Kinsella On Liberty

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 338. Update: See also KOL463 | Contracts, Usury, Fractional-Reserve Banking with André Simoni  and this Grok analysis of various problems with smart contracts including the fact that most loans are unsecured. From Human Action Podcast Ep. 308, "Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty with Stephan Kinsella" (May 27, 2021), with Jeff Deist, discussing Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty, chapters 9, 13, 19, et pass. (PDF). Shownotes: Lawyer and legal theorist Stephan Kinsella joins the show as we dive into Part II of Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty, grappling with the foundational issues of crime, proportionality, and contract. When is property justly held? When may injuries to a person or property be addressed with force, and how much force? How do we deal with one another contractually, in terms of promises and expectation? How do we resolve disputes privately? Rothbard presents a remarkable exposition of a theory of liberty, a normative justification for laissez-faire which was sorely lacking. Kinsella does a remarkable job of explaining Rothbard's concepts with force and clarity, so you won't want to miss this episode! Transcript below. Youtube: https://youtu.be/AkEdMTDrPfY Raw video (unedited): Related Links Rothbard on the “Original Sin” in Land Titles: 1969 vs. 1974 (Nov. 5, 2014) KOL146 | Interview of Williamson Evers on the Title-Transfer Theory of Contract A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability, Journal of Libertarian Studies 17, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 11-37 A Libertarian Theory of Punishment and Rights, 30 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 607-45 (1997) Fraud, Restitution, and Retaliation: The Libertarian Approach KOL197 | Tom Woods Show: The Central Rothbard Contribution I Overlooked, and Why It Matters: The Rothbard-Evers Title-Transfer Theory of Contract Justice and Property Rights: Rothbard on Scarcity, Property, Contracts… KOL004 | Interview with Walter Block on Voluntary Slavery   TRANSCRIPT Rothbard on Punishment, Property, and Contract Stephan Kinsella with Jeff Deist The Human Action Podcast, Mises Institute May 27, 2021   00:00:08 JEFF DEIST: Kinsella, you ready, Freddy? 00:00:09 STEPHAN KINSELLA: I’m ready.  I guess I can take my mask off. 00:00:12 JEFF DEIST: What is it?  I can’t see.  What’s it got on it? 00:00:16 STEPHAN KINSELLA: V for Vendetta. 00:00:17 JEFF DEIST: Oh yeah, yeah. 00:00:19 STEPHAN KINSELLA: I got it backwards.  That’s why. 00:00:21 00:00:24 JEFF DEIST: I love that movie.  I like Stephen Fry generally, and it’s got a very young, cute Natalie Portman. 00:00:30 STEPHAN KINSELLA: She had her day. 00:00:31 JEFF DEIST: Before she was in all those – I think she was in Star Wars movies at some point. 00:00:35 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yep. 00:00:37 JEFF DEIST: And then she became sort of a Hillary person. 00:00:41 STEPHAN KINSELLA: True. 00:00:42 JEFF DEIST: All right, we good, Clay? 00:00:44 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to the Human Action podcast.  If you have been following along—you should be following along—you’ll know that we’ve been working our way through some various Rothbard texts in the past few weeks.  And at some point we announced that we are going to tackle The Ethics of Liberty, which, after Man, Economy, and State might be the most treatise-like or full-length work of Rothbard’s for our purposes. 00:01:09 And we started the analysis of this book last week with Dr. Walter Block.  We went through part one of the book, which deals in natural law.  If you haven’t seen that show, be sure and go back and take a look because it’s got a lot of Walter Blockisms, and we wrestled with a lot of things conceptually in that show.  But part two of the book where Rothbard lays out a theory of liberty is really the meat of it. 00:01:32 And I thought there would be nobody better for our purposes this week than our friend, Stephan Kinsella who is, of course, someone most of you probably already know or are familiar with.  He’s not just an IP lawyer.  Of course he’s written the definitive text, Against Intellectual Property.  But he’s also written quite a bit about libertarian law more generally, the idea of when is force permissible, what is proportionality, what is contract, what is property, all of these things we wrestle with. 00:01:57 And Stephan, I guess by way of welcome, it’s interesting to me that Rothbard is writing this book in the’70s, comes out around ’82.  I mean you think all this stuff would have been settled by 1500 or so.  I mean we’re still talking about this stuff in the ‘80s.  And now we’re talking about it in the 2020s. 00:02:14 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, and in a way, Rothbard was – he was lucky that he came in at the time where there was lots of low-hanging fruit.  I think that’s one reason he made so much progress, but I always feel like the libertarian movement, the modern one, really started around Ayn Rand and that crowd in the ‘50s.  So it was relatively new when Rothbard was writing in the ‘70s. 00:02:35 JEFF DEIST: Well, so his big chapter in here, “Property and Criminality,” I mean this is a very different approach I think to libertarianism than a lot of people take, and certainly a different one than the general public would conceive of.  In other words, he roots it entirely in property.  So maybe we can start with this idea.  In modern statutory law and positive law, there’s a concept of tort and there’s a concept of crime.  In the Rothbardian conception, for starters, those two things collapse into one another.  So let’s give everybody the quick and dirty of what this means. 00:03:11 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Right.  I think most people think of different branches of law.  There’s contract.  There’s property.  There’s family law, international law, domestic law.  But really there’s private law and civil law, tort law, and crime, so they’re all treated differently.  And of course in the modern conception, crime is considered – a tort is when someone commits an offense against someone else.  And in libertarian terms, it’s basically trespass, which means using their property or their resource without their permission.  So that’s an offensive touching, like a battery, assault and battery, using their land or stealing their car. 00:03:46 Those are all types of torts.  But they’re also – some of those are considered crimes, and in our current system, the statist system we have, the victim is the state, which is why, when you have a crime, it’s the state versus O.J. Simpson, which is why Ron Goldman’s family could sue O.J. Simpson separately in a civil trial.  So there’s different standards of proof.  There’s preponderance of the evidence for a civil trial, that is, to prove that someone harmed you and owes you damages.  So you have to prove that more likely than not. 00:04:17 But if you convict someone of a crime, which is against the state, you have to prove by – beyond a reasonable doubt.  So there are different standards, and people have sought to collapse law into one thing, sort of like mathematicians and scientists – I mean physicists search for the grand unified theory to unify quantum theory and relativity.  So we seek to simply and unify these things, and Rothbard’s idea is that really it’s all tort.  And of course the state shouldn’t even exist and shouldn’t be the plaintiff or the prosecutor in a criminal action.  The victim should be the one that is able to seek restitution. 00:04:59 JEFF DEIST: So when we think of torts, I guess we think of a civil wrong other than a breach of contract for which the law provides some kind of remedy.  And that’s become an entire field of law, and of course there’s personal injury, which is a huge source of income for a lot of lawyers.  How radical do you think this was?  I mean in 1982 when this book comes out, if we say that, for example, as Rothbard says, all property is really private. 00:05:31 There’s no – the distinction isn’t public versus private property.  The distinction is whether there’s public or private actors controlling it.  And that at the end of the day, control is the most important right in the bundle of sticks that makes up a property.  So I mean do you buy this, this idea that private versus public is not the distinction? 00:05:52 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, yeah, and I think it was really radical at the time.  I think that a lot of things we read now seem tame because we’re so used to it.  I remember reading something by – Lew Rockwell had written something in – I think it was in the Hoppe Festschrift from just 11 or 12 years ago.  And he mentioned one splash Hans Hoppe made about maybe 10, 15 years before that was when he was critiquing the US Constitution and how it was a centralization.  It wasn’t really – the Constitution is not about protecting rights.  And he said something like you could hear a pin drop in the audience, so everyone was stunned by that. 00:06:31 That was a little boldly radical to say before an American audience, even libertarians, to criticize the Constitution and the alleged minimal state nature of the original founding, which is all nonsense.  But now that seemed like, oh yeah, we take that for granted, or at least it’s not – it doesn’t shock people to say that now.  So I think a lot of this stuff was more pioneering than we give it credit for because it seems so – not tame but seems obvious to us now. 00:07:00 I do think it was radical in part because even for libertarians to hear that it was radical because the common view is that the common law is the thing.  And also legislation is the primary source of law that can supersede the private common law, and even libertarians seem to have this view.

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 190-2. Also podcast as PFP145. In 2015 I delivered this talk: “On Life without Patents and Copyright: Or, Who Would Pick The Cotton?” at the Property and Freedom Society, 10th Annual Meeting, Bodrum, Turkey (Sep. 13, 2015), which is here: KOL190 | On Life without Patents and Copyright: Or, But Who Would Pick the Cotton? (PFS 2015). This is the subsequent panel discussion with Q&A from the speakers for that day, to-wit: Hans-Hermann Hoppe, David Dürr, Stephan Kinsella, Frank van Dun, Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple). Transcript below. Panel discussion video: TRANSCRIPT Panel Discussion, Q&A: Hoppe, Dürr, Kinsella, van Dun, Daniels (PFS 2015) by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, David Dürr, Stephan Kinsella, Frank van Dun, Anthony Daniels Property and Freedom Society, 10th Annual Meeting Bodrum, Turkey (Sep. 13, 2015) 00:00:23 HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: Somebody approached me with a wish – it was a question, if email addresses would like to be shared.  I did not want to do anything without the people’s permission, so there will be a list at the front desk where you can maybe – the name list of all the participants where you can either write your email address in there or not if you prefer not to make your email address known to others.  So whoever is interested, please take advantage of the opportunity, and David Durr wanted to make a brief announcement too.  Give the microphone. 00:01:17 DAVID DÜRR: Maybe first concerning also the email address, I was asked by some of you whether I could send you these slides of this morning so you could look at it closer with all the writings.  So my email address to just give it to you is D-U-E, double R at swisslegal in one word, swisslegal.  This is the name of our law group, dot C-H.  And then may I add this?  Some people ask me whether what I gave in the speech is also somewhere written in an article.  So there are not long and thick books of me yet on this matter.  I do have two books here.  They are not as sophisticated and scientific as the one of Hans.  And namely they are not so English.  They are German. 00:02:27 One is (indiscernible_00:02:29) which means state opera.  Switzerland, you know, the state as a big opera.  It’s the state house actually as opera house, and the subtitle is Few Stars, Many Startists.  So this is one – I just have one copy of each if you want to look at this, those who read English, or if you want to buy it or order it, so it’s here.  The second one is I have a regular column in a newspaper in Switzerland, and these are sort of anarchic – anarchist columns, and the collection of this is in another book.  They are always on Fridays in that newspaper, so it’s “Das Wort zum Freitag,” the world to the Friday, not to the Sunday as usual, to the Friday, so this is the second book.  Thank you. 00:03:31 Q: Which newspaper is it?  Which newspaper? 00:03:33 DAVID DÜRR: It’s called Basler Zeitung.  It’s a – people say it’s a right-wing newspaper.  They are very open in that they have, through all parties, columnists, but I like the newspaper as such, but I’m very independent.  I had one column once when I compared IS or ISIS with US.  I said, well, actually it’s about the same thing.  US is just bigger, and that gave huge protests from the newspaper itself.  And then this gave me an opportunity just to put one on the top because right afterwards these CIA reports came up about torture practices.  That was a wonderful example to insist on it anymore. 00:04:41 00:04:49 Q: Okay.  My question is for Stephan Kinsella.  It’s a question, not an argument.  What is the case for private photos and pictures shared over the internet on Facebook and someone else is using it?  What is the argumental basis on that from the IP perspective? 00:05:13 STEPHAN KINSELLA: What’s the justification for using someone else’s? 00:05:15 Q: Using, or do they need our permission, without permission?  What is the case for… 00:05:20 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Do you mean under current law or under libertarian system? 00:05:23 Q: Under – both. 00:05:24 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, under current law, copyrights – photographs are owned by the photographer, and if you put it online you still own the copyright, but you’re giving a license for people to use it for limited purposes like doing it on their browser.  If you use it beyond that, unless there’s a creative common license attached to it, you could be sued.  And the perverse aspect of copyright – let’s suppose you’re on vacation and you hand your iPhone to a stranger and he takes a picture of your family.  He owns the copyright but you don’t know who he is, so you have this great picture, and you may be infringing his copyright when you put it on your Apple TV. 00:06:02 And there’s other perverse aspects of copyright.  There are cases where there’s – someone takes a photograph.  They have a copyright in the photograph, and it becomes a best-selling print or something like that.  And someone else will go to the same location and recreate the photo by taking their own photograph, and they can be sued by the owner of the first copyright for taking a photograph in that location.  Under libertarian law, there would be no property rights whatsoever in information at all. 00:06:32 Information is not an ownable thing.  Information is the impatterning of an owned thing, a physical material resource.  Information is never free-floating.  It’s always the impatterning of a substrate: your brain, electromagnetic waves, a CD-ROM, a USB drive, a hard drive on a computer.  And those things are already owned by someone according to the principles Professor Hoppe referred to earlier.  The owner of the thing—I own this physical object.  It’s structured in a certain way, which is the information.  I don’t own the information and the phone.  I own the phone and the feature – it has certain features. 00:07:06 This phone has a weight.  It has an age.  It doesn’t mean I own the age of the phone.  If I did own the age of the phone, I would own lots of other phones in the world that were made on the same day you see.  So the problem with owning an aspect of a thing that you own is it’s a universal that applies to any number of instances in the world.  And to own that universal feature of the thing would instantly give you ownership claims over other material resources in the world that other people have claims to.  This is the very problem with IP.  So if you put a photograph online in a free society, then you have to take the risk that other people might look at it and use it. 00:07:44 HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: On intellectual property rights, a funny movement – you reported about it on your website where people – some alleged Austrians from Vienna, Mrs. What’s-Her-Name from the Hayek Institute, Barbara Kolm.  She wants to defend physical and intellectual property rights at the same time.  It never occurred to her that that is an absolute impossibility.  To give you an example, I whistle a song.  You hear the song, and you copy it.  You whistle the same melody. [Update: See excerpt on Kolm here.] 00:08:34 If intellectual property rights exist, of course I would be able to then sue you for having whistled the same song without having received my permission.  But that means that I thereby acquire property rights over your own body, that I am then an owner of your vocal chords and whatever it is.  And that shows quite clearly that either physical property rights exist or intellectual property rights exist, but both of these things cannot exist simultaneously.  So it’s simply a contradiction. 00:09:28 STEPHAN KINSELLA: And an actual illustration of that is the “Happy Birthday” song, which is in litigation right now.  This is literally true.  Waiters in restaurants in the US sing a different song because they may be sued for singing the one that’s in the movies, which movie studios have to pay licensing fees for.  It’s another way IP would help movie studios.  Their costs would go down.  I want to read something Hans wrote in 19 – Hans said in 1988 on a panel with Rothbard and David Gordon and Leland Yeager.  And this is ’88 at the Mises Institute I assume, and an audience member said I have a question for Professor Hoppe. 00:10:07 Does the idea of personal sovereignty extend to knowledge?  Am I sovereign over my own thoughts, ideas, and theories?  And Hans said in order to have a thought you must have property rights over your body.  That doesn’t imply you own your thoughts.  The thoughts that can be used by – the thoughts can by used by anybody who is capable of understanding them.  So Hans understood this with pure praxeology 30 – almost 30 years ago. 00:10:34 00:10:38 HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: Then I was still young. 00:10:40 00:10:45 Q: (indiscernible_00:10:45) First of all, I wanted to thank you for a remarkably funny talk on homicide, and I wanted to tell Professor Hoppe that it was extremely refreshing to hear what should be done with politicians.  Now, having said that, don’t you think that when you say a few people have asked you who is the best person you’ve known, and several – and many people have asked you who is the worst person you’ve known in a way echoes the fact that the best person you may know involves a value judgment.  Whereas what we consider evil, echoes of a natural sense of law such that what we libertarians call the Non-Aggression Principle can be naturally recognized by people throughout cultures and times. 00:11:33 00:11:38 ANTHONY DANIELS: No.  I don’t think that’s true.  I think – I’m afraid I think people are just salaciously interested in evil in a way that they’re not salaciously interested in good.  And evil entertains them in a way that good doesn’t,

Stephan Kinsella, libertarian legal theorist and former patent attorney, applies praxeology to property rights and Bitcoin. The conversation covers homesteading, scarcity versus non-scarcity, private keys as access not property, Bitcoin’s mimicry of rivalrous money, consensus fragility, mining incentives, and how Bitcoin might reshape law and liberty.

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 336. From April 22, 2021. "Here I interview the great Stephan Kinsella and discuss whether or not patents and intellectual property are actually a good thing. We get into philosophy, practical advice, and more." Related links: C4SIF.org Resources A Selection of my Best Articles and Speeches on IP Do Business Without Intellectual Property

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 335. I was interviewed by Paul Kramer of the Youth in Policy Podcast. Youtube highlights version below:

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 334. A libertarian named Sebastian is researching the issue of "habeas data" from a libertarian perspective, and wanted to discuss with me. So we did. This involves issues and questions such as: Proposition: Habeas Data is emerging in some countries as a legal or constitutional writ predicated on a personal autonomy right to one's personal data. From a libertarian perspective, is this a type of bodily/personal autonomy "property" right? What if the data is held by a public official/state organization and the habeas data remedy is limited to access/correcton/deletion from a public database? Is this libertarian? Is our private data always private vis-a-vis the never claim-of-right of the State?  Is that at odds with a bodily autonomy view of privacy/private property (information) rights? This is of interest as the Latin American/OAS writ is trending toward personal information as a kind of personal (bodily) autonomy right. What is the relation between Habeas Data and Right to Know/Right to Truth in Human Rights Law? How does the notion of Habeas Data relate to the libertarian critique of intellectual property and ownership of information? Related: Right to be forgotten My Louisiana Civil Law Dictionary From Sebastian: "A bit tangential but if Right to Truth ever includes Right to The Law: In Civil Law Systems, iura novit curia, or "The Court Knows the Law""

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 274-2. This is the Q&A panel following my talk [KOL274 | Nobody Owns Bitcoin (PFS 2019)] for the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society, Bodrum, Turkey (Sept. 12–17, 2019). For the four panelists' talks, see the Program, or the PFS 2019 YouTube Playlist. Transcript below. Q&A with Hülsmann, Dürr, Kinsella, Hoppe (PFS 2019) Unedited Transcript, with Guido Hülsmann, David Dürr, Stephan Kinsella, Hans-Hermann Hoppe Sept. 15, 2019 00:00:09 M (Rahim Taghizadegan): Hans, congratulations.  Your speech was really good food for thought, and because I want to hear more of it, I’ll try to challenge you and just create a little bit.  You made it seem as if going from a state of more culture as human beings to a state of culture somehow was a conscious agreement between human beings to find tools or artifices to reach the purposes.  And to me it seems like too much of separation between nature and culture because we see among animals quite a lot of complicated languages. 00:00:43 I call them languages, of course nothing compared to the complexity of the human being.  We see tools used by animals, and of course by our ancestors.  So it looks more like a spectrum which emerged out of our nature, and of course then complexities or at some certain level of complexity you can call it a more interesting culture and a more complex culture.  But I think you focus too much on the gulf between the nature and culture. 00:01:14 HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: I would doubt that we can speak of animals using instruments.  We can give completely causal explanations for them doing certain things.  It has also never happened that animals were constructing something that they cannot do by nature.  Men can construct instruments that make him – enable him to do things that he could not do by nature.  We can construct a car.  We construct an airplane.  Yes, we have beavers doing – building dams, but no beaver has ever done anything else but building dams or come up with, oh no, we just divert the flow of the river or something of that kind. 00:02:00 So the explanation that we can give for animal behavior, we would not need any reference to human or teleological vocabulary of goals and means and ends and success and failure.  We can – we do that because sometimes we like animals and like to describe them in human terms, but we could easily explain all of that in causal terms just as much.  Also, when animals learn something that they didn’t know how to do before like circus animals or something like that, that we can – again, this learning we can describe in a causal way—reinforcement, repetition, beating them, or not beating them, giving them a piece of sugar and whatever it is.  We never need human terminology to explain their behavior, but in our case, we do.  That is – that would be my point. 00:03:06 GUIDO HÜLSMANN: Actually, the naturalistic position can also be challenged that there are many natural phenomena that we cannot truly explain without a teleological element, such as the function of an eye for example.  Whenever we talk of a function, an eye, a liver, any human organ, a cell, DNA, information content and so on, you cannot just – the old terminology cannot just explain this in terms of the material characteristics and the so-called efficient qualities so what came before, and then what came after.  You need to have a teleological argument. 00:03:45 [Audience member]: I want to ask whether you will agree and perhaps expand upon this idea that another couple of good examples besides language are law, in particular, complex legal systems that emerge spontaneously over time.  And I think that this argument actually was made by Hayek and Sudha Shenoy as well.  And also, as a second example, as a second additional example, religion, and in particular one aspect of religion, that is, liturgy, different liturgies that embody sophisticated meanings that are transcendent.  I think that these are another couple of examples that can work just as well as language. 00:04:36 HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: Of course I agree.  I only took language, so to speak, the most important meta institution that makes lots of other institutions possible.  So there’s no disagreement here.  I – last year I spoke here for two hours, and I thought that might have been a little bit too much, so this time I wanted to be short and sweet.  I don’t know if the sweet thing did occur, but short it was.  There’s no disagreement whatsoever.  I just didn’t have time to go through all other aspects of culture besides the aspect of language. 00:05:21 DAVID DÜRR: I would like to take your example of law, which interests me most.  By the way, I’m not that much on your line, as you know, concerning this question, nature versus culture or however you call it.  And I namely mean that the law could be an interesting example to make another viewpoint.  Many speak about natural law, and this means something.  This means that these are principles that have to be found, not created by man. 00:06:06 Often when one says human law is something agreed upon by man, things like that, but I would say it’s more convincing or more consequent to approach that subject by trying to understand the regularities that are there in nature, regularities of behavior that, in this situation, this reaction will come up.  Even though within – so to speak in the inner view of such a conflict, then there are arguments.  There are purposes.  There are normative goals, things you were mentioning. 00:06:52 Even though within these procedures, things like that happen, I would say from the outer view so to speak these are natural processes.  And they are highly – terribly high complex.  They are so complex that we never will have any chance to get them.  So I think there we are not in the argument or in the aspect.  You mentioned that maybe sometime, but that will be later, we will have the possibility to catch the whole picture or something like that.  I will say we never will reach that possibility.  It will always be beyond our capacity, brain capacity or so.  But nevertheless, or I would say it’s not a cause that it’s a natural phenomenon. 00:07:54 HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: When we speak of natural law, we of course speak of something that has a purpose for purposefully acting individuals.  When we speak of something being a conflict, a conflict is something entirely different than banging this bottle against a glass.  We can, of course, metaphorically also say there’s a conflict between that bottle and the glass that it is – that we interpret certain events as conflicts has something to do that we do have purposes. 00:08:36 And one of our purposes is, of course, to overcome conflicts because conflicts are considered by us as some sort of problem that should be solved.  This is not something that either the glass or the bottle considers as something that should be solved in some way.  But, of course, I can say that.  But when I say that, that is just metaphorically speaking so. 00:09:07 M (Johann Gevers): I completely agree with the importance of purpose and teleology, and at the same time, I think I’m more Raheem and Dapheet about the continuum within complex systems, complex adaptive systems.  We see there’s the central concept of emergence, and that cannot be explained from the lower levels, so you have a qualitative shift, but it’s nevertheless a natural process.  And to get more specific, in animals, in the recent 10, 15 years, we’ve now discovered that they can not just use tools but actually even put together tools that are multi-stage tools so that they would have to see that if I do this plus this plus this, then it will enable me to get the banana off the tree. 00:09:57 HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: I think those are all metaphorical descriptions of things that can be fully explained in causal terms.  I think the most important philosopher who deals with this is Peter Janich.  Those people who can read – most of his books were only written in German, but those people who can read German I can recommend the book that deals most directly with this issue.  He has written many books that deal with it more indirectly.  It was called Der Mensch und andere Tiere, who also just shows that all of these interpretations, they use instruments.  And so this is all bull, to be drastic.  Yes, you can, of course, describe what they do in terms as if they make an instrument and then they make another instrument in order to reach some further distant goal. (( Update from Kinsella: See references to Janich etc. in Hoppe on Falsificationism, Empiricism, and Apriorism and Protophysics; also Hoppe, "My Discovery of Human Action and of Mises as a Philosopher". )) 00:11:05 But you can also describe that in a completely different, simple way.  And what I said before, no animal of any species has ever constructed an instrument that was entirely new, never happened in that species before.  Mankind has constructed artifacts that did not exist ever, completely new things, which all of a sudden become common instruments with the example of cars and airplanes.  Men cannot fly by nature, but we can fly.  Men cannot run very fast, but we can move in a very fast way.  No animal has ever invented an instrument that made it do things that it couldn’t do by nature. 00:12:02 M (Gevers): One question for Guido and one for Stephan.  Guido, at one point you mentioned that primitive tribes have neither a concept of property nor a concept of gifts.  And I’m curious if this is really true, and this is kind of in a continuation of the previous thread because, in the 1960s, Robert Ardrey wrote this book, The Territorial Imperative.  He was an anthropologist, and he also studied animals, and the subtitle of the book is The Animal Origins of Property and Nations,

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 333. This is my interview by Jeff Tucker (Oct. 9, 2010), which preceded my first presentation of the Mises Academy course “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics” (Nov.-Dec. 2010). For the second presentation in 2011, see KOL172 | “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics: Lecture 1: History and Law” (Mises Academy, 2011). Transcript below. Youtube: https://youtu.be/-XlKNStzoLs Understanding IP: An Interview with Stephan Kinsella, Mises Daily (Oct. 21, 2010) 10/21/2010Jeffrey A. TuckerStephan Kinsella Jeffrey Tucker: Stephan Kinsella, it's a pleasure to have you here today. Welcome. Stephan Kinsella: Thank you. It's good to be here. Tucker: We're going to talk about your class for the Mises Academy, on intellectual property. Kinsella: Yes, I'm looking forward to it. We've been planning it for quite a while, as you know. I think the first course will be on November 1st for six weeks and then we'll take a week off. We'll have time to go in depth into many of the issues about intellectual property and its relationship to libertarianism, economic theory, and various other areas. Tucker: Why is this an important issue? Kinsella: Well, it's becoming a more and more important issue as we've seen in our circles and as seen on the internet. Daily, we see horror stories and crazy examples of abuses of IP. People are starting to wonder if these are really abuses of IP or if there's something wrong with IP itself. In the past, free-market economists and libertarians have sort of given this issue a pass. They took it for granted. It's been in a corner all by itself. Now people are wondering, and as we start looking more closely at it, we can see that a lot of the assumptions about IP have been wrong. Tucker: It's striking you mention the history of thought here and why this issue is sort of crystallizing in our time, especially with your pioneering monograph on that subject, Against Intellectual Property. It's generally true, isn't it, that that theoretical element of economics or law or whatever catches up when the practical need for that new theory comes along. For example, the theory of money and credit was made necessary by the advent of central banking. So, 50 years ago, IP wasn't that big a deal. Kinsella: I think that's completely true. Mises said something I've always loved. (Everyone focuses on a few of his statements that other people don't see, because he has so many great aphorisms and things.) He pointed out that in his view economics is purely deductive reasoning from a priori categories. Plus, then you explicitly introduce certain assumptions to make it interesting. [See my post Mises: Keep It Interesting.] "Interesting" was something I always focused on. So, in other words, we could talk hypothetically about a barter society forever, but it won't get us that far. So let's introduce the assumption that there is money in society. It's not a priori that there is money, but there could be money and, if there is, then certain things follow from it. I think that likewise in libertarian theory certain things become interesting at a certain point. In the past, as you mentioned in your talk yesterday here at the Supporters' Summit, it was not as easy as it is now to replicate information. There was sort of a tie in previous times between a good that was produced, like a book, and the information in it. The information in the book was in the physical copy of the book, so you could easily find a way to sell that. Now, with information being so easy to copy — And, of course, as Cory Doctorow mentions in one of his articles and speeches, do we think we are going to get to a point where it is going to get harder to copy and to spread information? No, it's only going to get easier. These things have made people confront the issue of the morality and the politics of sharing information. Tucker: It's not only technological advances, it's also dramatic changes in policy that have occurred over the last 15–20 years. Kinsella: Yes. Copyright and patent keep getting worse. The Western countries are twisting the arms of emerging economies like China to adopt a draconian Western-style intellectual property. This ACTA treaty that is coming up is terrible. It probably will be passed and it will impose protections around the world similar to what we have in the United States in the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). Tucker: Is this enforced by the so-called World Intellectual Property Organization? Kinsella: The WTO will have a role in it, yes. The WTO is the World Trade Organization and the WIPO is the World Intellectual Property Organization. I'm not sure of their relationship to this. Tucker: But it's a UN organization, so you've got really international teeth growing here. Kinsella: Correct. Right. Tucker: And the prospect for unbelievable abuse. And you know what's striking about this to me? Here you have a sector of vast state expansion and imposition on individual liberty, and it's occurring in the name of property rights. Kinsella: Right. This is what is striking. When you start looking at this, you'll see that even libertarians, for a long time, have regarded patent and copyright as types of property rights. So they sort of assumed this is part of the property-rights panoply we should respect. It's in the American Constitution … Tucker: I should tell you I've always assumed that too. Unquestioned, really. Kinsella: But, when you look at the history of it, the origins of copyright lie in censorship, literal censorship. Basically, they were afraid of the "menace of printing," because now the church and the government couldn't control so easily the distribution of what thoughts were, officially, to be promulgated to people. So the roots of copyright are in censorship, literally. The roots of patents — this is something I will mention in the speech at the Supporter's Summit. I was mentioning it to you the other day. Ironically, the origins of patents are in piracy, literally in piracy. Nowadays you hear the defenders of IP attack so-called pirates. Of course, as you and I have discussed, they are not pirates at all, because real pirates kill people and break things and take things from you and make you worse off. IP pirates don't do that. One of the original uses of what is called letters patent was a grant to Francis Drake. Drake became a privateer, which is nothing but a legalized pirate. He went around the world using these letters patent, granted to him by the Queen of England, to plunder and to steal and to bring the treasures back home. He was literally a pirate authorized by a patent. So patents and piracy do go hand in hand actually. [See The Real IP Pirates.] Tucker: Now a lot of this history is being unearthed, again, only recently because of the change in technology and the intensification of the law have caused people to now look more carefully at the foundations of something that was previously largely unquestioned. Although, Hayek has some passages in his work that were explicitly against copyright and patent. Of course Rothbard was against patent; he had a clear statement about his views on copyright. He was in favor of so-called common-law copyright, which is more or less a free-market position. And Mises provides enough good reason to question the whole idea that you could have ownership of ideas. I think it is pretty clear that he did not believe you could own ideas. So you have these strains in the Austrian tradition and, of course, it's not only the Austrian tradition that matters here. It's just that the Austrians have been the ones who have done the most serious thought about it, right? Kinsella: In thinking hard about this issue myself, I have noticed that having an Austrian background, as usual, helps to see these issues more clearly. It has helped me in legal theory and other areas, but here especially. You can see why Mises, even though he didn't devote a lot of attention to this issue, didn't go off track too far because his focus on the structure of human action kept him from doing that. He saw the role of ideas as a guide to human action. It was not the means of action. The means of action are scarce resources, which have to be economized, but Mises saw that human action is guided by ideas. So he glimpsed, although he didn't unfold it too much, he glimpsed that ideas — as you mentioned in your speech — that ideas cannot be destroyed. They can last forever. They're infinitely reusable. They're malleable, which also, I guess, Hayek would see as well with his emphasis on tacit knowledge. Tucker: Isn't it great, too, when Mises says ideas are not phantoms; they're real things? Kinsella: They are things. And I think the mistake made by sort of crude philosophizing by a lot of libertarians, is they'll say well, if it is a thing, then it can be owned. "Thingness" is not the criteria for ownability. There is something else, which is scarcity or something like that. It's not to denigrate their importance. And a lot of utilitarian-minded people just assume that if you're skeptical about intellectual property then you are anti-intellectual or you are hostile to the role of ideas. Of course, it is the other way around. Intellectual property hampers innovation. Intellectual property literally imposes censorship on people. It literally prevents you from using knowledge that you have. So, basically, getting rid of IP, one of the goals there is to enhance innovation and to enhance intellectual freedom. Tucker: Make every industry work the way the fashion industry has managed to live and thrive without IP. Kinsella: Absolutely. We're used to that now,

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

Stephan Kinsella, a patent attorney and libertarian writer focused on IP, Austrian economics, and Bitcoin. He recounts his path into patent law and anti‑IP views. Conversations cover patent practice and strategy, Bitcoin’s role in spreading Austrian ideas, debates about money and Hayek vs Mises, and practical Bitcoin teaching tips.