A “friend” and I were discussing Rand — he said that though Rand said she opposed taxes, “eliminating taxes is among the last reforms Rand would make”. I don’t recall this–instead, I seem to recall she said this about abolishing drug prohibition. Anyone know where there is a cite or quote for either contention?
In a facebook note, Quee Nelson writes about Mises the Utilitarian (appended below). I wonder if he was more of a consequentialist than a utilitarian. Below I collect some points I’ve made along these lines before:
As I noted on p. 50 of my Knowledge, Calculation, Conflict, and Law, reviewing Randy Barnett’s Structure of Liberty:
Barnett’s aim in this ambitious book is to determine the type of legal system, laws, and rights which are appropriate, given the widely-shared “goal of enabling persons to survive and pursue happiness, peace, and prosperity while living in society with others” (p. 23). Happiness, peace, and prosperity are fine principles to select and quite compatible with libertarianism, but Barnett does not attempt to try to justify these basic norms or values. His argument is thus hypothetical and consequentialist, though not, he maintains, utilitarian (pp. 8, 12, 17–23, esp. 22–23).
See also Barnett’s Of Chickens and Eggs—The Compatibility of Moral Rights and Consequentialist Analyses.
From my What Libertarianism Is:
The libertarian seeks property assignment rules because he values or accepts various grundnorms such as justice, peace, prosperity, cooperation, conflict-avoidance, and civilization.[14]
In a recent excellent facebook post by Quee Nelson (see appended below), she wrote:
Some of my best friends are Randians. They’re excellent people, and one of the things I love most about them (among many things), is the fact that, no matter how generous, compassionate, and charitable they behave, they insist they’re just being selfish.
This called to mind some of the things I’ve written about this issue, a couple of which I collect here:
From The Inaugural Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society:An Incidental Record, by Sean Gabb:
Then there was Stephan Kinsella, who subjected me during a boat trip around the Ionian coast to a friendly but probing examination of what I thought about Ayn Rand and epistemology. I am not sure if he approved of all I gave in answer. Even so, the surrounding conversation was enjoyable. He was scathing about Objectivism. He noted that David Kelley is an improvement on the official movement. “But when someone has to write 15,000 words on why it is permissible to be nice to others, or to tolerate disagreement” he said, “there must be something wrong with his underlying philosophy”.
From Nov. 2008
Posted by Stephan Kinsella on November 4, 2008 09:45 PM
Well, I followed through on my no-voting plan. Drove my 5 year old to the local polling station around 4pm. Very light crowd.
I signed in, and took him to the “booth”–not really a booth, just a little terminal with privacy wings on the side. Not a booth like I had in Pennsylvania where you close the curtain around you. After going through the options, I snapped a few shots of the screen and my kid (holding his “Don’t Vote–It Only Encourages Them” placard). I selected no choices, then hit “submit ballot”–it confirmed that I really wanted to submit a “Blank Ballot” and I did. The election judge guy saw my flash and came over, telling me it’s against federal law to take pix, so he’d have to ask me to delete the picture from my camera. I assured him it was just a picture of my handsome boy. He backed off. Yeah! Back off, state-monkey boy! And lower my taxes, while ye’re at it, too!
Posted by Stephan Kinsella on October 20, 2008 11:44 PM
I don’t always vote–maybe once every 3 or 4 elections–and when I do, I have always voted LP where possible (except for my first vote, in 1984, for Reagan). This year, however, I can’t bring myself to vote for any of the candidates running for President–Obama and McCain are obviously out, and I can’t see voting for Barr, the Libertarian candidate, either (see L. Neil Smith’s criticism). But this year, I want to take my 5 year old to the polls so he can see democracy in action (with appropriate commentary from Dad). So I’ve decided we’ll go together, sign in, go into the booth; I’ll show him how the machine works, and all the abominable choices–and then we’ll leave. I figure if his friends ask him about his trip to the polls, and ask him who his daddy voted for, they won’t be able to comprehend his answer.Update: A Canadian reader writes as follows:
We just had our Federal election up here in Canada.
While we don’t get to vote for Prime Minister and can only vote for the local Member of Parliament, the choices were not good at all (for my riding at least): we had 4 socialists and a separatist (whose party I couldn’t vote for anyway) as the national leaders, and there was not a local candidate I could vote for in good conscience either.
Anyway, I took my 4 year-old son with me, I showed him how we would mark an ‘X’ on the paper ballot of the candidate we wanted to vote for. Then, we spelled out N-O-P-E, one letter in each of the 4 boxes on the ballot to spoil it.
That is one great thing about paper ballots, you can always be sure to spoil them.
Good luck with your voting.
The world inclines to Socialism because the great majority of people want it. They want it because they believe that Socialism will guarantee a higher standard of living. The loss of this conviction would signify the end of Socialism.
–Mises, Socialism
Added to my favorite quotes… (h/t Bryan Caplan)
This is a feature cast, an episode of The Command Line Podcast. [mp3 ; flac]
No listener feedback this week.
Due to the length of the interview, there is also no new hacker word of the week this week.
The feature this week is an interview with cartoonist and animator, Nina Paley, creator of “Sita Sings the Blues“. I’ve spoken and written about Nina’s story before, the troubles clearing her use of Annette Hanshaw’s torch songs that led her to work with Karl Fogel at QuestionCopyright.org. In the course of the interview, we also mention the store for “Sita” merchandise , the creator endorsed mark, “Minute Memes“, the “Sita” soundtrack by Todd Michaelsen, “Sita” on a persistence of vision wheel based display, and Bill Cheswick’s poster made from every frame of “Sita”. Sadly, by the time you hear this, you’ll have missed her talk at AU but I discuss it a bit in the intro to this episode.
Interview: Nina Paley [48:18m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Grab the detailed show notes with time offsets and additional links either as PDF or OPML. You can also grab the flac encoded audio from the Internet Archive.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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My article “Legislation and Law in a Free Society” was published today on Mises Daily (Feb. 25, 2010). An earlier version was published in 1995 in The Freeman, “Legislation and Law in a Free Society,” which was based on the longer “Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 11 (Summer 1995).
I was listening to the Mises Podcast and came across Rothbard’s wonderful 1972 lecture Scarcity and Choice. Around 34:09 to about 38:00 he discusses why specialization and the division of labor is useful, indeed essential, for civilization and human life and prosperity. He criticizes those intellectuals who still maintain that we should go back to a regime of self-sufficiency; that the specialization and division of labor is evil and alienating. He mocks the intellectuals who, as Marx put it, dream of some communist utopia where everyone would spend an hour at the factory, an hour at the field, an hour writing and thinking, and so on. As Rothbard notes, no one will be a great mathematician by devoting half an hour a day to it before rushing off to the fields (think of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hour rule” in Outliers, according to which “the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours”); so, without specialization, creative, intellectual development would be impossible; as would economic prosperity. We would “give up most of the production of the human race.”
Rothbard seemed to find a bit bewildering that there were, back in 1972, still intellectuals favoring self-sufficiency and attacking the division of labor and capitalism as being alienating. After all, didn’t they understand what pre-industrialist conditions were like? Didn’t they understand how much worse was the quality of life when self-sufficiency was the rule? But similar claims still abound, even among some libertarian intellectuals, mostly left-libertarians and their fellow travelers, who seem to be nostalgic for the simpler, agrarian times of yore (see Left-Libertarian Science Fiction: An Oxymoron?; On the Fate of our Left-Libertarian Comrades’ Ideas). It is no doubt true that state subsidization and intervention in various aspects of the market, such as transportation and protectionist or other laws that raise barriers to entry to smaller firms, have distorted the economy and made self-sufficiency more expensive or less feasible than it otherwise would be, but this does not imply that there is something wrong with the institution of employment, with firms, with industrialism, international trade, or the division labor.
[Mises]
Objectivists say they are against taxation; they say that you can fund a state by some kind of contract fee or lottery system. Obviously, you can’t, not without the state compelling membership or outlawing competitors, which permits them to charge monopoly prices which amounts to a tax.
But Objectivists are strongly pro-intellectual property (see Why Objectivists Hate Anarchy; IP: The Objectivists Strike Back!). They believe you deserve to be rewarded for creative, innovative, inventive action. But note that they also are extremely fond of the American Constitution and Founders; they believe the Constitution is a great achievement of the intellect—this corresponds with their belief that a proper state, such as the original American state, is a great value to man. Well, put two and two together: the Founders gave us a great creation: the Constitution, and our system of government. We all benefit from it. It’s only fair that the Founders charge us a royalty for our use of their creation—and naturally, the state itself is the agency as the natural successor to its parent-creators, the Framers and Founders, to inherit and manage this royalty-collecting right. Don’t call it a tax—call it a royalty.
See also the following post from the Mises Blog (Oct. 18, 2010)
A Thought Experiment about Patents and Taxes
In Reducing the Cost of IP Law, I argued that one improvement to the patent system (short of abolition) would be to eliminate injunctions and provie for a compulsory licensing system. As I noted there, the compulsory licensing approach is not new. Some countries impose compulsory licensing on patentees who do not adequately “work” the patent. I discussed provisions in US patent law that do permit compulsory licenses already in some situations. 1 I was reminded of this when discussing with some friends a comment to this blogpost, Pirated Software Could Bring Down Predator Drones. The commentor stated: “Just declare the IP a state secret. The market value is then zero, as the company cant sell it legally. Buy it from the company for 1 cent. Then classify the contract as top secret. If the company complains, send the people to jail or gitmo.”
As I noted in the previous posts, the feds have the authority to license third parties to manufacture patented articles, without patent infringement liability; this was threatened in the Cipro anthrax drug a couple years ago. The feds then have to pay “compensation” to the patent holder. Something similar happens if the some federal agency issues a “secrecy order” for military or other reasons for a pending patent. 2
It occurs to me that the very notion of a compulsory license for IP can help to illustrate how IP is an obvious transfer of wealth. Consider: under current law, the state grants a patent monopoly to some applicant. Then, the state can declare a compulsory monopoly (or issue a secrecy order), and pay you some compensation for this “taking”. Obviously this payment comes from tax payers. So the IP step can be seen as just an intermediate step to justify transferring money from everyone else to the patentee. It’s as if you tell the state you have an idea and the state takes money from others and gives it to you. Come to think of it, this is exactly the idea behind proposals for tax-funded “innovation” awards–proposed even by some libertarians (!). 3 The point is that even when the state does not issue the compulsory license, they are simply deputizing the patentee to go out and extort the money himself; it’s like taxation.
(Incidentally, in An Objectivist IP Argument for Taxation, I provide another argument for why IP could be used to justify taxes.)
I confess that I hate self-promotion but I cannot resist reposting comments like the following from the single most important libertarian thinker and organizer of our generation:
Daily Bell: One of the hardest issues to resolve from a free-market point of view is ownership of intellectual property. Can you tell our readers where you come down on this difficult issue? In a free-market, would individuals be able to claim and enforce intellectual property rights with any prospect of success?
Rockwell: Rothbard condemned patents but not copyrights. Mises and Machlup saw patents as government grants of monopoly, but neither condemned them outright. Hayek was against copyrights and patents, but didn’t write about them much. It is digital media that have brought the issue into focus. The key thinker here is Stephan Kinsella. He and Jeffrey Tucker have done the heavy lifting and convinced most all of us that intellectual property is an artifice that has no place in a market economy. There are incredible implications to this insight. The infinite reproducibility of ideas means that we stand a great chance for success. The fact that ideas are not scarce goods means that they need not be controlled. This is a wonderful thing. There is much work left to do in this area. The whole history of invention needs revision, and our theory of markets needs to take better account of the central place of emulation in social progress.
Invasive Government and the Destruction of Certainty, by Ridgway K. Foley Jr., The Freeman (January 1988 • Volume: 38 • Issue: 1).
An oldie but a goodie. I cited it in my Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society, Journal of Libertarian Studies 11 (Summer 1995). I met Foley in 1995 or so on a trip to Portland to visit a patent client (Intel). We had a nice lunch together.
Stephan Kinsella is a libertarian writer and retired patent attorney in Houston, Texas. He has published widely on various areas of libertarian legal theory and on legal topics such as intellectual property law and international law. His publications include Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Papinian Press, 2023), Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2008), International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (Oxford, 2020), and The Universal Principles of Liberty (2025).
My Failed Libertarian Speaking Hiatus; Memories of Mises Institute and Other Events, 1988–20192025
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