StephanKinsella.com

Q:

Hi Mr. Kinsella,

I just recently had a long conversation with my philosophy professor whose specialty is to study Kant’s works. He began to talk about the universalizability principle, ¹ so I asked him whether a State’s existence (which I clarified is an issue because one group of people essentially says “I can hit you but you can’t hit me”) can be coherently justified with a Kantian ethic. He said “yes,” which led to a long conversation and then me asking whether any initiation of force by one group of privileged individuals over a group of non-privileged individuals can be justified with a Kantian ethic. He proceeded to tell me that the initiation of force can be justified in circumstances in which the victimized party has no reason for resisting the force except for “it’s mine.” However, he also said that slavery is inconceivable because it treats people as a mere means, and gives people no “respect,” which they require for being autonomous beings. He also told me that Kant supported a confederation of nations and that any given maxim could be correct if it is conceivable that a “society” within a nation could exist that all adhere to this maxim. [continue reading…]

1. On this, see Kinsella, “The problem of particularistic ethics or, why everyone really has to admit the validity of the universalizability principle,” StephanKinsella.com (Nov. 10, 2011). [↩]

A.:

Dear Mr. Kinsella,

As you have pointed out BTC is not an ownable resource. [See KOL274 | Nobody Owns Bitcoin (PFS 2019)] I had a question about how this pertains to fraud.

Let’s say I buy an apple with BTC but the apple is rotten and the seller knows this. Has the apple seller engaged in fraud and therefore “stolen” my BTC? Since BTC is not ownable then it can’t strictly speaking be stolen right? Does this mean I can’t get my BTC back? [continue reading…]

Update: See also

• • The Libertarian Case for Gay Marriage
  • McElroy and Peron on Gay Marriage
  • Is Gay Marriage a Constitutional Right?

Q:

I  had a question on marriage contracts: are they enforceable contracts or just promises? I don’t see any title ownership claims being exchanged when the people just say “I will be faithful,” it sounds just like a promise, would this part of the marriage contract be enforceable and would someone who cheated be held liable for breaking this contract? I don’t see how they would… I don’t know what the wording is on the contracts, but I don’t see how someone should pay restitution or go through the legal trouble for cheating if it’s just breaking the promise. [continue reading…]

BOB:

Dear Mr. Kinsella,

You have made the point that technically speaking a property right is not the right to control a resource but the right to exclude others from using a resource. [See LFFS, ch. 2, Appendix I, the section “Property as a Right to Exclude” —SK] If you have the time I would like to ask 2 questions regarding how this applies to easements like a right of way.

Positive easements like a right of way are commonly looked at as the right to USE OR DO something to the land that is the subject of the easement.
How would one look at a right of way or other such easements from the perspective of the “right to exclude”? What do you have the right exclude the primary owner from doing with their land in this case? [continue reading…]

Last year I had an email discussion with a friend, Johann Gevers, about legal entities and corporations and such. Our discussion, lightly edited, is appended below, with Johann’s permission. For background see my post Corporate Personhood, Limited Liability, and Double Taxation.

GEVERS:

Dear Mr Kinsella,

I had a question about eminent domain [expropriation] and who becomes the rightful owner of a resource, let’s say a house, after the state has expropriated (stolen) it from the original owner. [continue reading…]

As I tweeted here:

Walter Block’s pro-Israel WSJ article from October, “The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas” (substack version) upset lots of libertarians, e.g. Scott Horton who says, at about 1:08:00 here, that Walter is now kicked out of libertarianism because of his Israel-Gaza views.

Kevin Duffy also criticized him; Walter responded here: “Have I Gone AWOL?” He argued that his views on Gaza are fine since it’s okay to disagree with Rothbard and still be a libertarian. [continue reading…]

I published the print version of Legal Foundations of a Free Society in September of 2023, in time for the 2023 Property and Freedom Society Annual Meeting. The Kindle edition is now available at Amazon. Nook version on Barnes & Noble, and a free online epub file, will be available in months to come. Enjoy!

I found this in some old files. Might be of interest to some. Other participants included fellow libertarian sci-fi authors J. Neil Schulman and Victor Koman. PDF

An intelligent observation from a reader of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (my comments interspersed)

Page 486 had a great example of nuggets in this book that give me a different perspective. Nothing earth shattering, just a more accurate way to understand.

Scarcity is a particularly poor term, for this reason: think of paper clips and why we call them scarce goods. At the root it has nothing to do with the class of paper clips. It’s rather about a specific instance of a paper clip. Now ask if 2 or more people can use that specific object simultaneously without conflict: no. That makes it an economic good. This means we can be talking about the Mona Lisa, of which there is 1, or that paper clip, of which there is (drumroll) … 1.

[continue reading…]

No time to clean this one up at present, so here it is mostly raw—