StephanKinsella.com

[UPDATE: See final version here]

Here is a first draft of a translation of Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023) into Chinese, translated by Li San (李三). The following is not yet proofread, according to the translator.

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• On Taxing Harvard: Ranting about Thuggocrats and Waystation/Post-libertarians

I’ve learned and profited a great deal from libertarian legal scholar Randy Barnett’s work—on contract theory, punishment, constitutional and ninth amendment issues, originalism, and more. ¹

In his really unique and excellent new book, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist (2024), which I read cover to cover, he has an intriguing section near the end on “What’s Next for Libertarianism” where he hints a possible future book extending his previous thought on liberty and libertarianism. He suggests several extensions to or possibly modifications to libertarianism that might try to address. For example: “If we are to be libertarians and not propertarians, … libertarians need also to be concerned about threats to individual liberty now posed by privately owned companies. … A good theoretical start would be to separate the “public-private” binary from the “government-nongovernment” binary.” I have concerns about conservatives and libertarians who try to blur the distinction between between private and state actors—for example in attempts to subject big tech platforms to defamation liability out of spite or because they just don’t like them ², or in arguments that private actors (banks, big tech, New York Times) are really “part of the state” and thus it’s fine to subject them to otherwise unjust and unlibertarian laws, such as libel law, or even to justify having the state regulate these corporations, since they are after all effectively state organs ³—but it would be interesting to see Barnett grapple with these matters. [continue reading…]

1. See my review of his book, The Structure of Liberty, “Knowledge, Calculation, Conflict, and Law,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), and many other references to Barnett’s work in this book. [↩]
2. No, Libertarians, We Should NOT Abolish the CDA §230 and DMCA Safe Harbors! [↩]
3. KOL354 | CDA §230, Being “Part of the State,” Co-ownership, Causation, Defamation, with Nick Sinard; Van Dun, Barnett on Freedom vs. Property; Is Macy’s Part of the State? A Critique of Left Deviationists; on Block’s defamation suit against the New York Times, see Walter Block Defends His Libel Suit Against The New York Times; A Libertarian Analysis of Suing for Libel (“How … can I justify suing the New York Times for libel? It is simple. The libertarian case against suing for libel applies only to innocent people, and this newspaper does not at all qualify. Rather, this organization is a member in good standing of the ruling class, and all bets are off for criminals of that ilk.”), and others here. [↩]

Dear Mr. Kinsella:

If you have the time I wanted to ask for some clarification regarding your views on positive obligations and their relationship with aggression and bringing children into the world.

In your article “How we come to own ourselves” you argue libertarianism is not inherently against positive obligations just unchosen obligations. You say one can incur positive obligations by commiting aggression. You use the analogy of pushing a person into a lake (aggressing against them) that creates a positive obligation to rescue them. You then say bringing an infant into the world with certain needs is akin to pushing a person into a lake.

My question is, does this mean bringing an infant into the world is aggression which then creates a chosen obligation to feed the infant (rescue them from the situation you’ve put them in)? Is this an accurate reading of your argument? [continue reading…]

Interesting new article: Stephen Crosswell, “The Common Law and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations,” Journal of Global Trade, Ethics and Law Vol. 2 No. 2 (2024): 1–33.

Adam Smith developed a theory of the ‘four-stage’ advancement of society as England was entering the Industrial Revolution (the fourth stage) and becoming the leading commercial centre in the world. That transition was raising new and novel legal issues that required legal solutions more complex than the earlier three stages in human advancement, as innovation gave rise to new technologies and ways of working. He and other juridical thinkers saw the debate about whether legislation could effectively drive that transition as the central question of their time, the answer to which would, in the long run, affect the fate of nations and Empire. They had a clear view on this, informed by the study of thousands of years of human history. For them, the common law was vastly superior.

This article examines the debate that took place on these issues, the Benthamite revolution that followed and the modern basket of rights that obfuscate the key question that policy-makers should be asking in our generation: if the common law was so successful in driving the Industrial Revolution, what confidence can we have in a legislated approach as we move into the fifth stage, the Technology Revolution? This is one of the most important issues facing the world as societies decide what legal framework(s) will regulate humanity’s move into a digital society and the efforts to discover and invent the technologies that will support us on that journey.

Related:

• Hans-Hermann Hoppe, From the Malthusian Trap to the Industrial Revolution: An Explanation of Social Evolution (PFS 2009)
• Stephan Kinsella, “Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023)

In a recent Tweet, I wrote:

Rand on the Injuns

“Now, I don’t care to discuss the alleged complaints American Indians have against this country. I believe, with good reason, the most unsympathetic Hollywood portrayal of Indians and what they did to the white man. They had no right to a country merely because they were born here and then acted like savages. The white man did not conquer this country. And you’re a racist if you object, because it means you believe that certain men are entitled to something because of their race. You believe that if someone is born in a magnificent country and doesn’t know what to do with it, he still has a property right to it. He does not. Since the Indians did not have the concept of property or property rights—they didn’t have a settled society, they had predominantly nomadic tribal “cultures”—they didn’t have rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights that they had not conceived of and were not using. [continue reading…]

From a facebook post by David Veksler:

There is no such thing as “intrinsic value” in economics. Value exists only in the eyes of the beholder. The concept of “value” is made possible by being valuable to a specific person, for a particular purpose. The only thing in the universe that is intrinsically valuable is human beings.

TLDR: Stop with nonsense like “Bitcoin has no intrinsic value”

My comment (lightly edited here): [continue reading…]

My friend Ryan McMaken has an interesting article up today, “Tax Cuts Without Spending Cuts Won’t Reduce the Taxpayers’ Burden,” LewRockwell.com (Nov. 8, 2024).

I am not sure I agree, though.

In my view, it is always better to cut FedGov spending, even if taxes are not lowered. It is also always better to cut taxes, even if spending is not lowered. It is of course best to do both, and the more cuts the better, but they are independent goals.

Cutting deficits is only a side effect, an ancillary goal, of cutting spending and of cutting taxes. Cutting deficits or balancing the budget is not the main goal or even a real, independent goal; it is just the consequence of lowering gov spending and gov taxation.

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I was alerted to a course by LiquidZulu, “The Fundamentals of Libertarian Ethics,” touted as “The single fastest route from novice to expert in Austrian legal theory.” Somewhat amusingly, his site states:

Theres a problem…

Philosophy is big. Learning even a very small part of one specific philosophy could take years, if you even know where to look in the first place.

Theres a solution!

I have spent those years autistically studying philosophy, so I can deliver to you only the parts you need to know to understand what is true, rather than having to slog through thousand-page tomes of utter nonsensical jibberish. (And believe me, a lot of it is jibberish).

Great care has been taken to craft the courses on this website and I refuse to release a course unless it is better than any alternative that I am aware of.

The course is presented in seven modules in written form, free online, and also in video form which can be purchased at whatever price you like. I have only skimmed through some of the modules so far but from what I can tell it looks like a very good introduction to this topic, well organized, written and researched. The site claims the text version takes about 3 hours and the youtube videos (I paid for it) appear to be about 2 and a half hours.

I did a longer course on a similar topic for Mises Academy back in 2011, “Libertarian Legal Theory: Property, Conflict, and Society,” which was well received, so such a course is definitely needed. I may in fact do an updated version of this course later, based on my book, Legal Foundations of a Free Society. Stay tuned. In the meantime, check out LiquidZulu’s course.

From an exchange on Twitter.

Jeremy Kauffman @jeremykauffman

1h

https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/1853107290481500254

The best study I’ve seen on libertarians by race is this PRRI 2013 survey: 

https://www.prri.org/research/2013-american-values-survey/

How does a current factoid about the current racial makeup of libertarians support your assertion: “A libertarian society will be majority white.”

Let’s say that from 2009 to 2024 99% of bitcoiners are whites. This would not justify the assertion “in the future 99% of bitcoiners would be white.” You would need an argument, someting connecting whiteness with bitcoinness.

For libertarianism, I can imagine some arguments you could supply (but have not, afaik) that connect “whiteness” with “being libertarian.” For example here is one possible argument: libertarianism requires high intelligence as well as a propensity for low-time preference, since it requires abstract thinking, curiosity, courage, the ability to understand complex historical, economic, and sociological concepts. These characteristics do not guarantee libertarian views, not sufficient, but they are arguably necessary. In short, libertarians are “superior” beings and only a subset of humans can ever superior enough to be libertarians.

Whites are superior in terms of IQ and the other related factors which explains why most libertarians are white and it also is why it’s reasonable to predict that going forward, the libertarian superior supermen will predominately come from the white race and only occasionally from the few outliers among the non-white races.

So that would be a somewhat coherent argument, but then it would be explicitly racialist, if not racist, and also it would be based on unfounded racist assumptions; it would be incomplete. I myself think this is a ridiculous view, but if you put it this way it lays bare the naked racialism underlying the claims that are now only implicit, and it would make clearer the assumptions your racialist reasoning is relying on that you could then be asked to prove. What’s next, pointing to unprincipled Popperian scientistic Charles Murray’s pseudoscientific work on race and IQ?

My personal view is that humans are basically all sapient and smart enough to grasp common sense concepts about the benefits of liberty, trade, property rights, and that there is no obvious intelligence barrier to any group being libertarian. In the present only a tiny minority of whites are libertarian anyway? If the “whites are superior” reasoning is right it doesn’t explain why 98% of all whites are still inferior statist-socialist idiots.

If liberty is ever to be achieved it will only be because a large mass of people have come to understand the practical and moral benefits of liberty. If it is ever achieved, it proves that it was not low IQ or intelligence that was the barrier. And if it’s not IQ then there is no reason to think only whites would be the ones escaping the socialist-statist way of thinking.

My view is that liberty may be possible. We do not yet know. If it emerges it won’t be because we (white?) libertarians were running around promoting it, but because it works and over time more and more people came to understand this. For example until the USSR fell in 1991 many people could still argue socialism was superior to capitalism. But that was a teaching moment and now millions of people are aware that free markets and private property work better and are essential to human production and prosperity. They learned this from watching history not from reading Hazlitt.

In my view the main hope for liberty is that because the primary source for wealth is the accumulation of technological knowledge, the human race can keep getting richer every generation. The richer we get the less excuse or need for aggression/crime, and the more people can afford to be “liberal” (cosmpolitan, toleratan, empathetic) and also to devote some time to the study of economics and poltiics. Also they will be witnessing in real time the benefits of capitalism, technology, freedom, information, knowledge, individualism, tolerance, cosmopolitanism–all little teaching moments that accumulate over time. Just as we see happening with bitcoin; more and more people will adopt it as its track record gets longer and they get comfortable with it. And so on. To my mind this is the only hope for liberty, but it also means that there is little we, as activists, can do to bring it about. All we can do is hope, and wait. Which also means that what we can do is recognize this fact and devote sufficient time and attention in our lives in a quasi-free society to trying to survive and flourish in this real world. That means not expecting activism to work, at least not any time soon; accepting reality as it is working to prosper in the face of the illiberal challenges we face.

In any case I don’t expect to see substantial liberty any time soon and if it’s ever achieved I don’t expect it to be “mostly white”.

From some Twitter posts:

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A friend remound me of this FB post (thanks, Brian). From Feb. 14, 2020:

How to easily fix things (or make them way better). These are simple, common sense policies that either of the two major US parties ought to be able to get on board with:

1. Legalize marijuana federally. (And all other drugs, while you’re at it)

2. Bring home 50% of foreign US troops over the next 5-10 years [continue reading…]