Recent TLS Blog Posts

Kinsella on This Week in Law (TWiL) Podcast

by Stephan Kinsella on January 31, 2011 @ 11:49 pm · 2 comments

in Podcasts,Technology

This Friday (Feb. 4) I’ll be a guest on This Week in Law, part of Leo Laporte’s impressive and growing private TWiT (This Week in Tech) netcast network. I would not be surprised if we discuss IP policy or other libertarian-related issues. It’s streamed live 1pm-2pm CST, and will be podcast later.

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Article: Intellectual Freedom and Learning Versus Patent and Copyright

by Stephan Kinsella on January 20, 2011 @ 12:01 am · 3 comments

in Current Articles,IP Law

In my various publications and speeches about intellectual property (IP), I’ve approached it from a variety of angles. In this article, I consider the role of information and learning, and the role of property rights, in human action. I use a praxeological analysis to show that human action employs scarce resources or means, but that action is guided by non-scarce ideas and knowledge. Property rights are recognized in means because they are scarce; but ideas are not scarce things: they are infinitely reproducible.  The growing body of knowledge is a boon to mankind. Property rights are needed for scarce means so that they can be peacefully and productively used in action; property rights in ideas restrict, impair, and imped learning and the use of information to guide one’s actions. Copying information and ideas is not stealing.  Learning is not stealing.  Using information is not trespass. In this article, I urge young libertarians to stay on the vanguard of intellectual freedom, and to fight the shackles of patent and copyright.

This article is based on my speech of Nov. 6, 2010, at the 2010 Students for Liberty Texas Regional Conference, University of Texas, Austin (audio and video versions may be found here). A previous version was published today under the same title in Economic Notes No. 113 (Libertarian Alliance, 2011).

(Incidentally, my 6-week Mises Academy course “Libertarian Legal Theory: Property, Conflict, and Society” starts at the end of this month (Jan. 31-Mar. 11, 2011). I describe it in my article “Introduction to Libertarian Legal Theory,” Mises Daily (Jan. 3, 2011).)

Read the Full Article by Stephan Kinsella

Afterwards, discuss it below.

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Objectivists on Positive Parental Obligations and Abortion

by Stephan Kinsella on January 14, 2011 @ 7:55 am · 0 comments

in Libertarian Theory

In my How We Come To Own Ourselves, Mises Daily (Sep. 7, 2006), I argue:

the libertarian could argue that the parent has various positive obligations to his or her children, such as the obligation to feed, shelter, educate, etc. The idea here is that libertarianism does not oppose “positive rights”; it simply insists that they be voluntarily incurred. One way to do this is by contract; another is by trespassing against someone’s property. Now, if you pass by a drowning man in a lake you have no enforceable (legal) obligation to try to rescue him; but if you push someone in a lake you have a positive obligation to try to rescue him. If you don’t you could be liable for homicide. Likewise, if your voluntary actions bring into being an infant with natural needs for shelter, food, care, it is akin to throwing someone into a lake. In both cases you create a situation where another human is in dire need of help and without which he will die. By creating this situation of need you incur an obligation to provide for those needs. And surely this set of positive obligations would encompass the obligation to manumit the child at a certain point. This last argument is, to my mind, the most attractive, but it is also probably the least likely to be accepted by most libertarians, who generally seem opposed to positive obligations, even if they are incurred as the result of one’s actions. Rothbard, for example, puts forward several objections to such an approach.

Now, I did not explicitly apply this to the case of abortion, but it should be clear that this approach could imply that parental obligations exist that obligate the parent not to abort the fetus, at least after a certain point, at least in normal, non-life-threatening, cases. (I lean toward this view: abortion is increasingly immoral, at least in the typical case, starting from the point of conception; and at some point in the second or third trimester, when the fetus has developed enough to be said to “be a person” (to have a developed brain and other organs), abortion would be infanticide, or tantamount thereto. I would still oppose state law against abortion even in the last trimester, however, partly because I oppose the state, and partly because enforcement of such a law would be inherently dangerous and invasive.)

So I found the following interesting. In a recent Noodlecast podcast, Objectivist Diana Hsieh notes some of her fellow Objectivists disagree with her on abortion. She notes, in particular, that her fellow co-blogger, the pro-IP Greg Perkins, has written Abortion Rights and Parental Obligations. In this piece, Perkins argues, similar to me, that you can assume positive, parental obligations, even “implicitly” by your actions; and that at a certain point of “viability” the fetus has personhood and rights, and may not be aborted (at least in the normal case). I disagree with some aspects and nuances of his argument, but … interesting nonetheless.

See also my post Objectivist Hate Fest, discussing the pro-abortion comments of some Objectivists who were opposed to women with Down Syndrome fetuses carrying them to term–they believe there is a moral obligation to abort–to “squelch”–an “unhealthy fetus”–and that support of these mothers is the “worship of retardation.”

See also Doris Gordon’s site, Libertarians for Life, an anti-abortion libertarian group.

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Nock and Leonard Read on “One Improved Unit” and the Power of Attraction

by Stephan Kinsella January 8, 2011

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Introduction to Libertarian Legal Theory

by Stephan Kinsella January 3, 2011

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Nominations for Best Libertarian Papers Article for 2010

by Stephan Kinsella December 30, 2010

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The Mises Institute has just published I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians (compiled by Walter Block; Mises Institute 2010). It contains my own entry, How I Became A Libertarian (December 18, 2002, LewRockwell.com).