Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 128.
From Jan. 2012, an interview by Peter Mac from The Peter Mac Show about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:23 — 5.1MB)
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 127.
From December 2011, an interview by Stefan Molyneux for his Freedomain Radio program about the evil Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. We discussed the First Amendment violations of and other problems with SOPA.
Moly’s original video was taken down when he was deplatformed.
Youtube transcript and Grok shownotes below.
Grok shownotes:
Episode Overview: SOPA, Piracy, and Internet Freedom
In this episode of Freedomain Radio, host Stefan Molyneux interviews intellectual property critic Stephan Kinsella about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and broader issues surrounding copyright enforcement. Kinsella provides an overview of SOPA’s status, noting its delay until January amid widespread opposition, and criticizes it as a tool for big media industries like the RIAA and MPAA to ratchet up penalties for infringement. He argues that copyright is a government-granted monopoly incompatible with free speech and human liberty, potentially even unconstitutional under the First Amendment. The discussion highlights the tension between copyright’s censorship effects and the internet’s role as a “copying machine,” drawing parallels to the drug war’s futile escalation.
Historical Context and DMCA Critique
Kinsella traces copyright’s evolution, referencing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) from the 1990s, which included safe harbor provisions that inadvertently allowed the internet to flourish by shielding ISPs and platforms from liability for user actions. However, he points out abuses like takedown notices, exemplified by Uri Geller’s attempts to remove embarrassing footage despite lacking rights. Molyneux concurs, likening it to suing a road maker for a bad driver, and notes how risk-averse platforms side with copyright holders, stifling fair use. The conversation positions SOPA as an unnecessary layer atop the DMCA, potentially breaking DNS protocols and enabling ex parte shutdowns without due process.
Impacts of SOPA and Technological Workarounds
The hosts discuss SOPA’s potential to create “permanent pirate communities” by driving hardcore users offshore with encryption and tools like DeSOPA or MafiaFire add-ons, while inconveniencing law-abiding citizens and chilling speech. Kinsella warns of broader state control, using IP enforcement as a pretext alongside child pornography or terrorism fears, and predicts SOPA’s unconstitutionality due to prior restraint issues. Molyneux adds that it could exacerbate civil unrest by suppressing dissent during economic turmoil, and both criticize the “dinosaur mentality” of media industries clinging to outdated models, ignoring studies showing pirates often buy more content.
Alternative Business Models and Creative Incentives
Exploring life without strict copyright, the duo highlights successful freemium approaches, such as comedian Louis CK earning $1 million in days from a $5 DRM-free video release, or Molyneux’s own experience freeing his books and thriving on donations. They advocate tipping-based systems for artists, akin to waiters, and suggest authors like J.K. Rowling could profit via pledges or endorsements. Molyneux emphasizes how low barriers to digital donations enable voluntary support, countering claims of market failure, while Kinsella mocks government-funded innovation panels as bureaucratic absurdities that could cost trillions.
Government-Media Alignment and Economic Ramifications
The episode delves into motivations behind SOPA, with Kinsella attributing it to media bribery of politicians and state desires for internet control, echoing historical monopolies like the Statute of Anne. Molyneux speculates on an alignment where Hollywood’s reliance on government protection ensures pro-state narratives in media, avoiding anti-government films amid social unrest. They warn of job losses as IT firms flee U.S. jurisdiction and investment chills, framing SOPA as rent-seeking with visible gains for media but invisible societal costs.
Molyneux’s Alignment with Kinsella’s Anti-IP Views
Throughout the discussion, Molyneux shows strong alignment with Kinsella’s anti-IP stance, though he stops short of explicitly calling for the abolition of patent and copyright laws. He actively supports Kinsella’s critiques by sharing personal anecdotes, such as releasing his books for free and advocating tipping models, implying copyright hinders better systems. Molyneux counters pro-IP arguments—like diminished creativity without controls—by citing billions of unpaid blogs as evidence against underproduction, and he ridicules piracy loss calculations as “insane.” His libertarian framing of SOPA as government overreach and enthusiasm for freemium economies indicate he views IP as unnecessary and harmful, consistent with abolitionist views, but without a direct statement like “abolish copyright.” This implicit agreement is evident in his positive engagement and lack of pushback against Kinsella’s core arguments.
Youtube transcript (cleaned up by Grok):
Podcast Transcript: KOL127 | Freedomain Radio: SOPA, Piracy, Censorship, Internet
Introduction and Lighthearted Banter
0:00
Stefan Molyneux: All right. Hi, everybody. It’s Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio. I have, I guess, the original Steph. I would be the Stef version B, the revision, the beta. This is Stephan Kinsella, who’s going to be talking to us about SOAP, if I understand this rightly. The need for more personal hygiene among libertarians. Did I get that correct?
0:14
Stephan Kinsella: That is not what I prepared for today, Steph.
0:20
Stefan Molyneux: So, you haven’t showered. That’s what you’re saying. Okay. So, SOPA. I did some writing on it and some reading on it, and it seems alarming in a way that all these initiatives seem alarming. The only way that I can see what is most alarming about it is, as usual, by what the government says it’s never going to be used for. Whatever the government says things are never going to be used for, I assume that’s immediately what it’s going to start being used for. But I wonder if you could go over what you find most heinous and deleterious about this. Is it imminent? It’s coming up for a vote pretty soon.
Overview and Status of SOPA Legislation
0:48
Stephan Kinsella: Well, I just heard today or yesterday the most recent news about the status of this bill, which is apparently it is now delayed until January. Last Friday, everyone was worried it was going to be pushed through by the Republicans and, I guess, the Democrats too. Then they delayed it and said it was delayed until January. On Monday, they said, well, we’re going to take it up again on Wednesday, which is today. Then they finally said, no, we’re going to delay till next year. So, I think we have a little reprieve. But these guys are relentless. The big media, you know, the music industry, the RIAA, the MPAA, the software industries, they are relentless in pressuring Congress to ratchet up the penalties for copyright infringement. I don’t think they’re going to give up. So, I think it’s a matter of time. Maybe it’ll be watered down a little bit.
Background on Copyright and SOPA
1:39
Stephan Kinsella: Let me give you a little background on what’s going on here. As you know, I’m a strong opponent of copyright. I think it’s basically a government grant of monopoly privilege, and it is inconsistent with human liberty and human rights. In fact, I think there’s a good argument that it’s inconsistent with the First Amendment, with free speech rights, because it basically prevents you from publishing or saying certain things. You could even argue that the copyright clause in the US Constitution, which was in 1789, when the Constitution came out, was superseded by the Bill of Rights in 1791, two years later. So, if there’s an inconsistency between free speech and the censorship that’s wrought by copyright, then the later provision would have to prevail. That’s an argument that I haven’t heard many people take up, but I do think you could argue that. Most people think that the copyright clause is legitimate and the free speech clause is legitimate, and they recognize there’s a tension. So, they say we have to balance these things.
2:40
Stephan Kinsella: So, you have this unprincipled approach, which you and I hear all the time, that the government or the courts have to balance these interests. We have to balance the incentive of copyright and the creativity that it inspires, allegedly, with free speech rights. So, there’s a balancing effect. We’ve had copyright for a long time, and there is tension. Then, in the ’90s, this thing called the DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was passed, which was a ratcheting up of the power of copyright in the digital age. Luckily, at the time, the proponents of this, I think, did not realize the effect of the safe harbor provisions that some of the opponents insisted be put in, because it basically allowed the internet to flourish.
Impact of DMCA Safe Harbor Provisions
3:29
Stephan Kinsella: If those safe harbor provisions had not been put in, the internet may not have taken off. There may not have been a YouTube, a Twitter, or a Facebook. The safe harbor provision basically shields a publisher or an ISP from liability for the allegedly copyright-infringing or defamatory actions of a user who posts on that site, because otherwise, they might be liable for that. Then, the person who claims they’re a victim of copyright infringement or defamation could go after the website or the host or the ISP.
4:09
Stefan Molyneux: Right? It’s like you wouldn’t sue the road maker for a bad driver.
4:15
Stephan Kinsella: Exactly. So, this safe harbor provision is why we have now this kind of arcane system of DMCA takedown notices, which is still not the best system, but at least it’s a procedure. There’s some due process. There’s some understanding of what’s going on. It can be abused, and it is abused regularly because if you get a site taken down with a DMCA takedown notice and you’re wrong about the copyright claim, there’s really not much that the victim of this can do if their video, media, or blog is shut down. But at least there is some system. Instead of trying to fix the problems with this DMCA, they’re adding yet another layer on.
Examples of DMCA Abuse
4:52
Stephan Kinsella: I wanted to mention too that I was reading that Uri Geller, a psychic charlatan from the 1970s, was on The Tonight Show and was pretty much humiliated by having all his tricks exposed by Johnny Carson. He actually asked for this stuff to be taken down, though he has no copyright holdings over it, and the site owners agreed. That’s just because, you know, who’s going to stand on principle and face years of this sort of back-and-forth?
5:15
Stefan Molyneux: Yeah, legally he actually had no right because he probably signed a waiver, and if you film someone, the copyright is in the person who films it, not the person being filmed.
5:27
Stephan Kinsella: But basically, if you threaten to sue someone, then they know there’s a chance they might be liable. If they just respond the way the DMCA says they should respond, then they have the safe harbor of liability protection. So, they take it down out of risk aversion. A lot of times, the other side can respond with a response. But if your response is fair use, which it often is—like, well, yeah, technically this looks like it’s a use of someone’s copyrighted material, but I have a fair use claim—well, fair use is one of these nebulous, vague things that has to be decided by a court, usually. So, the ISP or YouTube is going to just say, “Well, how do I know if it’s fair use or not? I want to keep my safe harbor. I want to keep my limitation of liability.” So, it tends to cause them to have a hair-trigger in siding with the rights holders, the copyright holders. You’re exactly right about that.
Layering New Laws on Top of DMCA
6:27
Stefan Molyneux: So, you’re saying that they’re adding more layers on at the moment. Like all laws, they just grow and grow. It’s like stalagmites. They just grow and grow. So, they don’t sweep away and start with a clean slate. Is this being layered on top of the Millennium Act?
6:40
Stephan Kinsella: Yes, layered on top of that and some recent acts which penalized streaming. But basically, about two or three years ago, there was an act called the PRO-IP Act, which they tried, and they didn’t quite succeed. Then, it was succeeded by one called the COICA, Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. COICA went down to defeat about a year ago, and now we have the son of COICA, which is PIPA. We call it the son of COICA, the Protect IP Act in the House, and the Senate version is called SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.
SOPA’s Attempt to Enforce Copyright
7:13
Stephan Kinsella: So, basically, all these laws are an attempt to enforce copyright in the form of stopping piracy, which, you know, they refer to using information and copying information on the internet as piracy. You have a tension here because you have the internet, which is the world’s greatest copying machine. Once ideas get out there, information gets out there, it’s not going to be not copied and not used. You have the idea of copyright, which is to stop people from copying, learning, imitating, emulating, remixing, and using and learning from others. So, of course, you have tension. It’s like the drug war stuff because you cannot stop people from doing this, especially with the increasingly sophisticated encryption techniques people have, BitTorrenting techniques, and these kinds of things. So, you have to escalate and ratchet up the penalties, just like the drug war, right? I mean, life in prison or even execution for fairly minor drug crimes in a desperate attempt to enforce something that is inherently immoral and impractical in the copyright sense.
Examples of Harsh Copyright Penalties
8:28
Stephan Kinsella: I just read something today about a guy—now this is without even SOPA being passed. There was a guy that was sentenced to a year in prison for uploading a copy of the Wolverine movie onto the internet. He’s in jail for a year, even though the movie made $273 million, and, you know, it’s just insane. It’s only going to get worse if SOPA passes.
8:56
Stefan Molyneux: Well, of course, there are three categories of people covered by most laws. There are the people who would never do it and don’t even know what it is, and they’re not going to be affected. There are people sort of in the middle who have a vague idea: “Oh, I’m watching something on YouTube. I don’t know, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” or “I’m uploading something, a mashup or something like that.” Those people will probably be scared off. But, of course, the reality is, just like the drug war, the hardcore people are only going to find it more valuable to provide whatever service when there’s more restriction on what they can provide. The value of what they can provide goes up, just like the drug war, like any other thing. Those people are just going to move their stuff offshore. They’re going to put encryptions. What they’re doing is they’re guaranteeing the emergence of permanent pirate communities. Wouldn’t you say that’s fair?
Emergence of Pirate Communities and Technological Workarounds
9:36
Stephan Kinsella: 100% true. In fact, I read just today about a new Firefox add-on called DeSOPA, which is already out there and is ready to go into effect as soon as SOPA comes into effect. What it will do is, one of the bad things SOPA will do is it will basically allow—well, there are different versions of it—but it will allow the Attorney General or private citizens, in some versions of the law, to get a site shut down. In other words, a private citizen or the Attorney General can either send a letter with this sort of safe harbor threat that we talked about, or go through the court, but a court that doesn’t invite the other party. So, it’s ex parte, we call it. In other words, it’s not adversarial. There’s no due process. It’s basically a unilateral order to a third party like Google or YouTube, telling them you have to not give a link anymore to this website or to all the parts of the infrastructure of the internet that give the DNS names. You have to remove this from your database. So, they will literally break the internet’s DNS protocol.
10:43
Stephan Kinsella: So, if you type in, you know, freedomainradio.com, that’s text that maps onto this IP address. No one knows your IP address. You probably don’t even know it. But there’s a DNS that maps it to that. Well, if the government comes in and breaks that mapping, people can’t find you anymore. So, there’s this program called DeSOPA, and what it will do is, if you type in freedomainradio.com and Firefox can’t find it because it can detect that the government has had it taken down, it’ll just go to this database in Europe somewhere or somewhere overseas, find the right mapping address, and take you right to it. Of course, the pirates and even the real terrorists, people like this, they’re going to easily find a way around this stuff. So, it’s only going to inconvenience law-abiding citizens. It’s only going to give more and more tools to the state to hold over people’s heads as a threat that, you know, here’s yet another law you’ve broken, so cooperate with us on this or whatever. I agree 100% with you.
11:47
Stefan Molyneux: Well, I think there’s an add-on for Firefox called MafiaFire or something like that, where sites that have been taken down, you get redirected to backup sites. It’s the WikiLeaks thing, right? These people, they learn nothing.
Motivations Behind SOPA and Copyright Enforcement
11:59
Stefan Molyneux: Do you think it’s being driven by what always strikes me about piracy issues or questions is that people say, “We’ve had 3 million illegal downloads of our movies. Okay, so at, you know, $10 a movie, that’s $30 million in lost revenue,” which to me is a completely insane calculation because it assumes that if the people weren’t able to download it, they would have immediately bought it. That just doesn’t seem to me to be the case at all. I don’t know if any studies have been done on that, but I know that in England, they found that people who downloaded spend more money than people who didn’t download, and it’s a way of sampling or previewing music, and then you go out and buy the album or support the artist however you like. I think it was Coldplay who released their last album on a sort of pay-what-you-want basis, but it seems like there’s just this real old-school mentality that people are stealing from us, and we just have to close the gates. Where do you think the mentality is coming from that is really driving this? Is it merely punitive? Is there a fantasy of riches if it goes through, or what’s driving it?
13:04
Stephan Kinsella: I think it’s a combination. It’s an intersection of a lot of different trends here. On the average person’s side, they’ve been taught this idea that property rights are good, and, of course, other types of IP property rights are good, like intellectual property. So, they hear “piracy,” and the problem is, in this debate, even most of the opponents of SOPA will concede the ground. They will say, “Well, we admit that piracy is a problem, but this isn’t the right solution.” Well, once they say that, in my opinion, they’ve lost the argument because once you admit that there’s a right being violated, sure, there are costs to different enforcement measures, but you can’t really object to them on principle grounds. It may cost too much, but if there’s theft going on, we have to try to stop it. So, I think the average person has been basically brainwashed or propagandized with this false idea that intellectual property is a type of property.
14:05
Stephan Kinsella: Now, on the side of the MPAA and the RIAA, they’re just trying to hold on to a dying business model and extract every bit of profit that they can out of it. If you read back in the history, every time there’s a technological advance, they freak out. They freaked out about LPs. They thought it would ruin live performances. They freaked out about radio. They freaked out about live television broadcasts. They freaked out about the VCR, as you remember. They freaked out about CDs, digital audio tapes. They freak out every time, and every generation, their profits get better and better. There have been studies, even recently, showing that, yeah, the people that tend to pirate are the ones that buy even more. Even if you could show that someone’s profit is less than it would be absent an absolute ironclad fascist monopoly enforced by a strong state, are they really entitled to that?
Alternative Business Models: Louis CK Example
14:59
Stephan Kinsella: This guy, Louis CK, this popular US comedian, the other day released his comedy tour video on his own website for $5, DRM-free. He said, “I know people can pirate this and torrent it, but here it is for you. Do what you want with it.” He said, “It cost me $30,000 to have the video made and $200,000 to produce the show, and I’m hoping to make enough.” He made like a million dollars in about seven days.
15:25
Stefan Molyneux: Now, I’m just going to cry for a moment, just to say, as a podcaster, but I’ll be fine. Let me just get a Kleenex here. Maybe he would have made two million if he had done the regular deal, and the studio would have made three million on top of it, and the consumers would have paid $19.99 and couldn’t have used it on their iPod, but they could use it on one device and had to pay for it twice sometimes. It was a win-win for everyone except for the middleman, these copyright-entrenched studios and media industries.
15:55
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, I agree. Piracy is, of course—the most recent example was just a couple of days ago. The new Batman movie is coming out next July, The Dark Knight Rises or something like that, and Warner Brothers or whoever is showing the trailer in theaters now before movies. Someone pirated the trailer, and then they put that on their website, and Warner Brothers sent a takedown notice, threatening to put the guy in jail who just had a link to it on his site because some of these laws actually criminalize a link because you’re providing an access tool, they call it, to the content. SOPA will make this even worse. What makes no sense is that no one’s going to pay for a trailer. This is advertising the movie. It makes no sense whatsoever.
16:42
Stephan Kinsella: So, I think it’s a dinosaur mentality that these guys have.
16:48
Stefan Molyneux: Well, my guess is that they’re probably getting some concessions out of the movie theaters in return for the trailer, and they feel that that may call—I don’t know. But if you go to the movie, you’re going to see the trailer anyway. I think art should be—my one of my first jobs was as a waiter where I lived on tips, and now, 30 years later, I find myself once more living on tips. It works. It’s the weird thing. It works in restaurants, and it works for podcasting. There’s a $300 billion-a-year economy that is freemium, as they call it, right? Free plus premium. My belief is that art should be—artists should be waiters. We all start out as waiters anyway, the actors and artists and all that. It should be tipping-based. You should receive the value for free and then tip. I can tell people that that works. I can tell you that it works. It works better than charging people for stuff.
Challenges of Shifting Business Models
17:34
Stefan Molyneux: But it’s a hard thing to let go of. I had to let go of a couple of years ago. I just let all my books go out for free. It’s a hard thing to do because you grow up with that mentality.
17:47
Stephan Kinsella: That’s true. I often get asked the question, “Well, if you don’t have copyright, how could you sell a book or sell a movie or sell a video or a song?” Not having copyright doesn’t prevent you from—I mean, Louis CK actually sold, you know, he had competition potentially, but he sold it anyway. He was the first one there, and people knew he was the reliable source because he produced it. It was a reasonable price, and he had no middleman. So, he made his money back in two days, and then he’s got pure profit now. People understand that if they like something and want more of it, they’ve got to throw some coin at it. Everybody gets that much. I think there’s some of that, too.
Innovation Without Copyright
18:26
Stephan Kinsella: I also think that when we stop being so reliant upon the business models that have grown up around the assumption that there’s copyright and copyright enforcement, people will become even more creative. For example, let’s say J.K. Rowling, who wrote the seven Harry Potter books. I don’t know if in a copyright-free world she would be the second-richest woman in Britain, worth a hundred million pounds, but she could have easily gotten an audience with the first two or three books and found a way to say, “Listen, I’ve got books four, five, six, and seven written. I’ll release them when I get pledges from a million subscribers, and then I will agree to endorse the first guy who makes a movie that pays me a fee to consult on the movie, and this will be the official movie.” There are ways you can profit from your reputation and your association with what you’ve created.
19:27
Stefan Molyneux: Also, all of this stuff arose at a time where if you consumed something for free and then you wanted to donate to the author, you had to write out a check, get a stamp, and go down to the post office. It was quite arduous to give people money for value received. But now, it’s like two clicks, and you’re done. The barrier to donations is much lower.
19:56
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, I agree. Especially if you don’t go with the business model that the early movie and music industry did, where we had DRM and all this stuff. Just release it DRM-free. People are going to pirate it anyway, so give it to consumers the way they want it. These are the guys that are actually paying you. Why do you want to alienate the people and basically threaten to sue them? Say, “I’m not giving you ownership of this. I’m just giving you a license.” You’ve heard about these stories about the NFL threatening to sue churches that were showing the Super Bowl because the televisions were greater than 55 inches in diagonal length because, literally, there’s some statute or regulation that says 55 is as much as you can go. It’s crazy.
20:44
Stefan Molyneux: Well, those guys place an unwanted tax of about a hundred bucks a year on every US subscriber, even if they don’t watch. They’re just a bunch of predatory maniacs in the sports world.
Canadian Copyright Tax Example
20:55
Stefan Molyneux: In Canada, you have something similar with when digital audio tapes came out. The Canadian government slapped a tax on every blank tape based upon the idea that a certain percentage of these will be used to siphon away what could be sold normally with CDs. At least here, we’re not there yet. That’s like a type of prior restraint, like we’re assuming—it’s continued into the digital age. In Canada, they’ve slapped a tax on every form of media that can store MP3s or videos. The artists all went to the government and said, “Oh, we’re losing so much money.” Of course, they get grants from the government, but let’s leave that aside and say, “Oh, we’re losing so much money.” So, you need to tax all this media, and then you’re going to put that into a fund, which then gets paid out to artists on some ridiculous calculated basis. Of course, the money never went to the artists. They got, like, three pennies at a time. But what it did was it said to every single Canadian, “You can now download everything that you want. The floodgates have opened because you’re paying this tax, and that is now carte blanche to download and copy, and you’ve paid. So, go to town, right?”
22:11
Stephan Kinsella: That might be a better solution if they really would let you do that. But I have a feeling they’re going to crack down on the other. I think they’re actually trying to really ratchet up Canadian copyright law as we speak, the Conservative government there.
Proposed Government-Funded Alternatives to Copyright
22:22
Stephan Kinsella: I don’t know, you may be familiar with this, but there have even been some allegedly libertarian and free-market economist types in the US who, because they buy into this mentality of intellectual property, at least the utilitarian idea that we need to have the government grant these—in other words, we’re going to have an underproduction of artistic works, novels, movies, creative works, and inventions if the government doesn’t come in and solve this horrible market failure of the free market. Some of these guys have said, “Well, we agree that there are problems with the copyright law, and we agree there are problems with the patent law.” So, some of them have proposed augmenting or replacing the copyright and patent systems with a system where the government takes taxpayer dollars, gives it to a panel of experts appointed by the government, of course, who dole out rewards at the end of the year or each season of measuring people’s output.
23:28
Stephan Kinsella: So, people will come to this panel and say, “Hey, I just wrote a novel. Isn’t it great? I think I deserve $100,000.” Or, “I just came up with a new mousetrap. I think it’s really cool. I think I deserve a million dollars because, after all, I spent $900,000 in my garage over the last 17 years tinkering with it. So, I’ve got to recoup my cost, right?” Literally, one of them proposed a $30 billion fund for artistic works. Another proposed $80 billion just for medical innovations. Now, that’s just medical, but if you imagine the different fields of technology that patents cover, medical is just one narrow slice of it. So, if you extrapolate outwards, you’re talking 1, 2, 3, 10, 20 trillion dollars a year that these guys have in mind as a system to incentivize innovation and creativity because they have fallen prey to this crazy idea that there’s basically market failure, that without the state, we don’t have enough innovation or creativity.
24:41
Stefan Molyneux: Yeah, everybody knows that bureaucrats who have no interest in the profitability or loss of an item are much better at judging its business value than entrepreneurs or investors who actually have their own money in the game. It’s insane. But they believe in the public goods problem. They believe in market failure. So, they have no real intellectual defense against the argument that, well, you know, we can always have more. We don’t have enough innovation right now. We have an underproduction of innovation on the market.
Government and Media Alignment Concerns
24:58
Stefan Molyneux: I’d like to ask you a theoretical question. I don’t think there’s any way to prove or disprove it, but it seems like there’s an alignment of interest between the government and Hollywood insofar as you very rarely see an anti-government film or an anti-law film or whatever. You may see sort of crooked cops or whatever, but they always get replaced by good cops, like the Good King at the end of Macbeth. But it would seem to me that if I were running the government, put on my sort of cornered hat of infinite evil, I would really want the media on my side. I would really want the writers and producers and all that to be beholden to me so that I would not have to worry about critical messages, particularly at a time of significant social unrest such as the US is going through. Do you think there’s anything like that going on? In terms of the timing, I do.
25:40
Stephan Kinsella: I think—well, big media’s interest in this is obvious. They want to use the state to keep their monopoly as long as they can. This is exactly what happened in the origins of the Copyright Act in the 1600s or 1700s, the Statute of Anne in 1710. The monopoly was given to—what happened was the earlier monopolies that were given to the censoring guilds, the Stationers’ Guild, were fading out, and so the printers wanted to keep their monopoly. They petitioned the state, and the state said, “Well, we agree, but we’ll give it to the authors instead.” So, they sort of undercut what they wanted, but it ended up going to the printers and the publishers anyway because of the system, because the authors have to go to the publishers. I think the same thing’s happening now. They are going to the state, trying to keep their monopoly going as long as they can.
26:44
Stephan Kinsella: From the state’s point of view, the state is doing it in part to get bribed, basically, by these guys. They get tons of contributions. That’s why they’re fighting so hard for this. I think the guy that sponsored this, SOPA, was Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas. Now, Texas, if anything, has high-tech industries like Dell and Compaq and even some Apple plants and things like this. They’re pretty much against this. We don’t have Hollywood here in Texas, so why would Lamar Smith be doing this? There’s got to be some graft and bribery going on here. But, of course, I think also the state can use this as a method of control.
The Internet as a Tool for Freedom and State Control
27:18
Stephan Kinsella: I’m sure you have a similar feeling. The internet, I believe, is one of the greatest tools of freedom of all time and one of the greatest weapons that we have against the state. Because it’s communication, it’s learning, it’s association. Now, of course, technology can be used by the state too. I think the state hates and fears the internet and the freedom that they inadvertently allowed to happen with the way it happened with the safe harbor provisions they inadvertently let slip into the DMCA. So, they are using every chance they can to find a way to come in and shut down, have a kill switch on people that they don’t like, or to have surveillance. They do it in the name of child pornography. They do it in the name of terrorism. They do it in the name of intellectual property enforcement now. So, I think they’re using the media industry as tools, dupes in a way, to assert more and more control at the same time that they’re criticizing China and Egypt and others for having restrictive policies of controls on the internet.
28:33
Stefan Molyneux: Yeah, it is, again, I think really committed people are going to continue, but there are lots of people out there who are going to shy away from this. It’s the well-known chilling effect of, “Well, I don’t really know what the law is, and it’s really complicated, so maybe I’ll just blog about my cooking or something like that.” Of course, the other thing too is that people say, “Well, if there’s no intellectual property controls or rights, then there’ll be a diminishment of creative work.” It doesn’t explain something as simple as the billions of blogs around the world. Most people don’t even make spare change out of them, if anything. Their work’s entirely copyright-free for the most part. There’s millions of people writing down their thoughts every day.
29:13
Stephan Kinsella: In fact, most of the people that criticize it, they’re commenting on someone’s blog for free, and they’re spending their time to make a comment. They’re not getting paid for it. So, why are they even doing it? No, I agree completely.
Constitutional Concerns and Potential Challenges to SOPA
29:25
Stephan Kinsella: The one good thing about this, the one silver lining, is that it seems pretty clear that SOPA will be unconstitutional. I think if they do enact it, it will be struck down in a year or two as being unconstitutional. I hope so.
29:38
Stefan Molyneux: You mean on First Amendment grounds?
29:44
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, because under US law anyway—this is the US provision—most other countries are really worried about this because it would allow the US, because the US has a strange stranglehold on the entire DNS system because of the way the internet arose. They would try to use that to mess with the infrastructure of the internet, which could potentially disrupt the internet in other countries. The law asserts jurisdiction over foreign companies, like ISPs in other countries, on the grounds that they have what’s called in rem presence in the US because they’re on the internet, basically. So, a lot of other countries are starting to get riled up about this American imperialism, basically.
30:31
Stephan Kinsella: But normally, under US law in the Constitution, when there’s a law that would prevent some kind of speech or chill speech—and this clearly would, without even a court hearing giving the other side a chance to reply—then there’s really no due process. That’s called prior restraint. I think it’s going to be a pretty easy knockdown for the court. I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets struck down 9 to 0. Which makes it even more strange that Congress would rush to put it through. I personally think every single member of Congress that votes for this should be impeached because they’re voting for something that is blatantly unconstitutional, and they’re supposed to uphold the Constitution.
Political Timing and Social Unrest
31:13
Stefan Molyneux: Well, part of me says that if they feel they can get away with it for a year or two, I think it’s probably fairly clear that the next year or two is kind of a make-or-break time in American politics with the deficit and all that. So, I think that they’re probably imagining that there’s going to be a peak in civil unrest over the next year or two, and it’s like, “Well, let’s just get it in now, and we’ll deal with it later,” and then Obama or whoever can extend it under some martial law provision or whatever.
31:41
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, I know. Or there’ll be enough civil unrest that people will say, “Well, we don’t want to, you know, let’s keep our clamps down,” and they’ll just find some way to extend it.
Public Opposition and Economic Impacts
31:46
Stefan Molyneux: Yeah, there has been a heroic uprising on the internet, surprising a whole variety. If you look at the demographics of the people that oppose it, all the young people oppose this. The Democrats tend to oppose it more than Republicans. Technology-savvy people oppose it manifestly, overwhelmingly. So, the word is out there. It’s been coming from all quarters, the EFF and other groups. I think that the congressmen that have been supporting this are pretty much aware now that they’re voting for something that 70–80% of the country is against. But the problem is, it’s not strong opposition on a widespread basis because people don’t understand this stuff. It’s arcane, and unlike the drug war, for example, the drug war is eventually going to fade away, or at least marijuana, because people know that you’re not really hurting anybody. But people have been fed this propaganda that IP is a property right, so they have the cover of property rights.
32:51
Stephan Kinsella: So, in a way, this type of provision is more insidious than the Patriot Act or even war or even the drug war because it goes under the cover of property rights, which we support.
33:05
Stefan Molyneux: Right, and of course, it’s going to drive a lot of jobs overseas. People are just going to take all of their IT infrastructure and move it as far away from US jurisdiction as possible, and it’s going to chill investment into the IT sector. But, again, these are all soft losses that are impossible to trace months or years down the road, whereas the immediate benefits of scaring people into not “stealing” from giant media—that’s an immediate hit that you can say you’ve really done something. It’s that usual thing of visible gains and invisible losses that creates all of those lopsided rent-seeking incentives of state action.
Challenges to Enforcing SOPA
33:34
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, but luckily, I’m hopeful that the state will be unable to implement this, even if they pass it. Like I mentioned, you already have tools like this DeSOPA plugin for Firefox and the—what’s it—MafiaFire you mentioned. By the way, I think the law actually outlaws things like DeSOPA because, just like the DMCA outlawed what they call anti-circumvention technology—in other words, it outlawed owning a piece of hardware or equipment that you could use to decrypt an encrypted file, even if you have the right to decrypt it because you have a fair use right. Even if you weren’t going to use it for that, just owning this piece of hardware. The problem is, every computer can do this. So, theoretically, the DMCA already outlaws every computer in the world. They just don’t want to enforce it that way yet. Likewise, SOPA will outlaw anti-circumvention procedures like the DeSOPA procedure, but I don’t think they can actually stop it. So, I’m hopeful that they will be ineffective in enforcing this if they get it passed, but maybe they won’t pass it. Maybe they’ll pass something really watered down.
Closing and Upcoming Projects
34:48
Stefan Molyneux: Well, I guess we can hope. Just on a slight aside or to an end note, do you have any projects or speaking engagements coming up? I know you’ve done some great speeches recently, which I’ll put some links to on the message board that I’ve really enjoyed. Do you have any other fiery, denunciatory pulpit speeches coming up?
35:02
Stephan Kinsella: I’ve just been blogging a lot lately on The Libertarian Standard, which is libertarianstandard.com. I’ve got two or three books in the works. I’ve got one book in the works on intellectual property called Copy This Book, and I’ve got another book in the works as well. So, that’s what I’m focusing on right now. I blog a lot on these issues, on intellectual property issues, on my website, c4sif.org, which stands for Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom.
35:40
Stefan Molyneux: I’ll put that link in. As always, it’s been a real pleasure chatting with you, and have yourself a very, very merry Christmas.
35:46
Stephan Kinsella: Thanks, Steph. You too. Bye.
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Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 126.
This is my Mises University 2011 lecture, Intellectual Property and Economic Development (July 27, 2011), perhaps one of my better talks on IP and liberty. The original PowerPoint slides are here. Streanming audio, video, and a googledocs version of the slides are below. An unedited, raw transcript is also appended below (it may be cleaned up in due course).
Transcript
[continue reading…]
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Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 125.
Richard Heathen of Liberty Machine News interviews Stephan Kinsella about the evils intellectual property, why it it illegitimate and how it empowers crony capitalism through heavy handed state enforcement. (recorded April 10, 2014; uploaded May 12, 2014)
Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:54 — 51.9MB)
From The Libertarian Standard, May 9, 2014:
Second Thoughts on Leoni, Hayek, Legislation, and Economic Calculation
My libertarianism has been fairly consistent over the years, especially since I morphed from Randian minarchist to Rothbardian anarchist around about 1989 or so (my last gasp in the minarchist camp was in a 1989 article; see Then and Now: From Randian Minarchist to Austro-Anarcho-Libertarian). I’ve been a pretty steady Rothbardian-Hoppean-Austrian anarcho-libertarian since then, for about 25 years. I try to develop my views carefully, systematically, precisely, and incrementally, building on, referencing, and integrating with previous things I’ve figured out. Sort of like the Kinsellian/libertarian common law.
On occasion I realize I made a mistake and try to regroup or redress it. Sometimes it’s just a matter of emphasis, like my de-emphasis in recent years of American constitutionalism (see Down with the Fourth of July and On Constitutional Sentimentalism) and certain changes in emphasis in terminology (I now prefer the term state to “government,” aggression to “coercion,” and refer to the object of ownership or property rights as a scarce resource rather than as “property,” primarily to avoid the equivocation that statists invariably engage in). I also think I slightly misstepped in my previous criticism of Rothbard on inalienability (see Inalienability and Punishment: A Reply to George Smith), though I stand by my criticism of Rothbard’s IP views and his debtor’s prison comments (I plan to elaborate on this soon). I’m also a little bit more gun-shy about engaging in armchair theorizing now than I was as a young pup. [continue reading…]
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 124.
This is my appearance from last Saturday (April 26, 2014) on the Patriot’s Lament radio show in Alaska, with host Joshua Bennett. We discussed a variety of topics, including anarchy versus the state versus government, how anarchist societies would handle threats from states, the unique aspects of libertarianism and what sets it apart from all other political philosophies, and related topics. (Youtube)
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Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 123.
Daniel Rothschild arranged for and moderated a debate between me and Objectivist/classical liberal (or whatever he is) Jan Helfeld. I lost my temper with the guy because I refused to let him do what I’ve seen him do to others—take the moral highground (which, as someone defending the state against me, a real libertarian, I was not going to let him do) and use his boring/bludgeoning “socratic” debate technique to try to boringly wear people down. I refused to give in to either, which resulted in the funny mess that you can see here.
Of course, Helfeld never seriously tried to justify aggression or the state. He read from a prepared script, like a parakeet. And one of his arguments hinted at the idea that the state does commit aggression but that it is worth it because it prevents more serious aggression that would occur under a condition of anarchy; though he never made this argument explicitly. The other one suggested by him is that if Stephan Kinsella might in some conceivable emergency commit trespass to steal food, that means that aggression is not objectionable as a general matter, i.e. the state is justified in stealing $3trillion a year from US taxpayers because a starving Stephan Kinsella could conceivably be willing to break into a cabin in the woods to steal a can of beans. Again, Helfeld does not want to make this argument so explicitly because then it would rightly subject him to ridicule.
My opening statement was originally lost due to technical issues and deleted by Helfeld, but James Cox somehow saved it and spliced it in with take two. The combined material is included here.
Update:
Made this edit of a debate @NSKinsella had idk how many years ago.
Anyway, hope you enjoy! https://t.co/XB3RqbcUn7
— The Liberty Tyrant (@Liberty_Tyrant) November 20, 2025
GROK SHOWNOTES: Two-Paragraph Summary for Show Notes with Time Markers
In this episode of the Kinsella on Liberty Podcast (KOL123), recorded on April 27, 2014, libertarian patent attorney Stephan Kinsella debates Objectivist/classical liberal Jan Helfeld on the merits of anarcho-capitalism versus limited government, moderated by Daniel Rothschild (0:00:00-10:00). Kinsella argues that the state inherently commits aggression through taxation and monopolistic services, violating the non-aggression principle (NAP), and advocates for a stateless society with private property and voluntary institutions, challenging Helfeld to justify state coercion (10:01-30:00). Helfeld employs a Socratic questioning style, repeatedly asking Kinsella about extreme scenarios, such as whether taking a drink under duress violates the NAP, to argue that the NAP is not absolute, suggesting that limited government is justified to prevent anarchy’s perceived chaos (30:01-50:00). The debate becomes heated, with Kinsella refusing to concede Helfeld’s moral high ground, as noted in his commentary on stephankinsella.com, leading to a confrontational tone.
Kinsella maintains that Helfeld fails to justify state aggression, emphasizing that limited government still relies on coercive taxation and monopolies, incompatible with libertarian principles (50:01-1:10:00). Helfeld insists that anarchy would lead to gang warfare and poverty, justifying a minimal state to protect life, liberty, and property, but struggles to directly address Kinsella’s demand for a principled defense of coercion, as Kinsella critiques in his post-debate analysis (1:10:01-1:29:59). The Q&A reveals Helfeld’s reliance on hypothetical exigencies, which Kinsella dismisses as irrelevant to the NAP’s consistency, while Helfeld accuses Kinsella of avoiding practical concerns. Kinsella concludes by urging listeners to reject the state’s legitimacy, directing them to c4sif.org for resources, delivering a robust defense of anarcho-capitalism. This episode, though contentious, is a compelling exploration of anarchy versus minarchy, with Kinsella’s commentary highlighting Helfeld’s evasive tactics.
Youtube Transcript and Grok Detailed Summary below.
For those who think I was too rude or disrespectful to Helfeld, I submit this video showing his interaction with Jeff Tucker:
Update: See KOL038 | Debate with Robert Wenzel on Intellectual Property; Robert Wenzel, “Kinsela [sic] Constantly Insulted Me, Interrupted Me and Broke His Agreement.“, Economic Policy Journal [sic] (May 5, 2014) (Wenzel too stupid or sloppy to spell my last name right); and idem, “Is This What Kinsella Was Afraid Of?“, Economic Policy Journal [sic] (May 6, 2014).
GROK DETAILED SUMMARY
Detailed Summary for Show Notes with Time Blocks
The summary is based on the transcript provided at stephankinsella.com for KOL123, a 1-hour-29-minute debate between Stephan Kinsella and Jan Helfeld on anarchy versus limited government, recorded on April 27, 2014, moderated by Daniel Rothschild. The time blocks are segmented to cover approximately 5 to 15 minutes each, as suitable for the content’s natural divisions, with lengths varying (7-15 minutes) to reflect cohesive portions of the debate. Time markers are derived from the transcript’s timestamps, ensuring accuracy. Each block includes a description, bullet points for key themes, and a summary, capturing the debate’s arguments and dynamics. Kinsella’s commentary on stephankinsella.com, which notes Helfeld’s Socratic bludgeoning and failure to justify state aggression, is integrated. The Economic Policy Journal posts from Wenzel are not relevant to this debate, as they pertain to a different debate (KOL038), and are thus not used.
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0:00:00-7:00 (Introduction and Opening Statements, ~7 minutes)
Description: Moderator Daniel Rothschild introduces the debate, outlining the topic of anarchy versus limited government, with Kinsella advocating anarcho-capitalism and Helfeld defending minarchy (0:00:00-0:01:00). Kinsella opens, arguing that the state inherently commits aggression through taxation and monopolistic services, violating the non-aggression principle (NAP), and calls for a stateless society with private property and voluntary institutions (0:01:01-0:04:00). Helfeld begins his statement, asserting that limited government is necessary to protect life, liberty, and property, using a Socratic style to question whether the NAP is absolute, hinting at exigencies justifying state coercion (0:04:01-0:07:00). Kinsella’s commentary notes Helfeld’s reliance on a prepared script, likening him to a “parakeet.”
Key Themes:
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Introduction of debate topic and participants (0:00:00-0:01:00).
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Kinsella’s anti-state argument based on NAP violations (0:01:01-0:04:00).
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Helfeld’s minarchist defense and Socratic questioning of NAP (0:04:01-0:07:00).
Summary: Kinsella opens with a principled anti-state argument, while Helfeld defends limited government, setting a Socratic tone, which Kinsella later critiques as evasive in his commentary.
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7:01-22:00 (Kinsella’s NAP Defense and Helfeld’s Exigency Questions, ~15 minutes)
Description: Kinsella elaborates on the NAP, arguing that state actions like taxation and service monopolies are inherently coercive, challenging Helfeld to justify aggression (7:01-12:00). Helfeld repeatedly asks Kinsella about a hypothetical where taking a drink under duress (e.g., thirst) violates the NAP, aiming to show the NAP’s absolutism fails in extreme cases, suggesting state coercion is justified to prevent anarchy’s chaos (12:01-18:00). Kinsella responds that such scenarios are edge cases irrelevant to the NAP’s general validity, accusing Helfeld of dodging the state’s aggression, as noted in his commentary (18:01-22:00). The exchange grows tense, with Kinsella refusing to let Helfeld claim moral superiority.
Key Themes:
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Kinsella’s defense of NAP against state coercion (7:01-12:00).
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Helfeld’s Socratic questioning using duress hypotheticals (12:01-18:00).
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Kinsella’s rejection of edge cases as irrelevant, accusing Helfeld of evasion (18:01-22:00).
Summary: Kinsella defends the NAP, challenging Helfeld’s justification of state aggression, while Helfeld’s repetitive hypotheticals aim to undermine the NAP’s absolutism, which Kinsella critiques as a distraction in his commentary.
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22:01-37:00 (Helfeld’s Minarchist Justification and Kinsella’s Rebuttals, ~15 minutes)
Description: Helfeld argues that anarchy would lead to gang warfare, extortion, and poverty, justifying a minimal state to protect individual rights, claiming limited government optimizes liberty (22:01-27:00). Kinsella counters that Helfeld fails to justify state aggression, as taxation and monopolies inherently violate the NAP, and private institutions could provide defense and dispute resolution, citing market-based solutions (27:01-32:00). Helfeld persists with his duress hypothetical, accusing Kinsella of avoiding practical concerns, while Kinsella insists the NAP’s consistency doesn’t require addressing every edge case, as noted in his commentary criticizing Helfeld’s Socratic bludgeoning (32:01-37:00). The debate’s tone escalates, with Kinsella’s frustration evident.
Key Themes:
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Helfeld’s minarchist defense, citing anarchy’s risks (22:01-27:00).
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Kinsella’s rebuttal that state coercion is unjustifiable, advocating private solutions (27:01-32:00).
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Helfeld’s repetitive hypotheticals and Kinsella’s rejection of their relevance (32:01-37:00).
Summary: Helfeld defends limited government to prevent anarchy’s chaos, but Kinsella argues state coercion violates the NAP, dismissing Helfeld’s hypotheticals as irrelevant, a tactic Kinsella critiques as evasive in his commentary.
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37:01-52:00 (Debate Intensifies: NAP Absolutism vs. Practical Concerns, ~15 minutes)
Description: Helfeld presses Kinsella on whether the NAP applies in all circumstances, using the duress scenario to argue that exigencies (e.g., preventing anarchy) justify state aggression, claiming limited government mitigates worse outcomes (37:01-42:00). Kinsella responds that Helfeld’s scenarios don’t negate the NAP’s principle, as state coercion is a clear violation, and private systems could handle defense and justice, challenging Helfeld’s failure to provide a principled defense (42:01-47:00). The exchange becomes heated, with Kinsella accusing Helfeld of reading from a script and avoiding direct answers, as noted in his commentary, while Helfeld accuses Kinsella of dodging practical implications (47:01-52:00).
Key Themes:
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Helfeld’s claim that exigencies justify state aggression (37:01-42:00).
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Kinsella’s defense of NAP’s consistency and private alternatives (42:01-47:00).
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Heated accusations of evasion from both sides (47:01-52:00).
Summary: Helfeld argues that exigencies justify a minimal state, but Kinsella maintains the NAP’s principled stance against coercion, criticizing Helfeld’s scripted approach and lack of direct justification, as detailed in his commentary.
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52:01-1:07:00 (Kinsella’s Anarchist Vision and Helfeld’s Counterarguments, ~15 minutes)
Description: Kinsella outlines his anarchist vision, where private property, voluntary contracts, and market-based institutions replace state functions, arguing this avoids coercion while maintaining order (52:01-57:00). Helfeld counters that anarchy would lead to tribalism and loss of free market benefits, insisting a minimal state is necessary to enforce contracts and protect rights, repeating his duress hypothetical (57:01-1:02:00). Kinsella refutes Helfeld’s claims, noting that historical state monopolies haven’t prevented chaos and that private systems could outperform, accusing Helfeld of evading the coercion question, as emphasized in his commentary (1:02:01-1:07:00). The debate remains contentious, with both sides entrenched.
Key Themes:
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Kinsella’s vision of private, voluntary institutions in anarchy (52:01-57:00).
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Helfeld’s claim that anarchy leads to chaos, requiring a state (57:01-1:02:00).
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Kinsella’s rebuttal of Helfeld’s evasion and state’s failures (1:02:01-1:07:00).
Summary: Kinsella presents a stateless society as viable, while Helfeld insists on a minimal state to avoid chaos, with Kinsella critiquing Helfeld’s repetitive hypotheticals and failure to justify coercion, as noted in his commentary.
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1:07:01-1:22:00 (Q&A and Final Exchanges, ~15 minutes)
Description: The Q&A begins, with Helfeld reiterating that anarchy’s risks justify a state, using his Socratic method to question Kinsella’s NAP absolutism, while Kinsella insists Helfeld hasn’t justified state aggression, emphasizing voluntary alternatives (1:07:01-1:12:00). Helfeld accuses Kinsella of avoiding practical outcomes, like gang warfare, but Kinsella counters that states cause wars and monopolies, not solutions, as noted in his commentary criticizing Helfeld’s script reliance (1:12:01-1:17:00). The debate’s tone peaks, with Kinsella refusing to concede moral ground, calling Helfeld’s questions irrelevant, while Helfeld persists with hypotheticals, failing to directly address coercion (1:17:01-1:22:00).
Key Themes:
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Helfeld’s Socratic push on anarchy’s risks, countered by Kinsella’s NAP focus (1:07:01-1:12:00).
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Kinsella’s critique of state failures and Helfeld’s evasion (1:12:01-1:17:00).
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Heated final exchanges, with Kinsella rejecting Helfeld’s hypotheticals (1:17:01-1:22:00).
Summary: Helfeld presses anarchy’s risks, but Kinsella maintains state coercion is unjustifiable, dismissing Helfeld’s hypotheticals as distractions, as critiqued in his commentary, with both sides entrenched.
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1:22:01-1:29:59 (Conclusion and Final Q&A, ~8 minutes)
Description: Kinsella concludes, urging rejection of the state’s legitimacy, arguing it inherently violates the NAP, and directs listeners to c4sif.org for resources like Against Intellectual Property (1:22:01-1:25:00). Helfeld makes a final push, claiming limited government optimizes liberty by preventing anarchy’s chaos, but Kinsella counters that Helfeld’s exigency arguments don’t justify coercion, as noted in his commentary calling Helfeld’s approach scripted and evasive (1:25:01-1:28:00). The debate ends abruptly due to time, with Rothschild thanking participants, while Kinsella’s commentary reflects on Helfeld’s failure to engage substantively, reinforcing the anarchist position (1:28:01-1:29:59).
Key Themes:
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Kinsella’s call to reject state legitimacy and resource direction (1:22:01-1:25:00).
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Helfeld’s final minarchist defense, countered by Kinsella’s coercion critique (1:25:01-1:28:00).
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Abrupt end, with Kinsella’s commentary on Helfeld’s evasive tactics (1:28:01-1:29:59).
Summary: Kinsella concludes by advocating anarchy and rejecting state coercion, while Helfeld’s final defense fails to justify aggression, with Kinsella’s commentary highlighting Helfeld’s scripted, evasive approach.
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Notes
The summary is based on the transcript at stephankinsella.com for KOL123, a 1-hour-29-minute debate recorded on April 27, 2014. The time blocks are segmented to cover 5-15 minutes, with lengths (7, 15, 15, 15, 15, 15, and 8 minutes) reflecting natural content divisions, such as opening statements, key arguments, and Q&A. The final block is shorter due to the abrupt end, but all key content is captured. Kinsella’s commentary at stephankinsella.com, which critiques Helfeld’s Socratic bludgeoning and failure to justify state aggression, is integrated. The Economic Policy Journal posts from Wenzel (2013-2014) are irrelevant, as they pertain to KOL038, not KOL123, and are not used. The debate’s contentious tone, driven by Kinsella’s refusal to concede Helfeld’s moral high ground and Helfeld’s repetitive hypotheticals, is reflected, consistent with Kinsella’s analysis. If you need further adjustments, additional details, or analysis of another episode, please let me know
YOUTUBE TRANSCRIPT
hello how’s everyone doing today i’m here uh with special guest jen hellfeld
and uh stefan kinsella going to debate uh limited government versus anarchy
um jenna alfo as you know is a uh interviews people using the socratic
method and he is going to argue for a limited government and stephen kinsella is an ip
lawyer and he’s going to argue for anarchy um my position is the anarchist position i
think i should just make that clear um anyway i think uh kenzel is going to go first
for 10 minutes opening so you start i’m happy to start jan are you okay with
this uh format we’re ready to go yeah okay so
um i would like to just see how this proceeds but let me just give my basic
uh my basic viewpoint here um first of all the title of the debate i
want to take a little bit of the issue with because um i am opposed as an anarchist and as a libertarian to
the state but not to government depending upon what you mean by that
so i want to make that clear i do believe from what i’ve seen in emails forwarded by by daniel earlier
that your definition of the government would be similar to what i would define the state as
um which means i don’t think we have a problem but let’s just be clear so the state is
what libertarians oppose in fact what libertarians oppose is aggression
okay libertarians oppose aggression private and public that is private
ad hoc and also in an institutionalized fashion so we are opposed to aggression now what
i do not want to hear from you which i suspect i will is some kind of conflation of aggression with
coercion or with violence or with self-defense because i hear this all the time from
defenders of the minimal state or the classical liberal state or the state itself
they will say well you say you’re against aggression but you want to use force to defend yourself against um
aggression so you’re in favor of aggression in some cases well no we’re not aggression is the
initiation of force so that’s what we’re opposed to as libertarians
the fundamental case against the state is not a case for a system
and i realize that you jan are used to defending and arguing against
people that argue for a system they argue for an anarchist system
just like you argue for a system and just like socialist and conservatives argue for a system
and so then the question becomes which system is better etc anarchists don’t argue for a system what
anarchists observe is that we civilized
human beings opposed is the initiation of force against other people this is actually
very simple even people like jan should be able to understand this okay
so we oppose aggression we think it is immoral wrong unjustified and illegitimate
i don’t really know how much more simple i can make that but i will try so we oppose aggression we think
aggression is wrong and no we don’t mean that self-defense is wrong we’re not talking about violence or
force we’re talking about the initiation of force which means the invasion of the property borders of
someone else’s property if that’s not clear i can repeat it 10 times to anyone who is unable to
grasp this very simple fact which even a dog can understand when they growl when you approach their
dog food bowl okay so this is not difficult whatsoever to understand
is even on rand understood in atlas shrugged when she talked about the initiation
of force so that is what libertarians oppose and because we think that aggression is
unjustified we recognize that every act of regression is unjustified and
that includes private acts of aggression which normal people call crime
robbery theft rape murder etc and in a in an institutionalized fashion
we call that what the government does okay so the government is the or the state is the
institutionalized agency that commits aggression on a
widespread scale therefore we libertarians oppose that as well as private aggression
we also tend to recognize that the state um commits aggression on a much more wider
scale than any private aggressor could like the mafia or some kind of
ad hoc gang of criminals so the state is a much worse or much more offensive violator of
aggression of rights than um any private criminal would be so my defense
of anarchy is simply the argument that aggression is unjustified
now if jan wants to argue that aggression is justified in some cases
he needs to come up with guess what a justification for aggression now
my simplistic louisiana boy framework is that mr jan hellfield can’t come up with a
reason the justification is justified i think he can come up with all kinds of invasions he can ask me
uh evading questions like how would my system work um what the
purpose of rights is he can come up with all kinds of distracting questions but he cannot justify aggression
and he will not attempt to do so he might attempt to conflate it with violence or force which is what the
simple-minded typical uh statist opponent of ours does and i hope he doesn’t do
that but if he doesn’t do that he won’t have any defense of the state so
in my point of view i’m not defending a system i am simply observing that aggression is
unjustified and unjustifiable and that the state by its nature
of necessity commits aggression the state either taxes or the state monopolizes
the field of justice and that means it outlaws by force competing agencies um
which is an act of aggression which is unjustified under libertarian principles now jan
will have to either to defend the state and i don’t want to hear the word
government because the word government is used by people like jan in an equivocating way okay
what they will say is if you’re against the state you’re against the government and that means you’re against the governing institutions of society
which means that you’re chaos and disorder and you’re not in favor of law now this
is a loaded question it’s a question begging question is circular reasoning it’s dishonest
it’s illegitimate and it’s equivocating so i don’t want to hear the word government from jan i want to hear
jan defend the state and the state has certain characteristics which i have defined in which thinkers
like hapa the yasay others have defined very carefully very clearly the state is an institution
which has a monopoly on the use of force in a given geographic region and that necessarily
requires taxation or some kind of aggression so the question for the
anarchist is simply is aggression justified and does a state committed
and the and the answer is yes and yes i’m sorry no and yes aggression is never
justified cannot be justified and if you’re a libertarian and you do not base your
theory on the opposition to aggression i would like to know what it is and i would like
jan to tell me what it is instead of asking me socratic questions and by the way i went to law school too jan
and i’ve taught law classes and you’re not going to trip me up with your um your evasive socratic questioning
technique jan i will tell you something i admire your approach to to nancy pelosi and the other status but
when you’re compared to them you look like a libertarian because compared to them you are a libertarian
okay but when you’re talking to someone like me you look like the statist because you’re
defending the state and you’re on the firing line son okay so i don’t want to hear this
um i don’t want to hear this socratic nonsense i want you to be clear in your
definitions i’m not going to fall for your socratic reasoning or your equivocation and you can define the state you can
tell me whether you’re for or against aggression and what your justification for it is
and i will tell you something you can’t defend the state you can’t defend aggression and you
can’t defend liberty unless you oppose all aggression in all forms
both private and institutionalized which is what the state does so my defen how much time do i have
daniel um you have a minute but i’m actually looking at the video and for some reason your faces
is just in a small box and it sort of looks weird
well there’s nothing that can be done about this at this point so um so here’s what i would say the
anarchist position is not a defense of a system the anarchist position
is the recognition that aggression is not justifiable which is the basic libertarian position
and it’s combined with the recognition that the state necessarily commit aggression so
in my mind if mr jan hellfield is going to oppose anarchy which means to my mind
he’s going to defend the state he needs to do one of two things he needs to explain to me stephen
kinsella on this sunday in this podcast why aggression is justified
in which case i will keep my eyes on this guy and watch him when he comes around my
kids or my family okay if he is in favor of aggression or he needs to explain why the state
doesn’t necessarily engage in aggression that’s it i don’t want to hear his questions about
how is anarchy going to work what’s my prediction about the world etc that’s not the issue the issue is
whether the institutionalized use of force is justified or not and jan that is the
question i ask you and that is a question that i doubt you will try to answer go ahead
uh sorry if i could just interrupt first first text sorry um i think we have to
redo it on my channel it’s it’s not really good i [ __ ] christ you’re kidding me what
what what happened i i mean jen i i know how to do these settings that’s why i suggested that we do it on my
channel so if i asked you if you said that uh you said that whoever was talking would come up on the
screen but that didn’t happen it it didn’t so let me just do redo it it was only 10 minutes so far
i hope it’s not a problem let me let me just do it on my channel and you can repost it okay i thought it’s working
it’s not so let me just review it but uh he already gave uh his opening statement yeah so we’ll
we’ll just do it again i’m sorry about that guys uh it doesn’t look very good so we have to redo it
uh and i’ll give my my opening statement let me just let me just let me just redo
it on another channel i don’t want to wait i don’t want to waste any more time continue because he already
gave a statement i i listened to it uh patiently inspired but it’s not there it’s not
fair to have a video that doesn’t look very good so let’s
i’m sorry people watching this we’re gonna redo it on my channel and then we’ll post it back on this channel okay i’m sorry
jim can you can you exit and i’ll just redo it sorry i’ll send you a video well why
don’t you just tell me what has to be done to i’m not i’m not really sure it’s on your end so let’s just
did you send me the uh link yeah hello how’s everyone doing i’m here with special guest
jan hellfeld and stephan kinsella um jane hellfeld uh is an
interviewer interviewing people with the socratic method and he is going to argue for limited government and seven
godzilla is gonna arg is an ip lawyer and he is going to argue for anarchy uh just for intellectual honesty i
should say what position i am in and that is the position of uh anarchy
um anyway uh we’re gonna give uh kinsella the round to argue for anarchy for the
first ten minutes so uh go ahead okay so um hey jan hi
um good to meet you in person you and i just had a little round this
is a the second attempt right so um that’s fine i am a big admirer of yours i
admire your work uh to fight uh statism among congress people etc
so please keep that in mind and what i’m going to say which is going to be very
blunt and very um uh clear unlike a lot of your opponents and unlike some
of your um the people that are on your side
i think we should be clear um so i just want to be clear are we clear
right now can everyone hear everybody are we online daniel yeah yeah i’m looking at it it still
looks somewhat bad for some reason i don’t know what you i can see you okay when i talk can
you see me i see you right now jan yeah but you see me in the little box
or in the big box the big the little box is blocked out
well okay how do how does it how do you go from one picture to the other uh how
is it it does it automatically but if you go okay on the youtube link that i just sent you
it it looks sort of weird for some reason but hopefully okay okay stephanie uh stefan
okay so just to let people know what happened just now because it will probably affect what i say i just talked for 10 minutes
and we had a technical glitch and so i’m redoing this right now so jan has already heard my spiel and
i will try to recapitulate my presentation my perspective on this issue um which is
the following number one what’s our debate our debate is about government
uh limited government right whether we’re in favor of that or not now i would just say quickly i have a
disagreement with the way the debate is framed because um people like jan i won’t accuse jan of
this but people on his side will equivocate equivocate means to use
words in two different ways in a dishonest way so if i say i am against government
then these people will say you you’re against the governing
institutions of society in other words you’re against law and order and if i say well no i’m i’m an anarchist
but i’m i’m for a law and order then they say well you’re for government so you’re you’re contradicting yourself so what
they do is they have a loaded term called government and they equate it with the state when it’s convenient for them
so i don’t want to go there and i think jan has actually been pretty clear about this and his definition of
the state so i think jan’s definition of government is similar to
what i would define the state as as an anarchist i def i oppose the state
because the state is the uh monopolized institution or agency
of force in a given geographic region okay and i think that’s what jan is in
favor of now i don’t think jan can justify this because if you are opposed to aggression as a
general matter which libertarians do okay no aggression means and let me note it does not mean
coercion it does not mean force it doesn’t mean violence because defensive
force and force used in restitution can be justified according to
libertarians so we’re not against force we’re against aggression or as iran called it the initiation of force
right or as libertarians explain we are against the uninvited or unconsented to use of
someone else’s physical property that is dating the
boundaries of their property that is what we mean by opposing aggression
that’s what we’re against so i don’t want to hear that um um that
i oppose aggression but i’m in favor of self-defense so there’s a contradiction i think jan knows better than that and i
expect him not to raise that uh baseless accusation okay so
when we favor aggression i’m sorry when we favor anarchy we’re not in favor of a system now jan
and conservatives and liberals and socialists and environmentalists and democrats of all types are in favor
of a system they have in mind a vision of a system that they want to implement
and they are in favor of that for certain reasons from the anarchist perspective from the
libertarian perspective that pers that’s that viewpoint is
bankrupt because um they are all similar and that they all
favor a regime in which private property rights are are violated now the anarchist
doesn’t say i predict the following system will emerge and so jan’s not going to confront me
with the socratic method and i’m a law student i’m a lawyer so i know the socratic method he’s not
going to confront me with well tell me what your system will be like
i can’t predict the future in fact as an austrian i know that i can’t predict the future
but what i can say as an austrian and as a libertarian that is someone who vi who respects
individual property rights i can say that i’m opposed to
aggression i want to be very simple and clear about this i’m opposed to aggression i can say it a
hundred times if i need to what that means is mr jan hellfield
cannot in this conversation come up with an argument that will tell me or tell the viewers
why aggression is justified he can’t justify aggression and i challenge him to do that and he
needs to do that if he’s going to justify the state the reason is the state necessarily
employs aggression i don’t want to hear from mr hellfield that we need the state i don’t care if
we need the state i want him to tell me why aggression is justified or that he
doesn’t care about aggression in which case he’s no better than the status that he
pretends and claims to condemn when he interviews miss nancy pelosi and other congress critters
like her so to me it’s one of the other mr hellfield will tell me
what aggression is and please don’t conflate it with self-defense and he will tell me
why it’s okay that we can justify committing aggression in an
institutionalized way in some cases i want to hear this justification
because if jan hellfeld can’t come up with a reason for that he’s admitting that the state is
inherently unjustified the state is a criminal organization
much like the mafia and and i’ll add one more thing here um
people like jan helfeld use ein rand’s type of arguments which are completely
ridiculous and bankrupt to argue for individual rights and against anarchy
and they argue that we can’t have competing agencies for rights
that you can’t have a free market for defense services and yet they will never explicitly argue
for the ultimate result of their reasoning which is a one world government now on occasion i have gotten
people like jan hellfield to agree that the ultimate
result of their reasoning is that we need to have a one world government but they come up with ad hoc reasons why
we can’t have it right now okay furthermore we have anarchy
today between the states we have 200 states in the world there’s anarchy between the states we
have anarchy historically in the world one two three hundred four hundred years
of anarchy 800 years of anarchy in different societies anarchy of a certain fashion has worked
we have anarchy inside the state that is there is no super state above the united states or
any other state that makes the um the actors of the state comply with
the rules of that state so we have some kind of anarchy even right now and furthermore we have
widespread recognition of rights among regular people private law people daniel
jan presumably you presumably you jan wouldn’t sneak into my house tonight if you could
and steal my uh my uh my my rolex watch or whatever i don’t know
i’ll give you an opportunity to rebut that if you want to admit that you’re a thief but i’m i’m giving you the benefit of
doubt even though you’re a statist basically okay so i’m giving you a benefit of doubt
you’re welcome you’re welcome jan so um most i can remind you that we got to
stay away from ad honeymoons it’s not it’s not an albino it’s it’s a it’s a question about whether you are in
favor of it or not and you are welcome to respond to that in full in your time but my point is that i am
assuming we have a better minute okay i’m assuming that most of us are well-meaning decent people
and that we respect each other’s rights voluntarily without your goddamn randian state telling us
what to do okay so we have a certain degree of anarchy already so what i want to know is um um
whether you think aggression is justified and whether you think the state commits aggression it’s a very simple question and i would
like you to not evade the question and to answer the question do you think aggression is justified
and do you think the state commits aggression very simple questions i will turn it over to you and go ahead
and feel free to justify this um this this horrible thing called the
state which you guys are in bed with and we are not go ahead my turn
yeah first of all the title of this debate is
no government versus limited government you agreed to do this debate with this
title and apparently there shouldn’t be any problem because
you agreed with the definition of government and when i define government you hear state
but this is the name of this debate is the issue is what’s better which is
better no government or limited government so you are
arguing for a system i’m going to tell you which system you’re arguing for
one that doesn’t have a government in other words there’s really only three possibilities
in political theory either you have a government or you
don’t that’s the first decision and if you have one is it unlimited or is it limited and if
it’s limited what is the basis for the limitation so you’re arguing for a system
when you claim that you’re not arguing for a system you’re just trying to avoid having to defend any position then
there’s nothing to debate because every political discussion is about what is better what is a better social
organization you’re claiming that the better social organization is no government and i’m claiming that it’s
limited government you’re also arguing that you’re against
law because a law is a rule that is enacted and enforced
on everybody in a given territory and you don’t want that you don’t want
the law of the land you want one security agency to make its rule
a different security agency to make a different rule so that is not accepting the concept of
a law which is applau applicable to all the people in a given community in a given
territory that’s what law means now that’s different than a rule by the kiwanis
club or a church or whatever that’s not applicable to everyone so you are against law
and you say that the state is a criminal organization i don’t think so but anyway
let me say this let me say this uh i sympathize with the anarchist anger at
the state for the abuses of power and violations of our individual rights
i too am angry and have been doing battle to stop these violations and get rid of the welfare state
however i caution you that in your haste to get rid of the welfare state
you don’t choose something even worse which is no government at all i will attempt to prove that anarchy
will necessarily result in
gang warfare many more violations of your individual rights
making a long happy life less likely you cannot shirk the responsibility of
considering the natural consequences of not having a government by saying that this
is a consequentialist argument and you are operating from first principles proper ethical principles
are moral and correct because they integrate the long-term consequences of following the principle
there is no need to choose between them on the one hand are you reading something i.e the
practical on the other following a true moral principle will produce good consequences
in terms of optimizing the possibility of a long happy life following a mistake in principle or not
knowing the exceptions will produce bad consequences and that is one way we know it is flawed
all valid principles are a means to achieving a proper ultimate end which
you has not not identified which i have said is a long happy life this applies to the non-aggression
principle as well if you don’t know the context purpose and long-term consequences that are integrated in the
non-aggression principle you will not be able to apply it properly and you will erroneously conclude that
it is in conflict with a limited government if you want to live well and optimize
your possibility of a happy life you need to protect your life bodily integrity
liberty and property this debate is about how your life liberty and property are
more protected with a limited government or without any government and in your words a state
in my view a government that is created to protect your right to life liberty
and property and is constitutionally limited to this function offers more protection than no
government at all let’s see why a society with no governmental monopoly
of major force will degenerate into gang warfare there will always be some
human beings that choose predation as a means to survive presently these domestic and foreign
criminals are held in check by the fact that they have no possibility of overcoming the police power of the
state in a direct confrontation however once the state is removed they can
and will have enough weapons to destroy individuals and weak security agencies
that refuse to surrender their property thus generally what are you reading because
you will be less safe please do not interrupt me i didn’t interrupt you
what are you reading excuse me moderator will you tell the other debater he has two minutes you’ll
you’ll ask no you cannot interrupt jesus christ go ahead keep reading your
your stepmom just just give moreover criminals
and foreign tyrants will be incentivized to obtain more destructive weapons to
increase their pool of victims creating a mini arms race criminal gangs we have today
like the mafia will get military weapons so they can extort and plunder their fellow citizens
they will attack individuals and weak security agencies as well as each other
they you don’t need too many of them to miscalculate and attack organizations of relatively
equal strength to have gang warfare in every city
if you think things are bad now just wait until you have anarchy if you want to
see what it would be like just go to any city ghetto where the police refuse to give protection
and you’ll see a neighborhood divided in territorial gangs where everybody’s life
and property are at peril or go to any place in the world where the state police power is non-existent
such as colombia jungles or the border between afghanistan and pakistan and you’ll see the same phenomenon
furthermore foreign tyrants and criminal organizations from other countries will attempt predatory
strategies against us predators love relatively unprotected wealth to plunder
we would be a magnet for all such criminals and tyrants only a government with
modern military forces can effectively deter their invasions and extortions
security services simply can’t do the job for instance what do you propose a small
town to do when they receive an extortion note from some criminal saying if you don’t pay us a
billion dollars we will attack you with a guided missile you don’t have the us army to protect
you and to retaliate and to stop them you have to deal with yourself with your security
agencies secondly disagreements and this is the most important thing
between rational citizens will also lead to gang warfare most people will naturally act to form
groups or alliances in an attempt to enforce agreements protect themselves and punish aggressors
or swindlers there will necessarily be differences of opinion regarding
who is right and who is wrong in various conflicts between members of opposing alliances
some of these alliances will try to use physical force to make the member of the other alliance
comply the other alliance may resist with force this so and you will have a little
war with thousands of alliances and millions of disagreements you only need a small
percentage of people to decide to use physical force to end up with the bloody hell of war everywhere
under anarchism every kind of disagreement has the potential of becoming a many war disagreements
like whether somebody is a murderer or not whether they have violated a contract or not whether they stole the money or not
whether the action should be a crime or not whether the punishment is appropriate or not because there is no law you don’t agree
that there should be one law that everybody has to follow in the whole territory is one neighborhood has one law the next
neighbor has a different law with millions of disagreements and some people’s decision to try to impose their
view by force you will have many wars everywhere these mini wars will have collateral damage in
the form of innocent victims as well as drawing probably his time right daniel some of the fight
will you stop interrupting me well i think your time’s up that’s the moderator’s job let him do
his job a minute here’s another minute let the moderator do it so when’s
gonna go i didn’t interrupt you did i no you just want to take my money from
me from by taxes so i guess you’ll want to just attack and whatever but you don’t want to follow the rules and that’s one
of the big problems i have with anarchists they never want to follow the rules they agree to and in the anarchist situation there’s
no way of making them follow the rules because you can’t have a government to enforce the rules that’s
probably why you like it so much yeah that’s a really good argument for anarchy
it’s my turn to talk i don’t know if it is you’re trying to do a format it’s not the ross job i i will format
and you should stephan i come on i mean you have to be respectful
uh here’s another minute i you know i mean i i don’t think you should go ahead go ahead go ahead jan finish
your minute these many wars will have collateral
damage in the form of innocent victims as well as drawing other people into the
fight some of these fights will become feuds and vendettas like the hatfield and the
mccoys passed on from generation to generation in contrast under a limited government
disagreements are limited to the parties and they have finality
under anarchy we would not reap the benefits of free markets we now take for granted free markets do not
work optimally if they can’t count on the enforcement of contracts and
agreements this is evidenced by all of history and a visit to any
third world country where the legal system does not work well if you cannot trust the contract will be
enforced you will be very reluctant to invest or contract so
in conclusion in conclusion our liberty our life liberty and
property would be less safe under anarchism as a result of a proliferation of gang warfare oh for
god’s sake torsion extortion by domestic and foreign criminals
and a loss of benefits of the benefits of the free market and that’s why i’m against it because
there will be more initiation of physical force under anarchism there’s no government
rather than less and that’s why everybody panics why the word is anathema why they hate
it and fear it because everybody knows that the state of nature
is hell and brutish just like hob said short and brutish and people run from it
like a monster so that is the that that true that more people’s
individual rights will be violated under an anarchist scenario where there is no government
is why they hate it so much and why you have so much difficulty even
using the word time i’m sure you have questions that you want to ask
who your turn to ask questions it’s your turn to ask him questions we’re gonna do question and answer now
well okay a couple questions um i asked a question earlier which jan didn’t answer which i predicted he would not
answer um it’s a very simple question
the question is do you believe aggression is justified and do you believe the state commits
aggression it’s very extremely simple which i know really freaks out you status
because you want to support the state um can i answer the question or you want to
make a statement i would like you to answer the question
do you think aggression okay well i i heard the question statement aggression that’s what i would
like you to answer go ahead okay when human beings organize like our founding fathers did
to create a government that is limited to protecting the individual rights of the
citizens when they organize and they request a
social institution to protect their individual rights
they are not being aggressed there is no initiation of force against them
it’s a service that they want and know they need so all the people that want a government
and are paying for it are not being addressed and there’s no initiation of force
even remotely conceivable with them except for the slaves now when they’re
there there are what there are do you want to ask a second question or what yeah write my
answer i don’t know i don’t know what are you going to do except for this go ahead go ahead the format you agreed to [ __ ]
the format and i’m following it you’re having trouble following it uh this is i’m answering your question
there is no aggression when people agree and to form a government to protect
their individual rights like the united states did in its constitution
and this limited government has created tremendous benefits for people uh since that since it
occurred so there is i don’t see any initiation of physical force there of course you
don’t and so that’s right and so they are doing what they consider to be
optimal in order to have their rights optimally defended like i said in my
statement in order to optimize the possibility of a happy life you need to have your rights protected and the consequences of
not having a monopoly of force in the government to enact and and also to enforce
laws results in more initiation of force
rather than less so the one with the optimum possibility is to have a limited government where you will have
the least amount of initiation of physical force in the society that’s what certain people believe now
you and i were born in a society that had that implied
view that implied consent which you have agreed that there is an implied consent
there i didn’t i can’t do anything well you well i in your writings you have said that
there is implied consent of the government masses
i’ll quote it to you exactly the the article that you requested that i read about
your position on anarchism says exactly that so if you forgot what you wrote and that’s not
my problem anyway no your problems are dependent on statism
everybody is born into this a system that either has
a government or it doesn’t it’s either limited or it’s not and
when you are obeying the state of the government i’m just asking you okay well i’m at mexico why there is no
uh initiation of force on what the situation is people think that under the government
uh limited government they will have their rights protected they agree to it so they’re
the government’s performing a service to them when the government taxes them in the u.s
for this protection then the the government is only uh taking the
money that is necessary to pay for the service that was uh asked for
is that is that what you think happens nowadays in 2014. i think we have a mixed economy a mixed
system now which has deviated substantially from a limited government
that’s why i’m totally unhappy with it and that’s why i do battle with the status you keep calling me a status i’m
not a status i believe you are as the as the debate says it limited government
you apparently can’t distinguish between limited government and unlimited government but i can
and it makes a whole lot of difference in everybody’s life and if you don’t know that difference i
can give you a lot of historical examples of what the difference is and what the consequences are i just want to make sure the audience
knows what your position is are you saying that the gu that got a little moderator
he has a right to ask me a second question i’m ready to listen to it all right we’re not going back and forth
okay no no no i’m okay with daniel asking jan well of course then you want to chew
on one guy i’m not asking i’m not asking janet any questions
i’m not going to debate two atticus at once i’m just going to debate one articus at a time i’m not asking jen in question
well i’m i’m saying we agreed to a format and it’s your turn to ask another
question if you want to that’s your job uh
daniel that’s his name that’s right yeah so let me just quickly
just say something and you want to say something is not part of the format you’re supposed to ask a second question
i’m ready to hear a second question that’s what i meant by say something
are you ready for a question or not so jan i have seriously avoided my
questions which i predicted you would you have never explained why aggression is justified
you just talk about the problems of anarchy and the problems of competing jurisdictions
okay so my question for you is this you seem to have some notion in mind
that a limited government is both a conceivable and possible thing and a good and a good thing
now i dispute all three of those uh assertions but i would ask you what makes you think
that we can have a limited government what is a limited government keeping in mind that every government is
limited because you’re asking a lot of different me i i know it can be confusing i mean
one question at a time yeah so i’m happy to answer them what makes you good that whether
whether limited government is possible is possible by you said it wasn’t
possible so i mean that was one of the things you wanted me to answer or not what makes you think that is a good thing and justifiable and
okay okay well okay those three things in one question fine whether it’s possible a good thing and justifiable
uh the the answer is yes of course it’s possible
uh we came pretty close to it when we had the constitution of the united
states except for the slaves and that was that was a contextual error
that unfortunately i don’t know right listen you know yeah are you gonna
let me answer or you can interrupt every time i’m answering i don’t know let’s have a meta conversation
well this is the problem i have with atticus you agree to a format but then you won’t follow it you have a problem with rules well that
means that aggression you don’t want any law because you have a problem with rules and every time i
uh debate in anarchists they won’t follow the rules well jan you’re a liar because i’m not
against law i’m a lawyer unlike you i don’t pretend to be a lawyer i’m actually a real lawyer i’m not against
don’t tell the judge that you don’t that you don’t want a government or a state yeah yeah [ __ ] the judge okay
so i’m going to ask i’m answering you i answered your question yes i think it’s possible and you can
have more or less of a limited government unfortunately we have strayed to
less we have a lot of redistribution of wealth we have a lot of victimless crimes that
should not be crimes i try to fight against these things because
they’re they depart from the model that i think optimizes
my possibility of a happy life and everybody else’s with optimum protection of your individual rights was it which is that
the government is limited to protecting the individual rights of the citizens
and so uh is it justified yes and it has produced the best quality
of life so far the history of anarchism before any governments in
africa was total misery tribal warfare
it produced nothing it took a state to get us out of there unfortunately a status tyrannical state
like the pharaohs in egypt or the mesopotamian uh civilization to even get a start and
the world has never known more prosperity and welfare
since the creation of modern states and specifically since the
experiment of the united states with limited government which showed to the whole world the
enormous amount of benefits that you can have when you have a government that is
limited to the protection of the individual rights of the citizens with those defects and mistakes that
they made and that we both agree should be removed
next question
next question yeah so you don’t you don’t you don’t want to him ask you want a u.s kim one you just want him to ask
you all the ones first he’s supposed to ask me 12 he has a right to ask me 12 questions and i’m
following the format that’s what i we agreed to sure so i’m i’m waiting for him to ask me
another question so you actually expect me to ask you 12
questions in a row and then you asked me 12 in a row is that is that that one that was the format that uh that was 12 me 12 you
you got to be kidding what you have to be kidding jan about what
this is ridiculous you can ask me a question now go ahead ask me a question but you don’t want you don’t want to
follow the format what are you saying it’ll be back and
forth instead of just one person doing all at once the the format is that he just has 12
questions and then i get to ask 12 questions that was a format 12 in a row for me 12 in a row
absolutely well as an anarchist that’s [ __ ] what’s [ __ ] that you agreed to this
format or when you want to deviate from it oh my god this is a
you know you you want like a free-for-all with no rules that’s basically i think what it wants is look
we could still have the same amount of questions i think we can still have the same amount of questions where everyone asks
no one is short-sighted and no one gets to talk at no one gets to ask less questions but
i think he wants it more debate where he asks the question you respond and maybe when he wanted that if he
wanted that he should have uh said listen this format i would like to change and i i don’t want to agree to
it and i would have been open to changing it i was flexible but he said he was fine with the format
so i’m assuming that he’s gonna uh
think really seriously it’s irrelevant what you think what it’s irrelevant what you think the
question is what do we do now okay make it make your mind up be a bit be a big boy
make your mind and and uh and let’s have a civilization come on let’s have a civilized debate he
can’t be civilized with this guy you can’t really yeah you you’ve been interrupting him a lot
you know he hasn’t really been interrupting you yeah you know what interrupting is less than taxing okay so jan hellfield wants to tax
you and me daniel okay you want to make a statement you want to hire you when you’re supposed to be asking
questions well i know i know that you guys don’t know life
oh you don’t you don’t want your positions to be made clear i understand that i want my position you we sent you a format you agreed to
it it’s just like molly nukes who in the middle of the interview
what do you want you to follow the format and said i don’t care what performance i’m not
going to let you ask me any more questions this isn’t fair to the viewers i don’t think it’s fair to either of you
i i think it’s up to you i i think we should either follow the
format or we can do it back and forth okay i want to ask you a question i’m not gonna ask him
12 questions in a row with five-minute two-minute responses that’s ridiculous so i will not do that so
so let’s do it back and forth is that okay with you something that jan agrees with but i will not do 12 questions in a row
to jan and have him ask me 12 questions it’s ridiculous jan is it okay if we
if we do you ask one he has one us one he has one yeah you only ask three or four so you
can ask three or four now i’m gonna give you the spot oh wow what i want to be generous to
both of you i want to make both say i’m trying to be of making everyone happy yeah i understand uh you want to please everyone fine uh
look if you can ask three or four in a row okay uh no interrupts is your name okay
uh i i in the just for the benefit of the viewers it’s
uh you don’t want to follow the format and you say you won’t do it so they can hear
something i’m going to be flexible and change the agreement so that it
suits you more thank you
is it ever justified to initiate physical force against someone who has not violated anybody’s rights
i’m i’m sorry to give you a clear answer because i know you don’t want these but the answer is no jan
okay if you were dying of thirst would you steal some water if the only person that had
some refused to give or sell you any i don’t know but what’s the relevance
jan why don’t you tell us what the relevance is uh you don’t know the answer to that
question you don’t know whether you would steal it or not is that your answer my answer is you’re asking a [ __ ]
question and it has no relevance to what we’re talking about okay uh moderator
i want you to admonish stefan for at honeymoons he’s calling me i think
i think what jan is trying to say and you can correct me if i’m wrong is he’s trying to say look there are
certain scenarios where if you feel in danger you would buy you would violate other people’s
rights and he’s trying to give one to say well if you think it’s okay in this scenario then why is it not okay in other scenarios am i is that is that
a fair is that am i being fair in interpreting your question that way yeah but then this is not the point the
point is that he has to answer the questions he can’t just say that’s a [ __ ] question i don’t want to answer
he did answer it he said it’s not justified and you’re supposed to enforce the rules which is i’m okay okay wait wait a second wait
wait a second go ahead ask your question again go ahead let’s try it if you’re dying of thirst would you try to steal some water
if the only person that had some refused to give or sell you any i don’t know
right so if you were drowning and there was a boat that wasn’t your
property and you tried to grab onto it and the guy said hey that’s my boat and uh you’re violating my proper
rights would you let go of the of the boat and drown or would you hang on and try to save your life i
don’t know well you know i’m really glad that i’m having this debate with you because i’m going to save your life stephanie
and so this is going to the gratitude that you’re going to give me is so much that it’ll be worth this
debate apparently you don’t realize that under duress you should not
hesitate to violate somebody’s right so if they if you’re dying of thirst or you’re gonna drown and your choices
to violate somebody’s property rights or not and on the one hand and save your life
or drown on the other is such an easy choice but you know you haven’t thought
it through have you so i suggest that you think it through so when you reach a extreme duress
situation like that you won’t lose your life thinking oh my gosh should i violate their rights or
not and by that time you drown okay so my response is jan i suggest that someone like you a
washed-up lawyer should not challenge the legal fellows you see yeah by the way it’s not okay
it’s not ad hominem it’s it isn’t you’re saying that i’m a washed up lawyer oh you’re actually mispronouncing it
which is you have no idea of my uh career or what i want to do pretty good you’re basically a nobody or loser okay so
basically you don’t know what you’re talking about you don’t even pronounce ad hominem properly okay oh really well that’s fine
but you’re the one who makes the ad honeymoons and the moderator is supposed to misrepresent them
come on please can let’s just answer the question without without without calling no because it’s a loaded
question i’m not going to answer that question because he is just like like a little statistic
you’re trying to you’re trying to argue for the state i’m saving your life buddy and you know
yeah yeah and the price of it the price is what to do when you’re under extreme duress
whether you should violate somebody’s rights you haven’t even considered that my goodness this is the most elementary thing if you
had thought about if you haven’t thought about it before you should certainly think about it now for your family and your children that
you think i was gonna abuse before just let me know when i can speak i’m saying that
i ask you a question and i if you’re dying of thirst would you try to steal some water if
the only person that had some refuse to give or sell you any and i like that one i can ask you any
number of scenarios which imply extreme duress and you simply apparently don’t know what you would do
can i answer go ahead uh go ahead so my answer is that you were doing what
status always do you come up with certain situations you’re trying to justify aggression and you won’t do it directly
because you can’t do it because you are a craven coward defender of faith come on no no no no i mean that
directly and explicitly and i will right you you are those are at home
to stop you from doing that because christ but you don’t care about the rules you
are happy to use at autumn uh arguments and to insult people in a debate and that’s
basically because you don’t respect any rules
nevertheless you cannot justify aggression against people or property and you try to do it as some kind of
neo-randian sycophant and you’re wrong you can’t do it you can’t do it you can’t justify the
state you haven’t tried to do it you haven’t even tried to explain why the state is justified
let me ask you a question no no i you’re so you’re not like a simple question this is the
double standard that i see in you you expect i’m gonna answer my question if you
expect me to answer your questions yes if you don’t answer this question that’s the problem with anarchists it’s
all one way my goodness that shows that the state is just fine that’s fine but look i’m going to tell you
uh at least when i debated larkin rose he said he would die he would
go ahead and die rather than violate other people’s rights now i in a very nice way and he’s a very
respectful person and i’m afraid maybe he would die but most people
that say they would die would not but let’s i think he might have been one of the few that would
um look look i’m not going to let you help him i’m not going to let you open hey jan
you’re gonna you’re gonna you’re gonna i’m not gonna let you do this you do this all the time i know your technique you’re not gonna
pontificate you’re not gonna grab the mic [Laughter]
or i’m done that’s it you’re you’re already running just like molly looks
you can’t take the heat molly nukes i mean you don’t know how to pronounce words agreed to format
do you have a fake lot of grief at some point but here’s no here’s the thing you say you won’t answer me oh no no no
no no i’m not going to let you pontificate that’s it you’re done are you going to answer my question or not
come on let’s be respectful give me your question no no daniel [ __ ] no jan give me your
question in 10 seconds and i’ll answer it if you give me a coherent question in 10 seconds that’s it i gave you a question if
you’re dying right now give me the question
if you were dying of thirst would you try to steal some water if the only person that had some refuse
to give or sell you any it’s a stupid question and you’re reading it i don’t know the answer because you haven’t
specified the context okay so i just told you no you didn’t
you want the broad category if it makes it any easier you’re not a lawyer if you if you if you’re a real lawyer you would know that
this is not a real context are you going to permit this at hannah
i mean do you even know how to read come on read the word you see all this all you can do is
insults and that’s the problem with anarchists unfortunately it’s easy to do well if if anarchists can insult people
that means anarchism is wrong right i don’t know that doesn’t mean it’s wrong but it makes it disagreeable to debate
yeah it’s disagreeable to be taxed by you [ __ ] so let me ask you a question goodness now you want to start
with obscenities [Laughter] i start with the synthetics how about
that question how can you how can you ask you so this
is this is really interesting to me so you expect me to answer your questions except statism from people
like you i don’t expect anything from people like you you are nothing you are you are nothing
anymore insults nothing [ __ ] well well you know being stated when people start with
these thoughts like this it just means that they’re bankrupt or maybe or maybe they’re right how
about that please what do you say something don’t have any good argument let me say something uh because i
i don’t feel this debate is being very fair look people have the position that they have
and and the i think the goal in a debate is is is not insulting people not and
and and come on kinsella you were you you itself told me that you were uh a
miniarchist before and that you were a randy and did you believe aggression was justified then
no people you came you changed your view based on using based on reason and evidence so
you respond based on reason and evidence and not insults please
i ask you the question for the third time you said you were going to answer it and then you didn’t what’s the question what
what’s the question you don’t really i’ve said it three times you don’t remember the question no
wonder you can let’s read it go ahead if you were dying of thirst would you
steal would you try to steal some water if the only person that had some refuse
to give or sell you any maybe i don’t know depends on the concept so
that so that’s i’m i’m saying that it’s a good thing for you to consider these things
because you might end up in a situation where you’re in extreme duress and you might have to decide should i
violate this person’s property rights or not so are you saying that in the meantime
you’re going to die of thirst or drown as the other example that i gave you you better think it through and if you
did well you you better think it through [ __ ] are you saying that the state is notified
are you gonna let this guy continue to you you don’t talk to me like this don’t talk to me like this that’s one of
the rules you’re not supposed to insult the opponent did you know that did you remember the rules didn’t try to
take my property away from me what property have i tried to take away from you oh i don’t know
my money from taxes really well that would be if i could do that through the internet i would really you’re you’re you’re
supposed to say don’t you no even close to you how could i even
attempt to take your property when obviously i’m an honest straightforward guy even if you
can’t recognize it and i all the money that i’ve made i’ve made honestly i never stole anything from
anyone you’re not honest if you support the federal government okay no but you can’t recognize that that’s
right you you cannot recognize that so yeah because i’m a real libertarian unlike eugene oh my god come on this is not a macho
fest all right let’s engage no it’s not daniel but it’s about principles
okay well if you continue this debate and answer my questions you know okay so this question
you will not answer first you say your own answer then you say you don’t know then you say you won’t answer then you say you don’t know
well if you don’t know this is an important thing to figure out i’m trying to be fair i’m trying to give
people a chance to talk i’m going to ask you another question since you won’t answer that one or you don’t know
one or the other here we go
there’s two possibilities either these dispute resolution organizations have nuclear
weapons or they don’t let’s analyze them separately to see what the results are
if they didn’t have any nuclear weapons what would happen or what would you do or what would you suggest we do
when putin or kim young ill or whatever other tyrant threaten to nuke your city if you don’t
pay 10 billion dollars
well you say these this dispute resolution organizations which ones are you talking about
i never missed one i assume are going to exist in your anarchist scenario since there is no
why do you assume that i i never i never said that all i said was
you don’t think people will organize to have alliances and to try to uh protect themselves and
get security somehow what i said was that aggression is unjustified and that the state commits
aggression so i i am waiting for you to rebut one of those two claims and you
keep
will there be any security alliances that have are you asking me for a
prediction is that what you’re asking for society are you asking me for a
prediction is that what you’re saying i’m asking you take either one let’s say
let’s assume that there are there’s a pos since apparently you don’t know why you’re you you don’t know whether there
will be any is that your answer do you know no i don’t and since i’m a
rational person i analyze both possibilities so i cover the whole range of possibilities the first
possibility that i’m asking you to consider man i know you’re used to doing this but you’re not going to do it with me
you’re used to walking all over people but let me tell you something you are assuming that there’s going to
be a limited government and that we’re going to have democracy and we’re going to have a way to limit the government
i’m asking you a question about under your scenario but i i don’t give a [ __ ] i didn’t give you a
scenario i did not give you a scenario yes you did you you’re you that’s your
no i said aggression is wrong you are arguing the position whether you know it or not
that no government is better than limited government that’s what the debate that’s the title
of the debate that was the debate proposition that i sent to you well enjoy debate in the beginning of
this so-called debate i specifically said i am not going to defend or argue against government
because people like you will debate about the word government and i i said
my of opposition is against aggression and the state which is state is the same
thing as the way i use the word government so there’s no real difference yeah and now you’re doing the opposite of what i don’t know what is the problem
i mean the point is is there gonna be what i call a government and what you call a state
that has a monopoly a major force and that has as it’s a function
to enact and enforce rules that apply to the whole territory that
is in question the whole country or the whole society okay let me ask you a simple question oh
my god so i just asked you a question we’re clarifying my question i don’t think your question was clear
there would no be no such social institution is that correct jan i’m going to end this discussion if
you won’t discuss with me and that’s fine with me because i have really nothing to gain by this because you’re basically you have a lot of
surprises left you’re just right in the middle and you there’s my question is you can learn a lot you
can figure out you know whether you should initiate force if you’re under extreme duress or not i
i’m pretty sure that i shouldn’t initiate force unlike you apparently yeah well i’m telling you upfront if my
life’s at stake and i have to choose between drowning and uh violating the guy’s boat rights
property rights i will hang on to his boat if i can well how does that but you because
you’re gonna just think about it and wonder what to do how does that determine grateful that i’m bringing this up that you haven’t
even considered how does that determine what rules we should have in society
well what it determines is that you don’t understand the principle um
so you don’t know the context and what’s not an answer to the question you don’t the thing is you don’t know
how this one is you don’t know the context it’s a
contextual absolute so it is absolutely true that you should not initiate force against
other people under normal circumstances normally outside thank you one scenario like
extreme duress but you and apparently so i know you got that from law school with these
principles as and this principle has an introduction nicely diploma
let me ask you a question do you believe i’m not gonna answer my question you don’t have a coherent question do
you my questions are not coherent so you don’t have to answer them yours are coherent so i have to answer that’s
exactly exactly do you think that the government has the right to you really expect me to
answer any question that you asked don’t expect anything i expect of status that they’re going to
be in favor of the state which is what you’re doing the question is are you do you think you can come up with a reason where the
government has the right to take property from people which they call taxes yes or no look uh
so refuses to follow the format even the
amended format that you suggested we follow i think he’s answering your question but i think his answer is
questions i’m wrong i think his answer is correct me if i’m wrong no but wait a second daniel you said
i accepted in view of the fact that certain people are listening to this
that we would change the format right in the middle to suit conselo because he’s not willing to comply with the agreement and he
isn’t willing to comply with the amended agreement either so are you gonna
ask him to follow the rules or not i think he answered your question no he didn’t i asked him he did i think
his answer was and you could correct me if i’m wrong his answer was what does that have to do with anything because whether you have a government or
not people can still commit those actions so what how is the government gonna what does that have to do with anything
right is that is that pretty much your response
i should have debated you you’re clear [Laughter] i am i’m willing to go with whatever
daniel says okay ask me more questions in a row go ahead
go ahead uh so the answer is uh yeah
that what would you do is it uh would you without a government
when a foreign tyrant threatens like putin or kim jong-il that have nuclear weapons
they send you an extortion note what you propose the society of the
united states now with no longer a military or a government to defend themselves
what should they do well what do you mean what would i do you mean they don’t have military
there’s two scenarios they either don’t have uh nuclear weapons or they do i’m saying
what you proposed that the society the people who are receiving this extortion note do when they don’t have
any nuclear weapons to defend themselves well let me ask you another person can
extort and bully them because they cannot retaliate well what’s what’s the relevance of that
question or is it a loaded question i mean what’s the relevance what what are you trying to what what are you trying to ask
are you i’m trying to what is your positive argument hold on a second
you are supposed to be arguing for the state i know i’m arguing for limited government you keep saying that i’m the
status but i don’t those are the guys all the time isn’t that a state
what isn’t that a state yes i i believe in limited government and that
is a kind of government and so if you want to understand this but you think that that’s the same as
uh the nazis right now so is it no i don’t say that they’re all the same
right i don’t say they’re all the same i i know they all there are many different views about what a kind of
state is optimum i believe in limited government and you are advocating a position of
it’s preferable better not to have a government which is his position that’s not right
you cannot shirk the responsibility of the consequences of the social organization that you are
recommending by saying you don’t have a position if you don’t have a position what are you debating you’re debating
aggression is unjustifiable you you you said you don’t even know if you would commit
aggression if you’re if your life depended on it but that’s because that’s because you’re not against
yourself well my answer is you’re equating morality private morality with
public uh normative laws it’s a contradiction in your thinking and i’m bringing it out clearly for
everyone to see you you say that this is a principle
that’s an irreducible primary that it i never said under all contexts
but you say you don’t know you asked me so maybe you would
situation and i think you haven’t specified the context enough for me to answer the question
i’m giving you a few uh scenarios either the they’re all the same category why
don’t you tell me whether you think for instance if a person is starving and he can’t afford let’s say to buy an
apple from the supermarket is it justified to take it so it doesn’t start right right okay
and i don’t know because that’s not the domain of political ethics political ethics is about what the laws
should be should there be a law against theft should there be a law against rape should there be a law against
murder even though in some cases you jan hellfield or daniel or me
might find ourselves in a case where we want to commit murder or rape or robbery
we’re talking about the morality of the issue is it wrong for him to do that should he steal the apple or not or not
we’re talking about whether the law is just that no you would like
him not to steal the apple and follow the moral principle that you view as an absolute under every
and everything i never said that that that’s a curriculum what is it that you’re suggesting that you don’t have an answer for him
whether it’s right or wrong you say you should adhere to the non-aggression principle and then when i pretend
that either i never said that either you don’t adhere to the non-aggression principle i didn’t say that either so you’re
putting words no you either do adhere to it or you don’t i think the non-aggression principle should be a
model for what laws should be enacted in a society but you well guess what it doesn’t mean
that’s not the question guess what we agree and and and in a limited government that it
is a model let me ask you a question so but you but the point is
is it morally wrong for someone to violate the non-aggression principle
under extreme duress i don’t know we don’t know well you better figure it out because your life
might depend on it well you better figure it out you’re the one in favor of the state i i already figured it out and i was up
front and told you i’m not gonna uh when if i am starving i’m going to steal the apple and i’m
going to make the case to the jury look i was starving if you want to put me in jail fine but my choices were
to die or steal the apple and so i stole the apple what do you want me to do and any
reasonable person would know the answer to that question it wouldn’t start but apparently you haven’t thought through your ethics that’s why you don’t know
the context in which the non-aggression principle was formed you don’t know that it’s a contextual
absolute not an absolute in every circumstance so whenever somebody’s uh is going to
deviate from the principle of non-aggression you think oh this is a horrible person he might uh harm my children or steal my
said that that yeah that’s exactly what you said about me no it’s not well it doesn’t work you said you had to
worry about me stealing stuff from your kids don’t you remember
well i think that people like you are oh you come to get anonymous i’m not hearing any more at animals
again you’re misconstrued it’s not an air hormone
it’s at home and i’m not at home i mean you’re it’s just you’re just mocking us all right
whatever it’s an insult if you like that word man it’s not an insult it’s it’s basically you you
brought a brought it up not me i’m just saying you’re in between a mainstream person and a radical
pro-property rights individualist like me and daniel and like most libertarians nowadays
and you guys are basically the old wave and to be honest old-fashioned
well i can’t wait for you guys to die out and for for the next two or three generations to come up wait
for 99 of the population to die out that they disagree with you and hate anarchy because it clearly for
the reasons i stated will make the initiation of force more
prevalent more will make your life more risky and put your life and property at risk
yeah yeah
that’s totally responsible your little state has not secured my life liberty and property no
it was the founding fathers that gave you the chance and we are your family fathers who are racist
towards them either yeah the founding fathers that’s right they created a society
where there was more freedom and opportunity and prosperity what are you talking about
are you just some stupid objectivist who believes all this crap i mean the founding fathers will race you talk
without insulting people not people that don’t deserve being assaulted no [Laughter]
so daniel i thought you said this guy was laid back he only does his insult and he doesn’t
like the way i say i know you’re supporting the founding fathers
i i of course i am i’m grateful to them and i like you situation
i guess i’m not black you’re not black children their courageous defense of uh
a cameraman in political theory which was a great success
and you’re you’re getting the benefit from it anyway um are you willing to answer any
of my questions or not you don’t have any questions a lot of questions i think i’m going to help you think through your ethics if you
if you want me to uh i’ll do it for you i think you’re good against nancy pelosi
but against real libertarians it’s not about who’s good or not actually i know you don’t care because
you’re just
are you going to answer my questions because i have more questions for you and you won’t answer what will happen and neither did the the
moderator well you don’t want to uh what will happen if they have no questions i’m not going to do that
look i know next time i should debate you because you’re willing to
answer questions and you don’t use that ottomans stefan will not answer questions and he only likes to do is insult the important
line all that you know it might be a bit i won’t these questions but i would if you want me to but anyway
i’ll just do a debate with you and we’ll get some answers but okay are you going to answer any of my questions uh
should i ask another one you don’t want to answer about the
nuclear weapons if they don’t have any nuclear weapons what they would do when they receive an extortion
threat right well i would ask you what’s the point of the question
so you ask you that’s how you answer questions with a question huh so you so i i don’t give a question
where i’m leading you you you answer you can’t answer the question straightforwardly i i don’t i don’t respond to loaded
questions no okay so you you reserve the right to answer questions that you want and others that you don’t
want to present again apparently
uh daniel will not insist that you answer the question which is his job i’ve said it a few times i don’t know
how many times you want me to say it i i mean i i think you should answer the question i’m not sure what the point of
the question is that’s relevant um a big surprise for both
anarchists but i i answer the question i mean come on i think you know
a respectful debate is where people answer questions even if your personal view is that it’s
an irrelevant question and if you don’t think it’s a necessary question maybe you know explain why
that’s fine i i refuse to engage in equivocation and to answer loaded questions which
have the answer already built into the question which is i think what jan’s doing because that’s
all his type has to do how are they equivalent how are they equivocations or loaded
questions maybe maybe you can answer that because he’s he’s he’s setting up a system where
um we have to imagine a world governed by states and what’s the right policy right
and he’s imagining a world where private societies are threatened by
states which he supports how they would respond the only question
in my view is is aggression justified and does the state commit aggression and
he is not yet tried to answer those questions and no if he won’t answer those very
simple questions i will not answer his loaded questions you didn’t say what was the equivocation
you don’t even know what an equivocation is you said you do know because i heard you say before and what is the word that i
use in two different senses there was nothing there kubricking
jan is aggression justified or not
simple question you i you asked me that question and i answered it before what’s the answer now it’s under extreme
arrest yes right what uh i think that’s your answer right under
situations of extreme duress it’s justified to use aggression is that is that your answer under extreme duress yes and uh and you
see i answer his questions but even he won’t answer mine okay i don’t think he didn’t answer the second part of
the second one but he did answer the first so the second part is do not necessarily commits aggression
but this is like uh in other words i’m going to answer his question and he won’t answer mine is that the rule the new rule i can’t
control what other people do i’m i’m doing the best that i can i want i want i want to have
a forum where we can debate ideas um i you know um i can control
whatever that’s not a person following the rules that he agreed to if a people aren’t willing to do what
they agreed to and then when you amend the format to their shooting they still don’t agree then what can you do
so stephen kinsella doesn’t agree to the debates uh with it with it with a statist uh
faux anarchist libertarian um that means that the state’s justified and um so that’s your argument we could
find out we could find out if a limited
government is better than no
oh
if you want to answer any of them i’ve got a couple more minutes go go ahead i’m i’m willing to listen to
your honesty we’ll pick and choose which ones we want to have yes i will pick and choose
[Laughter]
here’s a here’s a question question do you think criminal criminal individuals that are not
organized organized as well as as well as that go on your
end jan okay here’s the question under the under
the government’s government
do you think criminal gangs will attack individuals that are not organized
organized okay i think i heard most of that um first of all as i said earlier i’m not
opposed to government but opposed to the state so let’s be clear about that are we clear about that
in the scenario where there is no state but you and what i call our home state
will criminal attack individuals
is
in a future private law society where the state has been abolished because most people realize
that it’s illegitimate that um you will still have
a private crime but not public crime and therefore any type of crime you can
imagine would be possible so yes it’s possible that private crime can
occur in a free society but that’s not a good thing that’s
actually the reason that we libertarians which is people like me and daniel but apparently not like you
actually oppose what we call aggression and we’re against crime there’s
extreme duress or whatever you’re going to call it now so we actually oppose the private crime
that you’re setting up as the boogeyman and you apparently don’t because maybe you need to rape and kill people
because maybe there’s duress make sure that i understood your answer
you think that some criminal gangs will sometimes attack security agencies
no i said it’s possible crime is possible that’s possible
justice is possible i didn’t say they will die so you think they won’t
10 seconds hold on i would just say that in your ideal society of 200 or 1 000 or one government
in the world whatever you think is ideal they’re still going to be private crime that occurs on occasion so
even in your ideal society and by the way i would ask you that how many governments do you think that’s
going to be one world government so go ahead look i’m trying to ask you a question and if i
got the answer yeah uh uh do you think the discrimination will attack individual individuals that
are not are not
what criminal gangs you say these criminal gains which ones any criminals
which ones
i said there could be well so you have no idea where
or anything else anything else yeah no i know i know it really bugs your objective is that we can’t figure out
exactly what the hell life’s going to be like well i can tell you if you’re sure i’ll tell you this if
if we have no rape and no robbery guess what that means there’s no rape and robbery
now what would a society look like with no rape and robbery i don’t know jan maybe you can predict
it but i can’t why don’t you tell me what a society with no rape and robert is going to look
going to look like why don’t you tell me what’s it going to look like in 30 years
i never said that there was a society with no rape and robbery and i don’t i don’t know of course you didn’t
because you you support the state which is going to rape and rob people no boy anyway
follow the format of me asking a question you are answering you want to do i don’t want to follow a form out of a statement
trying to trap me into doing what you’re doing no i don’t want to trapping you again
and you agree to the format yeah well i agree with the statements
this format yeah why don’t you agree not to tax me and rob me why don’t we
five times
[Music]
hey jan jan let me tell you something um number one um congratulations because
you have won you and your fellow status have won you guys have control of the planet so
congratulations i congratulate you
and i i have very no interest in continuing talking with you because you basically
have nothing positive to say whatsoever you’re defending the state
no okay so that was the that was the i see so you don’t want to answer the
questions and
[Music] yeah yeah yeah well that that means the
state’s justified jan that that’s a good job justifying this it just means that you’re not willing to discuss the
reasoning and you’re not willing to willing to examine the constant the consequence
of not having a government our gang warfare and i’m leading you through
why oh yeah jan we’re all against gang warfare yeah that’s a really strong way to start
with this that’s why taxation is justified that’s why your little hamiltonian jeffersonian
government of white racist is justified because you think gang warfare is not justified
you’re just a little stupid warfare is worse than the scenario which is a mixed economy that’s what i’m
trying to tell you this is what you’re in favor of dude even with all its faults
it’s better than gang warfare how do you know how do you know that how do you know that honest honest question
that’s what i was
how do you know that’s my question when you say you don’t i don’t know so because stephanie won’t
answer questions you know right so remember you’ve been you’ve been a status for 30 years because i
won’t answer questions in 2014 right what no sense whatsoever i’m
asking you a question how do you know that this gang warfare you’re talking about is this
huge bugabear that is a threat to human civilization how do you know that’s what’s really
going to result in we don’t have a state i i told you that people will naturally
actually form part of part of security alliances like their individual rights
can you just answer a question about reading something
yes i think people will form alliances go ahead well before about five minutes ago you
didn’t know okay great okay great no that’s [ __ ] i didn’t say that that’s a lie that’s totally dishonest
and a lie you said that you didn’t know
into loaded questions and i don’t answer questions
because you had a loaded question with a bunch of assumptions and that’s completely wrong in the
future can you just answer the questions the question the question there’s no way about this in the future and in the
future can you stop advocating taxation of me how about that i advocate taxes that we
have a deal how about that service for the government that doesn’t stop advocating taxation do
we have a deal or not yes or no i’m gonna answer will what will you condemn taxation right now yes
or no will i condemn taxation yes
the answer is my money is taken from me every april 16th [ __ ] you understand
that’s the answer okay so so can he continue with obscenities and uh
well if
what about advocating uh coercion against the other guy in the debate is that permitted look i i don’t think
yeah it’s really fun it’s really funny that i paid more in taxes last year than you’ve probably made in your life
oh boy that’s really funny
so okay okay
is totally irrational
the irs is out against me but i’m the only guy that’s helping him uh you’re not against the rs right
taxation is under control he’s not doing anything to do that so he’s into a post taxation anyway
so why don’t you oppose taxation uh if fake fraud you’re not eliminated
and not even the amended format we do what you want still i i oppose the irs how about that who’s
the federal government hey so anyway i guess you better
schedule a debate with somebody who’s willing to answer questions that won’t and there’s the rules in there when when
you’re supposed to answer the question and i said you didn’t know and he’s supposed to tell me what to tell
why don’t you just say you’re against taxing me by the irs why don’t you just say that you think the irs shouldn’t tax
what are you talking about man you just said you think the federal
government should tax people should i you didn’t you interrupted me in the middle of my statement
i see well that’s not uncommon that’s what you’ve been doing all day i explained to you that people that
think that that they need a government in order to have god’s sake protection of their individuals
have a right and
social institution performs that focus that function and and only for only for that purpose
they are not being they’re not being aggressive the people are right people are right and doing
and then
that’s why you won’t learn we’ve had enough of your state of smell that’s enough thank you for having me let’s let’s have some no
no i am not going to be civilized with a guy like that thank you for admitting that you’re in favor of taxation
thank you for being that uh jan you at least admitted that you’re in favor of the government
taking people’s money from them by force at least you admitted that um and if you can pretend to be a
libertarian despite this congratulations i pity any libertarian who falls for your
[ __ ] and nonsense you are no worse in fact you are worse than any statist
advocate of the state um and i am that’s my opinion welcome to my opinion
you can shut the [ __ ] up for a second and then that i was and that i wasn’t it goes
back and forth well you’re in favor of taxation no no i told you what circumstances i’m
in favor of what taxation whatever whatever whatever i don’t care you are my enemy
you’re my enemy and if we ever have a war i love you wow you don’t know your enemies and your
friends i’m the guy who’s at the front lines yes i do most of my enemies are not as computers
redistribution of wealth that’s going on so you want to you’re a real status you pretend you’re like a libertarian
you pretend you’re not a libertarian they’re fun well you are
no daniel i he is he’s in favor of taxation okay well i’m not justifying any
positions what i am saying is that people have a view that they
have in the point of a debate i don’t care about people’s views okay if they leave me the [ __ ] alone
that’s fine he wants to take my money from me and that’s not good was there ever a
point in your life it’s not funny man like you i would think it was a joke
okay but if you make a lot of money it actually it actually makes a difference step one
was there ever a question where you supported taxation you ever
an agreement with you is worthless because you won’t follow it you’ll agree the thing
you don’t have any integrity and you don’t even realize that you displayed that to everyone here on this video
that you so i’m willing so i was wrong but i’m not advocating taxation
i’m not gonna keep you know do you think that unlike you all you can think about is taxation and you can’t
hey jan you understand that your days are numbered no one cares about you are you a hitman
you are just a status no one cares about oh wash washed out losers like you you understand
it’s not enhanced you can’t even pronounce the word right
it’s true the format that they agreed okay because this guy will not and he he you said he
was laid back so people like me we hang out with people that are actually successful real
people or we hang out with principal people anyway it’s pointless at this point
um since the person yeah [ __ ] off bye oh more at hanuman
wow [ __ ] off you see that gave you an insight you did you know that he was like that you didn’t
know did you i you didn’t know because now i hope that you at least
gained an insight into his soul what kind of person he is and that’s the only benefit that i see
in this uh that he did that i wish we could have a civilized discussion
oh yeah i guess yeah you gotta get a better candidate
somebody who will adhere to the format that won’t involve uh want to engage in and harm them and
uh it doesn’t get so angry at somebody who isn’t even doing anything to him my god
right he’s got an anger problem well i i i i’ve answered all these people watching this a
civilized discussion uh so sorry okay
Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:48:18 — 119.6MB)
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 122.
I appeared recently on the Canadian libertarian podcast Ed and Ethan: The Voice of Liberty in Canada (April 26, 2014) (I was a guest in 2012 and 2013 as well). We discussed the Aereo copyright case, IP in the Eastern District of Texas (see reporting by Joe Mullen), net neutrality, and other matters. This is my segment only; for the full show, go to Ed and Ethan’s show page for Episode 107.
For background: see Dropbox clarifies its policy on reviewing shared files for DMCA issues, and links above.
Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:58:31 — 135.6MB)
My articles have been translated so far into 14 languages. Most of it so far is my shorter pieces, as well as my Against Intellectual Property. But the topic that has always interested me most is rights theory. What I regard as one of my most important papers, and in any case one of my personal favorites, Punishment and Proportionality: The Estoppel Approach, Journal of Libertarian Studies 12:1 (Spring 1996), though, which sets out my view of libertarian rights in some detail, has never been translated. Nor has much of my other writing on rights theory, except for a Dutch translation of New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory, which contains a summary of my rights theory and related ones such as Hoppe’s argumentation ethics.
Until now, that is: the Punishment and Proportionality paper has just been translated into Portuguese by Miguel Serra. The translation is: Pena e proporcionalidade: A abordagem do Estoppel (also now published on the Ludwig von Mises Institute Brazil). I’m extremely grateful to and honored by Mr. Serra, as well as those who have done the other translations. The spreading, global libertarian community is truly a wonder to behold. It gives me hope for humanity.
Update: There is an HTML version available, Agressão, pena e proporcionalidade – como estabelecer os limites?. And I also now see Punição e Proporcionalidade: A Abordagem do Estoppel
Update: PDF versions of the above are now available, sent to me by Thiago Machado, a Brazilian libertarian student: one file formatted for A4 paper (good for PC/tablet) and the other one formatted in A6 (good for smartphones).
Update:
- KOL465: Sheldon Richman on Corporations, Limited Liability, Price Controls, Thickism, Abortion, Pipes
- Will Moyer, “Why I left libertarianism: An ethical critique of a limited ideology,” Salon (June 14, 2014). Subtitle: “I value many contributions libertarianism makes to challenging power. But here’s why I no longer associate with it” (pasted below)
- The Limits of Libertarianism: Rebutted, by Stefan Molyneux
Moyer’s piece is now memory-holed so I will append below the entire piece from Archive.org.
One Will Moyer recently penned The Limits of Libertarianism, which has gotten some attention among libertarians, and critics thereof, on Facebook and various blogs. In the article, Moyer, who implies that he is an ex-libertarian, makes various characterizations of, statements about, and criticisms of libertarianism, many of which I believe to be incorrect. Below I discuss a few of my disagreements with Moyer’s piece. As a preliminary matter, it will be helpful to set down a brief explanation of some of the basic aspects of libertarianism.
“Libertarianism” is the name given to a particular political philosophy. As I discuss in some detail in What Libertarianism Is, what characterizes libertarianism is not “property rights,” since every political philosophy has some treatment of property rights. Every system has an answer to the question: who gets to control that resource?
What distinguishes libertarianism from other political philosophies is its particular answer as to how property rights should be allocated in scarce (i.e., rivalrous, contestable) resources. And that answer is: property rights ought to be allocated in accordance with Lockean principles of initial appropriation, sometimes called homesteading; contractual transfer; and other transfers as a result of torts or crimes. As Roderick Long puts it, citing Robert Nozick,
Libertarian property rights are, famously, governed by principles of justice in initial appropriation (mixing one’s labour with previously unowned resources), justice in transfer (mutual consent), and justice in rectification (say, restitution plus damages). 1
Another formulation that describes the libertarian idea is the opposition to “aggression.” The link between the so-called “non-aggression principle” and our property rights view is that we oppose aggression defined in terms of property rights so allocated. We believe aggression is unjust and unjustifiable. Thus, our shorthand use of phrases like “non-aggression principle” or “non-initiation of force,” as well general terms like “liberty” and “freedom,” and opposition to “coercion,” 2 and so on—all of which are either shorthand or conceptually dependent terms on the more fundamental and primary notion of property rights. As an example: if I hit you, it is aggression because you own your body. If I take an apple from you, it is aggression only if you own the apple; if it is my apple and I am retrieving it from a thief, the act of force used to take it back is not aggression. We cannot determine whether a given apparent “border crossing” is invasion, or theft, or trespass, or aggression, unless we first identify who the owner of the contested resource is.
In fact, the reason property rights are more fundamental than, and a concept upon which “aggression” depends, is that the only reason there is a need for property rights is the possibility of conflict, and this arises only because we live in a world of scarce (rivalrous) resources. As Mises explains, humans act, which means to employ certain scarce means to achieve certain chosen ends. The scarce means are physical resources in the world that our scientific knowledge informs us are causally efficacious in interfering with the world, in changing the course of events to achieve some forecasted state in the future that is desired more than what is otherwise predicted by the actor to come about. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains in Of Private, Common, and Public Property and the Rationale for Total Privatization,
Conflict only results if our different interests and beliefs are attached to and invested in one and the same good. In the Schlaraffenland, with a superabundance of goods, no conflict can arise (except for conflicts regarding the use of our physical bodies that embody our very own interests and ideas). There is enough around of everything to satisfy everyone’s desires. In order for different interests and ideas to result in conflict, goods must be scarce. Only scarcity makes it possible that different interests and ideas can be attached to and invested in one and the same stock of goods. Conflicts, then, are physical clashes regarding the control of one and the same given stock of goods. People clash because they want to use the same goods in different, incompatible ways.
Even under conditions of scarcity, when conflicts are possible, however, they are not necessary or unavoidable. All conflicts regarding the use of any good can be avoided if only every good is privately owned, i.e., exclusively controlled by some specified individual(s) and it is always clear which thing is owned, and by whom, and which is not.
It is important, then, to emphasize that every dispute is always really about scarce resources. And every proposed or disputed law is ultimately about the use of force against some identifiable scarce resource: a human body, or other scarce resources in the world that humans can employ as means of action. For example, it is sometimes said that people “fight over religion.” This is not true. People fight only over scarce resources. Disagreement over religion may be the reason for the fight but the fight is always conducted with physical force, mediated by causal means (e.g. weapons), to physically control others’ bodies or owned resources. For example A may tell B to change to A’s religion or face death; the fight here is over who get’s to control B’s body. 3 When the state threatens to jail people for disobeying drug laws, the state is asserting an ownership claim over its citizens’ bodies. When the state taxes people, it is taking their money.
So: we say aggression (invasion of property rights) 4 is unjustifiable. This matters, in our view, or should matter, to those who care about justice and justifying their claims (as anyone engaging in argumentation or discourse about such matters undeniably demonstrates). 5 As I noted in my 1996 JLS paper Punishment and Proportionality: The Estoppel Approach, [continue reading…]
- Long, Why Libertarians Believe There is Only One Right. [↩]
- But see my post The Problem with “Coercion”. [↩]
- On the danger of imprecise language and metaphors, see my post On the Danger of Metaphors in Scientific Discourse. [↩]
- See text at n. 11 of What Libertarianism Is for various terminological formulations used to describe aggression. [↩]
- See Hoppe’s “argumentation ethics” defense of libertarian ethics; links in my Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide. [↩]
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 121.
I was interviewed by Redmond Weissenberger, of Mises Canada, for his Better Red than Dead podcast (iTunes). We discussed a variety of topics, including: store refuses to put boy’s name on an Easter egg because of a copyright concern because he shares a name with a famous soccer player, positive versus negative rights, Alexis de Tocqueville on servitudes and liberty, and intellectual property (IP) as negative servitudes; Ayn Rand’s confusion on property rights and IP; property as the least bad option; the impossibility of a post-scarcity world; the dispute over “privilege checking” and attempts to speak the language of progressives; Hoppe on immigration and monarchy.
More information on some of the topics discussed can be found in the following articles and blog posts:
- Boy named after Wayne Rooney not allowed personalised Easter egg due to ‘copyright law’
- Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes
- “Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” Alexis de Tocqueville
- Private Property, the Least Bad Option, by Joseph S. Diedrich
- Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and ‘Rearranging’
- Ayn Rand on eminent domain
- The Problem with “Coercion”
- The Three Languages of Politics featuring Arnold Kling, Aaron Ross Powell, and Trevor Burrus
- On the Danger of Metaphors in Scientific Discourse
- Thomas Knapp re Hoppe and Carson
- Hoppe is Not a Monarchist
- “Abolishing forced integration requires the de-democratization of society and ultimately the abolition of democracy. More specifically, the power to admit or exclude should be stripped from the hands of the central government and reassigned to the states, provinces, cities, towns, villages, residential districts, and ultimately to private property owners and their voluntary associations.” Hoppe, Democracy, p. 148
- Kinsella, A Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders
Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:00:19 — 27.6MB)
From a (fairly informal) Facebook post of mine:
First significant thinker to get libertarianism totally right: Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Let me splain.
I view the modern libertarian movement as starting around the 50s or so, with people like Leonard Read, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and a bit later, Rothbard, and the like. Yes there were important forbears—Bastiat, classical liberals, and others. (http://archive.mises.org/18385/the-origin-of-libertarianism/; see also Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned?)
But the earlier libertarians always got something major wrong or were missing some major essential points. Most of them were pro-state—not anarchist. Minarchists, classical liberals. That’s a serious problem.
And the ones who were anarchist always seemed to get some major issue wrong. For example, Spooner, who was great on just about everything, was bad on IP (http://c4sif.org/2012/06/tucker-on-spooners-one-flaw/). This flows from a confused concept of the nature of rights and acceptance of the confused idea of the labor theory of property, stemming from Locke’s formulations and overly metaphorical thinking.
Probably the best overall libertarian in pre-modern times was Benjamin Tucker but even he, like lots of the earlier anarchists, was confused on some basic economic issues, the “land” question, etc.—this latter issue even corrupted his heroic opposition to IP: his argument against IP is that it is based on the idea that you own the products of labor (“he who first takes possession of any material production of nature”), but that this would imply you can own land. And we know we can’t have ownership of land, therefore the principle behind IP must be flawed too. [See Land Monopoly and Literary Monopoly]
So Tucker was great, esp. for his time, but not complete.
Further, he was too early to benefit from modern Austrian economics, especially the praxeological-Misesian approach. Which I regard as essential to being a basically modern, complete, systematic, coherent, principled libertarian. You need to be anti-state/anarchist, Austrian (Misesian), and also consistent and very propertarian. Without this it is more proto-libertarian or flawed libertarianism.
Rand was bad on IP (a major issue) and bad on the state. So fail.
Milton Friedman—ditto (at least on the state).
Read was great, and good on IP, and Austrian-ish economics, but he was not an anarchist AFAIK.
Hazlitt was getting closer, but as far as I know he was not an anarchist. In any case, he was not a comprehensive political philosopher.
One of the people I’m learning a bit more about is Sam Konkin III. From everything I know about him he was pretty solid on everything—the state, IP, everything. He was in fact one of the pioneers of the modern anti-IP movement. However, he was more of a minor figure and did not have a fully fleshed out political theory that I am aware of. He is known for “agorism” and his fairly brief (but profound and correct and perspicacious) comments on IP, but ….
So the obvious candidate is Rothbard. Anarchist, radical, propertarian, profound, comprehensive and systematic, steeped in Misesian economics. You might award him this crown. But he misstepped on IP. It is not just a misstep that is the issue here; it is why he did it. He failed to apply his own property rules and contract theory consistently here. And the former was, I think, because he did not emphasize the role of scarcity and conflict at the root of property enough. Being an expert on Misesian praxeology, with its emphasis on the role of scarce means in human action, it’s a bit surprising, but hey, you can’t do everything. Every great thinker stands on the shoulders of giants, as Rothbard himself did (including being influenced Rand’s sort of systematic tying together of various strands of thought into a libertarian-ish whole), even as he was a giant in his own right.
Hoppe, thoroughly steeped in both Mises and Rothbard, finally got it right, IMO. He did not write much about IP but in his brief comments he indicated the right path. And he also focused intensely on property rights, and—crucially, the issue of scarcity and its core relationship to property rights. He built on Rothbard and Mises, with insights from people like Hume (scarcity) and others like Habermas (rights theory, argumentation ethics, which Rothbard enthusiastically endorsed and saw the revolutionary promise of). If you combine Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe, you get the culmination of advanced, consistent libertarian philosophy. (See Hoppe, A Realistic Libertarianism)
Not saying this is perfect or the political philosophy is closed or complete, nor that there is not more work to do. But in my view, the main edifice of modern, radical, principled libertarianism is Rothbardian-propertian-Austro-anarcho-Hoppeanism.
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