Kinsella On Liberty

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 265. This is my conversation with Jordan Head, who expressed some disagreement or confusion about my Against IP book on a Twitter thread; I offered to discuss with him, as I often do, and he took me up on it and consented to my recording it and posting it. His main hangup was my emphasis on "scarcity" and so he was thinking time was a scarce resource, so it's being "stolen" if others copy your products, etc. I think we made good progress. We briefly discussed a few unrelated issues, like Bitcoin maximalism. Related: KOL085 | The History, Meaning, and Future of Legal Tender, Jul. 25, 2017 And:

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 264. I appeared today on the Disenthrall.me Youtube channel, host Patrick Smith, to discuss the trademark issues between Tim Pool and his company media Subverse, and StudioFOW which has a popular crowdsourced porn video game coming out also called Subverse. We touched a bit on bitcoin ownership, patent and copyright, defamation law, and trademark law, and related matters. Related links: Tim Pool talks Subverse, Studio FOW, and Trademarks StudioFOW "Subverse" Has Forced Me To Retain A Lawyer Over My Trademark Of The Same Name Subverse porn game kickstarter How to Improve Patent, Copyright, and Trademark Law Trademark versus Copyright and Patent, or: Is All IP Evil? The Patent, Copyright, Trademark, and Trade Secret Horror Files

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 263. This is my short portion of the panel presentation "The Significance of Hans-Hermann Hoppe," from the 2019 Austrian Economics Research Conference (AERC), at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on the occasion of Professor Hoppe's 70th birth year. The entire panel presentation, plus my notes, and a link to a longer talk on similar themes, are below. Related: KOL259 | “How To Think About Property”, New Hampshire Liberty Forum 2019   “Hoppe on Property Rights” Panel: The Significance of Hans-Hermann Hoppe Auburn, Alabama • Mises Institute March 23 2019 Stephan Kinsella Kinsella Law Practice, Libertarian Papers, C4SIF.org NOTES Came across Hoppe’s writing in law school, his 1988 Liberty article “The Ultimate Justification of the Private Property Ethic.” Eventually met Hans at a conference in 1994, where I also met David Gordon, Rothbard, Walter Block, Lew, and others Hans’s contributions in a large number of fields have influenced me and many others: argumentation ethics; various aspects of praxeological economics; method and epistemology; a critique of logical positivism; democracy; immigration; and various cultural analyses. Helped change my mind about a large number of particular matters, such as the US Constitution, natural rights, and so on Eventually led to Guido and I editing a Festschrift in 2009 Presented here 10 years ago Including a large number of contributors including all of the panelists here today I delivered a 6 week Mises Academy course in 2011 on “The Social Theory of Hoppe” I’m going to focus on his views on property rights, which has greatly influenced my own ideas A more in depth talk on this last month at New Hampshire Liberty Forum, “How to Think About Property Rights”, on my podcast feed Laid out very plainly and concisely in Chapters 1 and 2 of A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (1989) Only 18 pages—bears re-reading and careful study “Next to the concept of action, property is the most basic category in the social sciences. As a matter of fact, all other concepts to be introduced in this chapter—aggression, contract, capitalism and socialism—are definable in terms of property: aggression being aggression against property, contract being a nonaggressive relationship between property owners, socialism being an institutionalized policy of aggression against property, and capitalism being an institutionalized policy of the recognition of property and contractualism.” He lays out the “natural” position on property rights, and distinguishes it from property rights, the normative position. Natural position is that each actor owns his body Any scarce resource is owned by the person who first appropriated it, or who acquired it from a previous owner by contract Property “rights” mirroring this natural position are then justified with his argumentation ethics, which has been very influential and also controversial in the libertarian world Echoed in Mises, Socialism: “the sociological and juristic concepts of ownership are different.” Key to this analysis is recognizing the role of scarcity, which is inherent in human action, and which socially gives rise to the possibility of interpersonal conflict and thus the necessity for property norms to make conflict free interaction (cooperation) possible. Hans anchors his analysis in a Misesian praxeological framework, in which actors must employ scarce means or resources to achieve ends. In Mises’s praxeological view of human action, there are two distinct but essential components of human action: scarce resources, and knowledge. Actors employ scarce resources, guided by their knowledge The use of resources is essential for all actors, even Crusoe Gives rise to the “natural” position on property (what Mises would call “sociological” ownership) In society, there is the possibility of conflict over scarce resources Gives rise to the necessity of property rights But notice the concepts of property and property rights apply only the the first component of action: scarce resources. Precisely because they are scarce: that is, interpersonal conflict over their use is possible Not to knowledge Knowledge is the recipes and other information about the world that guides our choices and actions The concept of conflict has no application to knowledge Any number of actors can act on the same or similar knowledge at the same time without any conflict whatsoever This is precisely why I ultimately was led to my conclusion that all concepts of so-called “intellectual property rights”—primarily patent and copyright—are completely unjust and unlibertarian. Took me several years of study, research, and thinking to clarify my thinking on this issue, and most of it centered around understanding the crucial role of scarcity in the nature of property rights This is why, amazingly, Hans was instantly able to recognize this early on: 1988 panel discussionon ethics with Rothbard, Hoppe, David Gordon, and Leland Yeager, which has this exchange: Question:I have a question for Professor Hoppe. Does the idea of personal sovereignty extend to knowledge? Am I sovereign over my thoughts, ideas, and theories? ... Hoppe: ... in order to have a thought you must have property rights over your body. That doesn't imply that you own your thoughts. The thoughts can be used by anybody who is capable of understanding them. EXTRA NOTES If time: Hoppe on wealth vs. property: As Hoppe notes in his classic article “Banking, Nation States and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order”: “One can acquire and increase wealth either through homesteading, production and contractual exchange, or by expropriating and exploiting homesteaders, producers, or contractual exchangers. There are no other ways.” Note that Hans here acknowledges that “production” is a means of gaining “wealth”. Not a source of ownership (property rights): which is only original appropriation and contract. Hoppe on Property Rights in Physical Integrity vs Value   First, as a mainstream leftwinger, his eyes were opened by the Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s critique of Marxism. Later, after encountering and then rejecting the logical positivism of Milton Friedman and the Chicago school, he discovered Mises and his unique approach. As he wrote in an interview in the Austrian Economics Newsletter: “Independently, I had concluded that economic laws were a prioriand discoverable through deduction. Then I stumbled on Mises’s Human Action. That was the first time I found someone who had the same view; not only that, he had already worked out the entire system. From that point on, I was a Misesian” For me I can’t imagine not having discovered Mises or Rothbard. For Hans I am not so sure “There can be no socialism without a state, and as long as there is a state there is socialism. The state, then, is the very institution that puts socialism into action; and as socialism rests on aggressive violence directed against innocent victims, aggressive violence is the nature of any state.” –Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, pp. 148-49

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 262. This is a followup to my episode KOL261 | Venture Stories Podcast Debating Austrian Economics, Libertarianism, and Bitcoin with Noah Smith. I recorded some of my impressions after the show was concluded, making observations about how it went, and so on. Listen at your own peril!

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 261. This is my appearance on the Venture Stories Podcast by Village Global, April 6 episode, hosted by Erik Torenberg: A Comparison of Austrian and Keynesian Economics with Noah Smith, Parker Thompson and Stephan Kinsella. It ended up being a bit of a debate with the other guest, Noah Smith of Bloomberg. This was a bit of an interesting episode, as I explain in the informal "bonus" episode KOL262. We ended up discussing/debating a variety of issues, such as: Austrian economics and praxeology, the business cycle, bitcoin, libertarianism, the federal reserve, anarcho-capitalism and related. By the time we started the podcast I had forgotten it was not exactly for an already-libertarian or Austrian audience, and in fact the host seemed at first (off-air) to think I was the Irish economic journalist Stephen Kinsella (see Stephen Kinsella’s I am Not), and I had forgotten it was a debate and that Smith would be taking positions opposed to Austrianism and libertarianism. My performance was a bit subpar, but I did the best I could to present Austrian views even though I'm not a professional economist. [I believe this was the show where I derisively referred to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as "Occasional Cortex," as I did also here, to the uncomfortable chuckles of the others, and they excised this from the published episode.] From the show notes: On this episode Erik is joined by Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella), libertarian writer and patent attorney, Noah Smith (@Noahpinion), Bloomberg opinion writer, and Parker Thompson (@pt), partner at AngelList. In a spirited debate, the three of them discuss the relative merits of Austrian economics vs. Keynesian economics. They start out by defining the primary schools of economic thought and explaining where each of the guests sits on the spectrum of economic thinking. They talk about the value of empiricism when it comes to economics and whether economic theories can be derived from first principles. They discuss inflation and whether centralized control of the money supply leads to better economic outcomes, as well as how one can determine these things in the messy real world. They also touch on a number of other topics, including whether it would be a good thing to get rid of the FDA and pharmaceutical patents, whether antitrust law is “unethical,” and whether the patent system is a net positive for society. Embedded: Listen to "A Comparison of Austrian and Keynesian Economics with Noah Smith, Parker Thompson and Stephan Kinsella" on Spreaker. Local copy. Related: Milton Friedman, Essays in Positive Economics Karl Fogel, The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World (see Youtube) KOL 038 | Debate with Robert Wenzel on Intellectual Property In response to one of Smith's comments about the origin of copyright, see Karl Fogel: "The first copyright law was a 1556 censorship statute in England. It granted the Company of Stationers, a London guild, exclusive rights to own and run printing presses. Company members registered books under their own name, not the author's name, and these registrations could be transferred or sold only to other Company members. In exchange for their government-granted monopoly on the book trade, the Stationers aided the government's censors, by controlling what was printed, and by searching out illegal presses and books — they even had the right to burn unauthorized books and destroy presses. They were, in effect, a private, for-profit information police force." Smith also claimed Robert Lucas and indeed many (most?) economists were for abolition of patents. I would love to see proof of this. Smith also seemed to deny that it's accepted in economics that minimum wage laws cause unemployment or that free trade is generally beneficial. Hunh? Smith seems to think that minimum wage might be justified if it only harms a few people but benefits most, without seeming to realize that the people that minimum wage laws harm are generally the very people the law purports to help: the least skilled and poor. Robert P. Murphy, The Depression You've Never Heard Of: 1920-1921 Thomas E. Woods, The Forgotten Depression of 1920 “Essentially, economic analysis consists of: (1) an understanding of the categories of action and an understanding of the meaning of a change in values, costs, technological knowledge, etc.; (2) a description of a situation in which these categories assume concrete meaning, where definite people are identified as actors with definite objects specified as their means of action, with definite goals identified as values and definite things specified as costs; and (3) a deduction of the consequences that result from the performance of some specified action in this situation, or of the consequences that result for an actor if this situation is changed in a specified way. And this deduction must yield a priori-valid conclusions, provided there is no flaw in the very process of deduction and the situation and the change introduced into it being given, and a priori—valid conclusions about reality if the situation and situation-change, as described, can themselves be identified as real, because then their validity would ultimately go back to the indisputable validity of the categories of action.”– Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 260. Libertarian Party Chair Nick Sarwark and I discuss a potpourri of libertarian issues, such as minarchy vs. anarchy, libertarian "centralism" and the Fourteenth Amendment, and applications to abortion, gay (same sex) marriage, civil asset forfeiture and the like. https://youtu.be/RZi2xDWcSGo Related links: Timbs vs. Indiana (2019)--recent Supreme Court civil asset forfeiture case Supreme Court rules against highway robbery through asset forfeiture Another neo-confederate, xenophobic racist… Healy on States’ Rights and Libertarian Centralists; Healy versus Bolick and the Institute for Justice The Libertarian Case Against the Fourteenth Amendment The Embarrassing Fawning over the Criminal State by Regime Libertarians The Unique American Federal Government Various Kinsella posts criticizing "libertarian centralism"

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 259. New Hampshire Liberty Forum, Manchester NH, Feb. 8, 2019. [Update: transcript here.] This is my main presentation at New Hampshire Liberty Forum, Feb. 8, 2019. Recorded on my iPhone. I'll upload a higher quality version later, if it becomes available. Youtube: https://youtu.be/asozCLV4FJ4 My Powerpoint that I used is embedded below:                     Background: KOL 037 | Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability Rothbard on the “Original Sin” in Land Titles: 1969 vs. 1974 (Nov. 5, 2014) “What Libertarianism Is”, see esp. n. 25 and accompanying text, regarding tracing title, in a property dispute, back to a common author (ancestor in title). Bonus: I also appeared on the Vin Armani and Dave Butler (of Vin and Dave's Destination Unknown podcast) livestream of the Free State Project's New Hampshire Liberty Forum, Day 1 -- we discussed government versus the state, intellectual property, and related issues. It is here: KOL259-2 | Destination Unknown with Vin Armani and Dave Butler: Government vs. the State, Intellectual Property (New Hampshire Liberty Forum 2019).

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 258. This is my debate at New Hampshire Liberty Forum, Feb. 7, 2019—really more of a roundtable discussion of immigration policy from a libertarian perspective. The other panelist was Daniel Garza, President of the LIBRE Initiative, and the moderator was Jeremy Kaufman. Some listeners may be surprised at my pro-immigration comments. Transcript below. https://youtu.be/9OWKh3yTyJ8 Recorded on my iPhone. I'll upload a higher quality version later, if it becomes available. Related links: I’m Pro-Immigration and Pro-Open Borders Switzerland, Immigration, Hoppe, Raico, Callahan KOL160 | Bad Quaker on IP, Hoppe, and Immigration Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s “Immigration And Libertarianism” at Lew Rockwell My article  Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders TRANSCRIPT Liberty Forum Debate vs. Daniel Garza: Immigration Reform: Open Borders or Build the Wall? by Stephan Kinsella, Daniel Garza, and Jeremy Kaufman New Hampshire Liberty Forum, Manchester, NH (Feb. 7, 2019) 00:00:01 M: … something that we’ll find out through the course of this.  Speaking tonight are, on my left-hand side, depicted by the convenient net placard I have in front of me, is Stephan Kinsella.  You’re not talking to me, all right.  Stephan Kinsella who is a patent attorney and leading libertarian legal theorist, the founder and director of the Center of the Study of Innovative Freedom and the Libertarian Papers.  He’s a former adjunct professor at the South Texas College of Law.  He’s published numerous articles and books in IP law, international law, and the application of libertarian principles to legal topics.  You can give a hand for him if you want. 00:00:46 [clapping] 00:00:52 On my right, your left, Daniel Garza, president of the LIBRE Initiative.  I have a very lot to say about him, but he’s asked me not to say all of it.  So I will say that he held a couple of important positions for the Bush administration in the early 2000s, has also done important things for the Hispanic community for Televisa and Univision and is currently, as I already said, president of the LIBRE Initiative, lives in Mission, Texas with his wife and three children.  Daniel Garza. 00:01:22 [clapping] 00:01:27 Moderating this will be Jeffrey Kaufman.  I don’t have a bio written for him.  I’m going to let you listen to him talk about himself and then field your questions.  There is – for anyone who wants to participate in this, Jeffrey will give you the opportunity to do so.  There’s a microphone at the back there, so that the panelists can hear you.  Just find me back there, and I will let you speak, and thank you for coming.  Thank you everybody.  Off to you, Jeff. 00:01:52 [clapping] 00:01:57 JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Thank you.  And I actually, since I see my purpose as moderator to be facilitating discussion and this has very little to do with me, I’m going to tell you nothing about myself, so we’ll just let that mystery remain.  So my purpose is to facilitate these guys talking.  This will – if I’m doing my job right, this will be the longest I talk in sequence for the entire night.  I do my job to be making sure that they’re answering the questions that are asked.  I am going to be trying to find areas of disagreement, so if there’s too much consensus, I’ll hopefully try to rile them up a little bit, and my job is to ask hard questions.  There will also be, depending on how good my questions go, either some or a substantial amount of Q&A time from the audience. 00:02:37 So if you – as you’re listening to this, if you have questions, make a mental note of them, and there will be time to ask them at the end.  That said, this – while this is a debate, it is not going to be a debate with a fixed resolution, so it’s going to be somewhat of a discussion aspect, although we will be seeking to find the areas of disagreement between our two speakers. 00:03:02 So what I want to start with actually – oh, sorry.  One more premise.  It’s – when we have these debates, a common tension in libertarian communities is the debate between the pragmatics of what we’re doing today, what we ought to do today in the world we live in today, and sort of what’s compatible with libertarian theory and anarcho-capitalist utopia or whatever you think the world ought to be.  And so it’s important both with our speakers when we’re asking questions if you could differentiate between what we think about what should be done today, or are we talking about what should be – how things should be in our ideal world.  So I’m going to start just by asking our speakers to just lay out your position on open borders, and we’re going to start with open borders in the world today.  So please lay out your position for open borders in the world today, for or against.  And we’ll start with Daniel. 00:04:01 DANIEL GARZA: So at the LIBRE Initiative, we take a very pragmatic actually approach to immigration given the realities of the world, given the realities of sometimes the overt statism that we live under.  It’s – I think it’s essential to look at the immigration debate in three components.  It has to do with family, integration of family and keeping the cohesiveness of families, and it has to do with humanitarian issues that are involved in the integration issues. 00:04:38 In that entire space, there are needs I think that are being driven or being imposed upon us that are humanitarian, and that is, I think, an important factor that can never be lost in this whole debate, things like refugees, people fleeing, economic conditions, political conditions, sometimes things that people have to endure because of – in the criminal space or criminal dimension I think is something that is tragic, and I think America has to be considerate of that. 00:05:19 And then for, I would say, if not most important, it’s probably critical is market demand like for market forces, to address market forces, to their – we believe in sort of a market-based immigration approach, so not so much open borders as much as I think it has to be – and I’m not talking about this sort of [indiscernible_00:05:52] where we decide the quota of – where the market demand is now.  But what I’m talking about – and [indiscernible_00:06:02] really important.  This whole discussion lately currently that we’re having on merit-based, switching [indiscernible_00:06:09] forward to merit-based.  I have issues with that as a person who believes strongly in individual freedom and spontaneous border.  Over 200 million immigrants have come to America in – through the arc of history, more than 200 million, and they made America strong, and they made America rich. 00:06:30 W: They made it great one might say. 00:06:32 DANIEL GARZA: I’m sorry? 00:06:33 W: I said it made it great one might say. 00:06:35 DANIEL GARZA: It made it great.  Absolutely it did.  Immigrants have made America great, and so what was important – an important part of the discussion is immigrants have always known how to fill market demand.  They developed any skills that they needed to fill market demand or leverage their own talents, their vast capacities to fill market demand.  And central planners didn’t have to tell us how many engineers we needed or how many doctors or mathematicians or whatever, and so I resist that. 00:07:11 So I’m open borders in the sense that I don’t think we should categorize the kind of immigrants that come in.  Immigrants are creating wealth for themselves and wealth for Americans, always have, always will.  They complement the American labor force, which is the greatest labor force in the world as far as I’m concerned.  And I think there’s – that we should honor that with the kind of immigration policies that we have.  So I guess what I’m saying is a smart, flexible system that accommodates for flows of – future flows of immigrants that – where we address family connections, humanitarian issues, and then also in market demand, which is smart, smart policy. 00:08:07 JEFFREY KAUFMAN: Thank you, Daniel.  And Stephan, your position on open borders in the world today [indiscernible_00:08:14]. 00:08:15 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Right.  So from my point of view, I think the consistent libertarian is a libertarian because we’re against aggression, going back to basics, which means that if you’re consistent, you’re against the state because the state is the agency of institutionalized aggression.  So, in other words, you have to be an anarchist libertarian to be a real libertarian, which is what I am, so that’s how I think about these issues. 00:08:48 So when these issues arise, we live in a non-free society.  We live in a state-dominated society.  So our only question is it’s either one of theory or it’s one of practice.  What would the world look like in a free society?  And what policies should we support now by the government, which is not libertarian and can’t be libertarian?  Everything the state does is a criminal act, so in a sense we real libertarians oppose everything the state does.  But the question comes down to what policy should be support now? 00:09:26 But we have to first recognize that that policy is not the ultimate policy because the ultimate policy is for the state to commit suicide or whatever the word in Latin would be for the state to kill itself, to disband.  Anything they do short of that is not going to be the optimal solution.  Given that the state exists, there will be losers of any state policy. 00:09:51 And this is one thing I think that open borders advocates, which I think I will come around to arguing for in a sense, but open borders advocates among libertarians don’t want to admit this.  They don’t want to admit that there’s really a choice, that we’re libertarians.  We’re against the state.

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 257. I appeared recently on Peter Mac's show for the first time in several years. We talked about a variety of topics: education, law school, anarchy, careers, libertarian activism, and so on. This is Part 3 of 3. Related: Past, Present and Future: Survival Stories of Lawyers New Publisher, Co-Editor for my Legal Treatise, and how I got started with legal publishing Previous appearances on Peter's show: KOL 027 | The Peter Mac Show (2009, discussing IP) KOL057 | Guest on The Peter Mac Show: “Capitalism,” Anarchy, IP and other topics (2010) KOL128 | “The Peter Mac Show,” discussing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) (2012)

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 256. I appeared recently on Peter Mac's show for the first time in several years. We talked about a variety of topics: education, law school, anarchy, careers, libertarian activism, and so on. This is Part 2 of 3. Related: Past, Present and Future: Survival Stories of Lawyers New Publisher, Co-Editor for my Legal Treatise, and how I got started with legal publishing Previous appearances on Peter's show: KOL 027 | The Peter Mac Show (2009, discussing IP) KOL057 | Guest on The Peter Mac Show: “Capitalism,” Anarchy, IP and other topics (2010) KOL128 | “The Peter Mac Show,” discussing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) (2012)