War: The battle over who controls Bitcoin’s protocol rules (2021), but I’ve never read it. In a Tweet, Miguel Vidal commented that “Roger Ver is deeply dishonest: he’s who tried to hijack Bitcoin. He attacked (bcash) and he failed (he had no interest in the underlying debate)” and that Jonathan Bier‘s “essay is quite well documented, fair, engaging and riveting. Highly recommend.” I noticed he had written the Prólogo (prologue, or foreword) ⁴ to the Spanish translation and he sent me a link to an a automatic English translation of his Foreword, which I append below. [continue reading…]

1. Am I a Bitcoin Maximalist?; various podcast interviews and posts. [↩]
2. KOL085 | The History, Meaning, and Future of Legal Tender (Crypto-Currency Conference, Atlanta, 2013). [↩]
3. Activism, Achieving a Free Society, and Writing for the Remnant. [↩]
4. Pat McNees, “What is the difference between a preface, a foreword, and an introduction?” [↩]

My book Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023) contains updated essays published over a 29-year period, and thus is quite lengthy—about 800 pages, including bibliography and index and about 712 page of text.

As I pointed out on the landing page, for those who just want a taste of what the book is about, I recommend the Foreword by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, my Preface, and chapters 1 (“How I Became A Libertarian”) and 2 (“What Libertarianism Is”). However, as I pointed out in the Preface, “For those who want to skip the more extraneous material and focus on the core libertarian theory chapters, I recommend chapters 2–12, 14–15, and 18.”

With this in mind, I have produced a version of the PDF with the extraneous material stripped out: LFFS—Core Chapters Only, PDF. This version is 304 pages shorter than the main text, containing 408 pages of text as opposed to 713 for the original version–so about 57% the length of the original.

As I mentioned to the folks at the CEES in Guatemala, ¹ when I spoke there earlier this week, ² which had expressed some interest in translating Legal Foundations of a Free Society—it’s so far been translated into Chinese and Portuguese, but not Spanish—this “core chapter” truncated version might be more suitable for translation since the overall length would be much shorter and result in a slimmer paper volume. Food for thought for others interested in publishing a translation.

1. Centro de Estudios Económico-Sociales, affiliated with Universidad Francisco Marroquín. [↩]
2. Speaking at APEE IP Panel in Guatemala. [↩]

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 458.

The meat of this talk is only about 15 minutes, if you skip the first couple minutes of setup and the Q&A at the end.

See also Self-Ownership, Natural Rights, Estoppel (CEES Guatemala 2025)

GROK SHOWNOTES: In this episode of the Kinsella on Liberty Podcast (KOL458), recorded on April 7, 2025, at the APEE 49th Meeting in Guatemala City, libertarian patent attorney Stephan Kinsella delivers a 15-minute panel presentation titled “Patent and Copyright versus Innovation, Competition, and Property Rights,” arguing that intellectual property (IP) laws, particularly patents and copyrights, are state-enforced monopolies that violate property rights and hinder innovation (0:00-7:00). Drawing on his forthcoming book Copy This Book and article “The Problem with Intellectual Property,” Kinsella traces IP’s origins to mercantilist privileges, critiques its economic harms like monopoly pricing in pharmaceuticals, and dismisses natural rights and utilitarian arguments for IP as flawed or empirically unsupported, including defamation law as a form of IP (7:01-15:00). He advocates for IP’s complete abolition to foster a free market of ideas, emphasizing its conflict with free speech and competition (15:01-22:20).

Youtube Transcript and Grok Detailed Summary below.

As mentioned in Speaking at APEE IP Panel in Guatemala, today (April 6, 2025) I spoke on a panel at the APEE 49th Meeting in Guatemala. The theme of this year’s meeting was “The Economic History of State and Market Institutions,” April 6-8, 2025, Guatemala City, Guatemala (program; other info).

My panel was Panel 50. [1.E.06] “Intellectual Property: Old Problems and New Developments,” Monday, April 7, 2025, 3:50 pm-5:05 pm, Breakout06. Organizer: Monica Rio Nevado de Zelaya, Universidad Francisco Marroquín;
Chair: Ramón Parellada, Universidad Francisco Marroquín. My full panel: [continue reading…]

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (50.1MB)

From twitter:

As early as 2011 I recognized that bitcoin could be closer to ideal money than anything else before. https://stephankinsella.com/2024/10/am-i-a-bitcoin-maximalist-or-big-blocker/…:

“(IN the bitcoin thing with digital currency, you can arbitrarily increase the granularity by adding more digits; in such a digital numeraire (which I confess I sort of think is the ideal money, in some sense, though not in a practical sense given some political and other problems), you never need to increase the supply at all (once it reaches its asymptotic maximum), because any supply truly is enough: you never face the granularity problem you guys allude to.”

The “political” problems I was thinking of was my fear that the state would kill it, if it became a real threat. For once I was too pessimistic (too confident in the competence of the state to realize the danger bitcoin poses) and thus I lost a bet to @real_vijay … but that led me to buy some bitcoin to repay my debt to him, so I don’t regret losing that bet! [continue reading…]