StephanKinsella.com

See Conspiracy Libertarians, Waystation Libertarians, Activists vs. Principled Libertarians

I lived in the Philadelphia area from 1994–97 and while there I associated a bit with local libertarian or related groups. For example I spoke a couple of times at the Philadelphia chapter of the Federalist Society. I also attended a few meetings of the Freeman Society of Valley Forge, which was run by my friend and free market economics professor John McGinnis. My recollection is that the Freeman Society was sponsored by or somehow affiliated with the Foundation for Economic Education, which published the magazine The Freeman. [continue reading…]

Como nos tornamos donos de nós mesmos, Portuguese translation of How We Come To Own Ourselves

I’m here in Positano, at the beautiful Villa TreVille, on the last leg of the longest vacation of my life so far (July 1-20: Venice, Capri, Positano, Berlin). And this morning, here in Positano, walking down the steps from our room to the terrace to lounge, I had my sixth epiphany. Or so.

First, there were two fairly minor and personal ephanies.

1. Hell/Jesus/Religion: First: at age 15 or so when riding the Gravely tractor/lawnmower, mowing our 3-4 acre tract. As a pretty devout Catholic schoolboy and former altar boy, I was thinking hard about religion and the world around this time. It had already occurred to me that if God condemns you to eternal damnation as punishment for some sins committed while mortal, this can’t be just. An infinite punishment is disproportionate for a finite amount of crime. So, I reasoned, there cannot be hell. Therefore not evertyhing the Catholics teach is right. So what else might be false? Then I dared to question the idea of Jesus, and of God, and it all crumbled. My epiphany was in the realization that I could dare not only to question Hell but the whole Catholic story about Jesus. [continue reading…]

Libertarian Robert LeFevre published his two-volume autobiography, with publisher Pulpless.com, in 1999. It’s still available in print on Amazon:

• A Way to Be Free: The Autobiography of Robert LeFevre: Volume I: The Making of a Modern American Revolutionary, and
• A Way to Be Free: The Autobiography of Robert LeFevre: Volume II: The Making of a Modern American Revolution.

PDF links for each volume are now available here: Vol. 1 [PDF]; Vol. 2 [PDF], posted here with the permission of the publisher.

I also discuss LeFevre here: Classical Liberals and Anarchists on Intellectual Property: observing: “Robert LeFevre (1911–86): expresses very good, early skepticism of the notion of IP or ownership of ideas (see LeFevre on Intellectual Property and the “Ownership of Intangibles”).”

Also see LeFevre’s The Fundamentals of Liberty, also available for download in many file formats here. His book The Philosophy of Ownership is also available online.

Note: An updated and revised version of this article appears as chap. 16 of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023).

The “Conversation” linked below appears as chap. 17 of the same book.

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I wrote the “Introduction” (really, a foreword) to J. Neil Schulman’s† latest book, Origitent: Why Original Content is Property (Steve Heller Publishing, 2018), just published this week (PDF; Amazon; discussed by Neil on Facebook here). It  includes a transcript of our previous discussion at KOL208 | Conversation with Schulman about Logorights and Media-Carried Property.

Here are links to my “Introduction” and the book’s final chapter, “Kinsella on Liberty Podcast Episode 208: Conversation with Schulman about Logorights and Media-Carried Property.”

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From my July 20, 2014 Daily Bell interview by Anthony Wile, “Stephan Kinsella on Libertarian Legal Theory, Self-Ownership and Drug Laws.” I have to point this out so many times over and over to people, that I thought I’d put it in a separate post.

Update: See Stephan Kinsella, “Selling Does Not Imply Ownership, and Vice-Versa: A Dissection,” The Libertarian Standard (October, 25, 2022); also KOL395 | Selling Does Not Imply Ownership, and Vice-Versa: A Dissection (PFS 2022) and “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” the section “Selling Does Not Imply Ownership”.

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Anthony Wile: You’ve called the following a fallacy: “If you own something, that implies that you can sell it; and if you sell something, that implies you must own it first. The former idea, which is based on a flawed idea about the origin and nature of property rights and contract theory, is used to justify voluntary slavery; the second, which is based on a flawed understanding of contract theory, is used to justify intellectual property.” Can you elaborate please?

Stephan Kinsella: I discuss this in more detail in some podcasts such as

• Tom Woods Show: Against Fuzzy Thinking; 
• Libertarian Legal Theory: Property, Conflict, and Society: Lecture 6: Applications Continued; 
• Common Libertarian Mistakes (Fraud Etc.); and 
• Correcting Some Common Libertarian Misconceptions.

This is hard to elaborate in a quick interview. But here is a summary answer.

Ownership means right to control. It is not automatically clear why this would imply the power or ability or right to stop having the right to control it. My view is that we own our bodies not because of homesteading but because each person has a unique link to his body: his ability to directly control it. Hoppe recognized this decades ago, as I point out in How We Come To Own Ourselves. I had to find an old German text of his and have it translated, to find out his early insight on this, from 1985. This has implications for the idea of the voluntary slavery contract and the so-called inalienability debate. [continue reading…]

Another great legal scholar, and friend of mine, LSU Law Professor Robert Pascal, has passed away. I previously commented on the death of my friend, LSU Law Professor Saúl Litvinoff, a giant of civil law scholarship who died in 2010. I never even knew Saúl while I was at LSU law school, but I became close friends with him shortly after my graduation in 1991, and maintained correspondence with him until his death in  2010 (he was one of the three professors who wrote recommendation letters for me to apply to the University of London’s PhD in Laws programme, the others being Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Randy Barnett). ¹

And another Louisiana legal titan, A.N. ‘Thanassi’ Yiannopoulos, died last year at age 88. I never met Yiannopouls at all, but we corresponded in the years before his death in 2017 about some civil law matters. He was friends with my friend Gregory Rome, a young Louisiana lawyer who co-authored Louisiana Civil Law Dictionary with me in 2011. [continue reading…]

1.  Litvinoff’s recommendation letter. [↩]

Update: See “Dialogical Arguments for Libertarian Rights” in The Dialectics of Liberty.

I’ve been invited to contribute to a proposed new book, The Dialectics of Liberty, to be co-edited by Chris Sciabarra, Ed Younkins, and Roger Bissell, to be published by Lexington Books in 2019. My chapter is “Dialogical Arguments for Libertarian Rights,” based on my article “New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 12:2 (Fall 1996): 313–26, updated including material drawn from other material:

• Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide
• The Genesis of Estoppel: My Libertarian Rights Theory
• Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics and Its Critics

Updates to follow in due course.

“The Voluntaryist Constitution,” by  Trey Goff, Stephan Kinsella, Cesar Balmeseda, and Pierre-Louis Boitel, published 10/24/17 at Mises Wire. This article was based in part on work I did in preparing notes for a draft constitution for Liberland (see its Constitution here).

See also my recent The Universal Principles of Liberty (Aug. 14, 2025).

For discussion of similar projects, see Libertarian Nation and Related Projects (cataloging various libertarian “free nation” and related projects); KOL359 | State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code (PFS 2021) and KOL345 | Kinsella’s Libertarian “Constitution” or: State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code (PorcFest 2021).

On my list of things to write someday is an overview of the social thought of Hoppe, whom I consider to be the preeminent social thinker of our time, along the lines of Oxford University Press’s 100-page “A Very Short Introduction” series (previously called “Past Masters“). ¹ In the meantime, the assembled links will have to suffice.

• “Introduction: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe,” Mises Daily (Aug. 7, 2009), in Guido Hülsmann & Stephan Kinsella, eds., Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Mises Institute, 2009)
• “Foreword,” in Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (Laissez Faire Books, 2013)
• “Afterword,” in Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Great Fiction: Property, Economy, Society, and the Politics of Decline (Laissez Faire Books, 2012)
• My six-lecture Mises Academy course “The Social Theory of Hoppe” (Mises Academy, 2011)
• “Read Hoppe, Then Nothing Is the Same,” Mises Daily (June 10 2011) (introducing the Mises Academy course)

See also:

• Hoppe: First significant thinker to get libertarianism totally right
• Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics and Its Critics
• Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide
• Hoppe’s remarks in Presentation of the 2015 Murray N. Rothbard Medal of Freedom
• Book Review (of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (1993)), The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, November 1994.
• The Undeniable Morality of Capitalism (text version), 25 St. Mary’s Law Journal 1419 (1994) (review essay of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (1993))
• Hoppe on Covenant Communities and Advocates of Alternative Lifestyles
• Hoppe Is Not A Monarchist
• Hoppe on Intellectual Property
• Hoppe on Liberal Economies and War
• Hoppe on Property Rights in Physical Integrity vs Value
• Hoppe on Treating Aggressors as Mere “Technical Problems”

For some classic and selected recent overviews by Hoppe:

• “Coming of Age with Murray” (Mises Institute, Oct. 2017)
• Libertarianism and the “Alt-Right” (PFS 2017)
• Murray N. Rothbard and the Ethics of Liberty, Introduction to the new edition of Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998)
• Hoppe’s Review of Rothbard’s Festschrift
• Introduction to Democracy: The God That Failed

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1. See, e.g., Plato by R.M. Hare, Kant by Roger Scruton, etc. [↩]

From an email sent initially to the wrong me (Stephen Kinsella’s I am Not) a few months back but then helpfully forwarded on to me by my fellow Kinsella. Our edited thread.

From one “Monty”:

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