A priest friend of mine has been writing for three years against his fellow clerics who went along with the COVID regime, shut their churches, masked their parishioners, and then pushed shots on those who didn’t need them. He said that they forgot the first principle: be not afraid. And the second principle too: put not your faith in princes. [continue reading…]
I’ve been fascinated with the inter-Austrian debate on fractional-reserve banking for years. 1 My view has long been that fractional reserve freebanking (FRB) is not inherently fraudulent and should not be illegal; but that economically it makes no sense. I think Huerta de Soto’s Roman legal analysis of irregular deposit warehouse banking is correct, 2 and that there is a distinction between the savings/warehousing function and credit intermediation. (Thus, our UK banking system reform proposal from a few years back.) 3[continue reading…]
I have profited from Professor Boudewijn Bouckaert’s insightful essay “What Is Property?”, Harv. J. L. & Pub. Pol’y 13, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 775–816, which was part of a symposium on Law and Philosophy which also included Tom Palmer’s seminal article on IP. 1
Unfortunately, Bouckaert’s article is not available online other than behind the HeinOnline paywall.
[Update: via email to me on March 2, 2012, Professor Bouckaert gave me permission to post his article: it is available here and here.]
[See also idem, “From Property Rights to Property Order,” in Alain Marciano and Giovanni Battista Ramello, eds., Encyclopedia of Law and Economics (Springer, forthcoming 2025).
Below I will briefly highlight some of the key insights that helped illuminate the IP issue for me, as can be seen by my citations to and quotations from this paper in Against Intellectual Property. I quote here a relevant passage from AIP, with endnotes: [continue reading…]
Fritz Machlup & Edith Penrose, “The Patent Controversy in the Nineteenth Century,” J. Econ. History 10, no. 1 (May 1950): 1–29. Shamefully, this article is not available online. A compressed discussion of this matter can be found in Fritz Machlup, U.S. Senate Subcommittee On Patents, Trademarks & Copyrights, An Economic Review of the Patent System (85th Cong., 2nd Session, 1958, Study No. 15), Part II.C, “The Rise of an antipatent movement” (1850–1873).
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?
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…]
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?
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…]
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
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