KOL345 | Kinsella’s Libertarian “Constitution” or: State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code (PorcFest 2021)

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 345. Related: Structural Safeguards to Limit Legislation and State Power Constitutional Structures in Defense of Freedom (ASC 1998) Randy Barnett’s “Federalism Amendment”–A Counterproposal; and related posts How to Fix the US KOL345 | Kinsella’s Libertarian “Constitution” or: State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code (PorcFest 2021) KOL359 | State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code (PFS 2021) Libertarian Nation and Related Projects Update:  See The Universal Principles of Liberty (Aug. 14, 2025) and Libertarian Nation and Related Projects (cataloging various libertarian "free nation" and related projects) This was my talk delivered today (June 26, 2021) at PorcFest 2021: "Kinsella’s Libertarian “Constitution,” or: State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code." The notes that I roughly followed are below; pix also below. Transcript below. For a related talk, see KOL359 | State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code (PFS 2021) Youtube https://youtu.be/hK6LyjRvvCk This is the video with better audio added after from my iphone recording, with the help of Jacob Lovell. Below is the original with passable audio https://youtu.be/6qzJXBWLhTA Related: Structural Safeguards to Limit Legislation and State Power Constitutional Structures in Defense of Freedom (ASC 1998) Randy Barnett’s “Federalism Amendment”–A Counterproposal; and related posts How to Fix the US KOL345 | Kinsella’s Libertarian “Constitution” or: State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code (PorcFest 2021) KOL359 | State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code (PFS 2021) The description from the PorcFest website (which will probably disappear at some time in the future): Kinsella’s Libertarian “Constitution” —————– When: Sat, 12:00P _(60m) Speaker: Stephan Kinsella {Website} {Pic}, An American intellectual property attorney and Austro-anarcho-libertarian writer and speaker for 25 years. He has spoken, lectured and published widely on various areas of libertarian legal theory such as rights theory, anarchism, contract theory, intellectual property, and on legal topics such as intellectual property law and international law. His legal works include International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Louisiana Civil Law Dictionary (Quid Pro Books, 2011); his libertarian writing includes Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute 2008) and the forthcoming Law in a Libertarian World (Papinian Press, 2021). Forthcoming works include Copy This Book: The Case for Abolishing Intellectual Property (2022), and a systematic, codified statement of libertarian principles as an alternative to constitutions and committee-prepared political platforms. For Whom: Constitutionalists; secessionists; Federal reformers; decentralists; polycentrists; anarcho-capitalists. Description: State constitutions, including the US Constitution, are not libertarian. The purpose of the US Constitution was to establish a new, powerful, central state, not to protect individual rights. Efforts to draft “libertarian constitutions” are also often flawed, as when they presuppose and legitimate a state or a territory owned by a single owner (Liberland). Does the idea of a “libertarian constitution” make sense? What kind of codification or statement of libertarian principles is appropriate? {More} Where: Anth: Anthem Theater, OfficeBld   ❧ TRANSCRIPT Kinsella’s Libertarian “Constitution” or: State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code Stephan Kinsella PorcFest 2021, Lancaster NH June 26, 2021 00:00:01 W: … published by the Mises Institute in 2008 and the forthcoming Law and the Libertarian World.  So Stephan, I’ll let you take it away about state constitutions. 00:00:10 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Okay.  Thanks a lot.  If you can’t hear me, let me know.  I have no mic.  I speak kind of loud and kind of fast even though… 00:00:17 W: If we need to turn it up we can, so let us know. 00:00:19 STEPHAN KINSELLA: All right, so my talk is – I’ll explain the title as we get into this: Kinsella’s Libertarian “Constitution.”  So I prepared a libertarian constitution, and I hope to cover as much of its 18 parts and 45 pages as possible in this next hour.  So part one, section A, subsection 1: definitions.  I’m just joking.  I’m not going to read my constitution.  I haven’t even finished writing it yet.  I read this to my wife and she said, Is this what you geeks think is funny?  I said we’ll see.  I said half the people in the audience might be relieved, but the other half might be, damn, I really wanted to hear a libertarian constitution read to me point by point. 00:01:03 I’m going to talk about the idea of constitutions and libertarianism and whether the whole idea makes sense at all.  So I’ve been a libertarian since about 1982, and I’ve seen so many libertarian – utopian libertarian projects that I can’t even remember them all.  Most of them are scams I think or failures, and I’ve been involved in a few of them, so I’m just going to go through a few.  Some of you guys may be familiar with some of these, but this is just going back to my memory archives from the ‘80s. 00:01:34 So there’s, of course, always the idea to have a cruise ship type of nation like – now it’s called seasteading or Blueseed.  But the earlier version was called Oceania, the Atlantis Project.  And then those same people that started Oceania years later started something called Project Lifeboat, which is an attempt to create a spaceship so we could save the human race from the singularity that Vernor Vinge, a libertarian sci-fi writer, was talking about.  Occasionally, crazy guys homesteading oil rigs that are abandoned and calling it a nation. 00:02:05 There’s, on occasion, private justice and arbitration and common law groups that crop up.  There’s one that cropped up a couple years ago called the Creative Common Law project, and the guy that started it was on Tom Woods’ Show, and I thought it was intriguing.  So we got in touch, and he got me on board as an advisor.  It was called Creative Common Law 1.0: Anarcho-Capitalism.  And then a few months ago I looked up the website to update my resume, and everything had been changed, and now it’s moved to Creative Common Law 2.0: Anarcho-Socialism and Syndicalism.  And the guy told me he changed his mind.  I’m like – I’m always wary of what I call way station libertarians, guys that came into it like ten minutes ago because I like – let it sit for five years and see if you’re still here. 00:02:54 Libertarian law professor, Tom Bell, has created something called Ulex, an open source legal operating system. [Libertarian Nation and Related Projects (cataloging various libertarian "free nation" and related projects)] He’s trying to get people to collaborate to develop kind of a libertarian-ish common law framework.  LiberLand, which I actually helped draft an early constitution for, which we published an article on called “The Voluntaryist Constitution.”  Galt’s Gulch Chile, which some of you guys may have heard of, which I think it was a scam that ended in a disaster.  I think my friend – well… 00:03:24 Honduras economic zones – they were trying to get some kind of free market enclaves there for awhile.  I was awhile associated with General Governance, which was started by David Johnson who is now a Bitcoin guy.  And the idea was to work with Indian tribes in the US and leverage their special constitutional status to try to extend their free market – or enclaves to – so American citizens could work there without paying federal tax.  And he promised me that this would be – the whole country would be libertarian within nine months, and this was ten years ago.  He abandoned it to do Bitcoin.  We actually met with the Indian tribes north of Houston, and they were interested. 00:04:05 But the Free State Project is another one of course, which is having some success.  There is a constitution written called the Libertarian Constitution on the National Constitution Center.  It’s written by some libertarians like Tim Sandefur and some others.  Roderick Long even made a stab at it even though he’s an anarchist.  It was kind of a Swiss-style model.  He wrote it years ago. 00:04:28 And then there’s others.  Even Dennis Pratt here has written something on the Bill of Rights.  So as I said, I’ve been dragooned into helping with some of these like General Governance, and there’s a Mississippi legislator named Joel Bomgar, a big Christian guy, a nice guy, successful businessman, and a libertarian.  And he wanted me to help him draft a constitution. 00:04:46 LiberLand – I swam with Wit, the president, in Turkey at Hoppe’s conference a couple years ago, and he went to the bottom to get a rock about 30 feet down.  And I tried to follow and I almost busted my eardrums, and he said, no, you have to push out with your lungs.  I said thanks for telling me now.  Anyway, others I’ve forgotten.  So they all – these guys always talk about perfecting the Constitution or improving the Constitution or writing a better constitution. 00:05:14 But why do we even use the word constitution as libertarians as if it’s a good thing?  So the modern libertarian movement in the US started I’d say in the ‘50s with Ayn Rand principally and then others like Milton Friedman and Leonard Read and Mises and Rothbard.  And because of this American base and Ayn Rand’s reverence for the American system as opposed to the Soviet system she left, there’s always been a reverence among libertarian circles for the Declaration, the War of Independence, the Constitution. 00:05:48 I mean the libertarian party uses the frickin’ liberty bell, the Statue of Liberty,