StephanKinsella.com

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 166.

I was a guest back on June 6, 2012 on the Peter Schiff Show (guest host Jeff Tucker), discussing problems with patent law. The original audio file for the full show is here; my segment was from 1:00:55 to the end (about 20 minutes total). For the podcast feed I have included only my segment.

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Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 165.

This is my Austrian AV Club Interview by Redmond Weissenberger, [RIP] Director of the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada, back from May 3, 2012. We had a long-ranging discussion of intellectual property and libertarian theory, including a discussion about exactly how Ayn Rand and other libertarians got off track on this issue, in part because of flaws regarding “labor” and “creationism” in Locke’s original homesteading argument; inconsistencies between Rand’s support for IP and her recognition that production means rearranging existing property; and also the different roles of scarce means and knowledge in the praxeological structure of human action. (For more on these issues, see my blog posts Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and ‘Rearranging’, Hume on Intellectual Property and the Problematic “Labor” Metaphor, Rand on IP, Owning “Values”, and ‘Rearrangement Rights’, and The Patent Defense League and Defensive Patent Pooling, and my article “Intellectual Freedom and Learning Versus Patent and Copyright.”)

The video is below as well. (Trivia: I used my iPad, running the Skype app, for this interview. More stable and better camera than a MacBook.)

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Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 164.

Friday, Sep. 23, 2011, I conducted a Mises Academy Webinar discussing the America Invents Act, signed into law Sept. 16 2011 by President Obama. I discussed the webinar in a Mises Daily article, Obama’s Patent Reform: Improvement or Continuing Calamity? (archived comments) and discussed the AIA in further detail in The American Invents Act and Patent Reform: The Good, the Meh, and the Ugly.

In the webinar, I:

1. summarized the basic problem with patent law from a free-market perspective;
2. presented a series of real patent reforms that could make significant improvement in patent law (short of abolition);
3. explained and critiqued the relevant changes made by the America Invents Act;
4. briefly summarized other imminent IP legislation and treaties on the horizon; and
5. responded to questions from attendees.

The slides used in the webinar are provided below.

Video

Slides:

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Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 163.

I was interviewed yesterday by James Sirois of the Critical Thinking is Required podcast, episode 27. The shownotes are below:

Released: December 2, 2014      By: James

In CTIR Interview 27: Stephan Kinsella (Intellectual Property), I interview Stephan Kinsella about intellectual property. Specifically, we discuss copyright, trademark, patent, and trade secret law. Additionally, we analyze how these various types of law stifle innovation and competition.

Critical Thinking is Required is a political and educational podcast for individuals with endless curiosity.

Thank you for listening to CTIR. If you enjoyed the show, please share it with your friends.

http://criticalthinkingisrequired.com

Thank you Mevio’s Music Alley for providing license free music.

The intro and outro song is titled “Power Within Me” by Junga World.

Sources:

https://stephankinsella.com/ http://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0 http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/12/argument-preview-justices-will-use-rare-look-at-trademark-law-to-consider-broad-and-narrow-conceptions-of-trademarks/

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Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 162.

Interview on IP and libertarianism by Fabrizio Sitzia, LibertariaNation.org (Italy) (April 15, 2012; recorded Feb. 23, 2012)

I was interviewed Feb. 23, 2012, by Fabrizio Sitzia of the Italian libertarian group LibertariaNation.org. It was posted on YouTube. We discussed intellectual property and related issues such as SOPA, plagiarism, IP-by-contract, and other libertarian issues such as prospects for liberty in the future; the importance of technology, the Internet, and globalism; Ron Paul and electoral politics; and libertarian sentiments and receptiveness among today’s young people. (See also Italian Libertarian IP Debate.)

More info at the LibertariaNation post Intervista a Stephan Kinsella (English translation from Google translate).

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:54 — 23.3MB)

Related

• The Origin of “Libertarianism,” Mises Blog (Sept. 10, 2011)
• The new libertarianism: anti-capitalist and socialist; or: I prefer Hazlitt’s “Cooperatism”
• Rothbard on Leonard Read and the Origins of “Libertarianism” (Nov. 17, 2014)
• Wikipedia entry on libertarianism, claiming 1796 usage of “libertarian” in the political sense
• SPRADING, “LIBERTY AND THE GREAT LIBERTARIANS”
• Timo Virkkala, Grand Theft L-Word
• Jeffrey Tucker, “Where Does the Term ‘Libertarian’ Come From Anyway?” FEE, September 15, 2016
• Mark Thornton, “Libertarianism: A Fifty-Year Personal Retrospective,” J. Libertarian Stud. 24, no. 2 (2020): 445–460

In a previous post I observed that modern libertarianism originated with the thought of Rand, Rothbard, Friedman, Hazlitt, and Read in the 1960s and 1970s (and that the term “libertarian” can perhaps be traced back to 1802). ¹ I’ve also argued that the key figure of modern libertarianism, ultimately, was Murray Rothbard, “Mr. Libertarian.” ² I still think this is right, but it’s interesting to note that in Rothbard’s journal Libertarian Forum, this distinction was bestowed upon Leonard Read in his obituary, in Vol. 17.5-6, May-June 1983, Rothbard (presumably it was Rothbard, as the editor), wrote: ³

More than any other single person, Leonard was the founder of the modern libertarian movement. … ⁴

In addition, more than anyone else Read coined the name “libertarian” for the current movement. Before that, we had no single name, awkwardly going back and forth between “individualist” and “true liberals”. The problem with the latter phrase is that the quasi-socialists had already succeeded in appropriating the term “liberal”, and calling ourselves “true” anything was confusing and hardly persuasive. And the term “individualist” tended to confuse political philosophy with possessing a spirit of individual autonomy. Read and a few others launched the term “libertarian” for the freedom philosophy, and it stuck—the only case I know of when we were able to appropriate a word from others. For before that, communist-anarhcists had often referred to themselves as “libertarian.” The first time when we were referred to publicly as “libertarians” was in an odious book, published in the 1950’s, by a certain Ralph Lord Roy, entitled Apostles of Discord. There was a repellent literature in those days of works written by aggressive centrists and “moderates” who pilloried all “extremists” as per se evil. Roy, a Social Gospel Protestant, wrote his book to attack both Communist and ultra-rightist “extremists” in the Protestant church. That was par for the course in those days, but lo and behold! he included a chapter called “God and the ‘Libertarians'”, spotting quasi-anarchistic extremists then centered around a libertarian publication for Protestant ministers called Faith and Freedom.  Libertarianism had arrived on the American ideological scene.

Ironically, as Rothbard goes on to note, “In later years, Leonard Read drew away from the libertarian movement which he had named and founded.”

[Update: used in 1796, apparently: See Wikipedia entry for Libertarianism:

The first recorded use of the term libertarian was in 1789, when William Belsham wrote about libertarianism in the context of metaphysics.^{[12][non-primary source needed]} As early as 1796, libertarian came to mean an advocate or defender of liberty, in the sense of a supporter of republicanism, when the London Packet printed on 12 February the following: “Lately marched out of the Prison at Bristol, 450 of the French Libertarians”.^[13] It was again used in a republican sense in 1802 in a short piece critiquing a poem by “the author of Gebir” and has since been used politically.^[14][15]

The use of the term libertarian to describe a new set of political positions has been traced to the French cognate libertaire, coined in a letter French libertarian communist Joseph Déjacque wrote to mutualist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1857.^[16] Déjacque also used the term for his anarchist publication Le Libertaire, Journal du mouvement social (Libertarian: Journal of Social Movement) which was printed from 9 June 1858 to 4 February 1861 in New York City.^[17] Sébastien Faure, another French libertarian communist, began publishing a new Le Libertaire in the mid-1890s while France’s Third Republic enacted the so-called villainous laws (lois scélérates) which banned anarchist publications in France. Libertarianism has frequently been used to refer to anarchism and libertarian socialism.^[18][19][20]

In the United States, the term libertarian was popularized by the individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker around the late 1870s and early 1880s.^{[21][better source needed]} Libertarianism as a synonym for liberalism was popularized in May 1955 by writer Dean Russell,^{[citation needed]} a colleague of Leonard Read and a classical liberal himself. Russell justified the choice of the term as follows:

Many of us call ourselves “liberals.” And it is true that the word “liberal” once described persons who respected the individual and feared the use of mass compulsions. But the leftists have now corrupted that once-proud term to identify themselves and their program of more government ownership of property and more controls over persons. As a result, those of us who believe in freedom must explain that when we call ourselves liberals, we mean liberals in the uncorrupted classical sense. At best, this is awkward and subject to misunderstanding. Here is a suggestion: Let those of us who love liberty trade-mark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word “libertarian.”^{[22][better source needed]}

Subsequently, many Americans with classical liberal beliefs began to describe themselves as libertarians. One person who popularized the term libertarian in this sense was Murray Rothbard, who began publishing libertarian works in the 1960s.^[23]

In the 1970s, Robert Nozick was responsible for popularizing this usage of the term in academic and philosophical circles outside the United States,^[24][25][26] especially with the publication of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a response to social liberal John Rawls‘s A Theory of Justice (1971).^[27] In the book, Nozick proposed a minimal state on the grounds that it was an inevitable phenomenon which could arise without violating individual rights.^[28]

References

1.  “libertaire – traduction – Dictionnaire Français-Anglais WordReference.com”. www.wordreference.com (in French). Retrieved 6 October 2025.
2.  Wolff, Jonathan (2016). “Libertarianism”. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London. doi:10.4324/9780415249126-S036-1. ISBN 9780415250696.
3.  Vossen, Bas Van Der (2017). “Libertarianism”. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.86. ISBN 978-0-19-022863-7.
4.  Mack, Eric (2011). Klosko, George (ed.). “Libertarianism”. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy: 673–688. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199238804.003.0041.
5.  Boaz, David (30 January 2009). “Libertarianism”. Encyclopædia Britannica. Archived from the original on 4 May 2015. Retrieved 21 February 2017. [L]ibertarianism, political philosophy that takes individual liberty to be the primary political value.
6.  “Non-Aggression Principle”. Archived from the original on 14 December 2024. Retrieved 23 November 2024. There are a small group of libertarians who do not accept the non- aggression axiom.
7.  Otero Carlos-Peregrín [gl], ed. (1994). Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments, Volumes 2–3. Taylor & Francis. p. 617 Archived 9 January 2020 at the Wayback Machine. ISBN 978-0415106948.
8.  Woodcock, George (2004) [1962]. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Peterborough: Broadview Press. p. 16. ISBN 978-1551116297. [F]or the very nature of the libertarian attitude—its rejection of dogma, its deliberate avoidance of rigidly systematic theory, and, above all, its stress on extreme freedom of choice and on the primacy of the individual judgement [sic].
9.  Long, Joseph. W (1996). “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class”. Social Philosophy and Policy. 15 (2): 310. “When I speak of ‘libertarianism’ […] I mean all three of these very different movements. It might be protested that LibCap [libertarian capitalism], LibSoc [libertarian socialism] and LibPop [libertarian populism] are too different from one another to be treated as aspects of a single point of view. But they do share a common—or at least an overlapping—intellectual ancestry.”
10.  Carlson, Jennifer D. (2012). “Libertarianism”. In Miller, Wilburn R., ed. The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America. London: SAGE Publications. p. 1006 Archived 30 September 2020 at the Wayback Machine. ISBN 1412988764. “There exist three major camps in libertarian thought: right-libertarianism, socialist libertarianism, and left-libertarianism; the extent to which these represent distinct ideologies as opposed to variations on a theme is contested by scholars.”
11.  Francis, Mark (December 1983). “Human Rights and Libertarians”. Australian Journal of Politics & History. 29 (3): 462–472. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8497.1983.tb00212.x. ISSN 0004-9522.
12.  William Belsham (1789). Essays. C. Dilly. p. 11. Archived from the original on 11 April 2021. Retrieved 26 October 2020Original from the University of Michigan, digitized 21 May 2007
13.  OED November 2010 edition
14.  Seeley, John Robert (1878). Life and Times of Stein: Or Germany and Prussia in the Napoleonic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 3: 355.
15.  Maitland, Frederick William (July 1901). “William Stubbs, Bishop of Oxford”. English Historical Review. 16[.3]: 419.
16.  Marshall, Peter (2009). Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. p. 641. “The word ‘libertarian’ has long been associated with anarchism, and has been used repeatedly throughout this work. The term originally denoted a person who upheld the doctrine of the freedom of the will; in this sense, Godwin was not a ‘libertarian’, but a ‘necessitarian’. It came however to be applied to anyone who approved of liberty in general. In anarchist circles, it was first used by Joseph Déjacque as the title of his anarchist journal Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social published in New York in 1858. At the end of the last century, the anarchist Sebastien Faure took up the word, to stress the difference between anarchists and authoritarian socialists”.
17.  Woodcock, George (1962). Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Meridian Books. p. 280. “He called himself a “social poet,” and published two volumes of heavily didactic verse—Lazaréennes and Les Pyrénées Nivelées. In New York, from 1858 to 1861, he edited an anarchist paper entitled Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social, in whose pages he printed as a serial his vision of the anarchist Utopia, entitled L’Humanisphére.”
18.  Nettlau, Max (1996). A Short History of Anarchism. London: Freedom Press. p. 162. ISBN 978-0900384899. OCLC 37529250.
19.  Ward, Colin (2004). Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction Archived 13 January 2016 at the Wayback Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 62. “For a century, anarchists have used the word ‘libertarian’ as a synonym for ‘anarchist’, both as a noun and an adjective. The celebrated anarchist journal Le Libertaire was founded in 1896. However, much more recently the word has been appropriated by various American free-market philosophers […].”
20.  Chomsky, Noam (23 February 2002). “The Week Online Interviews Chomsky”. Z Magazine. Z Communications. Archived from the original on 13 January 2013. Retrieved 21 November 2011. The term libertarian as used in the US means something quite different from what it meant historically and still means in the rest of the world. Historically, the libertarian movement has been the anti-statist wing of the socialist movement. Socialist anarchism was libertarian socialism.
21.  Comegna, Anthony; Gomez, Camillo (3 October 2018). “Libertarianism, Then and Now” Archived 3 August 2020 at the Wayback Machine. Libertarianism. Cato Institute. “[…] Benjamin Tucker was the first American to really start using the term ‘libertarian’ as a self-identifier somewhere in the late 1870s or early 1880s.” Retrieved 3 August 2020.
22.  Russell, Dean (May 1955). “Who Is A Libertarian?”. The Freeman. 5 (5). Foundation for Economic Education. Archived from the original on 26 June 2010. Retrieved 6 March 2010.
23.  Paul Cantor, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty Vs. Authority in American Film and TV, University Press of Kentucky, 2012, p. 353, n. 2.
24.  Carlson, Jennifer D. (2012). “Libertarianism”. In Miller, Wilburn R., ed. The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America. London: SAGE Publications. p. 1006 Archived 21 December 2019 at the Wayback Machine. ISBN 1412988764.
25.  Lester, J. C. (22 October 2017). “New-Paradigm Libertarianism: a Very Brief Explanation” Archived 6 July 2018 at the Wayback Machine. PhilPapers. Retrieved 26 June 2019.
26.  Teles, Steven; Kenney, Daniel A. (2008). “Spreading the Word: The diffusion of American Conservatism in Europe and beyond”. In Steinmo, Sven. Growing Apart?: America and Europe in the 21st Century Archived 13 January 2016 at the Wayback Machine Growing Apart?: America and Europe in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge University Press. pp. 136–169.
27.  “National Book Award: 1975 – Philosophy and Religion” (1975). National Book Foundation. Retrieved 9 September 2011. Archived 9 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine
28.  Schaefer, David Lewis (30 April 2008). “Robert Nozick and the Coast of Utopia” Archived 21 August 2014 at the Wayback Machine. The New York Sun. Retrieved 26 June 2019.

1. See Kinsella, “The Origin of ‘Libertarian’”; also “Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned?“, in ,Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023). [↩]
2. Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned? (transcript). [↩]
3. The PDF and HTML versions of the journal are apparently down now, but .mobi and epub versions are available here. [↩]
4. See also on this, See “Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned?“. [↩]

Below is an unedited (raw) transcript of my Yale speech “Balancing Intellectual Property Rights and Civil Liberties: A Libertarian Perspective,” available at KOL151. [continue reading…]

Below is an edited transcript of my presentation “Argumentation Ethics, Estoppel, and Libertarian Rights” delivered (by remote video) at the 6th Adam Smith Forum, Moscow, Russia (Nov. 2, 2014).

Video and audio for the speech, plus further information and related resources, are available at Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 161.

Argumentation Ethics, Estoppel, and Libertarian Rights 

Stephan Kinsella
6th Adam Smith Forum, Moscow, Russia
Nov. 2, 2014
(Edited transcript)

Hello. This is Stephan Kinsella. I am speaking today from Houston, Texas in the United States. I am happy to be able to present to the Adam Smith Forum and I appreciate the invitation to speak. I did speak here in 2011, ¹ remotely that time as well. I was unable to attend in person. And I hope to remedy that someday and to visit Moscow and Russia. But I appreciate the invitation.

Today’s topic will be on “Argumentation Ethics, Estoppel, and Libertarian Rights”. I have spoken and written on these topics before. More detail can be found in the notes to the podcast I will do of this lecture after the event. But if you want to follow up you can go to my website which is stephankinsella.com and I will have resources available there, primarily a previous Mises Academy course called “Libertarian Legal Theory” and also a course on the social theory of Hans-Herman Hoppe. ²

So a brief introduction. I am an attorney in Houston, Texas. I am a long-time libertarian and follower of the Austrian School of Economics, primarily the thought of Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard and Hans-Herman Hoppe, and also have been an anarchist libertarian for quite some time. I have developed my own set of views about libertarian rights and related matters and that’s what the topic of today’s conversation will be. [continue reading…]

1. KOL108 | “Why ‘Intellectual Property’ is not Genuine Property,” Adam Smith Forum, Moscow (2011). [↩]
2. See:
   • KOL153 | “The Social Theory of Hoppe: Lecture 1: Property Foundations” (Mises Academy, 2011)
   • KOL018 | “Libertarian Legal Theory: Property, Conflict, and Society: Lecture 1: Libertarian Basics: Rights and Law” (Mises Academy, 2011)
   • New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory
   • Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide
   • Defending Argumentation Ethics: Reply to Murphy & Callahan
   • A Libertarian Theory of Punishment and Rights
   • How We Come To Own Ourselves

   [↩]

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 161.

This was my (remotely delivered) presentation at the 6th Adam Smith Forum, Moscow, Russia (Nov. 2, 2014):

From the programme:

“Entitled “Argumentation Ethics, Estoppel, and Libertarian Rights,” Kinsella discusses the nature and definition of libertarianism and surveys different arguments and theories for its particular conception of rights and politics, including natural rights, consequentialist, and utilitarian approaches. He concludes with an overview of two more recent and unique approaches to justifying libertarian rights, the “argumentation ethics” approach of Austrian economist and political philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Kinsella’s own “estoppel” theory of rights.”

This is my second speech at the Adam Smith Forum; the first was “Why Intellectual Property is not Genuine Property,” 3^rd Adam Smith Forum, Moscow, Russia (Nov. 12, 2011), also via remote video. [continue reading…]

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:13 — 27.6MB)

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 160.

I was on Ben Stone’s “Bad Quaker” podcast yesterday, episode 449. We discussed IP and then some of Ben’s previous comments on Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s views on immigration law.

Related links:

• Bad Quaker podcast: 0448 pc383 Hoppe’s Immigration (corrected)
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s “Immigration And Libertarianism” at Lew Rockwell
• My article  Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:14:15 — 29.1MB)

Related:

• Property Title Records and Insurance in a Free Society
• Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe on the “Original Sin” in the Distribution of Property Rights
• Many of these issues are also discussed in Legal Foundations of a Free Society, e.g. in ch. 2, n.36, ch. 11, n.12, ch. 25, text at n.42
• Kinsella on the Chicago Sit-in: “Shoot ’em” (Freedom demonrats); Shoot the looters!, LewRockwell.com (Sept. 22, 2008)
• Murray N. Rothbard, “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle (1969),” Panarchy
• Jeff Deist, “Rothbard on Slavery Reparations,” Power & Market (July 12, 2019)
• Jeff Deist’s breakdown of Rothbard’s approach to such property issues in “A Libertarian Approach to Disputed Land Titles,” Mises Wire (June 3, 2021)

In the June 15, 1969 issue of The Libertarian Forum, in an article “Massacre at People’s Park,” Murray Rothbard writes:

The cry has gone up that all this was necessary to defend the “private property” of the University of California. In the first place, even if this little lot was private property, the bayoneting, gassing, torturing, and shooting of these unarmed park-developers would have been “overkill” so excessive and grotesque as to be mass murder and torture and therefore far more criminal than the original trespass on the lot. You do not machine-run [sic] someone for stealing an apple; this is punishment so far beyond the proportion that “fits the crime” as to be itself far more criminal than the original infraction. So that even if this property were legitimately private the massacre is still to be condemned.

Secondly, it is surely grotesquerie to call the muddy lot “private property”. The University of California is a governmental institution which acquires its funds and its property from mulcting the taxpayers. It is not in any sense private property then, but stolen property, and as such is morally unowned, and subject to the libertarian homesteading principle which we discuss below. The people of Berkeley were homesteaders in the best American—and libertarian—tradition, taking an unused, morally unowned, muddy lot, and transforming it by their homesteading labor into a pleasant and useful people’s park. For this they were massacred.

This has hints of the leftist and left-libertarian view of property rights—that if there is “taint” or “original sin” in the origin of title to current possessed resources, then the title is not legitimate, and the resource may be regarded as “unowned” and is legitimately subject to homesteading. Why something that is stolen is to be regarded as unowned, as opposed to owned by some dispossessed claimants and original owners, is not clear, and seems to contradict later writing by Rothbard. ¹

[Update: see also Kevin Carson on Confiscating Property from the Rich, discussing Rothbard’s “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle,” from Libertarian Forum, vol. 1.6, June 15, 1969, making similar left-libertarian arguments. And see also Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe on the “Original Sin” in the Distribution of Property Rights as well as Justice and Property Rights: Rothbard on Scarcity, Property, Contracts… ]

But in any case, later writing by Rothbard, as of 1974 at the latest, seems to reject any such implications. As I noted in my post Justice and Property Rights: Rothbard on Scarcity, Property, Contracts…, Rothbard published his article “Justice and Property Rights,” 1974, and in two forms: first, in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, which is available online here; and also, a second version, in Property in a Humane Economy, Samuel L. Blumenfeld, ed. (the second version is also included as a chapter in The Logic Action One, which is not online, and in Economic Controversies, which is available online). The two pieces seem identical but the latter version, from the Blumenthal collection, appends an important concluding paragraph that is not present in the earlier version:

It might be charged that our theory of justice in property titles is deficient because in the real world most landed (and even other) property has a past history so tangled that it becomes impossible to identify who or what has committed coercion and therefore who the current just owner may be. But the point of the “homestead principle” is that if we don’t know what crimes have been committed in acquiring the property in the past, or if we don’t know the victims or their heirs, then the current owner becomes the legitimate and just owner on homestead grounds. In short, if Jones owns a piece of land at the present time, and we don’t know what crimes were committed to arrive at the current title, then Jones, as the current owner, becomes as fully legitimate a property owner of this land as he does over his own person. Overthrow of existing property title only becomes legitimate if the victims or their heirs can present an authenticated, demonstrable, and specific claim to the property. Failing such conditions, existing landowners possess a fully moral right to their property.

It appears that language was added by Rothbard to combat the arguments of some, such as some left-libertarians, who want to argue that existing property titles are illegitimate because of their non-immaculate origins and, presumably, ought to be wrested from current nominal owners, especially the wealthy, and I suppose redistributed to the proles.

Or, as Rothbard wrote in ch. 9 of The Ethics of Liberty (1982):

To sum up, for any property currently claimed and used: (a) if we know clearly that there was no criminal origin to its current title, then obviously the current title is legitimate, just and valid; (b) if we don’t know whether the current title had any criminal origins, but can’t find out either way, then the hypothetically “unowned” property reverts instantaneously and justly to its current possessor; (c) if we do know that the title is originally criminal, but can’t find the victim or his heirs, then (c1) if the current title-holder was not the criminal aggressor against the property, then it reverts to him justly as the first owner of a hypothetically unowned property. But (c2) if the current titleholder is himself the criminal or one of the criminals who stole the property, then clearly he is properly to be deprived of it, and it then reverts to the first man who takes it out of its unowned state and appropriates it for his use. And finally, (d) if the current title is the result of crime, and the victim or his heirs can be found, then the title properly reverts immediately to the latter, without compensation to the criminal or to the other holders of the unjust title. ²

I do not see a closely corresponding passage in For A New Liberty (1973) (I stand to be corrected on this), so it appears to me that sometime between 1969 and 1973, Rothbard’s thought on this matter developed.

See also the related thoughts of thinkers like Mises and Hoppe on this issue, as discussed in Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe on the “Original Sin” in the Distribution of Property Rights.

1. I’ll have to find this language; I forget where it is. [↩]
2.  But cf. some arguably inconsistent comments elsewhere in ch. 9, and also in ch. 10. [↩]