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This is a lightly edited transcript of my speech “Correcting Some Common Libertarian Misconceptions,” delivered on May 28, 2011, at the Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society, and podcast previously at KOL044 | “Correcting some Common Libertarian Misconceptions” (PFS 2011). The video and the powerpoint presentation are embedded below.

Related:

• KOL 045 | “Libertarian Controversies Lecture 1” (Mises Academy, 2011)
• KOL023 | “Libertarian Legal Theory: Property, Conflict, and Society: Lecture 6: Applications Continued; Common Libertarian Mistakes (Fraud Etc.)” (Mises Academy, 2011)
• KOL206 | Tom Woods Show: Five Mistakes Libertarians Make
• KOL185: Clarifying Libertarian Theory (Liberty.me, July 2014)
• KOL118 | Tom Woods Show: Against Fuzzy Thinking
• This speech was discussed previously on the Mises blog with extensive comments (archived here and pasted below), and also on my blog

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Correcting Some Common Libertarian Misconceptions

by Stephan Kinsella

(Transcript of a speech delivered May 28, 2011, at the Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society)

00:00:08

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Thank you Hans.  Before I start, let me mention one thing.  Today, this article will appear on Mises Daily – well, yesterday, but this is the current issue.  So this is a summary of the Hoppian argumentation ethics theory, so anyone who’s interested in this idea you may want to take a look at this.  Also, at the bottom of this page there’s an ad for an upcoming Mises Academy course I have here, which is starting July 11, the Social Theory of Hoppe.  So it’s a six-week course where I’ll go into detail on Professor Hoppe’s economic and political theories.  So anyone who’s interested in that, take a look. [continue reading…]

As noted in my podcast episode KOL259 | “How To Think About Property”, New Hampshire Liberty Forum 2019, I gave a presentation at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum, Feb. 8, 2019. A lightly-edited transcript is 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).

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How To Think About Property

by Stephan Kinsella

(Transcript of a speech delivered at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum, Feb. 8, 2019) [continue reading…]

As noted in this podcast episode, KOL236 | Intellectual Nonsense: Fallacious Arguments for IP (Libertopia 2012), at Libertopia 2012, I delivered a 45-minute talk , “Intellectual Nonsense: Fallacious Arguments for IP,” the slides for which are below. I spoke for 45 minutes—well, 40, then the last 5 were taken up by a question from J. Neil Schulman—but only covered the first 25 slides. I covered most of the remaining 41 in a separate recording, Part 2: KOL237.

A lightly-edited transcript of Part 1 is below: [continue reading…]

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (73.4MB)

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 332.

I appeared yesterday (Friday, April 23, 2021) on the World Crypto Network (Youtube channel) panel The Bitcoin Group #255, hosted by Thomas Hunt. The other panelists included the CryptoRaptor (Dan Eve; see video below); Ben Arc; and Josh Scigala of Vaultoro. We discussed a variety of topics, including—

• Bitcoin Price Decline Deepens, Heads for Worst Week Since February
• Morgan Stanley Clients Hold Nearly $30M In Bitcoin Funds
• JPMorgan Sounds Urgent Alarm On Bitcoin Price ‘Momentum’ After $300 Billion Bitcoin And Crypto Sell-Off
• UK Court Agrees to Hear Copyright Lawsuit Brought by Self-Proclaimed Bitcoin Inventor
• Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk agree on bitcoin’s green credentials

Other related links:

• the Open Crypto Alliance, for which I serve on the Advisory Board
• Vijay Boyapati’s upcoming book, based on his now-classic article “The Bullish Case for Bitcoin” (see this talk)
• My previous appearance at KOL323 | World Crypto Network: Announcing the Open Crypto Alliance to Protect Bitcoin, Blockchain and Crypto

People often say that Bitcoin is too risky since if it becomes too successful, and thus a threat to the state, the state will just ban it. After all, Franklin Roosevelt did this to gold in 1933 with Executive Order 6102 (text). This is how I myself got into Bitcoin. I saw its potential early on. I never had the stodgy Austrian “regression theorem” or physical commodity fetish hangup that led Austrians early on to argue that it is impossible for Bitcoin to become money. In fact, back in 2011,  I wrote in an email:

(IN the bitcoin thing with digital currency, you can arbitrarily increase the granularity by adding more digits; in such a digital numeraire (which I confess I sort of think is the ideal money, in some sense, though not in a practical sense given some political and other problems), you never need to increase the supply at all (once it reaches its asymptotic maximum), because any supply truly is enough: you never face the granularity problem you guys allude to.¹

[continue reading…]

1. See Comments on Block and Barnett on the Optimum Quantity of Money. [↩]

Below is a lightly-edited transcript of my presentation of the same title to the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society on Sunday, Sept. 15, 2019. Youtube embedded below. For the podcast, related links, and associated powerpoint slides, see KOL274 | Nobody Owns Bitcoin (PFS 2019). I expect to publish a version of this as an article shortly; for now, cite as Stephan Kinsella, “Nobody Owns Bitcoin,” StephanKinsella.com (April 21, 2021).

Some related Q&A is in this session which was held later on the same day: Hülsmann, Kinsella, Dürr, Hoppe, Q&A (PFS 2019).

[continue reading…]

AIER has published a new book, Conversations on Conservatism (2021), from The Philadelphia Society. The PDF is here (with permission).