StephanKinsella.com

We non-Pollyana libertarians oppose calls for tax “reform” — as Rockwell writes, “The only tax plan anyone should trust is the most simple possible: the one that proposes to lower existing taxes.” He goes on:

But there is another danger to promoting a VAT or a NST. It might actually convince someone in Washington to give it a try. And instead of replacing the whole tax code, the politicians might try to introduce the new one at the seemingly low rate of 1 percent or 3 percent. If they ever get away with this, look out. It will inch up year by year as the political class discovers yet another way to loot us.

This points to a general danger of the idea of a replacement tax. I hear of these plans all the time. People say, let’s get rid of the tax I don’t like and replace it with one I do not pay. So people will propose getting rid of the capital gains tax and instead increase taxes on inheritance. Or they say, let’s get rid of inheritance taxes and put a higher tax on Americans working abroad. You can think of many of your own variations on this. The danger here is not in advocating the repeal of one tax. That is something we should all favor. The danger comes from advocating a new tax to take its place. If you know the way politics works, you know that the new tax will be enacted and the old one not repealed.

And here is perfect proof of this: Podesta Says Value-Added Tax ‘More Plausible’ as Deficits Grow. This is of course just yet another tax on top of others. Libertarians: stay strong. Never advocate tax “simplification”. Never advocate “replacing” any tax with another. (No offense, my naive, 23-year old self.)

[LRC cross-post]

This is a great quote. I don’t know if it’s mine, as one commentator implies, but I like it.

Here’s the post of said commentator, “Stephen”:

We’ve had quite a few threads lately that call Natural Rights into question. I stumbled onto this brilliant critique of this skeptical position by Stephan N. Kinsella, which I had read before and forgotten about.

Kinsella:
A third rationalist type of rights argument concerns the very nature of rights themselves and shows how any rights-skeptic contradicts himself whenever he denies that rights exist. It is similar to the estoppel approach outlined above, although the discourse under examination need not involve an aggressor. Instead, this argument focuses on rights-skeptics who deny the existence of rights, rather than on actual criminals who object to being punished in particular instances for a given crime.

If any right at all exists, it is a right of A to have or do X without B‘s preventing it; and, therefore, A can legitimately use force against B to enforce the right. A is concerned with the enforceability of his right to X, and this enforceability is all that A requires in order to be secure in his right to X. For a rights-skeptic meaningfully to challenge A‘s asserted right, the skeptic must challenge the enforceability of the right, instead of merely challenging the existence of the right. Nothing else will do. If the skeptic does not deny that A‘s proposed enforcement of his purported right is legitimate, then the skeptic has not denied A‘s right to X, because what it means to have a right is to be able to legitimately enforce it. If the skeptic maintains, then, that A has no right to X, indeed, no rights at all since there are no rights, the skeptic must also maintain that A‘s enforcement of his purported right to X is not justified.

But the problem faced by the skeptic here is that he assumes that enforcement–i.e., the use of force–requires justification. A, however, cares not that the rights-skeptic merely challenges A‘s use of force against B. The rights-skeptic must do more than express his preference that A not enforce his right against B, for such an expression does not attack the legitimacy of A‘s enforcing his right against B. The only way for the skeptic meaningfully to challenge A‘s enforcement action is to acknowlefge that B may use force to prevent A‘s (illegitimate) enforcement action. And here the rights-skeptic  (perversely) undercuts his own position, because by recognizing the legitimacy of B‘s use of force against A, the rights-skeptic effectively attributes rights to B himself, the right to not have unjustifiable force used against him. In short, for anyone to meaningfully maintain that A has no rights against B on the grounds that no rights exist, he must effectively attribute rights to B so that B may defend himself against A‘s purportedly unwarranted enforcement action.

More common-sensically, this demonstration points out the inconsistency on the part of a rights-skeptic who engages in discourse about the propriety of rights at all. If there are no rights, then there is no such thing as the justifiable or legitimate use of force, but neither is there such a thing as the unjust use of force. But if there is no unjust use of force, what is it, exactly, that a rights-skeptic is concerned about? If individuals delude themselves into thinking that they have natural rights, and, acting on this assumption, go about enforcing these rights as if they are true, the skeptic has no grounds to complain. To the extent the sceptic complains about people enforcing these illusory rights, he begins to attribute rights to those having force used against them. Any rights-skeptic can only shut up, because he contradicts himself the moment he objects to others’ acting as if they have rights.

And in hilarious footnote 14

Indeed, another way to respond to a rights-skeptic would be to shoot him. If there are no rights, as he maintains, then he cannot object to being shot. So, presumably, any rights-skeptic would change his position and admit there were rights (if only so as to be able to object to being shot), or we would soon have no more rights-skeptics left alive to give us rights-advocates any trouble.

funny post: 76 Words. Check it out–Karen eviscerates all the slacker gamer fanatics and other tar babies and nits who go crazy if you call a spade a spade.

Discussing the G20 protestors, I mouthed off something that such protestors are usually incoherent, and anyway losers–people with real jobs don’t have time to go protest. My buddy Rob Wicks replied,

Good point. The reason we can’t have another American Revolution is that we don’t have all that free time we could have by owning slaves.

Over on The Austrian Economists blog, David Prychitko has a post about Habermas, where he writes:

I spent quite a bit of time reading, and trying to make sense of, Habermas’s works. That began in the late 1980s and continued up to a couple years ago. It was a difficult and time-consuming process, but I thought his effort in political economy (backed by his own methodology) was important, as a large cottage industry arose inspired by his work. Looking back, the opportunity cost was too high, but at least it did result in a Cambridge Journal of Economics paper that I and Virgil Storr co-authored. If any of you are interested –and I’m sure most of you are not — here’s a downloadable copy.

The paper is “Communicative action and the radical constitution: the Habermasian challenge to Hayek, Mises and their descendents.” Since this paper is by an Austrian, and grapples with Habermas’s communicative action ideas and its relation to Austrian praxeology, one would have thought it would least cite, if only to criticize, a fellow Austrian economist, who obtained his PhD under Habermas, and who has written a great deal on Habermas’s communicative action theories from a praxeological point of view–namely Hans-Hermann Hoppe. (See Hoppe: Habermas’s Anarcho-Conservative Student; Revisiting Argumentation Ethics; Discourse Ethics entry in Wikipedia (which yours truly started, and which has more on Hoppe and Habermas); Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics writings; my New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory; and my collection of Habermas-related material here.)

But Hoppe is nowhere mentioned. Nor is Karl-Otto Apel, for that matter, another German philosopher who “co-developed” “the theory of communicative action and discourse ethics … with his friend, colleague, and collaborator Jürgen Habermas.”

[Mises blog cross-post]

As noted here (see also here, here, here),

Texas Instruments has issued a DMCA notice to United TI, a group of enthusiasts. They had been cracking the keys that sign the operating system binaries in an attempt to gain access and possibly expand on the features.

Suing your own most dedicated fans of your increasingly outmoded device (its calculators), for trying to modify it to make it more useful to them. It’s hard to decide what’s more ridiculous: IP law, or the way companies use them.
[AM cross-post; mises cross-post]

A Baltimore startup with less than 5 employees, WhoGlue, is suing Facebook for patent infringement, based on a patent it previously–unsuccessfully–tried to unload at a patent auction. The patent, no. 7,246,164, is for a “Distributed personal relationship information management system and method”. In essence, they claim that Facebook infringes their patent by permitting members to send one another “friend requests” and sharing information online, tracking each others activities, and so on. I.e., they are claiming a state-granted monopoly on a crucial aspect of social networking.

WhoGlue wants to make it clear they are not a patent troll, heaven forfend. No,

“The patent is a key part of WhoGlue’s business, and the lawsuit is meant to protect his company’s livelihood, Hardebeck said. … “We didn’t patent something that we thought would be an opportunity to license” to other companies, he said. “We patented it because it was core to our business.”

So… they are not some nasty patent troll who is just suing Facebook for some invention they never practiced or sold. They just want to protect something that’s “core to their business.” Something so core they tried to auction it off (but failed).  But do they claim that Facebook copied this “invention” from them? I doubt it–it’s unlikely Facebook did copy it, and copying need not be shown to prove patent infringement anyway. And what does this non-troll want? “Unspecified monetary damages”–probably hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, if the Blackberry patent suit is any guide–plus a permanent injunction issued by the state preventing Facebook from using this “invention”. I bet Facebook is so glad WhoGlue is not some annoying troll. [continue reading…]

The way abortion is portrayed on TV and in movies is annoying. Because Hollywood is dominated by left-liberals, whenever a woman has an unplanned pregnancy, we always see the mom-to-be wonder “what she’s going to do,” making it clear that she has the option to abort. But they don’t say the word abortion, and the woman always exercises her choice to keep the baby. That way, Hollywood gets to help spread the image that “of course” pro-choice is the right position, but the woman makes the “right” choice so as to avoid alienating the pro-life “rubes.”

Well that’s not enough for some of them. The new CBS comedy Accidentally on Purpose is about a late-thirties single woman who gets pregnant after a one-night-stand with a 22 year old slacker, and decides to keep the baby and raise it as a single mother. It’s based on the true story of one Mary Pols, who is upset because the CBS sitcom doesn’t have the pregnant mom consider an abortion. Pols is okay with the decision to keep the baby; that’s what Pols did in real life. But Pols considered an abortion; so she’s upset that the sitcom didn’t at least show the mom wonder–out loud, for the benefit of the rubes in Red states, you see–“Should I have an abortion?” And maybe–in a network sitcom, natch–casually mention that she had had an abortion in her youth. After all, Pols had one–she’s “been down the college-girl abortion route”–what good liberal college girl doesn’t?; its part of the natural learning experience, you see; and Pols even says “it had broken my heart”–but not, she’s careful to note, to avoid the raised eyebrows of anti-choice feminazis, “in a I-shouldn’t-have-done-that way, but” only in a politically correct, acceptable, “I-wish-I-hadn’t-had-to-do-that way.” [continue reading…]

Related:

• On the Non Liquet in Libertarian Theory and Armchair Theorizing;
• Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons
• Rosalyn Higgins, “Dissenting Opinion of Judge Higgins, Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Reports 1996 (I), p. 583,” in Higgins, Themes and Theories, ch. 9.8, p. 1129
• International Law, Libertarian Principles, and the Russia-Ukraine War;
• KOL250 | International Law Through a Libertarian Lens (PFS 2018)
• Book Review of Rosalyn Higgins, Problems and Process: International Law and How We Use It (1994), Reason Papers No. 20 (Fall 1995): 147–153
  • Patrick Tinsley, “Nuclear Weapons: Proliferation, Monopoly, or Disarmament?“, Mises Wire (05/02/2025)
• In response to the simpleminded but common comment and legal positivistic sentiment that international law is not real or that international law does not exist, because there is no sovereign state and enforceable legislation, see, inter alia, Anthony D’Amato, “What ‘Counts’ as Law?,” in Law-Making in the Global Communkty, Nicholas G. Onuf, ed. (1982), Northwestern Public Law Research Paper No. 11-02, and many other treatises and papers. Also Is international law real? Professor José Alvarez weighs in (“almost all 0:18 states comply with almost all international law almost all the time. 0:22 Most people focused on the almost, but the fact is that they do comply it’s 0:28 just not front page news when they do”); International Law Explained | Kal Raustiala | Big Think; Philip Allott – The True Nature of International Law.

Lew Rockwell noted on his blog recently some tentative steps towards disarmament between the US and Russia; he’s right: blessed are the peacemakers. And at first glance, the recent UN resolution committing all nations to work for a nuclear weapons-free world might give some cause for hope–though the cynic would think that China, Russia, Europe, and America are simply solidifying their nuclear hegemony, while America is starting to build its case for potential future military action against “rogue” nations (note one purpose of the resolution is to reduce the risk of nuclear terrorism”–shades of the buildup to the Iraq war!).

Granted, the UN raises concerns about centralization, one-world government, and socialistic resolutions ¹–but nowadays these concerns are very remote. There is little risk of the Powers giving up their sovereignty to the UN or forming a one-world government under anything but their own aegis; rather, the risk is they will just use the UN for cover to dominate and legitimize attacks on smaller states, as Bush deftly did with Iraq War (who said he’s stupid? he expertly used the international system to get what he wanted). Still, to the extent the UN is less restricted by positive law and legislation, it–in particular its International Court of Justice–is freer to follow traditional concepts of justice in declaring what international law “is”. For this reason, I’ve always had more hope in international law being potentially more libertarian than modern, legislated municipal law. There is no great barrier to considerations of natural law, for example, being drawn on to decide what international law is. That is, despite the (now remote) danger of centralization and one-world government, and despite its being used and manipulated by the Great Powers to dominate other nations, international law is, and should be expected to remain, more libertarian than the laws of individual states.

A case in point is the ICJ’s advisory opinion in 1996 (in response to a request by the UN’s General Assembly) regarding the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, which I noted on the LRC blog in 2003 (see also the companion case, Legality of the Use by a State of Nuclear Weapons in Armed Conflicts. See, in particular, the heroic dissenting opinion of Judge Weeramantry of Sri Lanka, which was (quoting from the unofficial summary): [continue reading…]

1. See note 29 of What Libertarianism Is. [↩]

My buddy Iceberg proposed a delicious test for IP proponents:

Here is a scenario to test a IP statists’ resolve–what would he say if one day aliens visited Earth to enforce intergalactic patents for devices which were patented 600 million years prior by that alien culture that mankind has been “stealing.”

Ha. That is indeed the logic of their position. Of course the IP advocates would find a slippery way to weasel out of it. They would say that this is another government–except the logic if their non-anarchist view implies one-worldism; and anyway, if something is real property, it’s property everywhere. They would say that they don’t believe patent rights should apply to independent inventors–even though patent systems have no such exception and would be largely declawed if they did.

[AgainstMonopoly crosspost]

My comment on a Mises blog thread:

Geoih, “I don’t consider myself an anachist because I think the idea is utopian and only attainable under the extreme conditions that all utopian ideals require.”

As I explain in What It Means to be an Anarcho-Capitalist, to be an anarchist simply means you oppose aggression, and you realize the state necessarily commits aggression. If you are not an anarchist, it means you either condone aggression, or think the state does not necessarily commit aggression. As you say you are not an anarchist, can you please tell us which one describes you? Are you in favor of aggression (like socialists and criminals are)? Or, do you think the state does not commit aggression (like children brainwashed by government schools think)?