StephanKinsella.com

No no, we’re done having kids. None of this prepper “have a ton of kids” stuff.

Kinsella is for me an interesting name to have inherited (literally, as I’m adopted). It’s not too weird, hard to spell, or ethnic, yet not too common here in the US. Every now and then someone says “say, Kinsella, as in Ray Kinsella, from Field of Dreams“? Yep. Or Sophie Kinsella of Confessions of a Shopaholic—? Yep, but hers is a ‘nym. There’s WP Kinsella, related somehow to that baseball lore of Field of Dreams fame. I can’t keep it straight.

As far as I can tell the Kinsellas came from some county in Ireland. When I visited Ireland as a law student I did see Kinsella sometimes, so it’s more common there than in the US. Apparently it’s rooted in some gaelic thing like “Cinnsealach” or something hard to remember and to care about. Apparently the “same” as Tinsley or Kinsley or Kinsel. Whatever that means—to be “the same”. But apparently they all mean “unclean head.” That’s right, I’m a “dirty-head”.

Since people are stupid they can’t tell the difference between Stephen, Steven, Stefan, and Stephan. And Steffen and Steffond, and so on. So over the years, well, there are enough Kinsellas so that there are some Stephens out there. No Stephans as far as I can tell, but people are too stupid too tell the difference. After all, a and e used to be the same letter, hence the dipthong æ. Or something.

So as my career progressed as did my notoriety in free market/libertarian circles, and on the Internet, occasionally I became aware of a couple of other Kinsellas who were similarly-named: a couple of Stephens. Not Stephan but close enough for regular people to think it’s the same. One is an antitrust (competition) lawyer in Europe, Stephen Kinsella. Another is an economic journalist in Ireland. We’ve talked from time to time. Sometimes we get each other’s emails. We help each other out.

The Irish Economist one, Stephen Kinsella, occasionally receives emails meant for me [[email protected]; Stephen Kinsella, PhD, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Limerick, Ireland; see e.g. his bitcoin comment here]. Why? Because people can’t tell e from a. He got one meant for me from Southwest Airlines last year about one of my flights, and helpfully sent it to me. And just a few months ago he received a paper from an anarchist from PorcFest meant for me, but sent to him by accident, which he sent on to me. And he told me: “I’m the Irish economist one. The Irish journalist one was actually one of my students, just to make it more confusing.”

And there is another guy, Nate Kinsella, I think he’s some kind of artist in New York, who gets my emails occasionally, since his is nkinsella@ gmail and mine is nskinsella@gmail, and he graciously forwards them on to me. He’s helped a brother out a few times.

I mean, look, I have this haunting feeling I am the only libertarian Kinsella. Let’s not be fooled by similar surnames. After all, my original surname was Doiron. So… I mean come on. If my brother, sister, and parents are not libertarian, why should these Euro-Kinsellas be? However, I will say my wife and son are pretty damn libertarian. At least I have some influence over them.

Anyway the latest entrant into the Kinsellaverse: someone named Eileen Kinsella, reporting on some copyright-related lawsuit in Australia.

I have half-a-mind to wrangle some of these Kinsellas into a libertarian-themed podcast interview just to see what a disaster it might be.

Update: Stephen Kinsella’s I am Not

I am slated to deliver a keynote speech on “Legislation and the State’s Corruption of Private Law—Louisiana’s Special Connection,” for the Louisiana Libertarian Party Annual Convention (tentative topic), to be held at the Belle of Baton Rouge Casino and Hotel (April 16, 2016). More details presently.

My 2011 Mises Daily article, “Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide,” ¹ has been translated into Spanish by Mariano Bas Uribe and published at Mises Hispano, as “Ética de la argumentación y libertad: una guía breve.”

My work has so far been translated into 14 languages; online here.

1. Includes “Discourse Ethics and Liberty: A Skeletal Ebook”; supplemental resources; archived version of the comments on the Mises blog. [↩]

[From my Webnote series]

Related:

• Other posts on apriorism and praxeology
• Hoppe on Falsificationism, Empiricism, and Apriorism and Protophysics 
• Extreme Praxeology
• Quotes on the Logic of Liberty

I’ve written umpteen times on Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s groundbreaking “argumentation ethics” theory for libertarian rights, since 1994 or so. I still hear the same, tired old arguments and criticisms over and over. It’s amazing to me how cocksure some libertarians are, who have no theory of rights of their own, and many of them have no philosophical or scholarly backgrounds, yet they feel compelled to punkishly criticize Hoppe and his theory of rights, even though it’s clear they have read almost nothing and have no theory of their own for why they are even libertarian. They are unaware of or are intellectually incapable of recognizing Hoppe’s many contributions to economic and political theory. ¹

I’ve written in detail about this—see discussion and links in “Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide.” ² But the questions keep coming; the same old tired repsonses keep coming.  I keep responding, for some reason, like Sisyphus. Anyway, here is a modified version of a recent response I wrote to some email correspondents who kept ignorantly insisting Hoppe’s AE is some bizarre crankish view. [continue reading…]

1. See my edited book Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe; “Foreword,” in Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (Laissez Faire Books ebook edition, 2013); “Afterword,” in Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Great Fiction: Property, Economy, Society, and the Politics of Decline (Laissez Faire Books, 2012); Presentation of the 2015 Murray N. Rothbard Medal of Freedom). [↩]
2.  Mises Daily (May 27, 2011) (includes “Discourse Ethics and Liberty: A Skeletal Ebook”) (supplemental resources) (archived version of the comments on the Mises blog.) [↩]

Below is the text of my foreword to the recently released book A Spontaneous Order: The Capitalist Case for a Stateless Society by Chase Rachels. Also republished at the Live Free Blog, the blog of Gary Johnson’s Our America Initiative). Audio at KOL339 | Foreword to A Spontaneous Order.

[Update: See Hoppe, A Note on Chase Rachels’s Book.

Also: re greatest books: See also Dave Smith tweet; Walter Block The 10 Books That Have Most Influenced Walter Block.]

Foreword

Modern libertarian theory is only about five decades old. The ideas that have influenced our greatest thinkers can be traced back centuries, of course, ¹ to luminaries such as Hugo Grotius, John Locke, Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill, and to more recent and largely even more radical thinkers such as Gustave de Molinari, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Bertrand de Jouvenal, Franz Oppenheimer, and Albert Jay Nock. ²

The beginnings of the modern movement can be detected in the works of the “three furies of libertarianism,” as Brian Doherty calls them: Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, and Isabel Patterson, whose respective books The Discovery of Freedom, The Fountainhead, and The God of the Machine were all published, rather remarkably, in the same year: 1943. ³ But in its more modern form, libertarianism originated in the 1960s and 1970s from thinkers based primarily in the United States, notably Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard. ⁴ Other significant influences on the nascent libertarian movement include Ludwig von Mises, author of Liberalism (1927) and Human Action (1949, with a predecessor version published in German in 1940); Nobel laureate F.A. von Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom (1944); Leonard Read, head of the Foundation for Economic Education (founded 1946); and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, author of the influential Capitalism and Freedom (1962). [continue reading…]

1. For more on this, see Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (2008), and David Boaz, The Libertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao Tzu to Milton Friedman (1998). [↩]
2.  See Boaz, The Libertarian Reader, id. [↩]
3. See Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, id. [↩]
4. Update: For those who doubt this: “The contemporary libertarian movement in the United States may be precisely dated as beginning just after World War II. … Into this wasteland there stepped Leonard E. Read, late of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and the National Industrial Conference Board, who, in 1946, founded the Foundation for Economic Education. The creation of FEE marked the beginning of the modern libertarian movement in America.” MURRAY N. ROTHBARD, “TOWARD A STRATEGY FOR LIBERTARIAN SOCIAL CHANGE” (APRIL, 1977).  See also: from Roderick Long’s foreword to the Laissez-Faire Books edition of Jerome Tuccille’s It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand, “It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand is a jazz improvisation on the early history of the modern libertarian movement.” From Hoppe: “At the academic level, Rothbard’s lifelong work for the scholarship of liberty has at long last come to serve as the foundational theoretical edifice for the modern successors of the old classical-liberal movement–the movement that originally influenced the development of the basic libertarian position.”
   And for those who dislike or are ignorant of Ayn Rand or deny her seminal influence in our movement, they really should read Rothbard’s and Mises’s letters to Rand, fawning over her and acknowledging her importance. [↩]

I’ll be speaking at PorcFest 2015 (Jun. 24-27) on “Intellectual Property: The Root of All Evil”, 5:00pm EST, Fri. June 26.

Earlier that morning, at 10:30am, I’ll be participating in Anarchism, for and against: a debate,” debating Objectivist Will Thomas, with noted Objectivist philosopher David Kelley moderating.

My main writing on anarchy can be found in my rights theory and in my article What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist. For more resources on related topics, see:

• Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Anarcho-Capitalism: An annotated bibliography
• David Friedman, Machinery of Freedom
• Randy Barnett, The Structure of Liberty
• Roderick Long, Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections
• Robert Murphy, Chaos Theory

Event description:

My article, Beware the Trans-Pacific Partnership: It’s Not About Free Trade, was published yesterday at BAMSouth. Unfortunately, some free market thinkers seem to be in support of the TPP, e.g. Tyler Cowen, some people at Cato, etc. (see Cato vs. Public Citizen on IP and the TPP).

Reprinted at FEE.org.

Update: See Jeff Tucker, This Trade Treaty Got Better when the US Bailed

Related links:

• Longer copyright terms, stiffer copyright penalties coming, thanks to TPP and ACTA…
• Looking Beyond TPP: US & EU Planning More Bad IP Rules In ‘US-EU Free Trade Agreement’
• Intellectual Property Rights: A Critical History and US IP Imperialism
• KOL110 | Ed and Ethan Show: Trans-Pacific Partnership
• Tell Congress: Oppose Fast Track for the TPP (EFF)

Full text:

[continue reading…]

Some fun old LewRockwell.com posts from a while back—which I was reminded of by this recent article: Malta Offers Citizenship and All Its Perks for a Price: “But the residency requirements, meant to make the program more palatable, are only increasing the consternation among critics, who say the program has resulted in the sale of citizenship to the global 0.1 percent.”

Update: Trump says $5m ‘gold card’ immigration visas will ‘sell like crazy’; US Commerce Secretary claims many takers for $5 million Gold Cards, says 1,000 sold in a day; tweet

Immigration Idea (Sep. 22, 2004)

How about this compromise: we remove all barriers to immigration except one: we charge a fee. I propose we charge somewhere between $1 million and $10 million per family. That way you guarantee you get fairly decent (non-criminal, educated, successful, civil, etc.) quality immigrants.

[continue reading…]

I’ve explained part of my intellectual progress to libertarianism before. ¹ On occasion I’m asked about my views on philosophy, Ayn Rand/Objectivism, and religion. So a short précis is in order.

I was born in 1965 in Louisiana and attended private Catholic schools. I a good student, bookish, and loved philosophy and science. I was very interested in religion and was very devout; I was an altar boy for several years. For a while I was reading books on various occult or pseudoscientific topics, e.g. pyramid power, Nostradamus, Chariots of the Gods, how to cast spells, and the like. I never really believed it, I think (though I did try a few spells), but it stoked my imagination, just as Star Wars and sci-fi and novels and comics did. [continue reading…]

1.  How I Became A Libertarian, LewRockwell.com, December 18, 2002; published as “Being a Libertarian” in I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians (compiled by Walter Block; Mises Institute 2010). See also The Greatest Libertarian Books. See also other biographical material. [↩]

My article New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory, originally published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1996, ¹ which had previously been translated into Dutch, has now been translated, by João Marcos Theodoro (revisão de Marcos Paulo Silva do Nascimento), into Portugese, as Novas Direções Racionalistas nas Teorias Libertárias do Direito. This article discusses and summarizes Hoppe’s argumentation ethics defense of libertarian rights, ² my complementary estoppel-based defense of rights, ³ and related ethical/normative theories. The article served as the initial basis for two Wikipedia pages: discourse ethics and argumentation ethics.

Nowadays, everyone knows me for my IP views, but this is my true interest and passion.

To date, my writing has been translated into fourteen languages.

1. Vol. 12, No. 2, Fall 1996, pp. 313–26.[↩]
2. See my Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide.[↩]
3. See KOL181 | Tom Woods Show: It Is Impossible to Argue Against Libertarianism Without Contradiction and links collected there.[↩]

Three letters-to-the-editor I wrote in the 1980s/90s that were never published are here, and repixeled below: on on inflation; one on gambling prohibition; one on free will (nature vs. nurture).

To The Economist (Nov. 11, 1992)

Editor, Letters Page
The Economist Newspaper
25 St James’s Street
London SWlA 1HG
England

Dear Sir:

In “Zero Inflation: How Low is Low Enough?” (November 7th) you assume that governments ought to pursue a low, stable price inflation rate in order to best benefit their economies. In a growing economy, however, a zero price inflation rate would require inflation of the money supply, which itself adversely affects market behaviour. Money inflation artificially lowers interest rates, sending false signals which cause malinvestments and temporary booms. These malinvestments must, ultimately, be liquidated by recession. Thus, the business cycle is born.

The “ideal” rate of price inflation is thus whatever rate—probably a mild deflation—accompanies a zero money inflation rate. In short, in order to avoid price inflation and harmful market disturbances, government should quit printing more money altogether.

Very truly yours,
N. Stephan Kinsella
Houston, Texas [continue reading…]