My Interview by The Libertarian (Keir Martland) has been translated into Spanish by Diego Aguirre, and posted on Centro Mises as Entrevista: Stephan Kinsella. (link to extract)
Someone on Facebook reminded me of one of my somewhat informal comments providing a summary explanation of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s argumentation ethics defense of libertarian rights. That post first quoted (a summary of) Hoppe thusly:
The mere fact that an individual argues presupposes that he owns himself and has a right to his own life and property. This provides a basis for libertarian theory radically different from both natural rights theory and utilitarianism.
Someone else posted one of my previous comments about this, which had been posted here and which probably originally came from some older Facebook thread track of which I have lost in the mists of Facebook history:
Think of it this way. You don’t care about all this if people are leaving you alone. You just go about your business. But if there is a dispute over your body—say someone wants to rape you or enslave you. Then either they are willing to try to justify it, or not. If not, then they are just criminals and you have to deal with them with force or whatever. If they try to justify then they have to do so in a peaceful context. And remember: all justification is necessarily argumentative justification. That means any conceivable justification, that is, any possible norm that could conceivably be justified, has to be compatible with the norms of argumentation. And those include: peace; the presumption that there is value to cooperation; the presumption that it is desirable that people have the ability to control their own bodies (not only to argue during the argument, but to have survived in the world to the point of making the argument, which requires (unmolested) use of scarce means; etc.
The point is that you can never justify a socialist or criminal ethic. How could you do so? You would have to make an argument, in the course of a peaceful argumentation, that peace is bad. This cannot be done. It is a contradiction. So if you want to commit aggression, you either have to just do it and give up on the idea that you can justify it; or, if you try to justify it, you have to recognize that it cannot be done. By examining the structure of this from the outside, we can recognize that no socialist ethic can ever, in practice, be argumentatively justified.
And to say you do not own yourself outside of argument, is simply to say that some form of socialism is justified. How can two supposedly civilized, mutually-rights-respecting, peace-desiring people (in an argument) ever argue that it’s okay to hit people who have done nothing wrong? If you make that argument, then you have no grounds for refusing to coerce the other guy into accepting your argument—which is contrary to the nature of argumentation which presupposes that each side has the right to disagree with the other and is not being coerced.
For more discussion of these issues, see Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide; What Libertarianism Is.
My article How We Come To Own Ourselves has been translated into Polish: Zbiór artykułów które przetłumaczyłem na język polski.
Contra a Propriedade Intelectual, the Portugese translation of Against Intellectual Property, is now available here. An online version is available here. Amazon (kindle and paper) here.
I was interviewed today (May 10, 2013) by XXX of the UK’s The Libertarian:
Stephan Kinsella is a patent attorney, a long-time libertarian theorist and lecturer in the Austrian-anarchist-Rothbardian tradition. Kinsella is also Director of the Cente for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF.org), Founding and Executive Editor of Libertarian Papers), blogger at The Libertarian Standard and has a podcast, Kinsella on Liberty. The topics discussed in this interview include Ayn Rand, Argumentation Ethics, Religion, Intellectual Property and Bullying.
Full text repixeled below. Original article.
See also KOL074 | The Libertarian: Interview Argumentation Ethics, Immigration, Libertarian Property Theory.
Update: Spanish Translation of Interview by The Libertarian
Interview: Stephan Kinsella
Stephan Kinsella is a patent attorney, a long-time libertarian theorist and lecturer in the Austrian-anarchist-Rothbardian tradition. Kinsella is also Director of the Cente for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF.org), Founding and Executive Editor of Libertarian Papers), blogger at The Libertarian Standard and has a podcast, Kinsella on Liberty. The topics discussed in this interview include Ayn Rand, Argumentation Ethics, Religion, Intellectual Property and Bullying.
The Libertarian: Thank you very much Stephan for agreeing to take part in the interview. Could you start by stating why you are a libertarian and, perhaps more importantly, what your definition of libertarianism is?
Stephan Kinsella: As for why I am a libertarian and how I define it: I explain some of this in How I Became A Libertarian (published as “Being a Libertarian” in I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians, compiled by Walter Block; Mises Institute 2010) and also in What Libertarianism Is .
I am 47, a patent attorney in Houston; I was born in Louisiana. I was always interested in science and literature, and in high school, around 11th grade, a librarian at my Catholic High School suggested I read The Fountainhead. That increased my interest in philosophy and made me interested in economics (Austrian, in particular) and political theory. This was maybe 1980 or so, 33 years ago, when I was about 15. I quickly became fascinated by all this and when I went to college (to study electrical engineering), I devoured lots of works on philosophy, economics, political theory, including works by Rand, Milton Friedman, and then Bastiat, Rothbard, the Tannehills. By the time I got to law school in 1988 I was becoming a Rothbardian Austrian-Misesian-anarchist libertarian, and soon became very influenced by Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s thought.
At first I thought of liberty and libertarianism in terms of the non-aggression axiom or principle. As I learned more about history, economics, politics, philosophy, anarchy, and law, I tried to refine my views, and now I think the NAP is more of a summary or consequence of more primary views. I think libertarianism is best described as the political philosophy developed from pro-peace, pro-cooperation, pro-prosperity “grundnorms” as informed by economic insights.
I think libertarianism is the view that the only political norms that are justified are those compatible with the values or grundnorms that are actually held, and that necessarily must be and are held, by people engaged in the civilized, rational, peaceful pursuit of norms. Libertarianism is best characterized by essentially self-ownership (meaning: body-ownership) and the Lockean-compatible rule of homesteading of unowned scarce resources combined with the right of contractual transfer of title to these owned resources. The NAP is a short-hand codification of this but is derivative of or dependent on it; it is not primary. The basic libertarian view is: justified rules of interpersonal conduct are those that comport with the basic rule that when there is a scarce resource, i.e. a rivalrous good over which conflict is possible, there ought to be a norm specifying an owner, so that conflict can be avoided and the resource may be used peacefully and productively, and that this norm is: (a) in the case of human bodies, each person himself has a better claim to that body, simply because of his direct control over it; that is, at least prima facie: until and unless he performs some action (tort, contract, crime) that changes this default presumption; (b) in the case of external resources, the person who has the earlier claim to the resource has the better claim. In other words, self-ownership plus first-use and contract (plus special rules to address torts or crimes). Non-aggression means that using or invading the borders of the body or Lockean-acquired resources of another is prohibited unless the owner consents. That is why property theory is more primary than the idea of aggression; we cannot know if A’s forceful action to take an object possessed/controlled by B, is rightful, or aggression, unless we know who owns it.
The Libertarian: Your idea of ‘grundnorms’ is essentially consequentialist. You’ve written elsewhere that, while utilitarianism is flawed, consequentialism is not to be shunned by deontological or natural rights libertarians. Would you say that any deontological system must be compatible with the grundorms of peace, abundance and co-operation?
Stephan Kinsella: On consequentialism vs. deontological arguments: I agree somewhat with Randy Barnett in ‘Of Chickens and Eggs’ and in the introduction to his book, ‘The Structure of Liberty’. I also agree with Rothbard’s assessment of Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics. The idea, as Rand noted herself, is that the moral is the practical, and vice-versa, so we should not expect consequentialism and principled arguments to be opposed; they should complement each other. (I have other problems with utilitarianism itself, as I explain in Against Intellectual Property, available at www.stephankinsella.com.)
Hoppe sees his argument as a variant of natural rights arguments, but focused on the nature of justificatory argumentation, not on man’s nature per se – Rothbard agreed with this. I think that by constructing a “transcendental” argument as Hoppe does, it is a natural rights argument but one that builds on some kind of necessarily presupposed grundnorms of any possible participant in any discussion about what norms are justified. So it is consequentialist in a sense, but it is about the rules and norms that one must favor (if one has a sufficient degree of honest, sincerity, and economic literacy) if one favors certain other basic values or consequences such as overall human peace, prosperity, and so on. Since no one can coherently propose a non-peaceful norm in an inherently peaceful activity like discourse, the presupposed values can be taken as an ultimate, unchallengeable “given.” So then you weave the givens, with logic and knowledge of human nature and economics, and you then realize that the only possible political or interpersonal norms that could ever be justified, as even possibly compatible with the necessarily presupposed grundnorms or values, are libertarian norms. All socialist norms conflict with the basic norms that all civilized people necessarily presuppose and adopt by virtue of participating in society and in engaging in sincere, rational discourse.
I can put it in a more practical way, too. Less transcendental, so to speak. Each human who is rational and grows up in a society that is the current manifestation of human history and civilization, can see the benefits to his own life, to being part of that society. If a sufficient number of people did not now and had not always also had social norms like empathy and so on, we would not have arrived at the advanced state of society we are in now. But happily, a large enough amount of humans have (for evolutionary and social reasons, I believe) a sufficient degree of empathy for others and respect for others’ rights, that we have always a type of “working libertarianism,” though it is not consistent enough. If you just take the top 80% of humans, the ones who by and large respect the rights of others, then if there are a small minority who are malevolent, sociopaths, whatever, then we have to regard them as merely a “technical problem” to be dealt with like any other challenge or threat in life. On the latter see and also “The Division of Labor as the Source of Grundnorms and Rights,” and “Empathy and the Source of Rights,” linked in note 14 of What Libertarianism Is.
And, yes: I do think that any deontological (or: principled) system must be compatible with the grundorms of peace, abundance and co-operation. I think these ways of looking at it dovetail. There is only one reality, after all; the blind men describing the elephant while detecting only parts of it or from different perspectives are talking about the same elephant, after all. That is why I think Kantianism (at least: realistic Kantianism of the Mises-Hoppe type) is not incompatible with, say, Aristoteleanism; in fact I see many similarities in the way Rand justified her “axiomatic” concepts with the way we can justify “a priori” propositions. For more on this see Mises and Rand (and Rothbard).
The Libertarian: Why did you depart from the ideas of Rand in favour of Rothbard? Was it a problem with her epistemology or reasoning, or her conclusions? One of the two must have appeared to be inconsistent with the other for you to have found Objectivism unsatisfactory.
Stephan Kinsella: Here is where I disagree with Rand. First, the cultishness, the cult of personality, the closed mindedness, the refusal to engage the mainstream, the humorlessness, the silliness of elevating your personal preferences to some kind of Holy Writ.
I still agree with the 4 main Randian tenets, but I would disagree with her application of them. On “capitalism” I would call it libertarianism, instead of focusing on one aspect of the economic arrangement we could expect in an advanced libertarian society, but that is more of a semantic quibble. I call myself an Austrolibertarian or anarcho-libertarian, not an anarcho-capitalist, just to try to be clear and to try to avoid the quibbling launched in part by the left-libertarians who go crazy over the word “capitalism”; they have succeeded in ruining the word for us.
I think she is wrong to think her capitalism-essentially, libertarianism-implies the state. Very wrong. And associated views on war, etc, but that is just her error in application.
I also think she is wrong in her over-reliance on confused intellectual property ideas in her rights theory. I think the Randian Quattro – reality, reason, self-interest, capitalism – implies anarchy, individualism, freethinking, and that intellectual property is fascist. They did not realize that their basic principles imply anarchy and that IP is evil. They were wrong on this.
I also was misled by her and her followers’ admonitions not to read libertarians like Rothbard, and their bizarre complaints that libertarianism was both incompatible with “capitalism”, while also saying Rothbard and others “stole” the idea of the non-aggression principle from her (more of her IP mania). I also disagree with the Objectivist view that you have to agree on the whole philosophy to be a good libertarian. Nonsense. I am for reason and reality, sure; but as long as someone is opposed, on sufficiently principled grounds, to aggression, that makes me very happy.
I am drawn also to some aspects of Rand’s aesthetics but don’t consider that to be part of political theory per se, and again, she was too strident and dogmatic about it, elevating her personal tastes to some unjustifiably lofty status.
Rand and her followers also unfortunately lionize the American Founders and the Constitution. I heard that she initially was in favor of eminent domain because it’s suggested in the 5th Amendment; she finally opposed it. I suspect the same thing happened to her with patent and copyright, though – as a budding novelist with some self-interest in copyright for her works -she was not unbiased and never gave that up, unfortunately; theoretically, I believe her reluctant minarchism and her embrace of intellectual property were her biggest mistakes.
The Libertarian: Indeed, I doubt there are many libertarians who will be able to effectively reject the ‘tenets’ of Objectivism. One area of Rand’s writing, and probably the majority of libertarian theorists since, which upsets me is their idea that religion is to be hated and condemned. Fair enough, as long as you also hate and condemn the state. Yet, speculating about noumena is surely not ‘irrational’, just non-falsifiable.
Stephan Kinsella: Actually, though Rand and Randians are explicit atheists, they seem not to make religion a huge scapegoat; though they do think it is a manifestation of collectivism and irrationalism, and I agree with them on this. But for me, though religion is completely irrational, worship of the state is even worse.
I think the Objectivist idea is that if you are religious you are accepting irrational ideas, and that can tarnish your ability to think coherently and clearly about other matters. However, it turns out, it seems to me, that people have the ability to compartmentalize. That is why I think that in some ways the argument for liberty has to be narrow, and to appeal to views people already hold, and not some general lifestyle type issue. You don’t get a good job by “being a libertarian.”
The Libertarian: Just to clarify: in what way would you say religion is irrational? My tolerance of religion has greatly increased since I considered two points about religion: it is a mere speculation about noumena and is not a lie, per se; and it teaches some moral rules which are often good for people to adhere to. A further point to make is that it weakens the state vis-a-vis individuals.
Stephan Kinsella: I have been a fairly strident atheist for over 30 years. But I think my tolerance has also increased, and I am not anti-religion, really. But even if religion plays a social role in helping counterbalance state power that does not mean that its supernatural claims are true. I think it is irrational primarily for reasons Ayn Rand identified: the arguments for it are riddled with irrational claims or leaps. I almost never see a sincere argument for a supernatural realm as being actually true. For example: arguments of this type: how can you bear to live, believing that you die forever? Well, this is not a real argument; it is an appeal to “wishing makes it so,” which Rand rightly skewered. And theists routinely make bizarre, dishonest, insincere arguments, such as God must exist to explain existence – yet what explains God’s existence? And there is a tendency to moral conservativism and also to anti-science (e.g. Creationism and anti-evolution, which I regard as completely irrational), combined with the willingness of Christians (say) to combine their atavistic theistic views with pro-American (say) nationalism, which is sickening to me and which probably would have disgusted Christ, if he ever historically even existed.
I view modern religion as the remnant of primitive philosophy; you see the sun go up, you posit a sun-God to explain it. Not much of an explanation, but understandable for the times. To keep the religion going, it has to incorporate customs, morals, practices, so it does end up encoding a good deal of practical wisdom, but it’s so encrusted with the irrational bits that I can’t see how religion is an efficient mechanism to spread and perpetuate valuable social norms. Yet as bad as religion is, I see the modern religion of statism as being much worse.
Sometimes I believe that we evolved too quickly – that we came out of the trees too soon. I sometimes fear that reason SETI has detected no signals from outer space is that life eventually evolves to intelligence and then soon finds a way to destroy itself in some form of gray goo -nanotech, biotech, nukes, whatever – and that this is our fate too.
But my hope is that as humanity continues to evolve and free markets and technology advance, despite the efforts of the state and statists to stop it, that various shibboleths like statism, religion, superstition, pseudoscience, collectivism, racism, will gradually subside and we will become more rational, individualistic, scientific, tolerant, and cosmopolitan. Though it is statism that is my main concern.
The Libertarian: You’ve mentioned Argumentation Ethics and you side with Hans-Hermann Hoppe on a good deal, from epistemology to rights theory. ‘Estoppel’ is one of your contributions, which is loosely based on AE: what is ‘Estoppel’ and what is its use in libertarian rights theory?
Stephan Kinsella: Re Estoppel: I recently had a podcast discussing this, KOL 052 | Renegade Variety Hour: “Being Good Without God”. I have links to my and others’ writing on these matters in the Concise Guide to Argumentation Ethics, mentioned previously.
As a budding libertarian, and having just read Hoppe’s argumentation ethics, in 1988 or so, as a freshman in law school, I had an insight in contracts class, when I was exposed to the common law idea of estoppel. That idea is that, in some cases, if you would normally have a defense against contractual enforcement (because some formality was not met etc.) the other side could still win, if they showed that you are making an argument or assertion, to defend yourself against a contract breach claim, that is incompatible with some other statement you made earlier in the proceeding or in your dealings with the opponent. If you made a statement that the adversary relied on to his detriment, then you “will not be heard” to utter a new claim that contradicts your earlier statement. The law basically requires you to be consistent; this is a recognition of the importance of the law of non-contradiction.
I saw that this is how the non-aggression principle works, since the essential idea of libertarianism is one of reciprocity or symmetry: you may not initiate force but you may use force if it is response to force. Force in response to force is okay; force in response to innocuous actions is not. By using the idea of estoppel, I reasoned that the aggressor, who has used (initiated) force against an innocent person, is estopped from complaining if the victim proposes to use force (retaliatory) against him. By this mental construct you can see what types of claims can be justified and which cannot. A claim to object to aggression is justified, but a claim to object to punishment for committing aggression is not justified because it is inconsistent; you are estopped from objecting to being proportionately punished by your victim. The argument dovetails with and complements and relies upon aspects of Hoppe’s argument ethics, especially the universalizability principle.
The Libertarian: It’s great that both you and Jeffrey Tucker agree with Stefan Molyneux that aggression by a parent toward a child is aggression all-the-same. Further to this, I also like the analogy made by either Tucker or Molyneux that the state is the perfect example of allowing a ‘parent’ to do whatever he likes to his ‘children’. Something I am less inclined to agree with you on is your theory of bullying. More specifically, the statement that you would sue the parents of a child who beat up your child. Why not the bully himself?
Stephan Kinsella: Fair point; I can’t stand strongly by this fairly informal comment. To fully justify it one would need a fully-developed theory of strict liability and vicarious responsibility, which no one has developed that I know of, to my satisfaction (including me). Maybe the child-bully should be the one sued. My point was not even that a lawsuit is the appropriate institutional remedy; maybe this is an unreasonable or disproportionate response, in most cases. My point was to emphasize that kids who bully are literally committing aggression, and creating victims; and their actions should not be laughed off or dismissed as in “oh, kids, you know them!” It is appropriate to focus on the victim and to condemn aggression. The Institutional responses to it, those details, are of less concern. In reality, in a free society, I expect these things to be much less common and to be handled speedily by private customs and arrangements-e.g. the school would contact the parents of the bully and make it clear it’s not tolerated, etc.
The Libertarian: Speaking of Stefan Molyneux, whom all readers of ‘The Libertarian’ hope will make a speedy recovery, to what extent is ‘Universally Preferable Behaviour’ the same theory as Argumentation Ethics?
Stephan Kinsella: I think UPB, as far as I grok it, is getting at some of the same insights that are in argumentation ethics. I think it is less rigorous and coherent, as are many other “fellow traveler” arguments I allude to in my Concise Guide article, but it is pushing in the same general direction I think.
The Libertarian: What, or who, finally convinced you of the absurdity of intellectual property? And, on a less serious note, how painful is it being a patent attorney when you’re the leading libertarian against IP?
Stephan Kinsella: Honestly, I cannot remember. I think it was a combination of Tom Palmer, Wendy McElroy, perhaps Sam Konkin, and to some degree Murray Rothbard, plus my growing appreciation for the role of scarce resources/means in action from reading people like Mises an Hoppe. I think I always really knew it was bogus; Rand’s argument on IP never made sense to me. As I started law school and then started practicing IP I turned my attention to it more because I knew I had to make up my mind. Then I realized things fell into place when I rejected IP; and clarifying these issues in my mind helped me reorganize my approach to related matters in legal and political theory.
I did hardcore patent prosecution for a solid decade, 1992-2002 or so, then got burned out on it primarily because it’s just a drain. But then, also, because I started hating the patent and IP system even more and more. So even if I help clients now acquire patents, and mollify myself that it is helping them defend themselves against patent aggressors in a horrible system, it’s still not pleasant. I imagine that if I took $50k as a defense attorney from the parents of a kid accused of selling cocaine, I would know I was doing a good thing but would feel uneasy about it. In any case I try to focus now only on projects for clients that I feel morally justified about; I refuse to actively help someone use patents to attack innocent victims. I turned down a client just last week, telling them I could never help you acquire patents if your intent is to use them offensively against your competitors.
The Libertarian: How optimistic are you that a stateless society will be brought about within your lifetime or the next generation’s lifetime? Are there any truly radical, consistent and effective think-tanks about anywhere in the world?
Stephan Kinsella: I am somewhat optimistic that the free market and technology will keep advancing, despite the efforts of the statists to stop it. And this will bring a gradual increase in appreciation for free markets and scorn for the state. I don’t see any binary or radical shifts, but more of a gradual change. Hopefully the state will become relegated more and more to the background. As for think tanks – well I am increasingly a fan of “agorist” or private solutions to private challenges that gradually invade the state’s territory and undermine it; just think of what email has done to the state postal services; what Skype has done to international long distance telephone service. I have long been a skeptic of the pie in the sky libertarian projects like floating nations and whatnot, but I am heartened by some more practical and recent ideas like General Governance , of which I am involved and which seeks to exploit some unique constitutional anomalies of the US Indian Tribes to spread free-ish “enclaves” within the US, the Blue Seed project, and even the failed but maybe-to-be-revived Honduran Free Cities Projects.
The Libertarian: Finally, Margaret Thatcher was the only UK Prime Minister to proudly proclaim her ownership of a copy of ‘The Constitution of Liberty’ by FA Hayek. While many libertarians seem to think that she was amazing, others, such as Sean Gabb, have criticised her policies very strongly. Do you have any thoughts on ‘The Iron Lady’?
Stephan Kinsella: My first vote, in 1984, when I was 19 or so, was for Ronald Reagan. That was my last vote for a Republican. Thereafter I voted Libertarian Party or abstained, and, lately, don’t waste time voting. So while I have some nostalgic affection for Reagan and Thatcher and some of their rhetoric, I cannot say I really admire very much any politician. I view them as almost inherently corrupt, dishonest, shallow, and evil. So, no, I have no fondness for Thatcher. I cannot see how anyone who rises to such a position of power in a modern social democratic state can be decent or principled.
The Libertarian: Thank you, once again, for taking part, Stephan.
Stephan Kinsella: Thank you! I enjoyed it.
My Mises Daily article How We Come To Own Ourselves (Sep. 7, 2006, Mises.org blog discussion; audio version) has been translated into Spanish, by Josep Purroy: Cómo los niños se vuelven dueños de sí mismos.
Too many libertarians, especially of the “sky is falling” crowd (the ones who have been predicting major societal collapse for 40 years), are sure we are in End Times. Some previous age was America’s apex, from which we’ve long been in rapid decline. America has gone from being a pretty decent place to a near “police state.” When was this golden period? Not the Founders’ generation (ugh). Not the post-war 1950s or even the post-Civil War 1850s. The 1950’s were better in some respects than the 2010s, but not in every respect. Yes, the police state is worse now but war is down. The draft is gone. Marijuana legalization is on the horizon (and marijuana is super-high quality now in states where it is quasi-legal). Gay marriage, unthinkable in the 50s and even 70s, is inevitable. 1 Alcohol was legalized long ago and porn’s legal status seems not in doubt.
Air travel is cheaper and safer, and used more and more by the masses. Middle class people take Disney Cruises, vacations zip-lining in Costa Rica, or vacation in Turkey, Germany, Italy, Britain, Australia. Incomes are higher, houses are bigger, air-conditioning is more ubiquitous. Cell phones are cheap; everyone has one. Computers are powerful, inexpensive and portable, and we are all linked by one of the most amazing developments in all human history: the Internet. 3D printing is on the horizon, food is better and cheaper. Diversity is flourishing, as is tolerance: some people are vegetarians, vegans; no big deal. Meat eaters accommodate them when they invite them for dinner. Christians have Jewish and Hindu and atheist and Muslim friends; their kids all associate with a rainbow of colors of kids from all over the country or the world, with different ethnicities, religions, traditions, holidays—no one minds. A waiter from Alabama might good-naturedly tease his LSU-shirt wearing customers, but everyone laughs it off; they have their mild regional and college and geographical identities and alliances, but they are not serious or real. We don’t have soccer hooligans and stampedes at football games here. The era of private spacecraft is upon us too. Tie-died clothes and “peace” teeshirts, once derided as “hippie,” are now cool—college kids and soccer moms wear them. (See: Justin Gaffrey Peace Art.) Some people have nose rings, multiple earrings. Tattoos. Nobody cares. That would have gotten you dirty looks or shunning in the ’50s. Mixed-race couples? Nobody bats an eye.
Food and restaurants are better than ever. There are amazing art museums all over. Movies and especially television are better than ever, and music is healthy and vibrant and proliferating. American universities are the best in the world, as is American technology and business and culture, as seen by the dominance of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Hollywood, and so on.
Libertarianism and free market economics (including Austrian) are on the rise; the numbers of intellectuals, students, etc. who are interested in these ideas today completely dwarfs numbers from even the 1980s, and even more so those of earlier generations.
The state is growing too, but it is also less powerful in some ways—cell phones and cell phone video cameras and the Internet and twitter and facebook and google have put state actions under increasing scrutiny. The threat of a truly major war is remote. And while the state does its usual song and dance of taking as much as it can get away with, the fact that the state taxes us and even regulates us (in some ways) more is, perversely, some kind of evidence that things are better. Why? The state is parasitical on its host: natural, civil society, the underlying free market economy operating beneath the fascist barnacles. The state is able to extract more from the host only because the host is bigger and richer now. (See Hoppe on Liberal Economies and War.) And it is able to ratchet up “police state” type measures such as surveillance, airport security measures, only because it is dimly aware that its victims usually have no readily available alternative state to move to. If one could fairly easily move from the US to country X and have a similar standard of living, earn a similar amount of money, and have even better freedom and civil liberties and lower taxes, millions would do this. That this doesn’t happen is precisely because those living in the US have it so good—despite the state.
And yes, the U.S. is allegedly slipping on the economic freedom index, but this is partly because other places are getting more free all the time.
Moreover, the main tools that the state once used to control the economy are becoming more and more non-functioning, and everyone knows it. Fiscal policy is at an end. Monetary policy is not performing either. Regulatory policy is all about a battle between large corporations over who can screw their competition fastest. But in general, the old vision of the state as the master of all things is completely dead in the U.S.—on the left and the right. The energy is with technology, innovation, and the development of private nations within the nation. Technology has permitted smaller, nimble companies and entrepreneurs who don’t need big foundries or staffs, who outsource discrete tasks to other specialists and who outsource themselves without centralized direction, responding to the tugs of supply and demand. They regard the state as a drag, a nuisance, and hop around it like acrobats, focusing on making money, making things, and pleasing customers.
Making observations like these often infuriates libertarians, who in their monomaniacal obsession with the state let thinking about the state permeate everything they do. They think you are making light of state depredations, that you are even excusing or forgiving it, if you admit that it’s possible to live a good, flourishing life even in the presence of the state. They scoff at the suggestion that there are really no “better places” for most Americans to move to … even though they are still here, too. Yes, the state is terrible. Yes, private crime is terrible too. But they are just impediments to life, challenges. Just as natural disasters, wild animals, disease, and even the fundamental facts of scarcity (of resources, of time) are obstacles or challenges that any successful, rational human actor has to overcome to lead a happy life. In some circumstances it is not possible to succeed; here, private crime, or the state, has imposed too much damage. Think of young blacks raised in a culture of violence, ugliness, horrible role models, drugs and drug war violence, fatherless, and suffering from the ravages of the government educational system. Or think of Jews living in ghettos or even concentration camps in Hitler-era Germany. The state can snuff out life.
But tens, maybe hundreds of millions of Americans find ways to navigate and ignore the state. They avoid drugs, since that might send you to jail; they don’t care much, as they don’t want to do drugs anyway. They don’t evade taxes, since they would prefer to keep 62% of their $150k salary than go to prison. And the $93k net they are left with has more purchasing power than their dad’s or grandparent’s net salary from generations past. They go to their children’s plays; they have nice SUVs; they have nice friends and family members; some go to church, some give to charity or work to help the less fortunate. Some have friends all over the world on facebook, and pin their hobbies on Pinterest. Startups burst like popcorn onto the scene all the time; some fail, like Digg, others prosper, like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, Apple.
Sure, more state-caused recessions are coming. But I am not persuaded that we know a huge collapse is coming (the kind “worse-is-better” libertarians too often pine for); Austrian economics tells us the state ought not to intervene in markets (if we want prosperity), but the future is uncertain (see my post Verstehen and the Role of Economics in Forecasting, or: If You’re so Rich, Why Aren’t You Smart?). For my part, since I believe in the power of freedom, free markets, and technology, I think it’s reasonable to predict that the economy and innovation will continue to increase, over time, in absolute terms, despite the state’s depredations. I could be wrong. It’s possible. But it seems to me that bugging out is not a viable solution. If doom is coming, doom is coming. For me, it’s not a reason to give up. Far from it; it’s a reason to try to be more successful—to acquire more money and power, to better withstand any coming statist calamities.
I do not believe in optimism for optimism’s sake. I am not a believer in the “power of positive thinking”; I’m a realist. Rothbard, I think, used to say the libertarian has to be a short-run pessimist and a long-run optimist. I suppose I agree: things look “bad” now from the point of view of libertarianism’s odds of success; and we can hope that the free market and freedom will ultimately somehow defeat the state, because they are more right, more productive, more powerful. I suppose. But this is strictly an activist perspective; it’s what someone focusing on libertarianism’s prospects would say. But the goal of each person is his own life. I am a personal optimist in the sense that I think I, myself, and many other people as well, can and will be able to live happy, successful, flourishing lives, despite the state. I view my libertarian involvement not as typical political activism; it is more of my own hobby, or avocation. Others have different interests outside their work and families. I am interested in libertarianism because I happen to like economics and political philosophy, and have a passionate, intense interest in justice and rightness. But as a person I am interested in more than this: in living a good and happy and successful life. So I view the state (and private crime) as evil, yes; and they are evil because of the barriers they put in the way of people who want to live happy lives. It does no good to complain about the possibility of hurricanes or a disease one has; the criminal actions of the state are intentional, so complaining about the state (or, more particularly: voicing objections to, criticizing the state) might have some long-run or even short-run efficacy, but there is no guarantee. So the state, as with private crime, has to be regarded as a type of background danger in life that one has to figure out a way to defeat, evade, escape from, hide from, navigate around, or ignore. And I’m confident that, for at least tens of millions of Americans, this is possible. It’s a shame; it’s an unfortunate cost or drag needlessly imposed on civil society, the economy, and individual human lives; but there you have it. We can still recognize it, take it into account, and prosper despite the state.
The main benefit of doing this is one’s own personal gains. But a secondary benefit, for those of the libertarian avocation, is that you also become a more effective torch-bearer for liberty. As I discuss in Nock and Leonard Read on “One Improved Unit” and the Power of Attraction (see also Living a Life of Excellence and Liberty), if you focus on improving yourself, succeeding, flourishing, instead of trying to improve others (or futilely trying to change the state, instead of recognizing that it’s bad, and exists, and is there), then you generate more light, than heat; and light has the power to attract others.
As Leonard Read wrote in The Essence of Americanism:
I am not at this level but I am aware of it and know some of its imperatives. One imperative is the awareness that the higher the objective is, the more dignified the method must be. If we aspire to such a high objective as advancing individual liberty and the free market, we can resort to no lesser method than the power of attraction, the absolute opposite of using propaganda, indoctrination, and half truths. A good way to test how well one is doing on the objective we have in mind is to observe how many are seeking his counsel. If none, then one can draw his own conclusions!
The sole force that will turn indifference into acceptance is the power of attraction. And this can be achieved only if the eye is cast away from the remaking of others and toward the improvement of self. This effort demanded of each individual is not at all a sacrifice, but rather the best investment one can make in life’s highest purpose.
Well, where can we find such individuals? I think we will find them among those who love this country. I think we will find them in this room. I think that one of them is you.
See also Anthony Gregory’s The Golden Age of Freedom Is Still Ahead.
(Thanks to Jeff Tucker and Anthony Gregory for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this post.)
Update: A lot of discussion of this post on Facebook.
And on a second Facebook post in 2016.
And Tim Sandefur says: “For once I agree with Stephan Kinsella.” For once? Well he has also agreed with me on IP—see his article “A Critique of Ayn Rand’s Theory of Intellectual Property Rights,” Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 9:1 (Fall 2007), pp. 139-61.
See also David Brooks, Relax, We’ll Be Fine, NYTimes April 5, 2010
- Update: it ended up happening in 2015. And see my post The Libertarian Case for Gay Marriage. [↩]
Stephen F. Austin State University‘s Young Americans for Liberty chapter and the Charles Koch Foundation will be hosting a conference called “Liberty in the Pines” (facebook event) later this month at Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches, Texas (about 2 hours N of Houston). I will be speaking on “Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Economics and Political Theory.” Stefan Molyneux will also be speaking, and Jeff Tucker will deliver the keynote. Walter Block will conduct an “Ask a Libertarian” Q&A session (remotely), and other speakers will appear as well. I’m looking forward to it.
Details:
When is your Event?:
Saturday, March 23, 2013 – 10:00am- 6:00pm local timeLocation:
1936 North Street
Nacogdoches, TX, 75962
United States
For some background on some of the issues I’ll touch on, see:
- Hume on Intellectual Property and the Problematic “Labor” Metaphor”
- Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and ‘Rearranging’
- Locke, Smith, Marx and the Labor Theory of Value
- “What Libertarianism Is”
- “How We Come To Own Ourselves“
After much thought and debate about this topic over the last 25 or so years, here is my attempt at a lean, concise, precise definition of what a libertarian is:
A libertarian is a person who believes that the invasion of the borders of (trespass against) others’ bodies or owned external scarce resources, i.e. property (with property allocations determined in accordance with Lockean homesteading rules and contractual transfer rules), is unjustified, because they (for whatever reason) prefer or value grundnorms of peace, prosperity, and cooperation and who have enough honesty, consistency, and economic literacy to recognize that the libertarian assignment of property rules is necessary to achieve these grundnorms.
Such a person, if he is consistent, also cannot help but recognize that the state, being an agency of institutionalized aggression, is inherently criminal and illegitimate.
Note what this does not say: It does not say that the libertarian necessarily believes all aggression is immoral, but rather that it is unjustified; it does not imply that rights are a “subset” of morals. It also does not say why the person values peace, prosperity and cooperation and favors it above interpersonal violent conflict. It also does not make the common mistake of interpreting the libertarian-Lockean property allocation rule as requiring one to prove title all the way back to the very first use of the resource; rather, it says that whoever has the best claim to a disputed resource has a property right in it (is its “proper” owner), and that as between any two claimants, the one having an earlier claim (use) of the property has the better claim. This does not require title to be traced back to the beginning of time but only to the earliest time needed to defeat any actual or potential claimants; though it implies that someone who can trace title back to the first appropriation has the best possible claim of all (unless title has been assigned by contract). Note also that although the libertarian rule is the Lockean rule this does not imply Locke’s reasoning in justifying his homesteading rule was correct—in particular it does not imply that Locke was right to say that labor is owned or that labor-ownership is the reason why first possession of a resource is sufficient to establish property rights in the resource.
For more, see my posts and articles below:
- “What Libertarianism Is”
- “How We Come To Own Ourselves“
- The relation between the non-aggression principle and property rights: a response to Division by Zer0
- The Division of Labor as the Source of Grundnorms and Rights
- Empathy and the Source of Rights
- Thoughts on the Latecomer and Homesteading Ideas; or, why the very idea of “ownership” implies that only libertarian principles are justifiable
- Justice and Property Rights: Rothbard on Scarcity, Property, Contracts…
- What is Aggression?
- The problem of particularistic ethics or, why everyone really has to admit the validity of the universalizability principle
- Hume on Intellectual Property and the Problematic “Labor” Metaphor”
- Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and ‘Rearranging’
- Locke, Smith, Marx and the Labor Theory of Value
- “Introduction to Libertarian Legal Theory”
- “What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist”
Also: Rothbard, Ethics of Liberty, chs. 4-5, 15; Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, chs. 1, 2, and 7.
Update: See also these related and interesting comments of Rothbard, ch. 6 of Ethics. Rothbard writes:
If Crusoe had eaten the mushrooms without learning of their poisonous effects, then his decision would have been incorrect—a possibly tragic error based on the fact that man is scarcely automatically determined to make correct decisions at all times. Hence, his lack of omniscience and his liability to error. If Crusoe, on the other hand, had known of the poison and eaten the mushrooms anyway—perhaps for “kicks” or from a very high time preference—then his decision would have been objectively immoral, an act deliberately set against his life and health. It may well be asked why life should be an objective ultimate value, why man should opt for life (in duration and quality).” 1
Notice here Rothbard has no problem bluntly saying that for Crusoe, alone on a desert island, some things are objectively immoral. So the thickers have a bit of a straw man when saying libertarians restrict themselves only to matters of aggression etc. (Recent example: as noted here, one critic, Will Moyer, says — “Libertarians typically push matters outside of property rights and violence into the realm of aesthetics, which Rothbard described as “personal” morality. On these issues of personal morality, libertarian theory is silent.”
If Crusoe had eaten the mushrooms without learning of their poisonous effects, then his decision would have been incorrect—a possibly tragic error based on the fact that man is scarcely automatically determined to make correct decisions at all times. Hence, his lack of omniscience and his liability to error. If Crusoe, on the other hand, had known of the poison and eaten the mushrooms anyway—perhaps for “kicks” or from a very high time preference—then his decision would have been objectively immoral, an act deliberately set against his life and health. It may well be asked why life should be an objective ultimate value, why man should opt for life (in duration and quality).[5] In reply, we may note that a proposition rises to the status of an axiom when he who denies it may be shown to be using it in the very course of the supposed refutation.[6] Now, any person participating in any sort of discussion, including one on values, is, by virtue of so participating, alive and affirming life. For if he were really opposed to life, he would have no business in such a discussion, indeed he would have no business continuing to be alive. Hence, the supposed opponent of life is really affirming it in the very process of his discussion, and hence the preservation and furtherance of one’s life takes on the stature of an incontestable axiom.
Further, and interestingly, this is the passage Hoppe pointed to as being proto-argumentation ethics… it also borrows from Randian views on value and rights, though without a footnote acknowledging this. See Hoppe, here:
Rothbard’s distinct contribution to the natural-rights tradition is his reconstruction of the principles of self-ownership and original appropriation as the praxeological precondition —Bedingung der Moeglichkeit — of argumentation, and his recognition that whatever must be presupposed as valid in order to make argumentation possible in the first place cannot in turn be argumentatively disputed without thereby falling into a practical self-contradiction.[29]
As Rothbard explains in an unfortunately brief but centrally important passage of The Ethics of Liberty:
a proposition rises to the status of an axiom when he who denies it may be shown to be using it in the very course of the supposed refutation. Now, any person participating in any sort of discussion, including one on values, is, by virtue of so participating, alive and affirming life. For if he were really opposed to life, he would have no business in such a discussion, indeed he would have no business continuing to be alive. Hence, the supposed opponent of life is really affirming it in the very process of his discussion, and hence the preservation and furtherance of one’s life takes on the stature of an incontestable axiom (pp. 32–33).
(See also my Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide.)
See also Rothbard in Ch. 20 of Ethics: Rothbard here conceives of the possibility that it is moral to violate someone’s rights. That implies that the obligation not to commit aggression may not be a moral obligation. It is a legally enforceable obligation. That is what in the law is the correlative of rights: duties, or obligations. Legally enforceable rights imply legally enforceable obligations, and vice-versa.
Rothbard:
We are not herewith concerned whether it is moral or immoral for someone to lie, to be a good person, to develop his faculties, or be kind or mean to his neighbors. We are concerned, in this sort of discussion, solely with such “political ethical” questions as the proper role of violence, the sphere of rights, or the definitions of criminality and aggression. Whether or not it is moral or immoral for “Smith”—the fellow excluded by the owner from the plank or the lifeboat—to force someone else out of the lifeboat, or whether he should die heroically instead, is not our concern, and not the proper concern of a theory of political ethics.5 The crucial point is that even if the contextualist libertarian may say that, given the tragic context, Smith should throw someone else out of the lifeboat to save his own life, he is still committing, at the very least, invasion of property rights, and probably also murder of the person thrown out. So that even if one says that he should try to save his life by forcibly grabbing a seat in the lifeboat, he is still, in our view, liable to prosecution as a criminal invader of property right, and perhaps as a murderer as well. ”
“To sum up the application of our theory to extreme situations: if a man aggresses against another’s person or property to save his own life, he may or may not be acting morally in so doing. That is none of our particular concern in this work. Regardless of whether his action is moral or immoral, by any criterion, he is still a criminal aggressor against the property of another, and the victim is within his right to repel that aggression by force, and to prosecute the aggressor afterward for his crime.
[TLS]
- By the way, this is yet another example of Rand’s influence on Rothbard. [↩]
Below is my Introduction to Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (Laissez Faire Books, 2013). Earlier editions of the book may be found here.
[Update: here are the epub and mobi files]
Appended below my Introduction is the Editorial Preface by Jeffrey A. Tucker
***
Foreword to the Laissez Faire Edition by Stephan Kinsella
YOU ARE IN for a treat. Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics (1989) utterly captivated and enlightened me when I read it over twenty years ago.
All of Professor Hoppe’s writing is insightful, including his books The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (2003), Democracy: The God That Failed (2001), Economic Science and the Austrian Method (1995), and The Great Fiction: Property, Economy, Society, and the Politics of Decline (2012), published earlier this year by Laissez Faire Books. But TSC has always been my favorite. An integrated, systematic treatise, not merely a collection of related essays, it is truly Professor Hoppe’s magnum opus—his Human Action, his Man, Economy and State.
TSC is so rich with insights that it bears careful reading, and periodic re-reading. In a book review of TSC, Professor Robert McGee noted:
When I read a book, I make marginal notations and underline the points that I think are worth reading a second time. With this book, I found that I had to restrain myself because I was making so many notations that it slowed my reading. Practically every paragraph has at least one point worth reflecting upon. 1 [continue reading…]
- Robert W. McGee, “Book Review” [of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism], The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty (September 1989), available at thefreemanonline.org.[↩]
As many of my readers know, I often lecture and speak and give podcast or radio interviews on various libertarian topics and issues, such as intellectual property (IP), anarcho-libertarians, Austrian law and economic, contract theory, rights and punishment theory, and so on. I also blog and comment regularly on such matters in various blogs (primarily The Libertarian Standard, on general libertarian matters, and C4SIF, on IP-related matters), Facebook, and so on—often posting my take on a given issue in response to a question emailed to me or posted online.
This month I am launching a new podcast, Kinsella on Liberty. I expect to post episodes once or twice a week. The podcast will include new episodes covering answers to questions emailed to me (feel free to ask me to address any issue of libertarian theory or application) as well as interviews or discussions I conduct with other libertarians. I’ll also include in the feed any new speeches or interviews of mine that appear on other podcasts or fora, as well as older speeches, interviews, and audio versions of my articles, which are collected for now on my media page). Audio and slides for several of my Mises Academy courses may also be found on my media page, and will also be included in the podcast feed later this year.
Feel free to 
Subscribe in iTunes or 
Follow with RSS, and spread the word to your libertarian friends. I welcome questions for possible coverage in the podcast, as well as any criticism, suggestions for improvement, or other feedback.
My general approach to libertarian matters is Austrian, anarchist, and propertarian, influenced heavily by the thought of Ludwig von Mises, Murray N. Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. My writing can be found in articles here and blog posts at The Libertarian Standard and C4SIF, such as:
- How I Became A Libertarian, December 18, 2002, LewRockwell.com (published as “Being a Libertarian” in I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians (compiled by Walter Block; Mises Institute 2010))
- “What Libertarianism Is,” Mises Daily (August 21, 2009)
- What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist, January 20, 2004, LewRockwell.com
- How We Come To Own Ourselves, Mises Daily (Sep. 7, 2006)
- Causation and Aggression, The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, vol. 7, no. 4 (Winter 2004)
- A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability, Journal of Libertarian Studies 17, no. 2 (Spring 2003)
- Inalienability and Punishment: A Reply to George Smith, Winter 1998-99, Journal of Libertarian Studies
- Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide, Mises Daily (May 27, 2011)
- New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory, 12:2 Journal of Libertarian Studies (Fall 1996)
- Punishment and Proportionality: The Estoppel Approach, 12:1 Journal of Libertarian Studies (Spring 1996).
- Defending Argumentation Ethics: Reply to Murphy & Callahan, Anti-state.com (Sept. 19, 2002)
- Montessori, Peace, and Libertarianism, LewRockwell.com (April 28, 2011)
On IP in particular, which I’ll also cover from time to time in the podcast, see:
- C4SIF Resources page;
- The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide
- Against Intellectual Property
- Selected Supplementary Material for Against Intellectual Property
I’ve always liked Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s observations regarding how we have to treat aggressors as technical, not ethical, problems. From The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (relevant parts bolded):
while scarcity is a necessary condition for the emergence of the problem of political philosophy, it is not sufficient. For obviously, we could have conflicts regarding the use of scarce resources with, let us say, an elephant or a mosquito, yet we would not consider it possible to resolve these conflicts by means of proposing property norms. In such cases, the avoidance of possible conflicts is merely a technological, not an ethical, problem. For it to become an ethical problem, it is also necessary that the conflicting actors be capable, in principle, of argumentation.
…
Whether or not persons have any rights and, if so, which ones, can only be decided in the course of argumentation (propositional exchange). Justification—proof, conjecture, refutation—is argumentative justification. Anyone who denied this proposition would become involved in a performative contradiction because his denial would itself constitute an argument. Even an ethical relativist must accept this first proposition, which has been referred to as the a priori of argumentation. [continue reading…]
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