A longtime friend and stalwart of the libertarian movement, J. Neil Schulman, has passed (born April 16, 1953, died Aug. 10, 2019), according to libertarian Tom Knapp. I’ve been writing too many of these obituaries of libertarian luminary friends lately. ¹ His last tweet.

I read Neil’s libertarian sci-fi novels Alongside Night and The Rainbow Cadenza in college and law school. Neil was a decade older than me, but we somehow encountered each other, even before the Internet took full flower. In the late 1980s/early 90s we were on some fora together, such as the GEnie Science Fiction and Fantasy RoundTable, one of the early precursors to the Internet. I devoured his The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana and even did a little review of it on the GEnie forum, which Neil appreciated and used for blurbs later on (he was never shy about that). ²

We gradually become friends, via emails, phone calls, etc., though as I adopted an anti-intellectual property position at odds with Neil’s “logorights” theory, we started disagreeing substantively, at least on this issue, though we both remained fellow anarcho-libertarians. ³ I had the pleasure to finally meet Neil in person at Libertopia in San Diego in 2012. ⁴ He was physically frail even then; I recall that it took him almost 20 minutes to slowly ascend the stairs to the second floor of one building–my own talk against IP, if I recall, so he could sit in the back and lob criticisms during the Q&A–and I offered to help him up the stairs. He would not allow it, but did consent to my carrying his briefcase up the stairs for him to meet him at the top.

We stayed friends over the years and talked for many hours on the phone, many, many times.  Often I would muse that “I should have recorded this conversation.” He would chuckle and carry on. We did do a podcast together, one time, ⁵ and, at his request, I agreed to write the “introduction” to one of his arguments for his ever-evolving version of IP (a term he often scorned). He was broad-minded enough to allow one of his opponents to write the introduction for his own work. That takes some balls, and integrity, and courage, and a bit of a sense of humor. ⁶

A few months ago we talked several hours into the night, and I probed him in depth about his history: his childhood, his parents, his education, his early adulthood and profession and novels, and how he came to be where he was. He was self-honest and perceptive, and spoke on and on. It was a fascinating story. Several times I implored him: Neil, go ahead and admit you were wrong on IP, before it’s too late! Do it! You could do so much good, have a huge effect on this issue, given your pro-IP prominence. Now’s your chance! He would chuckle, change the subject–and carry on.

From my experience, Neil was a smart man, a decent man, and a good libertarian. He made some personal mistakes, like most of us do, and I don’t think he always very “practical” in life; in that way, he was very much the driven intellectual libertarian. Till the end, he was trying to find ways to monetize his various creative works, against all odds. I argued with him many hours when he had financial troubles, trying to exhort him to just get a normal job to pay the bills; ever the optimist, he thought a big payday might be just around the corner.

His health was an obvious issue, and it apparently finally caught up with him. My understanding is that Neil suffered a pulmonary embolism resulting in cardiac arrest, then multiple organ failure. He was in the hospital a couple days, with a low chance of survival, and that played out. Neil was a sweet and earnest soul, gentle and sincere and fervent, and a strong, strong believer in liberty, and truth, and justice. He made his mark on the libertarian movement, foremost and especially with his novel Alongside Night. I am honored and pleased I was able to know him and learn from him, and will miss him. Requiescet in pace, my friend.

Update: Other obituaries/remembrances:

• Victor Koman
• David Gordon

1. Justin Raimondo, R.I.P. (2019); Norman Stone (2019), Anthony de Jasay (2019), Ralph Raico (2016); Tibor Machan (2016). [↩]
2. See Book Review of Schulman, The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana (1991). [↩]
3.  Replies to Neil Schulman and Neil Smith re IP; Reply to Schulman on the State, IP, and Carson; On J. Neil Schulman’s Logorights; Schulman: “If you copy my novel, I’ll kill you”; Schulman: Kinsella is “the foremost enemy of property rights”; Query for Schulman on Patents and Logorights; Kinsella v. Schulman on Logorights and IP. [↩]
4. KOL236 | Intellectual Nonsense: Fallacious Arguments for IP (Libertopia 2012). [↩]
5. KOL208 | Conversation with Schulman about Logorights and Media-Carried Property; see also KOL387 | The Great IP Debate of 1983: McElroy vs. Schulman. [↩]
6. “Introduction” to J. Neil Schulman’s Origitent: Why Original Content is Property. [↩]

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 271.

This is my appearance on Let’s Talk ETC! #87 (June 24, 2019), with host Dr. Christian Seberino. From his shownotes:

Stephan Kinsella is a Houston patent lawyer and libertarian advocate. He joins me for an informative discussion about libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism and related blockchain legal issues. Topics addressed include how blockchain technologies impact privacy, tax collection, copyrights, patents, obscenity laws and more.

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:26 — 61.2MB)

As noted on Antiwar.com, libertarian stalwart and heroic antiwar activist Justin Raimondo has passed away at the age of 67, from lung cancer. He follows several other noted libertarian/adjacent thinkers who have died recently (at least among the ones I knew personally), such as Norman Stone (2019), Anthony de Jasay (2019), Ralph Raico (2016) and Tibor Machan (2016).

I didn’t know Justin well personally but I  encountered him from time to time at various libertarian events, and read a lot of his work over the years, such as Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (1993) and his numerous articles, almost all expressing strong anti-war or pro-libertarian sentiments, themes, or insights. I was often impressed by his strident, clear, forceful prose, and appreciated that it was informed by an obvious passion for liberty and a deep, scholarly knowledge of history and political philosophy.

I met Justin in person first at Mises Institute conference in the mid-late 1990s, probably 1995 or ’96. I had consumed and enjoyed his Reclaiming the American Right, but thought his thesis that Ayn Rand had “plagiarized” Garet Garrett’s novel The Driver for her novel Atlas Shrugged was frankly absurd or even contrived (I still do; it’s a ridiculous notion, as I noted on the Mises blog in 2007). I remember vividly. It was at the Auburn Hotel and Conference Center, between sessions. I walked up to Justin and introduced myself, and explained that I enjoyed his book but I thought his thesis about Rand “plagiarizing” Garrett was unfounded and exaggerated. He sputtered some outrage, refused to engage me, and stalked away. ¹

I wish I had more to add, but that’s all I got. He was a very good writer and passionate about liberty. Would that this could be said about more people. At least the latter. Not everyone needs to be a writer. But more people need to be libertarians.

Update: I should mention that Justin wrote one of my favorite articles ever: his devastating review (Chronicles, June 1994) of David Horowitz’s annoying, self-serving memoir Radical Son.

Justin also appeared and spoke at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society, and he wrote about it in “Bodrum is Heaven,” in “Out and About,” Taki’s Magazine (June 16, 2008). His presentations at the 2008 PFS meeting are embedded below:

• Justin Raimondo, Ron Paul and the Prospects of PaleoLibertarianism in the U.S.; print version: “Libertarianism’s Divergent Roads,” Taki’s Magazine, June 11, 2008
• Simasius, Raimondo, Groezinger, Discussion, Q & A

1. Update: I just came across this piece by Kelley David Kelley responding to Raimondo. This was faxed to me by my friend Jack Criss. I agree with Kelley. See also the Wikipedia mention of Raimondo’s accusation, and this Quora post. [↩]

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 270.

This is my second appearance on The Corbett Report (Ep. 1453, 25 June 2019), with host James Corbett (from Japan):

Interview 1453 – Stephan Kinsella on Law Without the State

Stephan Kinsella joins us today to discuss the concept of law without the state. Is law and order possible without a state? What would that look like? And just what is “the law,” anyway? Find out more in this fascinating conversation on law, history, philosophy and anarchy.

Related:

• What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist, LewRockwell.com (Jan. 20, 2004)
• Fraud, Restitution, and Retaliation: The Libertarian Approach (Feb. 3, 2009)
• Hoppe, Anarcho-Capitalism: An annotated bibliography, LewRockwell.com, December 31, 2001
• KOL144 | Corbett Report Radio (2012)

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:15 — 45.5MB)

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 269.

My old friend Jack Criss, former libertarian AM radio talk show host from the 1980s and now a business journalist and publisher, throws his hat into the podcast ring. He interviewed me today. His episode page is here.

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:12 — 31.1MB)

“Dialogical Arguments for Libertarian Rights” appears as chap. 6 of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023). It is an updated and revised version of a chapter in The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom, Roger Bissell, Chris Sciabarra, and Ed Younkins, eds. (Lexington Books, 2019), which was itself based on my article “New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory,” J. Libertarian Stud. 12, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 313–26.

Original chapter and chapter from LFFS appended below.

Update: See “Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide” (2011) and Supplemental Resources. Also, Norbert Slenzok, The Political Philosophy of Hans-Hermann Hoppe: A Critical Study (2024) contains extensive discussion of argumentation ethics and other aspects of Hoppe’s and Kinsella’s social thought.

***

I just received my copy of the handsome new book The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom, Roger Bissell, Chris Sciabarra, and Ed Younkins, eds. (Lexington Books, 2019), which is part of the “Capitalist Thought: Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics” series (available on Amazon and here).

This anthology includes my contribution in Chapter 5: “Dialogical Arguments for Libertarian Rights [PDF]” (a text version to be posted later after this work is incorporated into my forthcoming book, Law in a Libertarian World [now: Legal Foundations of a Free Society]), based on my article “New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 12:2 (Fall 1996), updated including material drawn from other work: [continue reading…]

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 268.

I was a guest on Episode 39 of the excellent podcast The Bob Murphy Show, discussing “Law Without the State, and the Illegitimacy of IP (Intellectual Property)”. A few people have told me this particular discussion of IP was one of my best–thorough and systematic. No doubt aided by Bob’s excellent prompting, questions, and guidance.

Update: Someone on the Youtube comments asked me what essay we were discussing in this talk. I don’t think we were talking about any particular article, but I would say my best, most recent and comprehensive piece is my most recent: The Problem with Intellectual Property (2025).

Other relevant pieces:

• • A Selection of my Best Articles and Speeches on IP
  • Against Intellectual Property (2001/2008)
  • Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society (2013/2023)
  •  Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward (2023)
  • You Can’t Own Ideas: Essays on Intellectual Property (2023)
  • Stephan Kinsella, ed., The Anti-IP Reader: Free Market Critiques of Intellectual Property (2023)

Bob and I had planned to also discuss argumentation ethics, but the discussion of IP ran longer than we expected so we’ll save AE for next time. [Update: KOL278 | Bob Murphy Show: Debating Hans Hoppe’s “Argumentation Ethics”.]

From Bob’s show notes:

Bob talks with Stephan Kinsella about the basis of libertarian law, and how we could have justice without a coercive State. They then discuss Stephan’s pathbreaking work making the case that property must be in tangible things, rendering “intellectual property” an incoherent and dangerous concept.

GROK shownote summary: In this episode of the Bob Murphy Show (Episode 39), recorded in June 2019, libertarian patent attorney Stephan Kinsella discusses “Law Without the State, and the Illegitimacy of IP (Intellectual Property)” with host Bob Murphy, delivering a thorough critique of intellectual property laws rooted in Austrian economics and libertarian principles (0:00-10:00). Kinsella begins by outlining the basis of libertarian law, emphasizing that property rights apply only to scarce, rivalrous resources like physical objects, not non-scarce ideas, and argues that a stateless society could achieve justice through private law mechanisms like contracts and arbitration (10:01-25:00). He then transitions to IP, asserting that patents and copyrights are state-granted monopolies that violate property rights by restricting how individuals use their own resources, using examples like a patented mousetrap to illustrate this infringement (25:01-40:00). Kinsella’s discussion, praised for its clarity and systematic approach, leverages Murphy’s probing questions to highlight IP’s philosophical and practical flaws.

Youtube Transcript and Detailed Grok summary below.

Grok summary:

Summary of The Bob Murphy Show Episode 39

Introduction and Background

0:00 Bob Murphy introduces episode 39 of The Bob Murphy Show, featuring an interview with Stephan Kinsella, a practicing patent attorney, libertarian writer, speaker, director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom, and editor of Libertarian Papers. Murphy highlights their long acquaintance through Mises Institute events and online debates, particularly their disagreement on Hans Hoppe’s argumentation ethics, which they did not discuss due to time constraints. Instead, the conversation focused on private law and Kinsella’s influential work on intellectual property (IP), with plans to revisit their argumentation ethics dispute in a future episode.

Personal Journey to Libertarianism

5:34 Stephan Kinsella shares his journey to becoming a prominent libertarian legal theorist. Originally from Louisiana, he became interested in libertarianism in high school after reading Ayn Rand, deepening his interest in college and law school. By the start of law school, he identified as an anarcho-capitalist, influenced by Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe. His education as an electrical engineer and later as a lawyer at LSU, which uniquely teaches both Roman and common law, shaped his analytical approach to libertarian issues, despite having no libertarian professors and learning primarily through self-directed reading and correspondence with figures like David Kelley.

Legal Systems: Common Law vs. Civil Law

20:03 Stephan Kinsella explains the distinction between common law and civil law systems. He describes Roman law as a case-based system, developed through disputes and codified in Justinian’s Institutes, similar to the English common law, which evolved through judicial precedents. In Europe, Roman law was later codified into civil codes, like Napoleon’s, making legislation the primary legal source, whereas English common law relied on judicial decisions with occasional parliamentary statutes. Kinsella notes that modern legal systems in both Europe and the U.S. blend legislation and common law, but he argues that a libertarian case law system, driven by real disputes and precedent, aligns better with justice than legislative edicts, which often lack consistency with prior law or justice principles.

Anarcho-Capitalism and the Role of the State

40:36 Stephan Kinsella addresses critics who dismiss anarcho-capitalism as impractical, arguing that the state’s inherent aggression makes it unjust, regardless of its persistence. He compares objections like “who will build the roads?” to questioning the abolition of slavery by asking “who will pick the cotton?”—practical concerns that don’t negate moral arguments. Kinsella asserts that anarchism is about opposing aggression and recognizing the state’s criminal nature. He respects minarchist arguments that a minimal state might reduce aggression compared to anarchy but finds them unconvincing, emphasizing that advocating for justice doesn’t require predicting a crime-free society, just as opposing murder doesn’t assume its elimination.

Intellectual Property Critique

47:54 Stephan Kinsella discusses his seminal work opposing intellectual property, arguing that IP laws (patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets) are incoherent and unjust. He explains that property rights apply to scarce, tangible resources to resolve conflicts, not to non-scarce ideas, which can be infinitely shared without depriving the originator. IP laws, he contends, grant monopolies that restrict others’ use of their own property (e.g., a factory or printing press), effectively transferring property rights without consent. Kinsella traces IP’s historical roots to state-granted privileges, like patents from monarchs and copyrights from censorship-driven publishing monopolies, which persist due to special interests and propaganda labeling them as “property.” He argues that IP stifles innovation and free speech, citing examples like lawsuits over yoga moves or book bans.

Practical Implications and Incentives

1:13:40 Stephan Kinsella elaborates on why IP is not only unjust but also impractical, using the music industry as an example. He notes that artists already give away music to build recognition, making money through tours or merchandise, suggesting that IP laws primarily benefit large record labels, not individual creators. He likens IP to arbitrary restrictions, like suing over podcast formats or scientific formulas, which would hinder progress. Kinsella argues that the fear of “unbridled competition” drives IP support, as it slows replication of easily copied goods (e.g., books or drugs), but empirical evidence shows IP doesn’t enhance innovation. He hopes technologies like 3D printing will render IP laws obsolete by enabling decentralized production.

Listener Questions and Future Projects

1:30:35 Stephan Kinsella answers listener questions, sharing favorite fiction books (e.g., Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant), reflecting on his legal career (no horror stories, though he dislikes patent prosecution’s necessity), and clarifying his defensive patent practice, where patents are used to counter lawsuits rather than initiate them. He disagrees with Hoppe on minor points, like argumentation ethics’ terminology and fractional reserve banking’s inherent fraudulence. On the Libertarian Party, he supports its goals but focuses on theoretical work, hoping to add an anti-IP plank. Kinsella, an atheist, respects religious beliefs but critiques state-worshipping secularism. He mentions upcoming books, including “Copy This Book” on IP, a chapter in “Dialectics of Liberty,” and a legal reference on international investment law.

GROK DETAILED SUMMARY:

The Bob Murphy Show Episode 39 – Transcript

0:00 Bob Murphy: The Bob Murphy Show episode [Music] 39. There’s a title coming. What are you going to do? Get ready for another episode of the Bob Murphy Show, the podcast promoting free markets, free minds, and grateful souls. It’s your source for commentary and interviews conducted by a Christian and economist. Now here is your host, Bob Murphy. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Bob Murphy Show. I really enjoyed the following interview, the one you’re just about to listen to with Stephan Kinsella. Stephan and I have known each other for years. We know each other from Mises Institute events and just online arguing about stuff. When Gene Callahan and I published a critique of Hans Hoppe’s argumentation ethics, Stephan was one of the bulldogs to push back. Believe it or not, we didn’t actually get into that topic on this episode. I went into it thinking of course we’re going to talk about that because finally because it’s a kind of thing where in print I think we just kept talking past each other. I was really looking forward to hashing out our dispute on that and we just ran out of time. We were talking about private law stuff like that. It took us more than 10 minutes to settle the issue of how could a legal system exist without the coercion of the state involved. So anyway, it’s a great interview. I think you’ll learn a lot. Stephan’s a very smart guy and we cover a lot of territory like I say private law in particular and of course his pathbreaking work on intellectual property. And I’ll have to have him back on in the future to talk about our dispute over argumentation ethics. As far as his official bio, here I’m getting this from his website. Stephan Kinsella is a practicing patent attorney, a libertarian writer and speaker, director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom, and founding and executive editor of Libertarian Papers. So without further ado, here is my interview with Stephan Kinsella. Well welcome Stephan to the Bob Murphy Show.

2:27 Stephan Kinsella: Thanks Bob, glad to be here.

2:35 Bob Murphy: Now probably the first order of business is to clarify that your name is not Steven Kinsella even though many people write it as such.

2:41 Stephan Kinsella: I answer to anything. I go by Norman sometimes my first name. There’s actually two there are two literally Steven Kinsellas in one’s in Ireland and one’s in England and they spell it with the E. I’m with an A like Stephanie and we each get each other’s emails from time to time over the last 15 years and we will helpfully forward them on to each other usually usually it’s them forwarding something to me and they are like why am I getting this insane libertarian crap yeah they’re like “We’re not radical libertarians. I don’t understand why people keep accusing us of being nut jobs.” Yeah there’s well once once an economic journalist and actually I did a I did a podcast recently for some Bitcoin something podcast and we had set it up by email and I think the host someone else VJ Boyapati had recommended I do it and the host must have googled me but he found the guy from Ireland and when we started talking he says “Oh why don’t you have an Irish accent?” I said “Because I’m” and I said “Oh do you think you’re about to talk to the Irish economist journalist?” He says “Yeah.” I said “That’s not me if you want me to get him for you I can.” He says “No we have five minutes to start the show let’s go with it.” So that’s good that’s the one I I debated that guy Noah Smith the the Reuters guy or the you know what I mean i know yeah I know what you mean yeah the on it was on Austrian economics versus Keynesianism or something like that but it was kind of funny that the host thought he was about to interview an Irish guy but yeah it’s Stephan.

4:02 Bob Murphy: Well and actually you’re I mean I don’t know the other guy but I’m guessing you would have done a better job defending Austrian economics than that other guy.

4:08 Stephan Kinsella: Yes yeah I don’t think he knows very much about it he’s he’s more of a mainstream economic journalist and the other guy is an antitrust lawyer so yeah they had the right guy it’s just the host had researched the wrong biography I think right you were the right guy just Yeah he got missed I think so yeah that yeah there’s there’s a poor Robert Murphy who’s an econom I think a macroeconomist who’s a Keynesian and I just feel horrible for that guy because you can imagine like all the people like who probably assume that you know when they see something like hey aren’t you the guy that challenged Paul Krugman he’s like no I promise you that’s not me well and not to jump the gun but things like this is sort of an one example I give of why trademark is not really necessary trademark law because people have the same names and yet they manage to figure it out you know let’s say oh you’re the Steven Kinsella fellow from Ireland or you know you’re the Rob Bob Murphy who does this or you’re the one who went to Colombia or New York you know so people find ways of distinguishing when they need to yeah that’s a good point.

5:08 Bob Murphy: Okay before we get into the good stuff the juicy stuff first we need to know the origin and so longtime listeners know that I do this when I have a guest who’s somebody well known within libertarian and Austrian circles we stop and say “How did you get here?” So with whatever detail you want to get into Stephan why don’t you tell us how did you come to be the legal mind of the libertarian movement if you will.

5:34 Stephan Kinsella: Yeah and if anyone’s interested I have a little chapter in Walter Block’s book on libertarian biographies or something and mine’s called How I Became a Libertarian it’s on my website but I’m 53 and I’m from Louisiana originally and I’m a lawyer in Houston now and I’ve been interested in you know libertarian thought ever since like high school when I read Ayn Rand and that deepened in college and then in law school and I basically became an anarchist Rothbardian Austrian type by the beginning of law school and started publishing some articles right when I started practicing law so that’s kind of my interest in it and I’ve been heavily involved with the Mises Institute over the years and so been heavily influenced by the thought of Ayn Rand initially but really in terms of systematic thinking I’d say it’d be Mises and Rothbard and Hoppe.

6:25 Bob Murphy: Now did you have like any professors along the way or other students or was it just completely on your own just your own reading.

6:31 Stephan Kinsella: Totally on my own at the time i mean a librarian told me to read The Fountain Head because you know I liked philosophy and now at the time it was a wasteland right no I don’t remember having hardly any libertarian no libertarian professors ever i was an electrical engineer anyway so luckily the teachers weren’t political anyway and in law school they were just kind of practical nuts and bolts teachers mostly with a liberal or moderate conservative slant but no no libertarianism whatsoever i had one professor that I became friends with who had a copy of Hayek’s law legislation and liberty on his shelf but he was a New York lefty so no I things are different now of course there was a libertarian party but at the time I was hostile to the libertarianism and the party because Ayn Rand had such a violent hatred for libertarians I kind of assumed she was right it took me a few years to realize wait a second these guys sound just like Ayn Rand’s political you know theory and so I remember in 1988 I was just starting law school at LSU and I think Ron Paul came through campus on the on the LP campaign for president and I went to see it cuz I was curious and I remember I asked him a question about abortion cuz he was kind of coy about it so I thought I would nail him right and so I detected something there right i I was strongly proabortion at the time because I was a Randian right and Ron Paul and most libertarians probably are too pro-abortion rights but Ron Paul was not you know not a typical libertarian so I remember I actually talked to Ron Paul in 88 and just walked away a little puzzled.

8:08 Bob Murphy: Yeah i remember I was a student an undergrad at Hillsdale College when Harry Browne came through and he was the LP candidate and so of course Hillsdale was very you know evangelical is not the right word but there was a strong Christian presence on campus even though the school officially you know was was not was non sectarian and so somebody was was trying to corner him too and and yeah I I don’t know what Harry Browne’s ultimate views were in terms of the morality of it but certainly he didn’t think the federal government should be regulating abortion and and some student tried to tried to corner him and the way Harry Browne dealt with it was he said something like if the federal government you know declared outlaws abortions pretty soon men will be getting abortions and then you know I got a chuckle out of everybody and then he just moved on to the next so I thought that was a pretty good way of of handling it like you know so anyway I’m curious did you get more out of Ayn Rand’s fiction or non-fiction.

9:02 Stephan Kinsella: Probably the non-fiction in terms of libertarian stuff the fiction the more I thought about it the more I’ve rejected the fiction the fountain head was what really got me going probably because of its individualism I was sort of I think I was adopted and so I kind of never had this your your claim to worth is based upon your family lineage and all that you know I was kind of a pull yourself up from your own bootstraps self-made kind of mentality guy and I was into philosophy but I came from a little place in Louisiana as I never had anyone to talk to so that stuff kind of lit me on fire and kind of but in retrospect the fountain head is like it’s a novel with quasi rape in it number one and intellectual property terrorism i mean the whole plot is about this guy who destroys someone else’s property in a fit of rage that they used his ideas without his permission so the whole thing is completely anathema to what I now believe so I’m wondering what about the fountain head even attracted me now Atlas Shrugged is much better I believe from a libertarian point of view except it has a little bit of IP stuff in it with the Rearden metal stuff and the patent stuff which is confused but Atlas Shrugged is way more libertarian I think than the Fountain Head but no I think it was her her nonfiction works for me i mean this was probably from 84 to about 89 i would go to the LSU library and I would read the old Ayn Rand newsletters and I remember Barbara Branden’s biography came out at the time so I was devouring everything listening to tape lectures by you know David Kelley and Bob Bidinotto and all these guys that you could get from the Laissez Faire books catalog and things like that at the time because that’s all there was you know it wasn’t there was no internet and I would actually I corresponded by mail with David Kelley a little bit and a few other people like that Tibor Machan my friend Jack Criss in Mississippi so it was a wasteland back then i mean David Kelley wrote me back and he said I was in law school i remember David Kelley says “Well your questions are good.” And he gave me some nice answers and he said “There’s a guy in Jackson Mississippi.” Now I was in Baton Rouge so like he’s telling me there’s a guy 4 hours away from you who is similar age and has similar interest to you you might want to contact him i mean that’s how bad it was so I made friends with with a guy in another state in another city because I finally found someone in the country you know who had a kindred interest in ideas but it was kind of like that but yeah yeah.

11:26 Bob Murphy: Well this Yeah the the anecdote I tell just to try to get our younger listeners to to realize how bad it was I had read Human Action as a senior in high school not saying I understood it all but you know I I did read it cover to cover and I knew oh I got to be an Austrian economist that’s what I’m going to do for my life and I went to Hillsdale College and there I think I was talking to Gary Wolfram from when he referred to it as to the man as Mises and I was like oh cuz I had been calling them Ludwig von Mises the up till then so you know.

11:56 Stephan Kinsella: Well I’m I’m always surprised now i’ll still come across you’ll hear someone in an interview or something someone who’s like a fellow traveler like a I don’t know like a Ben Shapiro type or someone and they’ll mispronounce some of the they’ll mispronounce Ayn Rand still or Mises and I’m always surprised i’m like haven’t you guys figured it out by now like you surely couldn’t have only heard about this from in in in books i mean you must have heard someone say the name properly but and I will say one other thing i I went into engineering because I like technology but I always I think honestly my my strongest abilities in was probably like the liberal arts economics history English literature that kind of thing i don’t regret not having done it but in engineering which I did well in and I liked for the precision I always sort of had this hunger for the normative and the verbal way of talking so that’s why I love law school when I went to law school finally I was free from the confines of equations and all that you know my son is like 15 now he’s a little bit like me and his intellect and I actually think he’s going to do the liberal arts route and I don’t I don’t regret it but I think that’s one reason I’ve I’ve written articles and things like that i just I’m just I enjoy that more i never actually practiced double E engineering anyway but anyway so I’m saying I I didn’t have the luxury in my undergrad of doing a lot of stuff that’s conducive to this anyway it might have been for the better anyway.

13:20 Bob Murphy: I I don’t know what you think about this but I you know I don’t think not having taken official economics or oh I did take you know the basic economics engineers have to take I remember the Phillips curve made no sense to me and I was just then dabbling in Austrian stuff but the the whole idea a that unemployment and inflation are inverse relationships because I remember I told the teacher I said what if some space aliens murdered all the unemployed people overnight i mean it wouldn’t be a good thing but do you really think inflation would go up tomorrow and he says oh no the curve would shift i’m like okay well then you know so I was skeptical of the that mainstream approach even in even in college i have to ask i think Roger Garrison I know he was engineering was he Do you know was Roger Garrison electrical engineering as an undergrad.

14:04 Stephan Kinsella: I have no idea I’m pretty sure he was because I know he he said something along I’m paraphrasing here but I’m I think I’m getting the spirit of this right he said something like he was helped greatly in going into capital and interest theory and economics because with his engineering background they had to make sure the units matched up and the equations you know like that was something they you know they had to do and and that famously and you know when it comes to economists talking about interest you know like just even the the standard diagrams they’ll use the axes don’t make any sense like in terms of the units you say what what is that unit and it’s like it’s got a dimension off or something.

14:41 Bob Murphy: Well and I could see that being the type of person who’s an engineer or or who could be an engineer right being smart or good at math would aid you in the modern study of economics anyway right didn’t you didn’t you go to NYU and it’s very mathematical or something like that and it’s difficult for some Yeah for some yes I did but I think even beyond so yeah obviously you know if you have a if you’re a quantitative let’s call it background you’re certainly going to need that to get a an advanced degree at a at a decent university nowadays at least in the US in economics but you could have been a math major and if you didn’t have something like I guess either physics or engineering you wouldn’t have had to like check your units in the equations like that might never never have come up and so that that’s what Garrison was was getting at that it was his engineering per se not just a you know like somebody could be a statistics major you know and never have had that issue and so the things he was talking about in capital where you know really smart economists were making simplistic mistakes in terms of their I mean it was it was sloppy and they could come back and they say “Oh yeah yeah yeah right it should be you know per per year or something like that.” But but still it was the way they draw like Krugman did this a year ago like his diagram actually the axes as he labeled them didn’t make any sense.

15:51 Stephan Kinsella: Oh I see what you mean well on a this is a slight tangent on this topic but I I being a patent lawyer I actually ended up using my double E skills i mean it was essential for what I’ve done because I do laser patents and high high-tech electrical computer type patents so my double E degree turned out to be more useful even as a lawyer than it is for a lot of engineers who go off into business or whatever it was just serendipity but I remember I wasn’t one of these people who always wanted to be a lawyer i just kind of was frustrated with I went to grad school for engineering at first and I didn’t really want to be an engineer and so I kept going to school partly to ride out the recession at the time and partly to just see what I wanted to do so I thought about law school and I I walked across the LSU campus to the law center cuz I thought you had to have a pre-law degree i didn’t know anything about it and I I talked to the chancellor and I said “Do I need a pre-law degree?” He says “No all you need is a bachelor’s degree in something.” He says “But we don’t recommend it for engineers because they just they don’t do as well in law school.” Which I learned since then is complete BS it’s the opposite of true i think what he was thinking was a lot of engineers are not as good let’s say as an English or history major at writing and expressing themselves and even communication and he’s got a point there but if you can communicate well then the engineering mindset is actually conducive i think it’s called I would think of it as analytical cuz it’s problem solving now it’s more causal physics science-based but it’s still problem solving analytical and law school is too it’s just more verbal and legal concept type reasoning and the first year of law school the whole purpose is to break your mind and to make you think like a lawyer and a lot of like English majors and humanities types have trouble with that because they’re they’re used to all this open-ended inquiry you know there sort of struggle they’re forced to no you have to have a pro you have to come up with an answer solve this problem so but I did find that by pure luck again the one law school I chose LSU just for convenience I think turned out to be one of the best for what I ended up doing in my libertarian career because it it’s a it’s a civil law state so it’s it’s the only it’s one of the only schools in the country that teaches the Roman law as well as the common law and there’s a lots of legal background that most lawyers discard after they start practicing and only use what they need for their specialty but I love that stuff right and I now it’s helped inform a lot of my ability to analyze libertarian issues that and Austrian economics right Austrian economics Rothbardian radicalism and the libertarian views and kind of a knowledge of how the law works both from the Roman law or the European civil law I would say and the American common law or the English common law has been helpful a lot very helpful I think to helping figure out solutions to some of these kind of thorny problems that we have in libertarianism.

18:46 Bob Murphy: Yeah definitely before we I want to ask you more about that but just a quick little thing you that you prodded my memory on saying how your background in E helped you with you know laser patents and things similarly with me I mean I thought I thought I was going to be a theoretical physicist when I was like in seventh and eighth grade I was you know reading stuff about Richard Feynman and you know that he was my hero and oh my gosh I totally got to do this I’m going to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics that’s what I was going to and and then of course I got fell in love with economics instead but I’ve noticed because I do a lot of work on energy issues and just goofy little things like like if some free market economist is talking about the Obama administration and its regulations and they don’t know the difference between power and energy for example when they’re talking about you know just little things like that like what’s a kilowatt hour versus and it’s just like you know so anyway good good stuff there so can you I understand that like the terms you use there but for our listeners that might be worthwhile if you elaborate a little on this distinction So I think in libertarianism those who have read it all on this stuff like oh yeah the common law is our is our big favorite thing and we need to go back to that but you’re talking about there’s a different type of law so what’s what’s the difference and how why wouldn’t we just like the common law.

20:03 Stephan Kinsella: Well okay so there’s a common understanding of what which most people don’t have that so most people are just kind of unaware they just see they just they’re they know that the governments have laws you know we have laws they know what some of those laws are and they know that they’re complicated so that’s the kind of normal understanding of law it’s just not really an understanding at all but then if you go up one level right you ask your kind of moderately interested and intelligent person they’ll they’ll basically say something like this which I think is false they’ll say something like well the common law which came from England right is more case-based and the European law is more legislation based that’s sort of a first approximation of the difference in reality here’s what happened to and to simplify first you start with the Roman law right which is a law developed in Rome during the well I don’t know during the entire thousand years of Rome but for several hundred years during the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire and that was codified in Justinian’s institutes now that law developed like a case law system like a common law system actually because it developed in part by people having a dispute and they would go to these jurist consults or these judges and they would come up with a solution and over time those solutions became the body of Roman legal principles okay some of those decisions were hypothetical decisions though like these legal experts legal philosophers would just sit down in a room and say now what if this happened and they would come come up with a result so it was it was still case based but it was like hypothetical case-based but in any case that resulted in a body of law called the Roman law right which you can think of as a common law type system or a case law system they didn’t call it common law but it’s it’s a case law system later on during the English era the British era the English common law arose where decisions again were made by judges hearing cases between actual dis parties and they would come up with a solution and those solutions became precedent and other judges would build on them and so over the centuries a body of law developed called the English common law so the English common law and the Roman law were similar in that structural way and they came up with similar solutions they just had different names and different conceptual breakdowns now in Europe what happened was that Roman law was sort of lost and then found again because the just the institutes of Justinian were preserved and refound and all this and that started being built upon by the church’s canon law and by medieval law and the law merchant so you had these European laws added to the Roman law principles but eventually in the 1800s there became a codification movement started sort of by Napoleon you’ll hear about the code Napoleon or the Napoleonic code the French civil code it’s called so basically Napoleon had a bunch of legal scholars put together all the accumulated European law which was the Roman law plus the additions over the centuries which is mostly a common law type system and they codified it into these beautiful codes the French civil code is just a beautiful thing to read it’s like a summary of the law we have these in America called the restatements of the law those are privately done but they’re not legislated they’re just restatements of the law anyway so the difference was in in Europe they took this civil code and then the legislature approved it as the law so legislation or legal positivism you could call it became the primary source of law so in in Europe they think of law now as emanating from the legislature even though the original principles were based upon rules that accumulated in a common law or case law system over the centuries in England the common law was thought of as the predominant source of law judges are the source of law cases courts and cases are the source of law and only every now and then does the parliament come up with a statute and that was seen as a derogation or an intrusion into the body of law which is seen as mostly coming up from the courts so that’s how most people describe it now in my view in today’s 21st century after 200 years of growing legislation in America and in Britain which has gradually taken over the the function of the common law and in England as well there’s little huge theoretical difference anymore so civil codes plus tons of statutory law govern in Europe and common law augmented by lots of legislation is the law in say the US so they’re both a mixture of lots of legislation mixed with common law so that’s sort of a a summary and by the way so I’ve written a huge article on this in 1995 in the JLS on kind of talking about decentralization and law Hayek wrote a lot about this and a lot of economists fellow traveler economists to Austrians have written on this too.

24:57 Bob Murphy: Well yeah so that I mean where I know I came across it was you know Hayek’s famous compilation law legislation and liberty and just even up till that point I think I had used the term law and legislation almost interchangeably and then somebody made the I don’t know if it was Hayek or he quoted somebody you know earlier some saying so tell me if this is correct Stephan I’m curious but the idea being it’s a relatively recent thing in human affairs where political authorities had the hubris to think they could make the law yes yes you know so of course there were laws you know going way back but you know no no normal king or you know baron or whatever thought he had the ability or authority to to change what the law was it was no the law is the law and yeah.

25:43 Stephan Kinsella: And I think that this probably coincided roughly with the emergence of the modern state and the emergence of democracy I think Hoppe in his book democracy calls legislation democratic lawmaking i mean before the rise of legal positivism there was more of a natural law type thinking that judges were trying to discover the source of law and that you know even kings were subject to the law this kind of idea but with just with the advent of the US constitution itself we start thinking of of law as being the the decree of some authority and usually a civil authority the governmental authority you know either speaking for the people or whatever and we’re so used to thinking of law that way now so the the bottom line for me as a libertarian not even as an anarchist you can forget I mean anarchy is a whole different issue i mean you can I think the legislature is for example illegitimate because it’s part of the state because I’m an anarchist but even if you’re not an anarchist you can still believe that the primary way that law should be so to speak made I’d say developed would be through a case a case law system not through legislation because legislation is just the decree of a body of people it’s just an edict there’s no reason to believe that the decree of a bunch of guys on a committee number one would be compatible with justice and number two compatible with the previous body of law in fact you have statutes that are incompatible with each other all the time there’s just no reason but if you have a case law system number one the judges can only make a decision when there’s a real dispute between people they can’t they can’t just sit down and come up with a tax code or the Americans with Disabilities Law it’s always a dispute between two contestants over a piece of property basically and then the judge is at least trying to do justice and they’re somewhat bound by what has gone before so the law develops in a more or less consistent fashion and in pursuit of justice sometimes makes mistakes but I would say that the body of what we call private law developed in Rome and the common law in England is roughly compatible with what we libertarians would say is is just law and here yeah let me just extend that a little bit so and this is the thing I do one of my more popular lectures at Mises University is is called the market for security i’ll link to it in the show notes page folks again this is Bob Murphy show episode 39 and there I just I I point out that look at in a in a free society you know like according to Rothbardian principles let’s say the property titles and whatnot there’s still going to be disputes and there’s a genuine need for or or desire for some authoritative figure to come and render an opinion on who’s in the right in this dispute and even it’s even in our language today like what does the judge do the judge writes an opinion and so the idea is there’s this existing body of law out there then in the particular facts of the case the judge then applies the law to that and says in my opinion you know here’s how the law applies to this particular situation and so that you know that showing that the the judge is not in a sense making law but nonetheless there is a a strange sense in which over the centuries all of those decisions sort of create what the precedent is and the analogy I I didn’t invent this analogy somebody else did but like with spoken language you know the way we speak nowadays as English speakers is different from how Shakespeare did right and and and yet there’s nobody in charge of the English language yet there is a sense in which all the English speakers by their decisions quote define words and yet like a dictionary just codifies what the definitions really are it’s not that the company Webster creates the definitions if they put the wrong definition they’d go out of business so it’s a weird thing like that yeah and and and by the way one of the other classic works on this if anyone’s interested is is Bruno Leoni his work freedom in the law now he was an Italian legal theorist and that’s more the European tradition but he I think he was strongly influenced by the decentralized kind of arguments like of Hayek so anyway there are tons of works on this in our tradition that are are fascinating and as a libertarian I think it just means we need to be aware of the difference when we say what the law is it doesn’t mean it’s just now a lot of conservatives of the natural law tradition they get really hung up on this there was a famous series of debates between HLA Hart a legal positivist so-called from England and Lon Fuller who’s more of a natural law type and these natural law types you’ll notice they want to capitalize the word law and they want to say something like an unjust law is no law at all and as a lawyer and as just a practical person living I just don’t think that’s the proper way to look at it i we do have certain legally enforced prohibitions like the drug laws or tax laws which we would say as libertarians are unjust and if you want to quibble and say they’re not really laws okay fine but sometimes you’re going to get charged with violating this thing and you need to hire a lawyer to defend you you know so I think it’s better to recognize what the law is and then have an ideal form in our minds of what the law should be and we hold up the legal positive law to the just law and that’s how we determine whether the law is wrong or right even conservatives have a problem with this because they’ve even absorbed this positivist idea you know they have they can stop let me just stop a second you you’re using the term legal positivism can you just define that in case somebody doesn’t know exactly what that means.

31:12 Stephan Kinsella: Yeah so and just to be clear there’s you’ll hear of logical positivism right which is more of a of an epistemological or a methodological approach in the in the social sciences which is you know the idea that the only truth it’s like empiricism it’s the the only truths would be those that we can we can formulate as a as a as a falsifiable or testable law a rule right and then we can go test it and if it’s if it’s not testable it’s just empty utterances i don’t agree with that i don’t think most libertarians do there are certain so that’s logical positivism that’s logical so I just want to distinguish it although I think there are some connections legal positivism is again the idea that that law is whatever the authority says or posits it is so law flows from the from the government basically as opposed to the idea that law is out there and we can discover it okay okay the more natural law idea and I’d say libertarians are more natural lawyers in the sense that even if you don’t believe in natural law or natural rights thinking you still think that there’s a standard of what the rules ought to be they can be justified by human reason and you can’t decree something to be wrong that’s right and you can’t decree something to be right that’s wrong and that’s what so so we don’t think that the ultimate source of law is the state or is the is the legislature of the state so legal positivism is this idea we like again everyone thinks of law as just being whatever and not only that you’ll hear even libertarians sometimes who get confused by this modern parlance they’ll say something like oh like the income tax deniers right they’ll say it’s not illegal to evade income taxes because show me the law now when they say show me the law they’re saying show me where it’s written down so that very mentality is the legal positivist idea like they’re thinking of law as a set of statute books that the government has passed and then they want to quibble over the words in the income tax code but the point is they’re thinking of law as whatever the government says the law is or they could say it wasn’t properly ratified or something well that would Yeah yeah and but a libertarian would say “Show me where it’s aggression for me to for not pay income taxes.” I don’t care what the government says their law is the just law the moral law the libertarian law is is basically the codification of the non-aggression principle and property rights based upon that idea now even can I even push it for a further distinction even if we had you know an ideal free society of the kind you would like to exist and they had a you know free market and judges rendering opinions and over time it builds up what the the common law is even there couldn’t we imagine that they would have made mistakes and so the actual decision and so clearly I think you would have to say just as a practical matter well this is what the law of the land is even though I personally think it’s immoral yeah and I think that that’s a more difficult thing to answer it’s and people libertarians say well what what should the law be and a lot of time like I like the Randy Barnett’s distinction in the structure of liberty where he distinguishes between abstract legal principles and concrete legal rules and I think what would happen would be well First of all it wouldn’t necessarily be judges i think it might just be private so-called arbitrators which serve a similar function right and I also think you’d have a heavily decentralized society so you’d have different regimes different areas and you know you’ve written on this Hoppe and others have written on this the the role of insurance companies and contracts so I think law would heavily tend to merge into custom and tradition as embodied by the practices of the people as embodied in insurance practices as and which would reflect the real risks and people’s real preferences and is embodied in the cultural values of different areas and you could think of like all these different little mini cities around the world they would all be interlinked by like an international law and those have very abstract principles like pacta sunt servanda which is the idea that agreements are to be respected and even if you say that all the law in a given area is made by contract you still have to have a general theory of contract to to to build that on and to have a theory of contract you have to have a theory of property rights so I think just a basic say Lockean libertarian view of property rights which is embodied in the common law and the Roman law because it has to be because they have to be practical to work just the basic idea that basically people can use things that they find that are unowned people get to keep what they what they own without being molested or stolen from like stealing is wrong property rights are good people shouldn’t enslave or harm each other i mean just the very basic rules of contract should be respected all those things interlock together and they would be the abstract rules that would serve the basis like the underlying ground what Hans Kelsen the legal theorist would maybe call would call grundnorms or ground norms or basic norms and then on top of that you would have more refined rules based upon solutions that the judges and arbitrators have found over time maybe in a given region maybe internationally then you’d have sort of treaties or contracts between areas you’d have contractual arrangements and insurance-based incentives and effectively laws in different regions i mean you could imagine that nuclear weapons are not technically outlawed by a statute like they are now but they’re outlawed because of the prohibitions because of the risk and because of because you won’t be able to get insurance for it and your neighbors aren’t going to want to live next to you or allow you into their restrictive covenant area you know I mean you could see how it would result in prohibitions that some people would say are not libertarian but they’re libertarian in their in the means that we arrived at them or in the process that got us there.

36:59 Bob Murphy: Yeah I I really like that just to to chime in that yeah that that was what I did in in my booklet Chaos Theory was I was saying you know it’s tricky when you’re doing just the armchair reasoning that you know people who are against gun control and the arguments they use there actually you know if you took it to its logical conclusion would mean everybody could stockpile hydrogen bombs in their basement hey and until you initiate aggression on somebody who’s the government to come in and clearly that’s kind of crazy and so yeah in a in a totally free market private property society If you’re like living in an apartment building just like they could say you can’t have you know you can’t do certain things to the property you can’t they’ll take the toilet out or whatever with the landlord’s permission oh by the way you can’t have a hydrogen bomb well and it’s a little bit unfair for our critics to demand that we predict omnisciently what the world would look like when the reason we can’t know is because the government has monopolized all these fields and totally changed it from the way it would have developed so all we can do is guess when someone says “Well tell me exactly what the educational system would look like if we get rid of public schools.” I’m like “Well I don’t know we have some idea but we don’t know exactly.” And they’ll say “Well what about a poor family how would they It’s like well I don’t know may maybe if we made the political reforms necessary to get rid of the public school system it would be because everyone got more capitalist and more free market oriented so everyone’s richer anyway and it wouldn’t even be a problem by then.” I mean you can’t just answer from your armchair all these questions right unfortunately so all we can do is try to advocate incrementally moving towards more freedom and so then you let this I don’t like this kind of Hayekian terms this discovery process work so that we can discover through the decentralized workings of the legal system and the market what practices actually work for people that and that they also perceive as just and I know most of my listeners are going to be high-fiving you in the air in here but for those who think that that’s a copout I mean and this is standard rhetorical ploy but just to say okay well you know imagine the old Soviet Union and they bring you in as an adviser and you say you guys are really should free up your agriculture you know have private farmers grow all the food and deliver it and you you won’t have so many famines all the time and and then you know Stalin says “Okay well if I do that tell me exactly where all the grocery stores will be.” I don’t know yeah.

39:23 Stephan Kinsella: One one analogy I’ve given is in the intellectual property thing when people say “Well if you get rid of copyright how are how are artists going to make money?” And they say “Well let’s let’s take the slavery case we have slavery in the US.” And some abolitionist says “I want to abolish slavery.” And someone says “But who’s going to pick the cotton?” It’s like okay that’s an interesting question to ask but is your question supposed to be an argument for slavery seriously do I have to tell you who’s going to pick the cotton before we abolish slavery so sometimes you have to have a go for justice right that’s what we’re looking for and you know to be fair I’ve done my share of armchair theorizing and so have all of us so I just like to give the caveat that just because I can’t answer your question perfectly doesn’t mean that we don’t have an idea of what the right policy ought to be right.

40:09 Bob Murphy: Well this flows in naturally to something I wanted to bring up i’ll let you you’ll be more eloquent about it but I remember a while ago I read something where you were taking on the the critic who says “Yeah you know libertarianism or anarcho capitalism is good in theory but we’re never going to see anything remotely like that in my lifetime so let you know I’m going to focus more on reforming the Republican party or blah blah blah.” So what was your response to that kind of mentality.

40:36 Stephan Kinsella: Well I just think that we need to be clear that there are different say different types of libertarians or different reasons we’re interested in it you have activist libertarians and you have sort of theoretical ones you could say and then you know it’s just a different intellectual inquiry if the question is strategically or or tactically what can we do to achieve liberty or maybe just a predictive question when are we going to have liberty or when are we going to have more liberty or what’s the I mean those are interesting questions but they’re different and someone who’s so engaged in activism that their entire focus is on trying to do something in their lives to achieve more liberty let’s say or even to achieve total liberty when you say something like there’s no right to do this they go “What good is it?” It’s sort of like the Marxist saying you know tell me about your capitalism someone on an empty stomach can’t hear your arguments you know that kind of just anti-intellectual almost like they’re results oriented and we’re trying to say we’re trying to use reason to analyze what the right result is so my point there was and it was in a paper called what it means to be an anarcho capitalist and I simply said look you can’t refute when when I say the state is unjust like when I’m when I say I’m an anarchist I mean I think the state is unjust it’s criminal and then they’ll say well who’s going to build the roads it’s like well yeah but see your question is a practical question that doesn’t really respond to my assertion so my assertion is that the state is unjust and the reason it’s unjust is it because it commits aggression and I believe aggression is wrong and I have some reasons for that but that’s my basic argument and so when you tell me that the state won’t go away all you’re saying is that we’re going to have crime you know almost every decent person even someone arguing with you about anarchy we will all agree that murder for example is wrong or rape we all think is wrong and a crime but none of us thinks that they either practice will ever be completely abolished for the entire future of the human race even if we achieve utopia on occasion there will be someone who decides to break the rules so the very fact that some kind of crime is going to happen doesn’t mean that it’s not a crime it doesn’t mean that we don’t condemn it and recognize it as a crime so that was my point and so my point was being an anarchist simply means number one you’re opposed to aggression and number two you recognize that the state necessarily commits aggression so if you if you’re not an anarchist you either have to favor aggression which most people are reluctant to do or you have to say that the state doesn’t necessarily have to commit aggression like which is Robert Nozick’s argument right and what most people will do is they will they will equivocate they’ll say something like they’ll say “Well no one’s completely against aggression after all we favor putting criminals in jail.” So then they start using the concept of violent defensive force or responsive force that’s aggression too which is not what we mean right so they’re they’re they’re equivocating on the word aggression but if you nail them down and make them be consistent with their terms they will finally reluctantly admit “Yes I’m against aggression too.” Now some of them won’t some of them will say “We’re going to have aggression in the world no matter what.” Like I view these guys as sort of like norm utilitarians in a sense like they’re against aggression but they don’t think it’s possible to get rid of it so they want to minimize aggression so they think in anarchy you’ll have more aggression than you will with a minimal state or even with a a moderately small state so they think that the level of aggression that the government commits like from bad laws jailing people that are really innocent or from mistakes or from taxing people or conscripting people they think that that level of aggression is less than the aggression that would that would occur on a private free market without a state i can actually respect that argument i don’t think they can make that argument out but most people don’t get that sophisticated most people just say “Well sometimes you have to break an omelette to break some eggs to make an omelet.” You know it’s kind of the marxian idea that yeah sometimes some you have to the little people have to suffer for grander causes so my point is this to be in favor of the state you you do have to either show that the state doesn’t commit aggression or you have to come out in favor of aggression so that’s it so it’s not a prediction about when anarchy will be achieved any more than opposing murder it’s a prediction that we will achieve a murder-free society so that’s the main argument in that piece which a lot of people have liked.

45:03 Bob Murphy: Yeah and actually as after I asked it and you went into I realized I I did a steelman argument there i I made the initial person more reasonable than what I meant to because people you’re right what I have seen people do and what your article clearly blows up I think is a person who says because we’re not going to achieve anarchy in my lifetime the study of anarchy you know anarchy itself is is a stupid goal or it’s a stupid thing it’s not worth you know arguing about which as you point out that’s you know somebody said hey rape is wrong and somebody else said oh yeah well you know frat guys are going to keep doing that so you know your position is wrong like that wouldn’t make any sense at all okay well why don’t we get into perhaps your your most famous contrib contribution here and that’s the the fact that you are against intellectual property and so just the the background here I think your essay on there is it a booklet is that what we call it like or did you conceive of it as an essay or was it it it was it was just a long article in JLS and they they republished it as I call they call it a book but it’s a mon I call it a monograph maybe so yeah it’s it’s just called against IP right against intellectual property yeah and that was Hoppe’s title I gave it at an Austrian scholars conference in like 1999 I delivered it as a paper and I submitted it to the JLS and I said Hans I don’t know what to call this he goes just call it the against intellectual property because he’s so German and I mean he called his society the property and freedom society I remember we were discussing names for it when he came up with this in 2009 we were we were going to call it the Ararat society because it was going to be in Turkey because of where his wife had a hotel and it’s close to Mount Ararat and that was in contra distinction to the Mont Pelerin society right in Switzerland so they were going to call it the Mount Ararat society but it had a little bit too much of a biblical Old Testament sort of connotation so anyhow it says just called property and freedom society y yeah I like the Y yeah that was good okay so I I have to just you know acknowledge that that that essay is one of the single most influential in the sense of like that one thing I went into it with one set of views and then not only did you sort of challenge with a frontal assault like to my whole foundation in terms of how I’d been thinking about intellectual property but then you even dealt with you know the obvious objections that would come up and I was just by the end of it I was like “Yeah he’s right holy cow.” So so for a someone who is a you know believes in private property and but but thinks yeah I mean just you know I’m I’m against theft and and people just like if I want to be able to plant crops you know somebody needs to own that land otherwise you know what’s the incentive and it’s just and blah blah blah by the same token yeah if I if I create a song I mean that’s my property if somebody can come along and steal it what’s what’s going on that’s unjust and it it hampers productivity so what’s going on here Stephan.

47:54 Stephan Kinsella: Well let me and I can put this in context it relates to a lot of things the way this came about was I I remember I was in high school maybe whenever I read Ayn Rand’s I think capitalism the unknown ideal which probably was in high school or early college she’s got this thing on patents and copyrights and you know I think Ayn Rand was right on so many things in her way especially for the time but her two big mistakes were her foundation of rights basing it on intellectual property and on being opposed to anarchy and I can forgive her for that one but and this is true also of Galambos Galambos’s entire theory of rights is based on a huge insane insanely wrong spectacularly wrong basically intellectual property theory Lysander Spooner by the way has a huge insane essay on intellectual property he’s even worse than the others he wanted them to last forever in perpetuity I’d say the people who were best on this was Benjamin Tucker who Wendy McElroy has explored and pointed out but even even Benjamin Tucker was right for kind of the wrong reasons partly like he’s he’s against monopoly right so he al he was also skeptical of land monopolies so for the same reasons he’s against patent monopolies and copyright monopoly so it’s like not quite the right argument so what happened was I read this in in you say ear when I was early libertarian and it something about Rand’s argument didn’t it didn’t resonate with me like her other arguments did because patents and copyrights only last for a finite time like say 70 a life of the author plus 70 years for copyrights say roughly 100 years and about 17 years for patents and Rand she either had to say that they should last forever which would I think be absurd and kill off the human race that’s what Spooner wanted or she had to say that no they should be limited for a time so she had to come up with an argument to kind of justify the current system can I can I stop you real fast what remind us what’s the difference between patent and copyright yeah so intellectual property is a term that we use now to refer to several types of laws which have to do with creations of the intellect so that would be patent law which covers inventions okay it’s basically an inventor of a new machine or process that’s practical like a gizmo like a mousetrap they have a a monopoly on making that for like 17 years and copyright covers artistic or creative works like like a novel or a painting or a song or a movie nowadays and then there’s trademark which is the right to your reputation in form of a mark like a business’s trademark you know their name like a logo or not a logo yep logo it could be logo brand name product name product line name basically it’s a mark that you use to identify the source of goods okay so I can’t I can’t open up a a hamburger place called McDonald’s with golden arches that’s violate a trademark that would violate McDonald’s trademark now you could have say McDonald’s hardware store if it wasn’t confusing gotcha to if it and there’s laws on that too i’m opposed to all these by the way and then there’s trade secret law which most people it’s all these are arcane and very subtle and hard to understand if you haven’t practiced in as a lawyer and so it’s it takes a while to even explain why I would be against trade secret law because most libertarians like what’s wrong with keeping a secret it’s like there’s nothing wrong with keeping a secret that’s not what trade secret law does trade secret law gives the gives a company who someone else has discovered their secret the right to go to a court and get an injunction from the court to tell that person to keep quiet about it even though they’re not an employee of the I mean so it there’s reasons to oppose it okay it’s kind of like you’re saying oh I’m I’m a libertarian against laws prohibiting heroin use you’re like “What’s what’s wrong with refraining from using heroin?” Yeah yes it’s one of those kind of confusions and trademark they’re like “Well what’s wrong with me?” Or or people make this mistake they’ll say “Well if you don’t believe in ownership of of your labor like which I can get into someone else has to own it so you believe in slavery.” It’s like “No it’s you have to understand property theory it’s not a type of thing that can be owned.” But anyway so I was always uneasy with her argument because she was justifi she came up with this kind of ad hoc argument for why it makes sense to have copyrights last for a limited time like in your novel and and why it makes sense for patents to last for a limited time and I’m thinking like that’s not like natural law thinking that’s not like objective there’s no way the government can get that right there’s no way we can even know there is a right sort of peak in the middle so I was always uneasy with that and I kind of put it to the side but in law school I started thinking more and then when I started practicing law in 92 I started practicing patent law and so I started thinking more and more about this so I started reading tons of stuff and just trying to figure it i thought I’m going to i’m going to solve this problem i’m going to explain the real argument for patent and copyright right but finally I realized oh I keep running into dead ends because it’s unjustified the whole thing is wrong and and and figuring that out required like sort of a unique set of other understandings which only basically Austrian influenced and somewhat legally savvy somewhat academic you know and very radical libertarian people could even think of which is one reason I think that once you put these things this is one of the few areas that’s very difficult and people have gotten very wrong and that it’s somewhat easy to make a lot of progress persuading people to open their eyes like the abortion thing is like impossible anarchy is very difficult but this one I have had lots of people over the years give me your response and that’s a good thing and I don’t take full credit for this by the way i think I put it together better than anyone else has partly because I know IP law and I know how to speak the language and really not mangle the different arguments but I would say if you look at the history of this again Benjamin Tucker was one of the first to start getting it right then basically Sam Konkin and Wendy McElroy were really the first modern libertarians to start seeing this really carefully and really properly especially Wendy and then after that I would say Tom Palmer made the next big huge leap and he basically is the one who I think him with with Hoppe and Mises and some of Rothbard’s stuff mostly Hoppe and Mises with their emphasis on scarcity and human action right with Tom Palmer’s kind of combination of of this stuff helped me to start unlocking it and seeing it properly but I think Tom Palmer’s works in ’89 or something like that he had two articles were just probably the beginning of the modern clarification of this issue c can I stop your just to be clear are you saying all those people were also against IP or that they had necessary building blocks and that you Yes they were sam Konkin was against he was against copyright and his thought would would lead you to thinking that Wendy Wendy was against copyright and patent i mean they weren’t quite as fullthroated as I was and didn’t give quite the exact same arguments but yes they were they were it was more sketchy and shorter but yeah I’d say really it was Sam Konkin and Wendy learned a lot from Benjamin Tucker back in the late 1800s I guess so if you want to trace the history it’d be Benjamin Tucker Sam Konkin Wendy McElroy and then Tom Palmer and then and then my stuff sort of built on top of all that and is a probably more comprehensive and even more fullthroated but this to me this was just a puzzle I had to solve and it was just you know I started going to the libertarian the Mises scholars the Austrian scholars conference sorry at Auburn in like 1995 right after Rothbard died and I would present you know these little 20-minute papers and they were all like just puzzles I was trying to work out that weren’t addressed in a rigorous satisfactory way to me and which I had the ability to sort of do because I knew Roman law I knew common law and I knew libertarian theory and I knew some economics and I knew how to just be logical and try to figure it out and put it together so I wrote on contract theory and I wrote on this law this decentralized law stuff I wrote a rights theory which is this stuff that was inspired by Hoppe’s argumentation ethics which you and I have disagreed on and causality the theory of causation of the law so several areas of interest to me and IP was just one of them but not even my most f I don’t even I I never really enjoyed I liked it at first but I’m not I’m not in love with the practice of IP law i probably should have chosen something else and I don’t love IP theory itself although figuring it out and explaining it probably thousands of times by now to people has forced me to gradually clarify my understanding of economics property law contract libertarian i would probably write that paper a little differently now but I don’t disagree with anything in it i’d probably emphasize the term rivalry or rivalrousness instead of scarcity because scarcity I see now how that misleads people or allows equivocation cuz they’ll take scarcity to mean lack of abundance whereas in economics we mean something we we mean something more like the property of a thing that it can’t be used by more than one person at a time rivalrousness right I might be a little bit harder on trademark than I was then I was a little bit more lenient but the two the two worst are copyright and patent and I think the reason why a lot of libertarians even have been in favor of this and get confused on it is it’s been touted and heralded as part of the part of the free market system right it’s part of the US constitution it’s part of the west it’s part of capitalism it’s been part of American society since since the industrial revolution and it’s called the property right it’s called intellectual property right and we all believe that creativity and and innovation is good so it just seems like it must be part of of the fabric of free market and libertarian compatible laws that we that we favor but it just doesn’t make any sense in the end you know it’s kind of a mixture of incentive arguments with government meddling with market failure arguments with rewarding the creator like a desert argument like someone who creates something other people benefit from should be rewarded so all these kind of confusing ideas melt together and people just accept it of course the truth is it’s there because it benefits certain special interests and it was passed in part because of corrupt government practices in the past which I can go into and then it was adopted by certain people who could take advantage of it and they fought to keep it ever since and then they came up with a propaganda campaign to call it intellectual property instead of government monopoly privilege which is what it was so and then people got used to it and it’s hard to disentangle so why why don’t we Yeah why don’t we start though from scratch so you’re right obviously the historical development of it and so on just like with the you know the the what do you call it trust busting or whatever when you go and look and see how the these suits to to break up so-called monopolies actually come from the competitors and things but in terms of just pure theory somebody who’s never read your article they never heard someone make a a a case like this you know I I know I have a lot of musicians listening and and why why can’t they own their song the way somebody who builds a TV owns the TV yeah and I’ve to be I I have to clarify this over and over that even if you don’t agree with me just be aware that I personally am driven by a love for the mind and the intellect i value creativity i I’m in favor of property rights capitalism free markets and that’s the reason I oppose patent and copyright so it’s not because I’m some lefty who doesn’t like exploitation or profit or rewarding inventor it’s not that so just trust me i could be wrong but it’s not based upon a socialist or a lefty motivation so just a thumbnail sketch you know you basically have humans humans emerge right and like all animals they employ means which which is the Mises human action concept we use scarce resources in the world to achieve our goals so human action is basically just the use of a scarce resource that you can use to causally intervene in the affairs of things to change the outcome of what’s going to happen in the future if you don’t intervene this is just very basic this is praxeology this is Mises right so even Crusoe alone on an island with no other people around he uses scarce resources to achieve goals but he also has knowledge if he didn’t have knowledge he couldn’t act so there’s two basically there’s two fundamental ingredients to all human action that is access to or availability of scarce resources means and knowledge about the way the world works so you have to have some knowledge about what’s coming that makes you uneasy and you want to change that and you have to have some knowledge about how to change it that’s the knowledge of the causal laws of the world so if you feel rumbles in your stomach and think you’re going to get hungry that thought displeases you and you want to stave off being starved so you’re imagining the future and you have some ideas about how to stop yourself from being hungry you know you have to get food that’s a So this knowledge guides your action and then your action might be to go fashion a fishing net or a spear and catch a fish and eat it that would be the use of means guided by knowledge so this is just man acting alone and your body is also another scarce it’s a way you intervene in the world you use your body to act and you employ other things tools right to act this just the basic framework then when other people when you’re in society there’s a benefit to being in society you can trade with other people and you can interact with other people you can learn from other people so you can you can get resources from other people you can get consumer resources or or intermediate resources you know tools and you can get knowledge so you it’s benefits everyone but with other people there’s a possibility of of conflict over these scarce resources because they’re scarce only one guy can use this fishing net at a time and if I have a fishing net and someone takes it I can’t use it to accomplish my means so there’s a possibility of violent conflict and therefore the concept of ownership or property rights emerges which says that it’s a rule specifying who gets to who has the right to use this resource in the case of a dispute and those rules naturally become the natural law rules that we libertarians favor and that law favored basically you own your body which they say you own yourself which is a misleading way of putting it and you own these resources that you homestead or that you acquire by contract so that’s basically libertarianism and the private law that developed is basically finders keepers right and contract that’s I mean Anthony de Jasay has a book choice contract consent it’s very some very simple principles Richard Epstein has this s you know six common law rules for the world I mean the basic rules are very simple and they inform a property system so when you live in society to be able to be secure and able to use these scarce means that means to have successful action and to live a good life you need to be secure in the ability to use these means and that means you either have to have the ability to defend it yourself or you have to live in a society where people by and large respect those rights and that’s what happens in society most people voluntarily respect it because they get benefit out of the system and it’s enforced by a some kind of legal system combined with your own self-defense right you put a lock up you have your shotgun and you can go to your neighbors for help and you can go to a court if you have to and you have deviants every now and then but that’s what a property right system is the property right system is the emergence of a set of practical rules to solve the problem of conflict when there’s a world of scarcity so the entire purpose of property rights is to determine who owns what in a just fair way when there’s a possibility dispute and as you can see this applies only to the scarce means of action not to the knowledge that guides your action because these knowledge can spread the world over which is exactly why the human race has progressed because every century every generation every day the body of human knowledge scientific knowledge technical knowledge philosophical knowledge builds and grows and everyone can dip into it and learn from it and that knowledge magnifies the efficiency of our actions you could say that the amount of scarce stuff on the earth is maybe finite in a sense because there’s only so many atoms but the amount of ideas is potentially infinite and that’s why we’re getting richer every generation because our technical knowledge is getting better but property rights only apply to the things where there can be a dispute over it because the property right always answers the question when there’s a dispute between two or more people over who has the right to use this one thing that only one of them can use who gets to use it okay now we have a set of answers to that but that’s just property law itself but that’s what property rights are now that would be the case in a purely just society a private law society as Hoppe calls it right or an anarcho capitalist society a free a totally free market when a state comes on the scene of course they intervene in certain ways they have to support themselves with taxation which is taking someone’s property without their permission which is a type of theft but people tolerate a certain amount of that to get the protections of the king and etc anyway now what happened was let’s say starting in the middle ages around that time time of the law merchant kings and monarchs increasingly would they would on occasion practice a type of favoritism or protectionism even so this is where patents come from so monarchs would grant someone what they call a letter patent and patent it means open in Latin patente so it was an open letter like the king would write Sir Francis Drake is the only guy who can be a pirate on the high seas or this or this guy this tea company you know that they have the monopoly right to do this in this colony so a patent was basically a monopoly privilege granted by the king and then in exchange the people that got it would be loyal to the king they might help the king collect taxes this kind of stuff so patents were basically just privilege grants by the crown everyone knows this this is like not disputed history at the same time before the printing press it was hard to produce printed works this would be the domain of copyright so the church and the state kind of combined together could easily control what works could be printed right they want thought control they only want you know the Catholic version of the Bible to be printed or whatever you no pornography when the printing press came about it threatened this monopoly right because they now you could have a river of books being printed easily for the masses and so the government of course got into the game and like in England they they had this thing called the stationers company I can’t remember the years from 50 whenever the printing was 1500s I think so they had like this hundred year charter so during that time if you wanted a book published you had to go there and they’re only going to allow certain books to be printed with the approval of the church and the crown right so that’s what copyright came from this basically purely censorship it was control of thought in the meantime this publishing industry started emerging and they got used to the fact that they were the ones who had this basically monopoly on publishing books so go back to the patent thing in 1623 the abuses got so bad that parliament passed what they call the statute of monopolies you can look it up statute of monopolies see they they were honest in their language back then like we used to have a department of war in the US now it’s department of defense right they called these things monopolies and they limited they circumscribed the ability of the crown to grant monopolies like all these privileges he was giving like on who can sell playing cards in the town or sheep skin or whatever but they made an exception they said but if it’s an invention like if it’s if it’s a useful new innovation or invention the crown can still grant them subject to some regulations so patent for inventions escaped this prohibition okay so you’ve had the statute of monopolies which started the basis of modern patent law and then it was emulated by the United States in 1789 when we ratified the constitution and it had a patent clause in there so that’s how it started it started as grant of the government of monopoly protectionist grants which basically protected people from competition and that’s what they do now copyright in 1709 10 Queen Anne when she was under pressure to renew this stationer company’s charter under pressure from the publishers and from authors published they parliament enacted this statute of an 17 I think it’s 1709 but it was ratified in 1710 but anyway that’s the origin of modern copyright so that basically on paper granted the right of copyright to the authors but as a practical matter the authors still had to go to the publishers to get a book published they didn’t have Xerox machines you know they didn’t have photocopiers so so the publishers just turned around and kept their their monopoly going and which has lasted until this day and it’s only now being broken down by Amazon and the internet and self-publishing this is why we’ve had a publishing industry all these years because of the legacy of the censorship system right so an author would have to sign all their rights away to the publisher or the an employee who works for hire as someone authored hired to paint or to compose that as a practical matter they would have to assign their rights to the publishers anyway so it ended up being just like it was under the stage until just recently i mean remember Prince put slave on his cheek for several years because of the horrible way he was bound by his his label’s record contract and this has happened so many times but now thanks to the internet we’re finally freeing we’re seeing the crumbling of the legacy publishing industry we’re seeing the crumbling of the ability to to really strictly enforce copyright law and my hope is that 3D printing will be the analog of that for patents like eventually people will be able to make objects without permission you’ll get an encrypted file that’ll have the design for some device and you’ll just make it even though someone has a patent on it so my hope is that technology will help us to basically evade and and render basically moot the copyright and patent system and the reason I really am worked up about these is I think that really copyright is horrible it it basically censors free speech prevents people from publishing books if they want to prevents documentaries from incorporating photographs and footages that that some rights holders don’t want included and patents are even worse because they basically impede the development of of technical innovation technical of invention because someone is not going to bother to innovate in a field if they won’t be able to sell a product because someone has a monopoly on it so it slows down the rate of innovation and I think that slows down the progress of the human race and it’s it basically kills people because we would have more wealth we’d have more life-saving drugs we’d have more amazing inventions so I think these things are very very harmful to the human race they’re not just abstract problems and the other problem is it’s insidious unlike say the drug war or or or war itself or taxes which most people especially most libertarians even if they’re a minarchist they can kind of see that taxes are wrong it’s wrong to put someone in jail for drugs but it’s harder to persuade them about IP because it’s called intellectual property and it’s and we think of the intellect as good and innovation is good and creativity is good so that’s one reason it’s an insidious problem and I mean you can see even now Trump and these guys are using it china stealing our IP as an excuse to limit free trade so it has lots of tentacles in in in lots of laws.

1:11:52 Bob Murphy: Hey folks let’s take a break from my interview with Stephan Kinsella to talk about you know I’m going to do something new here i’m not going to try to sell you something how’s that i’m just going to encourage you if you haven’t ever read it to read my pamphlet Chaos Theory two essays on what is it private law and private defense something like that i forget what the subtitle is and it’s good stuff so you you can buy it if you want to but the Mises Institute also has the PDF version up there and I will also link in the show notes page to my longer journal article on private law and military defense that was in the journal Libertarian Papers that Stephan is the founder of so for those links go to bobmurphyshow.com/39 and you’ll see the links to my writings on private law and private military defense that’s great stuff Steph let me just sort of crystallize I think what some of the main points you made there just again because for someone who’s never heard this before I know it takes a while to get over it and so I think you in terms of just the justice of it and the nature of property rights you’re saying and that has to be concerning physical tangible things and you know somebody can I own a a pizza if somebody takes a piece of my pizza away that’s one fewer slice I can eat whereas if I create a song and then somebody quote steals my song that doesn’t actually limit what I can do with it if they if they really just copied it you know if if they broke into my house and they know they took the hard drive that it was on then you know maybe that but but it’s not that they stole my song it’s they stole my hard drive that’s the issue and so is that the fundamental difference in terms of why intellectual like it’s it’s it’s not merely that you’re saying like it’s immoral you’re saying it’s incoherent like it doesn’t make sense to say you can own an idea that doesn’t make any sense.

1:13:40 Stephan Kinsella: Yeah so so the word stealing is actually wrong so people use that they’ll call it theft stealing or even the word piracy but literally th those are not going on it’s called copying or learning or competition or emulation if you see someone doing something successful in the market and you learn from them that this is a good thing to do and you start emulating them this is why we have competition so I think the reason it’s incoherent is that I think I wouldn’t say that owning ideas is wrong i’d say it’s literally impossible so it’s it’s it basically every intellectual property law is a disguised transfer of ownership to tangible things so for example if if I have a patent on making an a smartphone with rounded edges which Apple does and I can sue you to prevent you from making a smartphone with rounded edges the court is in effect granting me a property right in the other in the competitor’s factory so you have what I would call in the law calls as a negative servitude or a negative easement sort of like when you have a neighborhood with a restrictive covenant arrangement which everyone has agreed to where every no one can paint their house orange in effect all your neighbors have a partial property right in your house in that they have a veto over one way that you can use it but that’s contractually granted what the patent system does is it grants this negative right this negative easement or this negative servitude it grants it to the patent holder even though the person with the property burdened by it never agreed to it so it’s a taking of property so basically when you say there’s a right to an idea it’s just a way that the that the law in effect gives someone ownership over other people’s property can I Yeah let me just mention because that’s a fundamental point so I I write a short story you know and Microsoft Word on my laptop and I go and I apply for copyright protection and so I I take you to be saying Stephan rather than viewing it as ah now finally the law recognizes my ownership of this story really what’s going on is the law is now limiting the ability of everyone else on planet earth to use their printing presses or blogs or you know Microsoft Word license software in a certain way because now they can’t reproduce quote my story so really it’s not that I have a property right it’s that now everyone else has less of their property rights in their tangible stuff yes and I mean Tom Palmer points that out in his seminal article Roderick Long in like 1995 in his antiip article it points out that owning ideas means owning other people and there’s even been some cases about this like you can’t go on stage and like there’s some lawsuits against yoga practitioners for like certain Bikram some trademarked yoga now this is trademark partly trademark or dance moves that are choreographed moves you can’t dance in a certain way i think there was a Beyonce was challenged for one of these some people have gotten tattoos on their faces like some basketball players and those are copyrighted tattoos and so now what do you do do you do you actually have to force them to have surgery or laser surgery to remove it you have now the law usually backs down from these they find a way you know cuz hard cases make bad law or whatever you say but they they shy away from the extreme implications but that those are implications and some cases have literally ordered books not to be published JD Salinger has his Catcher in the Rye and there was a sequel written by someone and his estate went to court and the court banned the publication yeah and that’s a good point i know like when I was younger I was a Star Trek geek and there was you know this whole like genre of Star Trek books that were not you know based on the movies but just you know people taking the characters invented by Gene Roddenberry and making new situ and that those are of course all you can’t do that you need to get permission from whoever owns the the copyright to do that and it’s amazing you know so you can’t you can’t just take Captain Kirk and Spock and put them in some new story because oh no those characters are owned by whatever paramount whoever owns it well and you hear the same kind of complaints about like colorization of movies And people say “Oh you’re destroying the work.” It’s like I’m not destroying it i mean the black and white one’s still there you know you don’t like it if someone’s doing it but you know I think Benjamin Tucker had a point he said something like “If you go into a public street and drop a bunch of money people are going to scramble after it you can’t complain that they’re doing that likewise if you have an idea that you want to keep to yourself keep it to yourself but if you make information public you can’t complain if other people use the information that you make public and so if you come up with a new mousetrap design you can keep it to yourself but if you want to sell this mousetrap you need to sell it and you probably want to tout its new features to sell it so you’re going to reveal to the world necessarily in most cases you’re going to reveal to the world how you’re doing this and guess what you’re going to invite competition and people are going to over time compete with you the real complaint I think about about not having patents is basically it’s a fear of what people call unbridled competition so and they explicitly say this so if you think about it the like the Austrian idea and correct me if I’m wrong because I’m probably slightly misstating it but the idea is that there’s a natural rate of interest or profit but the profit is something above the rate of natural rate of interest and tends to go down to that as you attract competition and you attract competition over time when people notice that you’re doing something that is a new way of pleasing consumer wants so if you have a pizza delivery idea and you start doing that eventually there’s going to be dominoes and other companies and your profit rate will go down so you have to continually keep innovating or keep your reputation up or something to make this profit and it might be easier to make profit at first but not forever the problem is that in some types of of sectors of the economy some services and goods there’s a heavier proportion of that good that is that is easily replicable like a book for example especially nowadays like the main value of a book is not the value of the paper it’s it’s it’s the particular arrangement of the ink on it it’s the pattern and that’s pretty easy to copy so the concern about people that are in favor of copyright and patentable inventions is that or like pharmaceutical drugs is that those types of things it’s much easier for your competitors to compete they can compete quicker and sooner than they could build up a competing donut shop or something because those are more capital intensive etc and so basically their fear is that competition is too easy so they want to they want to make competition harder so they want they want the field any field of of economic trade that relies kind of heavily on patterns of information that are easy to replicate they want to slow down competition to make it more like in the tangible world so that it’s harder to compete so that the innovator has like a resting period where they can make basically monopoly profits for a while to justify their original expenditures so that’s the utilitarian argument which there’s no evidence for by the way either on the utilitarian and empirical side of things all the evidence points against Let’s stop hang on one second let me just make sure we drive that point because yeah that that’s the last thing I want you to to hit here is the incentive issue but but yeah just in terms of that you’re you’re right i mean it’s like and again I I know there are particular musicians who listen to this podcast and I’m I’m tryinging them as the the target audience here to get them to see so clearly like in music yes you you do copy things or you or like podcasting for example I saw when I started this show that Joe Rogan would have somebody on for three hours and at first I thought that’s insane who’s going to sit there but then I actually listened to some of the guests that I enjoyed and I realized oh wow you can really get into deep stuff if you have someone on for a long time that you’re not going to get you know like as opposed like Tom Woods’s rapid fire interviews where he has people on and so so imagine if Joe Rogan could sue me and say “No no that was my idea to have really long interviews you’re not allowed to do that Bob Murphy.” I mean that would be insane or Einstein comes up with E=mc² imagine if other physicists had to pay him a fee to use that equation or you know like a mathematical theorem once it gets proved imagine if somebody said you know what I don’t I don’t want anyone the mathematician using this would would other you know math journals have to pretend they didn’t know that and you know so it’s it’s insane so the the patent system comes up with arbitrary exceptions in in response to those things because they know that life would break down if you started doing that so they’ll they make up an exception for for purely abstract laws of nature and math for no real good reason i mean you could use E=mc² and apply it to make some nuclear powered device maybe get a patent on that but not the original abstract formulation Ayn Rand they try to distinguish between discovery and invention and as a patent lawyer I my personal view is none of these things are objective at all the law is totally subjective it’s not even easy to apply the existing law and the standards in the law are not objective they’re totally arbitrary and even in in music just to give like so there clearly in order for music to progress people do have to emulate there’s a story that I thought was funny so that you remember stuff in the the we are the world song when all those different musician and the A’s came together and so the story goes that Michael Jackson went up to Daryl Hall of Hall and Oates and apologized to him and said “Hey I’m sorry but you know the baseline you guys have in that song can’t go for that.” You know no can do that song that I I stole that for my for Billie Jean and so for folks oh if you play the beginning of those two songs actually you know at first you might think it’s one song or the other they’re very similar and apparently Daryl Hall said “Oh don’t worry about it we stole it from somebody else.” So obviously they were joking and they don’t mean literally steal but clearly musicians all you know oh you know the Beatles were influenced by Buddy Holly you know their story of Paul McCartney talking about he and John Lennon went to go see him it’s like wow how is he playing like that and just studying him and going back to their garage and trying to reproduce it clearly for music to progress artists have to quote steal from each other all the time and so it’s a pretty arbitrary line to say where should the law step in and science too I mean every everything is incremental there there are no inventions or innov innovations in a vacuum everything builds upon previous knowledge even the fact we use language to communicate with each other no one no one came up with the language but we all use it and benefit from it I think people also confuse the idea of accreditation and dishonesty and plagiarism those are all completely different concepts so they they think certain people should get credit you know Michael Jackson should be seen as the guy who came up with Billie Jean and by and large he is but that’s got nothing to do with rights and plagiarism is a completely different thing altogether that’s basically pretending you’re the author of something in a contractual setting like a school like a university without giving full attribution credit but there’s almost like this obsessive idea that you should have a we should live hyperfootnoted lives and every single little thing we ever do we have to have some chain of credit i mean Galambos who I mentioned was one of the craziest he is renowned to have changed his name from James Andrew Galambos to Andrew Joseph Galambos because his dad was the other name and he didn’t want to infringe his dad’s rights in his name and he had this idea that Thomas Paine invented the concept of liberty so every time you use the word liberty so he thought his followers should all put a nickel in some box some escrow account for whenever we finally discover who Paine’s descendants are and we can pay them back for using the word liberty but they’re not even joking it sounds like a joke but this is the consequence of taking this idea seriously of owning owning ideas because there is no dividing line and like I said no idea should be ownable because ideas are not ownable and then you’ll have people who defend the IP system they will they will say “Oh you’re you’re being dishonest because the copyright system doesn’t let you protect ideas is it only lets you protect the application of an idea or blah I but on the other hand half of the IP supporters say it’s important to protect ideas so they will just flip back and forth as they need to and avoid the fundamental issue which is that you cannot own patterns of information or as Roderick Long called it in his article you can’t own universals like if you own let’s say you own a red car you own that car but you don’t own its redness if you did own its redness that means you own everything that’s red so all of a sudden you own every everyone else’s red car or maybe never their red balloons maybe everything they have or maybe everything that weighs the same amount so every item that you own piece of property has material attributes or characteristics or properties it has weight an age a size a shape and then patterning on its surface like a book you don’t own those features you own the thing and it has certain features so this is the mistake people make they they abstract away the ownership of the resource by the way it’s the same thing with Bitcoin i’m I’m a Bitcoin enthusiast and and hopeful type right and and interested in it but when people say you own a Bitcoin a Bitcoin is just an abstract concept of a of an entry in a ledger and the ledger is just a collection of data or information which is stored on various people’s hard drives around the world those hard drives are physical devices owned by individual people they own those hard drives no one else owns it so if you were to own your Bitcoin that means that if someone steals it you should be able to go to a court and I guess they’re supposed to give it an order to all the thousands of people around the world who have hard drives storing the blockchain and give them an order to change the to unwind it or to change it which is what basically Craig Wright by the way who’s the Bitcoin SV guy is arguing for right now cuz he he’s arguing that the Bitcoin Cash the BCH people conspired and violated antitrust law he’s got a lawsuit he filed in Florida or one of his companies and I guess the theory is they want this court to order the Bitcoin Cash blockchain to unwind and go back to where Craig wants it to be which is of course impossible technologically and it’s just ridiculous and it but it demonstrates that this whole idea of owning having a property right in patterns of information has to undermine property rights and other things just like when you print money the government prints money it reduces the purchasing power of existing money just like when the government comes up with positive rights it’s not free they can’t just grant everyone a right to education or health care we all have to pay for it so nothing comes for free and when you grant property rights in non in non-scarce things you necessarily necessarily undermine property rights in scarce things precisely because all property rights are enforced by physical force and can only be enforced against physical things right i mean if I sue you for copyright infringement I want your money or I want to stop you from push publishing a book so I’m really just using this as an excuse to take care of other resources so I I know we only have you for a few minutes left here and I want to get to the questions so I would encourage those listening because I know you know here I think Stephan makes a great case for just a you know a direct frontal assault on the notion of intellectual property but you have concerns like well gee but why would anyone write songs again so I especially for those who are upand coming artists I would say imagine how much easier it would be for you to break out and become known and get big if the major record labels didn’t have this incredible power that the government system right now is giving to them that a lot of what you do is you to get new you you quote give away your music for free and you make your money you know touring and things like that or or having you know signed albums or other goodies that you give away besides just the actual song itself so I would I would say that actually I think your business model right now probably does involve a lot of just quote giving the songs away to to get your name brand recognition up and and that the way you know the reason it’s so hard to break into the music industry is precisely because these big players have the government has their back and sort of you know beating down people who challenge their monopoly position or their cartel position and and not only that summary on that issue stem yes and we have copyright right now and their songs are still being copied because of the internet so copyright is too late it doesn’t prevent copying anyway yeah it’s sort of like the drug law or drug war that even if you thought it was a good idea clearly it’s not working so it’s not like we’re getting rid of heroin use by making it illegal okay so Steph I know let me just let’s go real quick through these i know you got to get going here soon but we just have six questions from the listeners if you just want to do a rapid fire is that all right with you that’s fine yeah sure we can go we can go a little bit longer if it’s up to you if you Yeah it’s fine with me yeah i just don’t want to tax you too I know your time is scarce so so somebody asks what is his favorite fiction book.

1:30:35 Stephan Kinsella: Oh well probably US Constitution oh one probably The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson that first trilogy of his also love The King Must Die by Mary Renault I don’t think I have a favorite i actually don’t my mind doesn’t always work that way like having a favorite especially cuz tastes change over time sure Yeah Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis is also a great one so okay that’s a good selection.

1:31:07 Bob Murphy: Somebody asks “What was his worst story working as a lawyer?” I think maybe he means the best story involving something that was distasteful when you were working as a lawyer.

1:31:18 Stephan Kinsella: i mostly do patent prosecution which means obtaining patents for people and I sort of assuage my discomfort over that by imagining myself to be like making guns or bullets like so I’m selling it to people some can use them for good some for evil because a patent can be used justly defensively so I don’t have a if it’s distasteful i wish my job didn’t exist i wish that people didn’t have to waste money on people like me in terms of litigation I’ve been lucky that I’ve only been involved on the defense side of patent suits if I had to be part of the offensive assertion of a patent I probably wouldn’t I wouldn’t do it now and I don’t know what I would I would just turn down the the client so can you explain what do you mean defend defensive you practice defensive patent line what does that mean so if I own a patent I can go after my competitors and just sue them or I can if I’m a patent troll I can have a patent and just go after people practicing something similar to what the patent covers and ask them for money otherwise I’m going to sue them so that would be an offensive use i would say an aggressive use is it’s an act you’re trying to use the courts to steal people’s property but if someone sues me for patent infringement I might counters sue them for violating one of my patents and I think that’s totally justified this is one reason why people accumulate patent war chests is so they can use them defensively if they get attacked so you have all these people it’s sort of like the nuclear situation between US and Russia they keep accumulating these weapons for tons of money just to keep each other from using them right it’s like that just as a deterrent effect it’s a deterrent and it’s also it helps them establish cartels so you have Apple and Samsung and Google all these big companies IBM and you know GE they accumulate patents in vast areas and if they sue each other they can usually settle eventually and cross license and then go back to business and pass these wasted costs on to the consumer but little companies can’t even compete because if they start competing and making like some small startup starts making a smartphone similar to an iPhone they’re going to get sued out of existence and they won’t have any patents to sue Apple back with so it helps establish walled gardens or cartels or oligopolies so which is not surprising because a patent is a monopoly grant by the government right and and then you have the government has antitrust law and so the courts say well there’s a tension between like you think there’s a tension between the government’s antitrust law and the government’s patent law so they say well if you abuse your patent monopoly then that’s an antitrust violation in other words if you use it so the the government’s schizophrenic I I I like to say so I don’t have any horror stories i actually enjoyed the practice of law i I worked in Philly for a while and I enjoyed practicing in a in a Philly law firm even though being from Louisiana I was kind of more intellectual than a lot of these guys and knew more about patents and double e stuff and so it was fun sort of being a a Louisiana lawyer in Philly but I don’t have any horror stories i I’ve enjoyed I’ve enjoyed law i had no I never had any traumatic experiences well probably if I asked the guys in that firm they say “Oh yeah there was this one guy from Louisiana let me tell you stories about that clown.” Oh well I I can’t there was I did make one big mistake when I was younger but I I can’t repeat the details but I I typed something in a joke email to my secretary and she made a mistake of telling a female partner at the firm cuz she thought it was funny and that almost got me in trouble but I’ve learned to learn what jokes were inappropriate now.

1:34:53 Bob Murphy: Did you say “Hey that was my email or my note you shouldn’t have given that to somebody else.” That was Yeah I’ll i’ll tell you offline okay let’s see somebody wants to know is there any substant area where Kinsella disagrees with Hoppe.

1:35:10 Stephan Kinsella: Maybe on the naming of your article there are a couple of quibbles I have in some things I think in his argumentation ethics he glided a little bit too casually back and forth between the way he described property rights and like he’ll he used it descriptively sometimes and he used it normatively sometimes but and I mentioned that in my long review I did 1994 but I I thought that could be repaired just by carefully right working it out maybe some little economic issues where like he and Guido have disagreed like on this division between your income between savings and investment and consumption and kind of the the praxeological the way to look at that I think that’s in the footnote of Guido and Hans’s two articles in that big big fractional reserve banking debate I don’t think I agree with Hans or any of the Rothbardians strictly speaking with this idea of fractional reserve banking being inherent fraud and this kind of double title problem i think they’re I think that’s slightly wrong I think in practice it’s been fraudulent and I think it’s economically incoherent so I agree with them ultimately but I think that this idea that it’s inherently fraud and that even if the bank put a big warning notice on these IOUs they’re issuing that this is just an IOU and it’s not backed that it should still be outlawed like Guido is really strong on this he thinks that should be outlawed I I think that gave ammunition to the to the free bankers like a White and Selgin because they could pick on them for that mistake when if they’d stuck to the economic incoherencies of fractional reserve banking that would have been better but that’s just a little issue I’m probably not quite as I’m not I’m not really as interested in the culture war stuff like Hans is that he got into later in his democracy and subsequent stuff but I find it interesting and and persuasive he does have an article where he posits an alternative explanation for the Malthusian trap how we got out of it and I tend to agree with his criticism of existing theories like they’re not adequate like explaining the industrial revolution basically and his theory sounds somewhat plausible but I don’t think he proves it it’s basically that we we evolved to a certain amount of intelligence like in Europe at a certain point in time around 1800 where the average intelligence was high enough that the average person was smart enough to emulate the ideas of the in of the geniuses who had always been there and then then the ideas could spread that is a that is an intriguing theory but I don’t I don’t I’m not persuaded of it i have I have a different theory but I don’t know but that’s about it that I can think of off hand.

1:38:03 Bob Murphy: We got two more here so one person wants to know so he here he’s alluding to something I wasn’t aware of i guess you had a discussion with Nick Sarwark about the LP and and this guy just wants to know like do you have any further thoughts about how the LP should proceed going forward or if that’s not your bag or your your cup of tea or how what’s your take on that.

1:38:26 Stephan Kinsella: Well my like I mentioned my first encounter with LP was Ron Paul when he visited LSU and I think my very first vote was 84 Reagan’s second election i voted for Reagan even though I was a registered Democrat because my parents told me to be so my very first vote was a Republican but after that I I always voted Libertarian even though I was never a member of the party and even though I don’t vote usually but I’ve never been hostile to the LP i just think politics is kind of futile but when Tom Woods I don’t know if you were part of that but about a year or two ago when the LP Mises caucus got going and Wood and I think Woods and some other guys got critic they they criticized the LP and then they got criticized they said “You’re not even a member how can you criticize us?” They said “All right then we’re going to join.” So I think Woods and three or four five other prominent libertarians all joined and I thought to myself you know over the years everyone always asks me they always all the normal people in my life they always confuse libertarian small l with libertarian big L they all assume I’m a member of the LP and I’m always trying to explain to them the difference and they don’t understand they don’t care and I thought to myself you know what i’m not really into political activism i don’t think it’s going to work i’m more into theory and trying to live a good life and do it that way and or whatever you know but they are my peeps basically so these guys are all my people why am I denying it so hell yeah I’ll just So I joined the LP just to join and I my one thought was if I could make one difference it would be to get them to adopt an anti-IP plank in their platform i mean there’s no reason it shouldn’t be in there i know it probably won’t be because there’s such a Randian influence and there such a utilitarian segment of of libertarians but I thought maybe I can do that and there’s actually this girl Karen Ann Harlos who is on the committee or something and she asked me for a draft I don’t know maybe 9 months ago and I had written one actually a draft of how the LP platform should be amended to oppose patent and copyright and I gave it to her and I think they’re trying to get it on some state platform first so if I could make that one change I would be I’d be somewhat mollified but I have nothing against the LP i I personally think that whoever they nominate for president should be a libertarian I would not I would not have voted for William Weld i would I don’t think he’s libertarian I would I wouldn’t mind voting for a minarchist or someone who I don’t agree with on everything but at least if they call themselves libertarian and they they’re basically a core libertarian so I’ll probably vote libertarian again if I vote in two years but I have nothing but good wishes for the LP and I understand why they why their squabbles about purism versus pragmatism and all that kind of stuff.

1:41:04 Bob Murphy: Okay and then the last one is somebody wanted to know what are your religious views if if you have any if you want to talk about that at all you want to answer for me.

1:41:22 Stephan Kinsella: Well I was reared Catholic i was a strong Catholic until maybe 14 or 15 and then I basically started questioning things and became an atheist so I’m an atheist and I was kind of militant for a while I I don’t think I’m militant anymore I’m very I understand I put it this way i would prefer real religious people than secular democrat atheist liberals who worship the state so they’re they’re religious too they just think they’re better than that and they worship a horrible monstrous god which is the state so I’m I’m an atheist but I try not to make it the core of my life and I’m I’m not I I don’t think I’m militant about it and I when I get weird questions like “Do you respect other people’s belief?” I don’t know what that means to respect someone’s beliefs i mean right I I guess you have someone’s ill-willed or or honest or intelligent or correct but I I think people have the right to believe whatever they want and I understand that some people are religious and I don’t think I’m hostile to it so that’s my basic stance.

1:42:28 Bob Murphy: Okay fair enough i will be praying for you Stephan i’m not offended by that okay well thanks so much for your time at some point I want to have you back cuz as you alluded to you and I do disagree about argumentation ethics but I think that would you know we wouldn’t be able to do it justice in this in this setting so we’ll have you back again we could probably talk a good 30 40 minutes on that so maybe we should do a separate episode because it would probably be interesting to we’ve never really talked that much in detail about it apart from our writings right and and that that is definitely something I want to have you back on and we can talk about that so I understand Stephan that you have some books that are coming out in the near future do you want to tell the listeners about them.

1:43:28 Stephan Kinsella: Sure real quickly I I do plan to write a new IP book someday from the ground up based upon the the kind of different ways I’ve learned since writing that I the other one about presenting the argument and some nuances I’ve learned since then and I’m going to call that Copy This Book so maybe two three years that’ll come out but that’s a long-term project i might also do an anti-IP libertarian reader with a David Koepsell and maybe Gary Chartier but this year I have coming out next month I have a book coming well Chris Sciabarra in New York and Roger Bissell and one other editor have a book coming out called Dialectics of Liberty it’s being published by Lexington i think it comes out in June and I have a chapter in there on on sort of the argumentation ethics and my own approach to to rights theory libertarian rights theory and in September I have a book coming out called International I keep forgetting the title of my own book let me see here international Investment Political Risk and Dispute Resolution a practitioner’s guide and that’s by Oxford and that’s going to be like a 800 page lawyers legal scholars reference serious thinker huh well in a way this is my most practical and mundane book but it in a way it’s my most systematic and scholarly work but it’s I have two co-authors my one co-author is an an American lawyer who lives in France who’s one of the world’s leading international arbitrators Noah Rubins and we have a new co-author this time from from Cyprus a Cypriot law professor so we cover the whole spectrum of international investment law and it’s fascinating and the only libertarian angle is that from my point of view the goal of it is to look as a lawyer for the benefit of clients at ways to protect their property rights when they invest in other countries because there can be takings and expropriations and things like that and then finally I’ve been working for many years on just coming up with the energy to put together an edited collection of my more libertarian theory articles and that should come out either later this year or early next year and that’s going to be called Law in a Libertarian World okay that sounds great and I guess the barking dogs means it’s time for us to wrap up here so yeah that’s by the way that’s my poodle Louis V Mises Kinsella barking well great so we I will have you back on at some point Steph because we need to talk about argumentation ethics but obviously we don’t have time to do it now that’s something where we you and I do disagree strongly and it’ll be good good for the listeners to hear that so I’ll have you back at some point to talk about that in the meantime thanks so much for your time Stephan thanks for being a part of the Bob Murphy Show thanks you’ve just experienced another episode of the Bob Murphy Show the podcast promoting free markets free minds and grateful souls for more information and to subscribe to this podcast visit [Music] bobmurphyshow.com higher get you higher get you higher

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Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 267.

I was a guest today on Sal Mayweather’s “The Agora” podcast, ep. 48 (Soundcloud version below). From his shownotes:

We discussed Craig’s copyright application of the Bitcoin White Paper and whether they lend any credence to his claim of being Satoshi Nakamoto. Does a copyright application imply that CSW is actually Satoshi? Stephan also breaks down some of the torts Craig has filed against against various individuals who have said he isn’t Satoshi and/or referred to him as a fraud. Can he use the courts to force individuals to recognize him as Satoshi?

This is a great opportunity to learn the standard libertarian position on IP, the difference between a copyright and a patent & how it all applies to current crypto-community from the world’s leading expert!

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Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 266.

This is my appearance in Episode 36 of the Did You Know Crypto Podcast, with host Dustin. We talked “about the possibility of using patents as an attack vector on Bitcoin.” As Dustin summarized in his show notes:

Stephan and I talk about…

• What is a Patent?
• Differences in EU/US & China
• Why is it so “hallowed”
• Open Source Software and patents
• What is a “Patent Troll”
• Craig Wright’s patents
• Can Bitcoin developers be sued?

NOTES:

• Stephan on Twitter
• Stephan’s website
• History of Patents
• Paris Convention
• Patent cooperation treaty
• Current (2019) US /China Tarriff dispute
• KOL234 | Vin Armani Show: Live from London: Kinsella vs. Craig Wright on Intellectual Property
• KOL267 | Sal the Agorist Interview: Bitcoin, Copyright, Craig Wright
• Tom Woods w/Stephan Kinsella – Ep 225 “Patents & Liberty”
• Tom Woods w/Stephan Kinsella – “Libertarianism & Intellectual Property”
• Article on Nchain Hiring Patent Lawyer

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My article “What Libertarianism Is” was previously translated (by Lacombi Lauss) into (Brazlian) Portuguese as “O que é libertarianismo.”

In

• Propriedade, Liberdade & Sociedade: Ensaios em homenagem a Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Rothbard Institute Brasil, 2022), Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, co-editor, with Jörg Guido Hülsmann (Mises Institute, 2009)

Now a new translation, in Portugal Portuguese, by Carlos Novais, appears, with an introductory note, in a new book on libertarianism, Liberais À Solta!.

Contre la Propriété Intellectuelle, a French translation of my  Against Intellectual Property, translated by Daivy Merlijs and Stéphane Geyres, is now available.

According to the translator, the previous French translation available was not complete. The present translation is complete and also has updated the dead URLs as footnotes using Wayback Machine.

Here are PDF, mobi, epub, and Word versions.

My gratitude toward the translators and publisher.

Vive la France and Vive la liberté!

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An older translation, by Xavier Gillard, is also here: PDF; Amazon kindle.

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Update: A commentary on and summary of the French translation of my monograph, by Marius-Joseph Marchetti, has been published here: Contre la propriété intellectuelle : un essai éclairant [Part 1], and Part 2, and is reprinted below (auto translation). See Marchetti: Against Intellectual Property: An Enlightening Essay.

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My paste of the Word file is below: forgive formatting errors: [continue reading…]