As I tweeted here:
Walter Block’s pro-Israel WSJ article from October, “The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas” (substack version) upset lots of libertarians, e.g. Scott Horton who says, at about 1:08:00 here, that Walter is now kicked out of libertarianism because of his Israel-Gaza views.
Kevin Duffy also criticized him; Walter responded here: “Have I Gone AWOL?” He argued that his views on Gaza are fine since it’s okay to disagree with Rothbard and still be a libertarian. [continue reading…]
Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:14 — 50.9MB)
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 422.
A new podcast by Dumo Denga, ManPatria, has just released an audio narration of my article “What Libertarianism Is” for its first episode, entitled “What is Libertarianism.” This narration appears to be based on the original article, not the updated version that appears as chap. 2 of Legal Foundations of a Free Society.
There is also a previous narration of this article by Graham Wright (KOL005).
I published the print version of Legal Foundations of a Free Society in September of 2023, in time for the 2023 Property and Freedom Society Annual Meeting. The Kindle edition is now available at Amazon. Nook version on Barnes & Noble, and a free online epub file, will be available in months to come. Enjoy!
I found this in some old files. Might be of interest to some. Other participants included fellow libertarian sci-fi authors J. Neil Schulman and Victor Koman. PDF
An intelligent observation from a reader of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (my comments interspersed)
Page 486 had a great example of nuggets in this book that give me a different perspective. Nothing earth shattering, just a more accurate way to understand.
Scarcity is a particularly poor term, for this reason: think of paper clips and why we call them scarce goods. At the root it has nothing to do with the class of paper clips. It’s rather about a specific instance of a paper clip. Now ask if 2 or more people can use that specific object simultaneously without conflict: no. That makes it an economic good. This means we can be talking about the Mona Lisa, of which there is 1, or that paper clip, of which there is (drumroll) … 1.
No time to clean this one up at present, so here it is mostly raw—
Now, the topic of Willful Negligence.I looked at “The Libertarian Approach to Negligence, Tort, and Strict Liability: Wergeld and Partial Wergeld”. I understand the idea of a “spectrum between non-action or mere behavior”.Where I get jumbled up, is on the combined topics of “willful negligence” and “action”. Example:Joe is lounging in his easy chair holding his known-to-be-vicious dog on a leash. He falls asleep; dog gets out of the house and kills a child. Whatever other details we wish to add (front door open, etc) should show Joe as extremely willfully negligent. Even stipulate Joe shows no remorse, indeed, objects to any estoppel argument. [continue reading…]
No time to clean this one up at present, so here it is mostly raw. All the indented (and lighter colored) text is from my questioner:
QUERY:
This is not a question, more of a light-bulb insight the book helped clarify for me: Page 225 says “…acquiring and abandoning both involve a manifestation of the owner’s intent”.
Formerly, I would sense a gap between the nature of first-acquired title, versus subsequently title transfer.
Original appropriation seemed clean and straightforward. But acquiring already-owned resources always seemed interlaced with a history of title transfer…acquiring it from someone who themselves can show clear title from a former owner; and that former owner can show the same, and so on, as far back as the property’s history is known (reasonably). And indeed I intuitively saw nothing wrong with this. It just seemed complicated in comparison to pure homesteading.
Q: Re page 424 at the top [“Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society], was the topic of exchanging a tangible for a service. This got me to thinking: how about service-only trades? I haven’t seen this covered, perhaps it falls outside libertarian legal framework.
How would we categorize an agreement whereby the parties exchange only their services (actions), AND make no provision for non-performance … therefore, no tangible resources are involved at all? An example: I’ll help set up for your party; you wash my car; and we don’t discuss what happens if one of us reneges. [continue reading…]
Stephan Kinsella is a libertarian writer and patent attorney in Houston, Texas. He has spoken, lectured and published widely on various areas of libertarian legal theory and on legal topics such as intellectual property law and international law. His publications include Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Papinian Press, 2023) (see below), Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2008), and International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (Oxford, 2020).
The Libertarian Standard (TLS)
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