I’ve seen a lot of weak and pathetic arguments for IP, but this one takes the cake. (With reference to David Koepsell: Another Austrian-Influenced IP Opponent, Comment on Koepsell’s “A methodical response to Chris Holman’s ‘review’”, Are Libertarians For Intellectual Property?: Comment on David Koepsell’s “Why I Believe Gene Patenting is Wrong”.) See the comment by one David Mayes to Are Libertarians for Intellectual Property? (I believe he is responding to my comment: “I’m also affiliated with the Mises Institute, so I suppose Mr. Mayes has my work in mind when he unfairly, uncharitably, and falsely disparages and dismisses us as ‘idealogues.'”):

Stephan, I am not familiar with you or your work at all.

I believe we have different psychological perspectives on approaching patenting DNA. I feel connected to the history that has led to the current biotechnology infrastructure. Also, I feel connected to the type of libertarianism advocated by CEI and Cato embracing limited government which is practiced ubiquitously in the US at the municipal, state and federal levels. Since no government entity in the US, that I am aware of anyway, practices the von Mises ideal of political economy, ther must be a disconnect with what is going on and possibly some feeling of alienation.

I do not think that Tom Palmer is an idealogue. Upon reading about his background, I discovered he has affiliations with the Institute for Humane Studies. This would explain his conservative and moral objections to patenting DNA. Obviously, Cato respects his individuality on this issue which contrasts their official position and that is what their brand of libertarianism is all about. In contrast, I would imagine that a Mises scholar would have to quote Rothbard, Mises , or Hayek to give an official position which is my interpretation of an ideologue.

Main Entry: ideo·logue
Variant(s): also idea·logue
Function: noun
Etymology: French idéologue, back-formation from idéologie
Date: 1815
1 : an impractical idealist : theorist
2 : an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology

A number of psycholigists refer to the ability to form a sense of self as the final stage of cognitive develoment. Unfortunately, not everyone reaches this stage. I have the highest respect for IHS since Leornard Liggio taught me classical liberalism and I consider him my favorite teacher of all. No one has influenced my politics as much as he has.

Here is an article titled “The FTC’s Suit Against Intel Is an Attempt to Steal Intellectual Property” by: Robert S. Getman on Ayn Rand’s official website regarding monopoly caused by IP. Rand actually feels there is a moral obligation to protect our intellectal capital.

http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5275

But, actually my quote is referring to David Koepsell’s confusion with how libertarians justify a temporary monopoly. My discussions with other pragmatic liberatian scholars informed me of the heirarchy of core values.

Ain’t that somethin’?

My reply:

Dear Mr. Mayes, Strain as I might, I am confess that unable to discern even a hint of coherent argument in your no doubt higher level take on things. No doubt this is my own limitation due to being a “von Mises ideologue.” As best I can tell, you feel “connected” to something or another, and that settles it for you. How nice for you. Us lowly “von Mises ideologues” can only strive in vain to reach such lofty heights.

A friend on an email discussion mentioned Carl Sagan and noted he was good on skepticism of pseudoscience and mused about whether he was good on politics. Alas, no. As is typically the case of engineers and scientists brainwashed with scientism (The Trouble with Libertarian Activism, Libertarian Activism-comments, Yet More on Galambos, Engineers’ Syndrome and C.P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures” and Misesian Dualism), he was a clod on this issue. From a review of one of his books:

My second critique is with regard to Sagan’s contradictory political views. On the one hand, he argues against authoritarianism of any sort, he points out government waste, discusses how the government shouldn’t be anti-choice, and is upset that politicians only work for the short term since they are only working to get elected again. I agree with his assessment to this point. However, then he seems to argue out of the other side of his mouth that the government should be there to provide ever larger social safety nets (i.e., welfare, social security, entitlements, etc.), collect more taxes in some cases, give U.S. tax dollars to other countries, and fund projects that don’t justly benefit those doing the funding (taxpayers). I don’t understand how someone can reconcile the seemingly opposed views. If the government can’t do its current jobs well, why give it more to do inefficiently and ineffectively? If individuals should be the responsible party, why shift all the burdens (in the form of more tax dollars and more government spending) to governments?

And another friend stumbled across this amusing anecdote, which illustrates what a statist and/or arrogant jerk he was. From the Wikipedia entry on Sagan:

In 1994, Apple Computer began developing the Power Macintosh 7100. They chose the internal code name “Carl Sagan”, the reference being that the mid-range PowerMac 7100 should make Apple “billions and billions.” Though the internal project name was never used in public marketing, it did come up in Usenet postings and news of the name grew from there. When Sagan learned of this he sued Apple Computer to force the use of a different project name. Other models released conjointly had code names such as “Cold fusion” and “Piltdown Man“, and Sagan was displeased at being associated with what he considered pseudoscience. (He was at the time writing a book discrediting pseudoscience.) Though Sagan lost the lawsuit Apple engineers complied with his demands anyway and renamed the project “BHA” (for Butt-Head Astronomer). Sagan promptly sued Apple for libel over the new name, claiming that it subjected him to contempt and ridicule, but he lost this lawsuit as well. Still, the 7100 saw another name change: it was finally referred to internally as “LAW” (Lawyers Are Wimps).

This reminds a bit of the story in Shades of Galambos!

As Pete Boettke notes, “Tyler Cowen argues that in hindsight, we should consider the bailout to have been successful in averting a financial meltdown of the US economy.  He specifically asks me whether I can bring myself to admitting this.”

Boettke heroically says no. And Cowen is getting a good and well-deserved austro-libertarian smackdown on the Internets: a sampling:

• Can I bring myself to utter THOSE words?, the afore-mentioned piece by Pete Boettke
• Tyrone on the Bailouts, by Arnold Kling
• Scale, Scope, and What to do with Failing Banks (or: Has Cowen Forgotten his Higgs?), by Steve Horwitz
• This Is a Libertarian Economist?
• Libertarian, Free-Market Blog “MarginalRevolution” In Support of White House Torture, Bob Murphy
• Tyler Cowen’s Response, by David Henderson
• A Cowen reply: A second-best theory of libertarian bailouts
• see also Tyler Cowen Is So 1914ish

My own previous comments on Cowen include Comment on Tyler Cowen’s “Kindle and DRM and Netflix too” (about his pro-copyright views); Wirkman Virkkala, the “Locofoco Agnarchist,” on the confused Tyler Cowen; What Kind of Libertarian Are You? (rebutting Cowen’s absurd smears of Mises Institutes as “nationalists”); and Things Go Better With Koch … ? (noting Charles Burris’s observations about “Kochtopus minions such as Tom G. Palmer [and] Tyler Cowen,” and “The precocious Tyler Cowen has gone on to be one of the most pliable instruments in the Kochtopus toolbox, especially when it comes to denigrating Austrian economics and the work of Ludwig Von Mises”).

For some other web commentary on Cowen, see Tyler Cowen: Statist, anti-Rothbardian agent of the Kochtopus; and David Gordon’s The Kochtopus vs. Murray N. Rothbard, Part II, which states, in part:

Grinder placed particular emphasis on Tyler Cowen, a brilliant student who had been interested in Austrian economics since his high school days. Cowen enrolled in an Austrian economics program at Rutgers, where he impressed both Joe Salerno and Richard Fink with his extraordinary erudition. When Fink moved to George Mason University, Cowen moved with him; and he completed his undergraduate degree there in 1983. Grinder considered him the next Hayek, the hope of Austrian economics.In accord with the elite universities policy, Cowen went to Harvard for his graduate degree. There he came under the influence of Thomas Schelling and gave up his belief in Austrian economics.

After he finished his PhD in 1987, Cowen was for a time a professor at the University of California at Irvine, and he used to visit me sometimes in Los Angeles. I was impressed with his remarkable intelligence and enjoyed talking with him. But I remember how surprised I was one day when he told me that he did not regard Ludwig von Mises very highly. Here he fitted in all-too-well with another policy of Richard Fink and the Kochtopus leadership. They regarded Mises as a controversial figure: his “extremism” would interfere with the mission of arousing mainstream interest in the Austrian School. Accordingly, Hayek should be stressed and Mises downplayed. (After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which led to new interest in Mises’s socialist calculation argument, this policy changed. The mainstream, though of course continuing to reject Mises, now recognized him as a great economist.) The policy was strategic, but Cowen went further – he really didn’t rate Mises highly.

Cowen eventually returned to George Mason University as a Professor of Economics. He is said to be the dominant figure in the department. Because of his close friendship with Richard Fink, who left academic work to become a major executive with Koch Industries and the principal disburser of Koch Foundation funding, Cowen exerts a major influence on grants to his department.

Although he is largely favorable to the free market and believes that the Austrian school has contributed insights, Cowen remains a strong critic of Austrian and Rothbardian views. He has published a book that sharply attacks Austrian business cycle theory, Risk and Business Cycles: New and Old Austrian Perspectives (Routledge, 1997); and in an article written with Fink, “Inconsistent Equilibrium Constructs: The Evenly Rotating Economy of Mises and Rothbard” (American Economic Review, Volume 75, Number 4, September 1985), he argued that a key feature in the economic theory of Mises and Rothbard, the evenly rotating economy, is fundamentally flawed. It was ironic that the hope of Austrian economics, according to Grinder, and the prime ornament of his stress on elite universities, wrote an article for the most prestigious economic journal in the United States critical of the theory Grinder wished to propagate. Cowen has also criticized libertarian anarchism, another fundamental plank in Rothbard’s thought. He has defended government funding of the space program and limited government subsidies for the arts.

One might object to what I have said so far. Although the heavy Koch support for Cowen did not advance Austrian economics, was not a flourishing Austrian program established at George Mason? If so, did not the generous fellowships offered by Koch organizations, such as the Claude Lambe Foundation, play a major role in this happy development? Fellowships were also given to those studying in the Austrian program at NYU.

Wrote Robert Nozick in The Examined Life:

The significance of the Holocaust is more momentous than even these tracings can know and these responses can encompass. I believe the Holocaust is an event like the Fall in the way traditional Chistianity conceived it, something that radically and drastically alters the situation and status of humanity. … Mankind has fallen.

I do not claim to understand the full significance of this, but here is one piece, I think: It now would not be a special tragedy if the humankind ended, if the human species were destroyed in atomic warfare or the earth passed through some cloud that made it impossible for the species to continue reproducing itself. I do not mean that humanity deserves this to happen. … What I mean is that earlier, it would have constituted an additional tragedy, one beyond that to the individual people involved, if human history and the human species had ended, but now that history and that species have becomes stained, its loss would be no special loss above and beyond the losses to the individuals involved. Humanity has lost its claim to continue.

…Although we are not responsible for what those who acted and stood by did, we are all stained.

…If a being from [another] galaxy were to read our history, with all it contains, and that story were then to end in destruction, wouldn’t that bring the narrative to a satisfying close, like a chord resolving?

Reading this, one might wonder, what the hell is philosophy good for, if it produces this pompous, stupid, narcissistic, self-absorbed nonsense masquerading as “deep” thought? This is typical philosopher’s bullshit: notice he just asserts, as if he’s some authority, that because of the Holocaust, “Mankind has fallen.” Whatever this means. Even he does not know what he means: “I do not claim to understand the full significance of this…” So, he does not know. “Ah, dear reader, don’t expect even me, in my brilliance, to be able to fully understand the outpourings of that same brilliance… I’m so complex, so complex…” But he does know “one piece, I think”—you think? great!—”It now would not be a special tragedy if the humankind ended,” blah blah blah. Libertarianism individualism FAIL. [continue reading…]

I’ve noted before Rand’s bizarre and unlibertarian view that some peoples are “savages” who basically have no rights, like Native Americans and other nomads (so it was okay for Americans to kill them and conquer them), and Arabs who can be nuked (see my posts Centralist, Pro-War Objectivists on Paul and Rand on Collateral Damage; and Roderick Long’s The Justice and Prudence of War: Toward A Libertarian Analysis). And also the Objectivist view that American oil companies “really” owned the oil because the “savages” have no rights and/or because it was American oil companies’ technology helped discover under Arabian soil (and we know that “ideas” are the supreme rights according to Randians).

I used to practice oil & gas law, and the question of how libertarian principles would be applied to underground oil rights always interested me. I believe Rob Bradley suggested an approach in his Oil, Gas & Government [Bob Murphy’s intro], but one approach adopted in some Americna states is the “rule of capture“; and there are other theories in other states.

My own view is that the owner of the surface does not automatically own the minerals beneath but does have a right to use his surface to explore them; and once he finds some oil or gas or whatever, he is entitled to try to get it. I don’t personally think this gives him ownership over his neighbor’s surface estate to the extent he can prevent them from punching a hole in the same pool of oil (this is the rule of capture). I have always intended to develop this theory a bit further but have not gotten around to it yet. But in any case, it seems to me that the surface owners have a way to acquire rights to the oil beneath their land.

Now, it also seems to me that one can hire agents to do things for you, including homesteading or appropriating unowned resources. Thus, Hoppe, in his Property, Causality, and Liability (p. 92), writes:

We have no trouble … conceiving of an “indirect” act of appropriation. A, B’s boss, orders B to clear a piece of previously unowned land and drill for oil. B finds oil. Thereby A, not B, becomes the owner of the oil (although A is only the indirect cause of the act of appropriation).

So, under such a view, even if the Arabs were too primitive to have the technology needed to explore for oil, as owners of the surface they had the right to make a contract with people who did. Thus, when the Western oil companies came in and found oil under Arab land, they homesteaded certain oil rights for the surface owners, as agents of the surface owners. It doesn’t matter that the Arabs didn’t have the right technology–that’s why they entered into the deal with Exxon etc.

This is why Objectivist assertions that the Western oil companies “really” owned the oil because it was their technology that was used, has always seemed fishy to me.

(N.b.: Another friend, Daniel Roncari, mentioned to me that Rothbard wrote:

The Sabahklatura that runs the Kuwait government is immensely wealthy, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, derived from tax/”royalty” loot extracted from oil producers simply because the Sabah tribe claims “sovereignty” over that valuable chunk of desert real estate. The Sabah tribe has no legitimate claim to the oil revenue; it did nothing to homestead or mix its labor or any other resource with the crude oil.

It is reasonable to assume that the Sabah family stands ready to use a modest portion of that ill-gotten wealth to purchase defenders and advocates in the powerful United States.

I am not sure what exactly is the implicit theory Rothbard is relying on here to assert that “The Sabah tribe has no legitimate claim to the oil revenue; it did nothing to homestead or mix its labor or any other resource with the crude oil”. It could be that they are less legitimate than the people or natural owners of the soil; it could be he is adopting Rand’s view here; I do not know. But it seems to me that if the Western oil companies discover oil by using the surface owned by someone else, with the permission of that owner and subject to contractual conditions, then the Western oil company is not the owner–though who has a better claim on the oil in Arabia itself is another matter.)

But as my little buddy Geoff Plauché remarked to me, wouldn’t the mutualists, with their “occupancy” view of rights, have to side with the Randians here? After all, the surface owners didn’t occupy the oil fields–the oil companies did–it was their rigs and personnel sitting on the ground. In fact, by mutualist standards, the Exxons etc. would own the actual surface rights too, no?

Rothbard described Mencken as “The Joyous Libertarian,” a label that could also be applied to Rothbard himself, called by Justin Raimondo “the happy scholar-warrior of liberty“–though he did famously quip that “hatred is my muse.”

Man collapses with ruptured appendix... three weeks after NHS doctors 'took it out'..

From Mises blog:

[Update: See also The Blockean Proviso (Sep. 11, 2007); and Michael Makovi, “The ‘Self-Defeating Morality’ of the Lockean Proviso,” Homo Oeconomicus 32(2) (2015): 235–74:

Locke’s theory of appropriation includes the “Lockean Proviso,” that one may appropriate ownerless resources only if one leaves enough for others. The Proviso is normative and obviously may be rejected on normative grounds. But it is less obvious that it may have to be rejected for positive reasons. According to Hoppe, private property is a means for minimizing social conflict under conditions of scarcity. But the Lockean Proviso would actually exacerbate social conflict. According to Demsetz, property emerges precisely when scarcity arises and there is not enough left for everyone. Accordingly, the Lockean Proviso may be logically incompatible with the very purposes of the establishment of property. Or the Proviso may constitute what Derek Parfit calls “self-defeating morality.” Several adaptations of the Proviso – including Nozick’s – are rejected as well, based on the impossibility of interpersonal comparisons of subjective utility and the problem of economic calculation.]

Down with the Lockean Proviso

[Archived comments below]

March 13, 2009 2:35 PM by Stephan Kinsella | Other posts by Stephan Kinsella | Comments (7)

My attention was recently called to Tibor Machan’s paper “Self-Ownership and the Lockean Proviso” (working paper version), which will be in his book The Promise of Liberty (Lexington, 2009). As noted in the Abstract, the paper argues as follows:

Locke’s defense of private property rights includes what is called a proviso—”the Lockean proviso”—and some have argued that in terms of it the right to private property can have various exceptions and it may not even be unjust to redistribute wealth that is privately owned. I argue that this cannot be right because it would imply that one’s right to life could also have various exceptions, so anyone’s life (and labor) could be subject to conscription if some would need it badly enough. Since this could amount to enslavement and involuntary servitude, it would be morally and legally unacceptable.

Other libertarian criticisms of the Lockean Proviso include Rothbard, ch. 29 of The Ethics of Liberty; Hoppe, p. 410 et pass. of The Economics and Ethics of Private Property; and de Jasay, p. 188 and 195 of Against Politics (also discussed on p. 91 in my review thereof).

See also my own critique of what I call Walter Block’s “Blockean Proviso“. As I note there, the Lockean Proviso says that you may homestead an unowned good but only if “enough and as good” is left for others—that is, if you don’t harm them by your homesteading action by making it more difficult for them to have a similar opportunity to homestead some goods of that type. Both Block and I would reject this. But the Blockean Proviso would say that you can only homestead property that is a potential means of access to other unowned resource so long as enough and as good access to the unowned resource remains available!

Archived comments:

Comments (7)

• Lucas
• I got a good gist of this from Narvesson, Respecting persons…

• Published: March 13, 2009 4:15 PM

• David C
• I disagree with this. Human action is the ends in itself, not property. Property is usually a consequence of human action, because without it all that is left is “might makes right” – which tends to minimize human action.”… that this cannot be right because it would imply that one’s right to life could also have various exceptions…”

  There are various exceptions. If I’m locked in a cage with you, and there is only although water for one person to live. My right to live is as much as yours – irrespective of property or claim.

  However, in larger populations, all claims like this are a fraud. It will be “every man for himself”, long before any leader ever claiming to represent the greater good could “wisely” allocate the remaining scare resources.

  Philosophies that don’t make maximization of human action the ends will always run into unrealistic problems. EG. someone claiming a continent, and then violating peoples liberties in the name of “property rights”

• Published: March 13, 2009 10:28 PM

• newson
• david c says:
  “might makes right” – which tends to minimize human action.”you mean it tends to minimize productive, rather than re-distributive human action? or human action in general?

• Published: March 13, 2009 11:28 PM

• Gil
• I disagree – moral might does make right. A problem with a lot moralities is the way they preach Pacifism. If a moral society is to last then they should follow a moral creed that preaches the moral to be strong warriors and teach this strength to their descendants. Pacifists act surprised when they keep finding themselves overrun by criminal gangs again and again. It’s almost a crime to good strong people taking their knowledge ‘to their graves’ because they’re afraid the next generation might use the knowledge for evil never thinking for a moment that criminal gangs immediate school their children in their criminal ways.

• Published: March 14, 2009 12:22 AM

• Aeon J. Skoble
• I think Nozick already defused this issue. The proviso is ONLY applicable in the hypothetical state of nature. It’s a hypothetical limit on original appropriation in the S of N. In the real world, the proviso is always met* because you have either literally created new stuff, or obtained something via trade, thus automatically “leaving” something for others.
  *unless you’re stealing of course

• Published: March 14, 2009 9:31 AM

• Richard Garner
• Aeon,I am inclined to agree with you on Nozick. However, one point to pick up on:
  

  I think Nozick already defused this issue. The proviso is ONLY applicable in the hypothetical state of nature.

  Actually, Nozick doesn’t mean it just to apply in the state of nature. In a footnote to page 55 of ASU he suggests that the proviso may apply to prohibiting acquiring property so as to trap somebody in their home (by acquiring the property around the person’s house). The implication of those, though, is that the proviso is not simply about “the principles of justice in acquisition,” but also about “the principles of justice in transfer,” since it would allow a third party to impose conditions upon the terms by which one person sell’s their land to another. In the end, though, it means that, by allowing the proviso, Nozick’s theory of justicie ceases to be a historical one and beomes a patterned theory. It also seems not conform to a “will” or “choice theory of rights,” making it open to incompossibilities of rights or duties.

• Published: March 16, 2009 12:02 PM

• Michael A. Clem
• Reading the original Locke, I didn’t see where he provides any real argument in support of the proviso–he just sort of throws it out as an assertion. The closest he comes to an argument for it is that God gave the world to man in common. Clearly not a good, logical argument.Thus, I think it’s safe to just ignore the proviso–it doesn’t hurt the rest of his argument for the initial acquisition of unowned resources–and don’t see a need to dance around it, explain it away, or anything else.

• Published: March 16, 2009 1:04 PM

From Mises blog

C.P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures” and Misesian Dualism

August 2, 2006 5:45 PM by Stephan Kinsella | Other posts by Stephan Kinsella | Comments (8)

I’ve long been fascinated by C.P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures” (excerpts) thesis, which concerns misunderstandings between the sciences, and the humanities. But it always seemed … incomplete. To be missing something. In part, this was its triteness: engineers don’t read Dickens; humanities and artsy types don’t understand math and science. Yawn. But mainly I think it is a lack of rigor; a failure to appreciate the problems with scientism and positivism.

It always seemed to me that Snow’s thesis ought to be re-cast with the benefit of Misesian insights into the nature of science.

In The Moral Case for the Free Market Economy, Tibor Machan touches on these issues. Machan rejects the type of dualism that says anything other than the natural sciences must be relegated the the unscientific realms of mysticism. As Machan notes, if one holds that some aspects of reality can be understood scientifically and systematically, and others cannot, this is a type of metaphysical dualism. “Indeed, that was the theme of British author C. P. Snow’s famous article about the ‘two cultures’: the arts, the humanities, the human sciences are left to one dimension of inquiry. The others, the hard sciences, natural sciences, are the most organized and orderly fields, are left to another dimension.”

Machan rejects this metaphysical dualism and believes that ethics and politics, for example, can be understood scientifically–albeit not by the methods appropriate to the natural sciences (predictability, etc.). I take this as compatible with Misesian epistemological dualism, which sees economics as a teleological field of study and the natural sciences as engaged in the study of causal phenomenon. Different methods of study are appropriate to each. See, e.g., Hoppe’s Economic Science and the Austrian Method (1995); Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science.

As Hoppe notes,

In view of the recognition of the praxeological character of knowledge, these insights regarding the nature of logic, arithmetic and geometry become integrated and embedded into a system of epistemological dualism. The ultimate justification for this dualist position, i.e., the claim that there are two realms of intellectual inquiry that can be understood a priori as requiring categorically distinct methods of treatment and analysis, also lies in the praxeological nature of knowledge. It explains why we must differentiate between a realm of objects which is categorized causally and a realm that is categorized teleologically instead.

Nor is the scientific approach limited only to non-normative fields like physics, or economics. A science of ethics is also possible; witness Hoppe’s extension of Misesian type epistemology and scientific methodology to ethics (see also Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide). Note Hoppe’s interesting statement about his proof of libertarian ethics:

Here the praxeological proof of libertarianism has the advantage of offering a completely value-free justification of private property. It remains entirely in the realm of is-statements, and nowhere tries to derive an ought from an is. The structure of the argument is this: (a) justification is propositional justification—a priori true is-statement; (b) argumentation presupposes property in one’s body and the homesteading principle—a priori true is- statement; and (c) then, no deviation from this ethic can be argumentatively justified—a priori true is-statement. [Economics and Ethics of Private Property, p. 208]

So, are there “two cultures”? Well, certainly it remains true that arts and humanities types often do not appreciate natural science. But that takes no special thesis to understand. There are differences in aptitudes, and there is a division of labor and specialization, after all. But the natural scientists, as well as many humanities types, seem to have accepted the scientism-positivism of our age. This is rampant among engineers, for example (Yet More on Galambos, Libertarian Activism–comments), who cynically dismiss philosophy, economics, ethics, as being loosey-goosey and non-scientific. Economics, of course, has conceded this and adopted positivism a long time ago.

The real two cultures are the mainstream natural scientists and artists and intellectuals, on the one hand–those who have accepted scientism, the view that only causal fields are truly scientific; and, on the other hand, Misesians and others who recognize that fields outside the natural sciences can be true sciences but need not ape the method of the sciences.

To unite or provide a bridge between the “two cultures” of natural science and the humanities, both “sides” need a little bit of epistemological education.

Update:

• The Trouble with Libertarian Activism
• Engineers’ Syndrome
• Yet More On Galambos
• Libertarian Activism–comments
• IP discussion with an engineer

Thank God He’s Gone, that is. What an evil person. The quality of the human race was briefly raised yesterday. As a friend said, “Al Gore created the Internet so that we could mock the death of Ted Kennedy on it.”

For those soft-heads who think this is mean-spirited–my sympathy is with Ted Kennedy’s millions of victims. I ain’t got none left over for him.

[Update: Koepsell on IP]

An interesting (and amusing) post on Leiter Reports, How Not to Respond to a Bad Book Review, led me to the work of David Koepsell, author of The Ontology of Cyberspace: Philosophy, Law, and the Future of Intellectual Property (Open Court, 2000) and Who Owns You? The Corporate Gold Rush to Patent Your Genes. (UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), and of the blog Who Owns You?, which discusses gene patents and IP law.

The Leiter Reports blog remarked on a debate between Randy Mayes and David Koepsell on human gene patents at the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies site (Leiter Reports unfairly implied Koepsell had made matters worse by the way he replied to a very critical book review–I disagree with this assessment, as will be evident from my comments linked below). I ended up writing a few responses, including one posted in Are Libertarians For Intellectual Property?: Comment on David Koepsell’s “Why I Believe Gene Patenting is Wrong”; and see also Comment on Koepsell’s “A methodical response to Chris Holman’s ‘review’”.

In correspondence with him I learned Koeppsel says his theoretical background is informed by Austrians, and he has studied Menger, Mises, and Reinach and studied under Barry Smith. In his book The Ontology of Cyberspace he undermines the classifications between works of authorship and other machines, using Reinach. I’ve just ordered it.

[Mises blog cross-post]