Below are a couple of my comments on Jeff Tucker’s post Scrupulosity and the Condemnation of Every Existing Business (see also Art Carden’s Against A Ruthless Libertarian Criticism of Everything Existing). These 2 are below, plus a related comment of mine on Steve Horwitz’s post Power and the Market: Talking to the left.

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Last Saturday (May 28) I delivered the speech “Correcting some Common Libertarian Misconceptions” at the 2011 Annual Meeting, Property and Freedom Society (May 27-29, 2011). The video is here, and streamed below; here is the powerpoint presentation.

pfs-2011 Stephan Kinsella, Correcting Some Common Libertarian Misconceptions from Sean Gabb on Vimeo.

[Mises]

From today’s Mises Daily:

Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide

Mises Daily: Monday, May 23, 2011 by Stephan Kinsella

Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe burst onto the Austrolibertarian scene in the late 1980s, when he moved to the United States to study under and work with his mentor Murray Rothbard. Since his arrival, Professor Hoppe has produced a steady stream of pioneering contributions to economic and libertarian theory. A key contribution of Professor Hoppe is his provocative “argumentation-ethics” defense of libertarian rights.

Read more>>

Update: For additional material, see:

• Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics and Kinsella’s Estoppel Discussed in Hebrew
• James Carlin’s Argumentation Ethics (Articles & Links), which includes:

Analysis of Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics

• “Objective Statements” – JC Anarchy Theory
• “Why I avoid Argumentation Ethics debates like the Plague” by James Carlin – JC Anarchy Theory
• Critique of Argumentation Ethics – JC Anarchy Theory

Critiques of Argumentation Ethics (external links)

• Hoppe’s Justification of the Private Property Ethic by David Friedman
• “Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethic: A Critique” by Bob Murphy and Gene Callahan
• “The Hoppriori Argument” by Roderick T Long
• A Critique Of Hoppean Ethics (‘argumentation ethics’) by Nielsio
• Exploding Argumentation Ethics by Justopia

…wordy critiques….

• Phenomenology and Argumentation Ethics by Xavier_Meulders
• Reflections on Argumentation Ethics by Michael S. Rozeff
• Reply to Hoppe by Gerard Radnitzky (pdf)
• Against Absolute Certainty (pdf) by Ilja Schmelzer

Argumentation Ethics (external links)

• “Argumentation Ethics” – Mises Wiki
• “Deontology (Right and Wrong Action)” – Intentional World View

I have for years edited or co-edited three legal treatises, first for Oceana Publications, then for Oxford University Press, and now, for West/Thomson Reuters. These are:

• Trademark Practice and Forms (Oceana/Oxford, 2001-2011; West/Thomson Reuters 2011-present)
• World Online Business Law (Oceana/Oxford 2003-2011; West/Thomson Reuters 2011-present)
• Digest of Commercial Laws of the World (Oceana/Oxford 1998-2011; West/Thomson Reuters 2011-present)

I look forward to working with the new publisher.

[KinsellaLaw]

From the Mises blog:

Explore the social theory of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the foremost present-day libertarian theorist, with Stephan Kinsella, the foremost present-day Hoppean.  You may even get the chance to pose questions to Hoppe himself!

As readers of Libertarian Papers know, all LP articles are published free and in PDF and in the original Word source file. We use the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License so people are free to do what they want with our articles–reprint them, incorporate them into new works, include them as chapters in books–just grab the Word file and you’re good to go, with our blessing. (I discuss the origins of the journal in “Fifteen Minutes that Changed Libertarian Publishing” (2) )

Still, we often get requests for print and kindle/ebook versions. When we started LP in early 2009, we published the first few articles in Kindle format–I simply uploaded the Word files as individual “books,” and priced them at the lowest price Amazon would allow, $0.99. They sold, even though Kindle owners can easily put the Word version of the article on their Kindle for free. People like convenience, it turns out. But I stopped putting up Kindle versions after a while due to lack of manpower and resources. Gil Guillory helped with some early podcast mixing and with two LuLu print-on-demand versions of Vol. 1, but this was a volunteer effort and could not be sustained. I intended to figure it out myself–I bought a book on Kindle formatting–but I just could not find time to do it. It was time to outsource. (The Mises Institute hosts and publishes the journal and generously provided website design and technical resources. I could have asked them to do the print and ebook publishing, but I knew they are swamped with so many publishing and other projects and their resources, plus I wanted to try this on my own to learn more about this type of publishing.) [continue reading…]

My latest publication is Montessori, Peace, and Libertarianism, published today on LewRockwell.com. In it I discuss Montessori’s educational method and her philosophy of peace, and quote extensively from a great article by John Bremer, “Education as Peace.”

Update: see also my LRC post Battle Hymn of the Libertarian-Montessori Father.

Some things I had to cut:

Reading and Writing. One of my favorite things about Montessori is its approach to learning reading and writing. Following a blend of these ideas (see Montessori Read and Write) and Glenn Doman’s How To Teach Your Baby to Read, I, as a first-time parent, taught my own child to read at a very young age (I recall him reading his first word, “red,” off of a flash card at our kitchen table when he was perhaps 14 months old). He was soon reading fluently, amazing adults, and is now, at 7, reading books at 7^th grade level (he is on book 7 of the Harry Potter books). I’ve instilled a love of reading in him which is extremely important foundationally (his spelling is excellent too, like his dad’s). I don’t think he was able to do this because he’s some genius; I think this is possible with most kids. (You can also teach them to swim very early, which I also did. This is important as a survival skill in places where lots of people have pools!) [continue reading…]

My friend Gil Guillory told me this:

The best advice I ever got was from my father: people judge your intelligence by your ability to follow instructions.

I love that!

Love this.

A Strong Smell of Turpentine Prevails Throughout

Category: Humour • Psychedelic
Posted on: March 31, 2010 8:20 AM, by Martin R

When I was in school I read a great story about a man who took opium, felt that he had a great philosophical insight, wrote it down, and then found, after sobering up, that what he had written was “I perceive a distinct smell of kerosene”, Jag känner en distinkt doft av fotogen.

Mucking around on the blessed web, I now find that the man was Oliver Wendell Holmes, an American 19th century physician and author. But it was ether, not opium, and turpentine, not kerosene. Here’s what OWH writes in his essay “Mechanism in thought and morals : an address delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University, June 29, 1870”.

I once inhaled a pretty full dose of ether, with the determination to put on record, at the earliest moment of regaining consciousness, the thought I should find uppermost in my mind. The mighty music of the triumphal march into nothingness reverberated through my brain, and filled me with a sense of infinite possibilities, which made me an archangel for the moment. The veil of eternity was lifted. The one great truth which underlies all human experience, and is the key to all the mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me in a sudden revelation. Henceforth all was clear: a few words had lifted my intelligence to the level of the knowledge of the cherubim. As my natural condition returned, I remembered my resolution; and, staggering to my desk, I wrote, in ill-shaped straggling letters, the all-embracing truth still glimmering in my consciousness. The words were these (children may smile; the wise will ponder): “A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.”

This reminds me of a time at a party when one of my buddies was drunkenly talking about how great other drugs than the beer bottle in his hand are, and described some deeply meaningful and intense insights he had attained while tripping on acid. Sadly, as I was sober as always, I failed to see their import. Like my friend the philosopher once said, “When you have that eureka feeling of really having made an intellectual breakthough, you’re generally wrong”.

As I noted last post, due to some career changes and other things, I’ve been unable to keep up with Slate podcasts as much as in the past (mainly because my commute has largely disappeared). So I’m listening to fewer podcasts but Slate’s Culture Gabfest is still just about my favorite one so I still listen almost every week. I’ve just fallen behind in blogging their, as Metcalf calls them, “SAT words” (BTW one thing that annoys me is–usually yankees–who call that test “the SATs”, plural, instead of “the SAT”).

In the most recent episode, which I listened to today, I noted two words that I was thinking about blogging about–not because they were SAT words but because, it seemed to me, the hosts mispronounced them. The first was “presages,” used by Dana, and pronounced “pree-sayj”, I think. I always thought it was “pres-ij,” and this is the favored pronunciation in the dictionary, though “pri-seyj,” which is close to Dana’s, seems to be an alternate.

Then later in the show, Metcalf mispronounced “desuetude” as “de-SOO-eh-tude” (it should be “deh-SWAY-eh-tude,” as Julia rightly notes). I think I already knew desuetude from its legal usages, and vaguely recall it has an international law usage as well; and I am pretty sure I remember my law professor in London, Rosalyn Higgins (later judge at the International Court of Justice), pronouncing it the proper way.

Anyway, right after Julia corrected Steve, Dana said “here comes the Gray Croissant.” So now I feel self-conscious, but I promise I was gonna blog it before they said that! I thought it was funny Dana joined in the chorus about this response to Steve’s mangling of desuetude, when I had already noted her “presages” use. Heh.

(Here I keep a running collection of the terms from this series of posts.) [continue reading…]

Great observation by Rothbard in Living in a State-Run World:

… it is vital to distinguish between two kinds of State activities: (a) those actions that would be perfectly legitimate if performed by private firms on the market; and (b) those actions that are per se immoral and criminal, and that would be illicit in a libertarian society. The latter must not be performed by libertarians in any circumstances. Thus, a libertarian must not be: a concentration camp director or guard; an official of the IRS; an official of the Selective Service System; or a controller or regulator of society or the economy.

This insight also applies not only to questions of employment but also to issues such as privatization and questions of whether state programs are “too inefficient” or not (Rothbard may have addressed this too, elsewhere, more directly, but I have not located it yet. But the idea is that for things in class (1) above, such as roads and dispute resolution, yes these activities should be privatized, and yes, it’s bad that the state performs them very inefficiently. For things in class (2), including also institutions and policies such as jailing drug criminals or tax evaders, these things should not be done at all, they should “privatized,” and we should not want the state to be more efficient at these things–to the contrary, we want the state to be as inefficient as possible at such things.