Roman Law and Hypothetical Cases

by Stephan Kinsella on December 19, 2022

Any free society needs law—private law based on libertarian principles. This means that there is a need to identify and clarify our basic libertarian principles, and for law to develop to implement and apply these principles. As discussed in KOL345 | Kinsella’s Libertarian “Constitution” or: State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code (PorcFest 2021), any law code that libertarian theorists devise cannot be hyper-detailed and all-encompassing.

For one thing, many of the particular rules in a given setting will depend on contractual relationships and choices. Libertarian theorists, such as Rothbard, David Friedman, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, envision various territorial enclaves whose internal legal rules are based on local preferences, custom, and contract. For example, in Hoppe’s “covenant communities”: “a libertarian world could and likely would be one with a great variety of locally separated communities engaging distinctly different and far-reaching discrimination” (“e.g. nudists discriminating against bathing suits,” as Jeff Tucker points out in Idiot Patrol). ¹ [continue reading…]

See Hoppe on Covenant Communities and Advocates of Alternative Lifestyles. [↩]

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Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty

by Stephan Kinsella on December 14, 2022

[From my Webnote series]

Murray Rothbard’s treatise, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998) is online in a couple of obscure places, and some of its individual chapters or portions is available online in separate articles. I’ve listed below those I am aware of: [continue reading…]

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KOL400 | Ask an Austrian #11: IP, Anarchy, Natural Rights…

by Stephan Kinsella on December 7, 2022

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 400.

I appeared tonight (Dec. 7, 2022) on the LP Mises Caucus’s Ask an Austrian podcast and youtube channel, episode 11, at the request of Liam McCollum. I fielded as many questions as I could in the allotted time. The questions given to me ahead of the session are posted below, most of which I addressed.

Questions: [continue reading…]

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:53 — 52.1MB)

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The Dawn of Knowledge (1980)

by Stephan Kinsella on December 3, 2022

A short story I wrote in high school, 1980-82 or so. Around the time I decided to stop hunting.

The Dawn of Knowledge

The boy impatient clicked the safety of his 20 gauge shotgun on and off. As he struggled down the trail through the weeds and briers in an open patch of the forest, he tore his arms and legs constantly against the unrelenting pull of the briers’ spindly appendages. He stumbled clumsily into a branch, causing a downpour of dew to drench him. He nervously blazed down the trail, knowing with a pessimistic confidence that the rabbit would cross the trail ahead of him. The negative mood was enhanced by the dour expression of the sun behind clouds smeared with dirty yellow. The barking of his dogs seems so close that he knew the rabbit had already passed. But, as he buried his way around an end in the crude path, the rabbit, ears back and fleeing for his life, sped across the trail from the right. [continue reading…]

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The Basset Hound (1981)

by Stephan Kinsella on December 3, 2022

A short story I wrote in high school, 1980-82 or so.

The Basset Hound

The Basset Hound leisurely trotted down the center of the railroad tracks. The sky was vast, pale, and blue, and curved down an left and right to meet the green lines of trees in the forest. The wind was dry and brisk and smelled of pine. The only sounds were the few sounds of the forest, the wind rushing past his long, drooping, soft ears, and the clicking of his toenails on the rocky gravel between the planks in the tracks.

A hawk soaring over caught the corner of his eyes, and before his brain had time to recognize and identify it as harmless, curiosity or instinct or fear gave him a small jolt into running. Normally, he have just have increased his speed for a step or two until the signal “slow down again—false alarm” reached his legs. But, as in most dogs, his life was very simple and moment by moment.

The new heat and invigoration felt good, so he kept running. He increased his speed even more. The heat and the fantastic sensation of sucking, almost viciously, the delicious air into his lungs, along with the engagement and thrill of the perfect and ecstatically painful act of running, caused him to run faster and faster,

The heat was building up. The planks rushed past, and he was breathing in quick, desperate gulps. The roar of the wind grew louder and louder, too loud. A sub-conscious feeling crept into his awareness; the running didn’t only feel good, it had some other purpose also. but the dog was so involved in running, breathing, and enjoying life that he paid no heed to the intuitive little signals being given to him,

There was a pounding all about, and then something definitely went wrong, too strong to be ignored. In the midst of this rare and strange experience, a whistle could be heard in the background. As he cocked his head instinctively to place the source and identity of the out of place sound, the train, with a thundering, cataclysmic climax, came rushing over him.

[Dedicated to Fernando Muñoz]

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KOL399 | CryptoVoices: Ukraine and Liberalism

by Stephan Kinsella on November 4, 2022

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 399.

This is my appearance on the CryptoVoices podcast, Episode 138, interviewed by host Matthew Mežinskis.

Update: To be clear, in my off the cuff comments about some “antiwar” types and Israel and Russia, I had in mind some particular individuals, some private conversations and some others online, but did not mean the good folks at Antiwar.com–I’ve long been and remain a supporter, financial and otherwise, of Antiwar.com. I should have been clearer with my language.

Shownotes:

Matthew interviews Stephan Kinsella, lawyer and author, and anti-IP advocate.

Stephan covers a lot of ground on how to increase liberalism and reduce war, through the lens of the unjust and terrible war being waged by Russia in Ukraine.

Though there are a variety of views on NATO, nukes, and strategies for minimizing this and all state wars, the focus on this show is to philosophize and center our arguments on freedom and liberalism and private property, with the important caveat that we live in 2022, not in an anarcho-capitalistic world.

Listen on to learn more.

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:09:47 — 159.7MB)

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Marc Victor’s Arizona Senate Run: A Lesson for Future Libertarian Party Strategy?

by Stephan Kinsella on November 1, 2022

From my substack:

Marc Victor’s Arizona Senate Run: A Lesson for Future Libertarian Party Strategy?

Stephan Kinsella

34 min ago

The Libertarian Party1 has long been controversial among libertarians, since its founding in 1971. Should it have a broad tent or a purist message? Minarchist or anarchist—or both? Should it try to elect candidates, and water down its radical principles to do so, or run purist, principled candidates to use their platform to get the message out?

One problem the LP in the United States has always faced is that unlike the parliamentary systems in European and other countries, in which minority parties can form coalitions with others, the US system tends to be a binary winner-take-all system. In this system even libertarian-sympathetic voters know that the LP candidate cannot win so and they don’t want to “waste their vote”. So the LP candidates rarely get a significant percentage of the votes cast.

Austrian Economics Discord Conference, Jan. 2023: Inflation, Money, and the State

by Stephan Kinsella on October 29, 2022

UPDATE: IGNORE BELOW. SEE NOW KOL402

I’ll be speaking at next year’s Austrian Economics Discord Conference: “Inflation, Money, and the State,” Austrian Economics Discord Server (Jan. 7–8, 2023); my talk is “Inflation: Its Causes, Effects, Parallels and Death in a Bitcoin World.”

Final trailer:

[continue reading…]

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KOL398 | Story and The Power of Control | The Stephan Kinsella Series | Episode 3 (WiM229) with Robert Breedlove, of the “What is Money” Show

by Stephan Kinsella on October 28, 2022

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 398.

This is my appearance on Robert Breedlove’s What Is Money podcast, Ep. WiM229 (Youtube channel). This is Ep. 3 of the “Stephan Kinsella Series” (released Oct. 26, 2022). For Ep. 1, see KOL391 | Hoppe’s A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, Ep. 1 with Robert Breedlove, of the “What is Money” Show. For Ep. 2, see KOL394 | The Nature of Property, Ep. 2 (WiM216) with Robert Breedlove, of the “What is Money” Show.

From Robert’s Episode notes: “Stephan Kinsella is an American intellectual property lawyer, author, and deontological anarcho-capitalist. He joins me for an in-depth conversation about the book “A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics” by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.”

Youtube:

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:30:14 — 82.6MB)

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KOL397 | Libertarian Podcast Review ep. 70: Patently False – Kinsella Defends Hoppe

by Stephan Kinsella on October 26, 2022

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 397.

I was a guest last night (Oct. 25, 2022) on the Libertarian Podcast Review … podcast, ep. 70, with hosts Tyler Janke and Garbage Mane Andy. We discussed… well… Hoppe.

They’re like—why are you always the one called on to defend Hoppe? I’m thinking—I dunno, you tell me.

Łukasz Dominiak, “Must Right-Libertarians Embrace Easements by Necessity?”

by Stephan Kinsella on September 26, 2022

Łukasz Dominiak, “Must Right-Libertarians Embrace Easements by Necessity?“, 34 Diametros 16 (2019), 60: 34–51.

Abstract:

The present paper investigates the question of whether right-libertarians must accept easements by necessity. Since easements by necessity limit the property rights of the owner of the servient tenement, they apparently conflict with the libertarian homestead principle, according to which the person who first mixes his labor with the unowned land acquires absolute ownership thereof. As we demonstrate in the paper, however, the homestead principle understood in such an absolutist way generates contradictions within the set of rights distributed on its basis. In order to avoid such contradictions, easements by necessity must be incorporated into the libertarian theory of property rights and the homestead principle must be truncated accordingly.

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Łukasz Dominiak, “Libertarianism and Original Appropriation”

by Stephan Kinsella on September 26, 2022

Łukasz Dominiak, “Libertarianism and Original Appropriation,” Historia i Polityka, No. 22 (29)/2017, pp. 43–56.

Abstract:

The article is devoted to the problem of the structure of libertarian theory of justice. It tries to present a map of the main concepts and principles of this theory and to investigate its possible justifications. It explains such fundamental concepts as original appropriation, homesteading, labour theory of property or first possession theory of original appropriation. The article shows merits and drawbacks of alternative libertarian principles of justice in first acquisition and proposes a sketch of an original justification for the first possession theory of original appropriation.

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