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.

UPDATE: SEE KOL079 | “Federalist Society IP Debate (Ohio State)” (2011)

Last week I participated in a debate on IP at the The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Student Chapter of The Federalist Society (Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University, Columbus OH, March 3, 2011). This was part of the “John Templeton Foundation’s Big Questions Debate series on Intellectual Property and Wealth Creation”; I debated patent attorney and adjunct IP law professor Steve Grant, who represented the pro-IP side. I recorded it on my iPhone; audio file is here (32MB; the version from the camera’s recording is here), though a video version with possibly better audio should be available soon. Professor Grant did his best, but didn’t have a solid argument for IP other than the standard “I think we should reform IP but not get rid of it.” My opening speech is about 15 minutes and has decent audio quality, and is a summary of a hard-hitting version of the basic libertarian case against IP law (here is the powerpoint presentation I used; embedded version below). Grant’s speech is audible but I was not very close to him; but his conventional and unsystematic, more empiricist and positivist than libertarian and principled remarks will be of only mild interest to libertarians. For my 10 or so minute rebuttal to him, I left my iPhone at the table but it’s still audible; for the Q&A period, it was in front of me so it’s decent again for that part. My host was Aman Sharma, a very staunch libertarian law student and head of the student chapter of the Federalist Society. When I was involved with the Federalist Society (lawyers chapters) in Philadelphia and Houston they were populated with mainly Newt Gingrich loving neocons; good to see some Austro-libertarians infiltrating their ranks. Sharma told me “I had a lot of fellow students approach me after the event with questions showing a new-found interest in the Mises/Austrian worldview.” That is cool and gratifying.

While in Ohio, I met my friend Jacob Huebert and other local libertarians/Federalist Society people–including Katelyn Horn and Maurice Thompson, of the 1851 Center, for dinner at Barrio Tapas. A fun trip, and great people.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:05:59 — 30.2MB)

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As I noted in H.C. Andersen Sculpture, the image at left accompanied my 2006 Mises Daily article “How We Come To Own Ourselves.” I just loved it. Someone at Mises chose it but when I inquired, no one could remember who had done it or where the picture came from.

I started trying to find out more about it. The image file name was something like “andersen father and son”, so some googling finally revealed this to be the work of  sculptor H.C. (Hendrik) Andersen. I have a libertarian book in the works—now entitled Legal Foundations of a Free Society—and thought a better picture of this statue might make good cover art for the book. I think it nicely evokes liberty, humanity, freedom, cooperation, love, the natural order, the whole bit. I see it as man becoming man, becoming a self-owner, a homesteader, a rights-bearer. And it’s classical yet modern, and beautiful.

I could not find any better pictures of this statue, but eventually found a few others (see below).

Turns out Anderson’s sculptures are in a special Andersen museum (2, 3) in Rome. I had my friend Roberta Modugno, an Italian scholar, contact the museum for me. She got me the basic info. I then had a Canadian lawyer friend, Daniel Roncari, who speaks Italian, translating for me as I communicated with the museum. Initially I tried to find out if I could purchase a photograph of the sculpture, but they had none. They provided me with a list of approved photographers, and with Roncari’s help I finally hired one. I first paid the museum a fee, then paid the photographer for his services. A few of the photos are below.

Update: I could not find an appropriate place in our new home for the painting so gave it, with Wax’s blessing, to my fellow libertarian friend Mark Maresca, ¹ who now has it proudly hung in his foyer:

New home of John Wax painting of Anderson sculpture in Mark Maresca’s home

Anyway, it turns out the child is a girl, not a boy, and the official name of the sculpture is Nudo maschile con bambina sulle spalle (Male nude with girl on shoulders).

I then decided that instead of using the photograph itself for the cover, to get a stylized painting done based on it—similar in some respects to the style of the art on the cover of Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom, which I had always liked. So I asked my good friend John Wax to do a painting for me. A few months later—it arrived in the mail. Now I’ve had it scanned—see below—and plan to use it for my book cover next year or maybe 2013.

John Wax’s Painting

Initial draft cover, by Susi Clark

Update (Oct. 2023): Legal Foundations of a Free Society has now been published. After consultation with my book designer (Susi Clark), I decided to go with a simpler cover, and move a faded version of the painting to the back cover. Final covers below.

Update: In May 2017, I visited Rome and my son and I were able to locate the Andersen museum. Some pix below.

1. Kinsella as “White Pill”: Maresca, “From the White-PillBox: Part 29. Achilles Heel edition 3”. [↩]