StephanKinsella.com

I’ve been blogging a lot lately on LewRockwell.com’s blog.

See the heroic World Court Judge Christopher George Weeramantry of Sri Lanka’s dissenting opinion regarding the legality of nuclear weapons in the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons case.

See also the related case Legality of the Use by a State of Nuclear Weapons in Armed Conflict.

[LRC cross-post]

see also

• KOL250 | International Law Through a Libertarian Lens (PFS 2018)
• International Law, Libertarian Principles, and the Russia-Ukraine War
• On the UN, the Birchers, and International Law
• Neocons Hate International Law
• The UN, International Law, and Nuclear Weapons

Raico: Rethinking Churchill, https://mises.org/library/rethinking-churchill

Liberty, Nov. 1997: Raico rely to Palmer? Mises and MonarchY; http://www.libertyunbound.com/sites/files/printarchive/Liberty_Magazine_November_1997.pdf [http://www.libertyunbound.com/node/363] also here in text: https://web.archive.org/web/20050206104444/http://www.libertysoft.com/liberty/features/62raico.html

reply to Palmer’s bashing of Mises Inst/rockwell Sep. 1997: http://www.libertyunbound.com/sites/files/printarchive/Liberty_Magazine_September_1997.pdf

Palmer: Lew rockwell’s Vienna Waltz, https://web.archive.org/web/20050209061244/http://www.libertysoft.com/liberty/features/61palmer.html Liberty Setp. 1997

palmer reply: For Mises’ Sake Jan 1998: http://www.libertyunbound.com/sites/files/printarchive/Liberty_Magazine_January_1998.pdf

raico pic w/ ptak and reisman: https://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.damico.9/posts/10103218252088967?comment_id=10103219132574467&reply_comment_id=10103219416056367&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R8%22%7D

Raico flagpole, Facebook.

Discussed in Ralph Raico, R.I.P.

David Gordon, The History of Our Movement

Raico grew up in the Bronx, but in contrast with the leftist views common in his family’s apartment building and neighborhood, he acquired from an early age a sympathetic grasp of the isolationist wing of the Republican Party. In high school, he joined Youth for Taft, where he encountered George Reisman. While still in high school, Raico and Reisman became interested in Mises, and Raico describes their hilarious attempt to meet Mises, in the guise of door-to-door salesmen for The Freeman.

The attempt failed, but they soon were able to join Mises’s famous seminar at New York University. Here Raico met someone who became one of the dominant intellectual influences on his life—Murray Rothbard. The incredible range of Rothbard’s scholarship, as well as his enthusiasm and humor, impressed Raico deeply. Rothbard was the first person Raico had met who defended “a fully voluntary society—nudge, nudge.”

Raico, along with Reisman, Ronald Hamowy, and several others, became members of the Circle Bastiat and met regularly with Rothbard. When Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged appeared in 1957, Rothbard and his followers met for a while with Rand and her group, “The Collective,” but Rothbard and the Randians soon clashed. He refused their demand that he divorce his wife Joey, who had committed the unpardonable sin of being a Christian.

Raico did his graduate work at the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago, with Friedrich Hayek as his major professor. He found Hayek “more interested in his own research than teaching” and, although friendly, somewhat remote. While at Chicago, he founded the New Individualist Review, which became one of the best of all classical-liberal journals. He was able to attract such luminaries as Hayek and Milton Friedman to contribute.

Listeners to the recording will catch the nostalgia Raico feels for his first teaching position at Wabash College; the quality of the students there was never matched in his later career at Buffalo State College. Raico also describes his many trips to Europe, and listeners will especially enjoy his account of the Gaudi buildings in Barcelona. While in Europe, he lectured widely. Raico became the foremost expert on the history of nineteenth-century German liberalism and published Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School.

Like Rothbard, Raico has been very closely associated with the Mises Institute. The recording conveys a clear impression of Raico’s intelligence and wit. Listening to it is almost like meeting Ralph Raico in person.

Some classics posts:

Switzerland, Immigration, Hoppe, Raico, Callahan

Raico: Grow Up, Canada https://stephankinsella.com/2009/06/grow-up-canada/

introduction to the classic JLS immigration debate  https://stephankinsella.com/2007/09/boudreaux-on-hoppe-on-immigration/

Raico Cleans Tom Palmer’s Clock www.stephankinsella.com/2003/08/raico-cleans-tom-palmer’s-clock/

Raico on checkpoint charlie: https://stephankinsella.com/2009/11/hoppe-on-east-vs-west-germany-and-the-fall-of-the-wall/

re: Raico Cleans Tom Palmer’s Clock

From an email from Gary O’Connor, re my KinsellaLaw blawg:

The most recent issue of the Journal of Appellate Practice & Process has an article on legal weblogs: “Legal And Appellate Weblogs: What They Are, Why You Should Read Them, And Why You Should Consider Starting Your Own” (link2).

Stephanie Tai (blueblanketblog) and I (Statutory Construction Zone) wrote the article. As far as I know, this is the first law review article that primarily focuses on legal weblogs (a few others have brief mentions–no more than a few sentences). It is available online through LEXIS now, and should be on Westlaw by July 31st.

The article mentions your weblog as an example of a blog focusing on intellectual property and technology issues.

Reminds me of Steve Martin in the movie The Jerk–“The new phonebook’s out! I’m somebody now!”

I’ve previously blogged and written (Of Legal Fictions and Pro-Lincoln Libertarians: Reply to Sandefur; Pro-Lincoln Libertarians II) about libertarian Tim Sandefur’s pro-Lincoln views. My recent LewRockwell.com article, Sandefur and Federal Supremacy, adds a brief coda.

From LewRockwell.com July 5, 2003

Some LRC readers may recall a debate in the pages of Liberty magazine and various blogs, concerning libertarian attorney Timothy Sandefur’s pro-Union views on the War Between the States. It started with Sandefur’s July 2002 article Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, which elicited various libertarian critics (including mine). Sandefur responded in his December 2002 Liberty article Why Secession Was Wrong; some libertarians, including Joseph Sobran and myself, hit the ball back over the net, and Sandefur has posted yet another response to these and other critiques on his web site.

Readers interested in the sordid details can peruse these links. However here I want to make a narrow point. Sandefur repeatedly points to the evil of slavery and the need to end it as justification for the war. For example, he writes, admitting his hyperbole, “slavery is so evil that it was worth all the awful depredations of the Civil War to end it, and would have been worth more”.

And yet he states the essential issue as follows: “The question of the Civil War is really two questions: first, Is there a Constitutional right to secede? If the answer to the first question is no (and it is), then the second question is, Was the South engaging in a legitimate act of revolution?”

He concludes that there is no constitutional right to secede (for reasons which are not relevant here). In other words, a State may leave the Union only: (a) with the permission of Congress; or (b) via a “legitimate act of revolution”. Otherwise, if a State tries to quit the Union, the Federal government may use armed force to stop what Sandefur terms a “criminal conspiracy”.

Since Congress obviously did not consent to the Confederate States’ secession, the question is whether it was a legitimate act of revolution. Now Sandefur states that it was not, because “the Southern states could not legitimately claim a right to revolt in defense of slavery”. Revolution is an act in defense of rights, therefore, secession in furtherance of the violation of rights (slavery) is simply not revolution. The South was not responding to aggression by the North, and “its firing on Fort Sumter was therefore an initiation of force. The President being Constitutionally required to see that the laws — including the Supreme Law of The Land — be enforced, Lincoln was therefore right to enforce the Constitution, at point of arms, if necessary.”

Note how Sandefur neatly links his passionate opposition to slavery and its moral justification for the war, to his theoretical framework regarding the constitutional right to secede. According to Sandefur, a state can secede if it gets permission from Congress; or if it is engaged in a legitimate revolution. However, a state seceding for the purpose of upholding slavery is not engaged in a legitimate revolution. In fact he tries to explicitly link slavery to the question of the legitimacy of revolution: “It is true that slavery is immaterial to the question of whether secession is Constitutional. But if we answer that question in the negative, we move to the second question [of whether there is a legitimate revolution]: and in that discussion, slavery is central.”

But what I wanted to point out is this: slavery is completely irrelevant to Sandefur’s argument. Here’s why. Sandefur repeatedly states that legitimate revolution is one that is in response to invasions of rights by the federal government. As he writes, “revolution is justified only as a form of self-defense against rulers who have engaged in a train of abuses and usurpations against those individual rights which just governments protect. This alone distinguishes an act of revolution from a mere criminal conspiracy.”

According to this theory, even if none of the United States had had slavery in 1861, it would still have been a “mere criminal conspiracy” for the South to secede, without permission from Congress. This is because the South, according to Sandefur, would not have been “able to point to a long train of abuses pursuing the design of reducing them to despotism”. In other words, even if slavery had already been abolished, the Union would be justified in using armed force to subdue a seceding State, unless the State was engaged in “revolution” in response to acts of “despotism” by the Union.

Sandefur’s real position is that, barring acts of despotism by the central government, it may legitimately use armed force to prevent the secession of its States. This view would find even fewer libertarian adherents which is, I venture, the reason why he focuses on the evil of slavery — to mask the true implications of his theory.

My latest article, Supreme Confusion, Or, A Libertarian Defense of Affirmative Action, discusses the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on gay rights and affirmative action.

On the phone with my dad last night, he told me to turn on the TV because “Hitler: The Rise of Evil–Part 2” was about to come on. I said, “That’s alright, I don’t need to, I already lived through Clinton’s second administration.” But on second thought, I shouldn’t be comparing Clinton’s evil to Hitler’s. No. That’s improper. Because as an adherent of the Austrian school of economics I should realize that evil is not quantifiable and therefore it’s difficult to compare.

Cool program: CaptureWiz 1.1: “Capture anything on your screen and print, save, e-mail, or sticky-note it quickly with this virtual camera” (free to try).

Honda put together this extremely cool ad to highlight the inner workings of one of its new cars. You will think it’s got to be computer generated or special effects, but it’s actually real.

Look at these quotes pulled from Vitamins: More May Be Too Many, NY Times, April 29, 2003. What exactly do nutritionists and medical “experts” actually know about what nutrients are really good for, or harmful to, us? Seems like all guesswork and voodoo to me.

“Until recently, there was little concern about vitamin A and bone health.” Now, she added, “we may have to rethink the issues.”

“All of a sudden, scientists are rearing back and saying, `Wait a minute, do we really know that we need this and do we really know that we need that?'”

“We don’t know what ingredient in a healthy diet is responsible for which condition.”

“So far, the folic acid studies are suggestive, not definitive. But Dr. Fletcher said, “If I were a betting man, I’d bet on it.”

“I think it’s a good form of insurance,” Dr. Manson said. “I don’t think there’s a significant downside. We don’t have the evidence yet that it is beneficial.”

High levels of homocysteine are associated with increased risks of heart disease, but there is no study showing definitively that reducing homocysteine levels protects against heart disease.

“Our position,” she said, “is that most people, literally most people, would benefit from taking a multivitamin every day.”