This is my presentation (audio only) at the Austrian Economics Discord Conference: “Inflation, Money, and the State,” Austrian Economics Discord Server (Jan. 7–8, 2023); my talk was “Inflation: Its Causes, Effects, Parallels and Death in a Bitcoin World.”
I appeared on a Twitter Spaces discussion Jan. 12, 2023 for Sazmining, for the topic “Bitcoin & Property Rights,” with Kent Halliburton and Logan Chipkin. A variety of questions were fielded. A synopsis and transcript are here, and re-pixeled below.
Synopsis:
Lawyer and libertarian theorist Stephan Kinsella joins Logan Chipkin and Kent Halliburton to discuss Bitcoin from a property rights perspective. If Bitcoin is not physical, how can anyone own it, if at all? [continue reading…]
Interesting findings in Walter J. Ong’s classic work Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 30th anniv. ed. (Routledge, 2012), pp. 50–51:
(1) Illiterate (oral) subjects identified geometrical figures by assigning them the names of objects, never abstractly as circles, squares, etc. A circle would be called a plate, sieve, bucket, watch, or moon; a square would be called a mirror, door, house, apricot drying-board. Luria’s subjects identified the designs as representations of real things they knew. They never dealt with abstract circles or squares but rather with concrete objects. Teachers’ school students on the other hand, moderately literate, identified geometrical figures by categorical geometric names: circles, squares, triangles, and so on …. They had been trained to give school-room answers, not real-life responses.
State vs. Government: See Hoppe’s definition of the state in “The Nature of the State and Why Libertarians Hate It.” If government means the state, it’s criminal; but it clearly means something different: the governing institutions, law and order. The state has coopted government like it has coopted roads and transportation, money, education. But just as roads are not inherently statist, neither is government. We anarcho-libertarians do not oppose law and order and the institutions of “governance”; just state control thereof. We oppose our enemy, the state.
For one thing, many of the particular rules in a given setting will depend on contractual relationships and choices. Libertarian theorists, such as Rothbard, David Friedman, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, envision various territorial enclaves whose internal legal rules are based on local preferences, custom, and contract. For example, in Hoppe’s “covenant communities”: “a libertarian world could and likely would be one with a great variety of locally separated communities engaging distinctly different and far-reaching discrimination” (“e.g. nudists discriminating against bathing suits,” as Jeff Tucker points out in Idiot Patrol).1[continue reading…]
Murray Rothbard’s treatise, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998) is online in a couple of obscure places, and some of its individual chapters or portions is available online in separate articles. I’ve listed below those I am aware of: [continue reading…]
I appeared tonight (Dec. 7, 2022) on the LP Mises Caucus’s Ask an Austrian podcast and youtube channel, episode 11, at the request of Liam McCollum. I fielded as many questions as I could in the allotted time. The questions given to me ahead of the session are posted below, most of which I addressed.
A short story I wrote in high school, 1980-82 or so. Around the time I decided to stop hunting.
The Dawn of Knowledge
The boy impatient clicked the safety of his 20 gauge shotgun on and off. As he struggled down the trail through the weeds and briers in an open patch of the forest, he tore his arms and legs constantly against the unrelenting pull of the briers’ spindly appendages. He stumbled clumsily into a branch, causing a downpour of dew to drench him. He nervously blazed down the trail, knowing with a pessimistic confidence that the rabbit would cross the trail ahead of him. The negative mood was enhanced by the dour expression of the sun behind clouds smeared with dirty yellow. The barking of his dogs seems so close that he knew the rabbit had already passed. But, as he buried his way around an end in the crude path, the rabbit, ears back and fleeing for his life, sped across the trail from the right. [continue reading…]
This is my presentation (audio only) at the Austrian Economics Discord Conference: “Inflation, Money, and the State,” Austrian Economics Discord Server (Jan. 7–8, 2023); my talk was “Inflation: Its Causes, Effects, Parallels and Death in a Bitcoin World.”
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