Kinsella On Liberty

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 160. I was on Ben Stone's "Bad Quaker" podcast yesterday, episode 449. We discussed IP and then some of Ben's previous comments on Hans-Hermann Hoppe's views on immigration law. Related links: Bad Quaker podcast: 0448 pc383 Hoppe’s Immigration (corrected) Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s “Immigration And Libertarianism” at Lew Rockwell My article  Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 159. This is my seminar, Practical Solutions to the IP Trap, delivered to Liberty.me members on May 19, 2014, based on my monograph Do Business Without Intellectual Property (Liberty.me, 2014). This discussion, moderated by Matt Gilliland, provides an overview of IP and the issues faced by people in their careers and lives and offers suggestions as to how to ethically and practically navigate challenges posed by the existing IP system. Transcript below. Youtube: See also: Profiting without IP “Conversation with an author about copyright and publishing in a free society” (Jan. 23, 2012) Do Business Without Intellectual Property (Liberty.me, 2014) “Innovations that Thrive without IP,” StephanKinsella.com (Aug. 9, 2010) “Examples of Ways Content Creators Can Profit Without Intellectual Property,” StephanKinsella.com (July 28, 2010) “The Creator-Endorsed Mark as an Alternative to Copyright,” Mises Economics Blog (July 15, 2010) Diomavro, Avengers endgame or do movies need copyright? Creators SHOULDN’T Own their Creations TRANSCRIPT Liberty.me Seminar: Practical Solutions to the IP Trap Stephan Kinsella Liberty.me, May 19, 2014   00:00:10 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Let me briefly define the background, the topic, and if I say anything that is confusing or anyone has questions, feel free to raise your hand, and Matt can let me know and I’d be happy to address something that I go over too quickly or that needs more elaboration.  Intellectual property, in the modern, capitalist, 21st century age, is an entrenched part of the western legal system, America, Europe, etc. and other countries as the west tries to push it and gets it entrenched in those countries.  It is considered widely to be part of the capitalist, property rights system.  In fact, patent and copyright, trademark and trade secret and other types of intellectual property are called intellectual property for a reason. 00:00:59 It was for a propaganda reason to try to get these things thought of as a property right.  Originally, they were thought of as privileges or policy tools by the monarch or the state, but under attack by free-market defenders, the proponents of IP started calling them property rights.  So this is where we are now.  We have a system where patent law, copyright law, trademark, trade secret, and other types of IP, which I can go into, are basically part of the landscape. 00:01:36 Now, the libertarian position, which I’ve argued for over a decade now, almost two decades now – the libertarian position is that patent and copyright law and other types of IP law are completely, 100% incompatible with free markets, competition, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and individual property rights.  So I’m totally opposed to patent and copyright law.  I don’t think we should reform it.  That would be a good step.  But I think we should totally abolish it.  I believe that patents impose hundreds of billions of dollars of damage on the economy of the US, let’s say, every year. 00:02:27 I believe copyrights also impose damage and cultural distortion, and it represses and suppresses freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and it arms the state to come up with excuses to regulate the internet and restrict internet and digital freedom.  So there’s basically nothing whatsoever good about patent and copyright and other forms of intellectual property like trademark and trade secret.  But they are definitely entrenched, so that’s a fact of the modern world. 00:03:01 And I’ve talked at length on this.  I’ve got tons of podcasts and lectures and articles, and so do other people, which I have collected at my website, C4SIF.org.  So the background is that we live in a world with lots of non-free-market, non-libertarian interventions and measures and policies and practices and institutions like the drug war, taxation, minimum wage law, regulations, immigration restrictions, war itself, conscription lurking in the background, all these things.  They’re there.  They’re un-libertarian.  We don’t like them, and intellectual property.  So the question is what do we do about them? 00:03:46 Well, the political answer is that we should work to abolish them, but this course is more about practical ways that, as a person living in the real world, what do you do about it?  So my way of looking at it is that there’s different approaches.  Number one, there’s the moral approach.  So if your question is, what do I do as a moral person, in particular, as a libertarian, how do I act in the world?  Is it legitimate or moral for me to take part of the given system?  Can I drive on public roads?  Can I take part in the patent and copyright system, etc.?  So that’s one type of question. 00:04:33 And then there are other practical questions that relate to this.  For example, if I don’t want to use intellectual property, how can I avoid it?  Or is it a good idea for me to avoid it or to use it?  So all these issues arise.  So let me focus really quickly on the two main types of intellectual property, which is patent and copyright.  Patent law governs inventions.  Copyright governs creative expressions, artistic works. 00:05:10 These are the two big things.  So let’s take copyright first.  In a way, the question is a little bit moot because the way copyright works is it’s automatically granted ever since 1989 in the United States after acceded to the Berne Convention, which eliminated formalities, which was previously you had to register a copyright, and they put a copyright notice on a work to get a copyright.  Now, those requirements are eliminated.  So under the current law, ever since 1989, copyright is automatically granted.  So every time you write something down, make a painting, write a software program, you instantly have a copyright granted by the federal government whether you want it or not, and it’s almost impossible to get rid of it. 00:05:58 Okay, so the first thing to do is to recognize what the landscape is, what the threats are, what your rights are, what your options are, and the same thing is true for patent law.  So for copyright, the question would be what should you do?  What can you do?  Now, one of the approaches I think you can take is most of the things that people author, we want the word to get out there.  And so because the copyright automatically attaches to these things, it is a restriction on what others can do with it. 00:06:44 So for most people, as Cory Doctorow, for example, says, if people don’t know about your works, obscurity is going to doom you.  You want your works to be spread.  So one thing you can do is try to release your works into the commons as much as possible.  There’s both a moral and a practical reason for this.  The moral reason is because copyright is totally unjustified and illegitimate.  So that’s the moral reason.  The practical reason is that you want people to spread your ideas and your work, and you cand o this in today’s world by means of using the creative commons licenses. 00:07:25 Now, the one I recommend that people use is the creative commons attribution only.  That’s CC-BY.  I would prefer CC0, which is basically making it almost public domain.  I’m just concerned that the way the law works, that that is not an effective, legally enforceable license, and that means that people that read your works or want to use your works can’t rely on the license because they don’t trust it, and it’s like it’s copyrighted still.  So I think the most safe license would by the CC-BY, which is what I try to use as much as I can. 00:07:59 Now, practically, how does that help or hurt you?  It helps you because it helps get the – it makes your work easy to copy and spread.  And does it really hurt you?  I don’t think it does.  There is lots of ways you could profit from your writing, and we have to recognize most people don’t write or create for profit.  They do it for other reasons, or if they profit, they profit without the benefit of copyright law.  So in the cases where you would profit monetarily, having a CC-BY license wouldn’t really hurt you at all.  You’d get your reputation out there.  You’d get known more, and you – so one blog post I have is an example. 00:08:49 If you think about J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter novels, who is now the first or second-most rich woman in England – she’s a billionaire because of the movies and the merchandising and the novels from the Harry Potter series.  Take her, for example.  If she had released Harry Potter on Amazon Create Space, the first novel, and it had become popular, she would have made some money because the books are $1 or $2 or $3 each.  In a copyright-free world, let’s say, maybe she would have been pirated right away, but she still would have sold many copies.  She would have made a good sum of money, but she would have established her name as the author of a very popular series. 00:09:30 She could have, for example, said I’ve got book number two and three written already, and I will release it as soon as 100,000 or a million of my fans pledge $10 each to buy the book.  I guarantee she could have done that.  That’s $10-$20 million right there just for the next book or two.  So she easily is already at a 10-or-20 millionaire after one or two or three books, and she wrote seven, by the way.  So we can already see she’s approaching $100 million of value in a copyright-free world. 00:10:07 In a copyright-free world, anyone could have made a movie on the Harry Potter series.  But if there’s one or two or three studios trying to make the first Harry Potter movie, someone would have an incentive to approach her and get her cooperation, advisor, executive producer status, and endorsement to make the movie be the most popular one.

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 158. This is the final  of 6 lectures of my 2011 Mises Academy course “The Social Theory of Hoppe.” The slides for this lecture are appended below; links for“suggested readings” for the course are included in the podcast post for the first lecture, episode 153. Transcript below. LECTURE 6: POLITICAL ISSUES AND APPLICATIONS; HOPPE Q&A Video Slides TRANSCRIPT The Social Theory of Hoppe, Lecture 6: Political Issues and Applications; Hoppe Q&A Stephan Kinsella Mises Academy, Aug. 15, 2011   00:00:01 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Final class.  We have a lot to cover.  Before I start, let me say don’t be intimidated by the length of the slides if you see them later.  There’s a lot of slides.  I put a lot of text in there for your reading pleasure later.  We’ll skim over some of that.  It’s there for – just for a full sort of, almost like a paper for you to study later and for resources.  I’m going to try to cover as much of it as I can, and I suspect we’re going to go the full 90 minutes on the lecture.  And I’ll be happy to stay as long as we need after that for Q&A, so that’s my plan. 00:00:39 So let’s get going.  Slide two.  So we talked about economic issues and applications last week.  We have a few more to finish tonight, and I will post the final quiz later this week.  I think only maybe 15-20% of the class took the midterm, which is fine.  You’re not – don’t feel under an obligation to take it.  But some of you might find it fun and a good refresher, and you’re not really graded on a per-class basis.  It’s just personal grading.  So today, we’re going to cover the – we’re going to finish the economic applications and issues from last time. 00:01:19 We’re going to go over the Hoppe Q&A.  He did provide me with answers to a bunch of questions that you guys submitted.  And then we’re going to talk about a variety of political issues and applications.  In addition to the ones we’ve already discussed, of course, argumentation ethics, which is a political-type issue, but some other applications tonight.  I didn’t give any suggested readings for this week.  There’s just so many little issues.  All the links are in these slides, and we’re going to go over them tonight. 00:01:48 So I thought that was sufficient rather than giving you – Karl is asking about the midterm.  I don’t – I think it’s probably close already, but Danny can let you know that.  If it’s not, I wouldn’t mind having it held open a little bit longer if people who haven’t taken it yet want to take it.  Okay, fine.  Stephen says it’s still open, so just – it’s only 16 or 18 questions, all multiple choice.  Some are funny.  Some are harder.  Some are easy, so feel free to take it as a refresher. 00:02:21 00:02:28 Karl says sounds went out.  Can anyone else hear me?  Okay, Karl, it’s your issue.  Maybe Danny can help you.  Okay, now – so I’m going to get to one of the remaining issues that we had here.  I’m only – I’m going to go over these, and a lot of them cover what I think are the highlights so that we can cover a lot.  Okay.  So a brief review.  There is, in the Austrian economics literature, an issue called the “Economic Calculation Debate,” 1920 or so. 00:03:10 Mises wrote a famous article where he argued that one problem with a centrally planned socialist economy, that is, an economy where the government, the state owns the means of production, is that there won’t be market prices for these things.  And therefore, you won’t know how to compare alternative projects.  When entrepreneurs think about the future, they compare possible uses of resources they have available.  And they compare them in terms of what kind of profit they can make in the future, that is, monetary profit. 00:03:42 So the only way to do that is to try to imagine, if I do project A, I might make a million dollars.  If I do project B, I might make $2 million, etc., and you compare the projects that way.  And then you choose the one with the highest profit, other things being equal, risk, etc., and you do that.  So that’s the standard Austrian idea of entrepreneurship, and Mises pointed out, well, without private property ownership of the means of production on a free market, you won’t have prices.  And then so the central planners won’t know how to compare these things.  They won’t know how to compare a bridge versus a tunnel.  You won’t know which one uses more resources.  You won’t know which one is more efficient. 00:04:24 So the action they – the decision they make will not be economic even if you just – even if you forget about all the other problems with it, which is self-interest and collusion and corruption etc.  So there’s a – for a long time – and then Hayek came along, and Hayek built on Mises’ theory with his knowledge ideas about how – Hayek said that, well – at first he was working within this idea of Mises, the criticism of socialism.  And he said, well, another aspect of this is that actors on the market know things, but they don’t know how to express them.  Like you know how to tie your shoe, but you might not be able to say that.  You know other things. 00:05:07 He called this tacit knowledge, but his point was even though knowledge in the economy is dispersed and widespread and held by different people and a lot of it’s tacit, it can be expressed in action when people make decisions on the market.  They affect prices, and so this knowledge that people have tacitly and in a dispersed form is spread throughout the economy by sort of a signaling mechanism of the price system.  And for a long time, Austrians said that Hayek had sort of illustrated Mises – or sorry, expanded on Mises or built on that or was sort of the flipside of the coin. 00:05:49 In 19, I want to say, 90-something Joe Salerno, in a postscript to the republication of Mises’ 1920 or ‘21 argument, points out that Hayek’s argument was really different than Mises’.  That’s called the de-homogenization debate.  He de-homogenized Hayek and Mises, and that started a series of articles in the review of Austrian economics, which are fascinating to read if anyone is interested in this.  Look in the later issues in the 1990s, articles by Leland Jager and Hoppe and Joe Salerno and Jeff Herbener and others about this calculation debate.  It’s a fascinating debate. 00:06:36 So I can’t go into it in detail, but Hoppe takes the side of the Salerno de-homogenizers here, and let’s go to slide five.  Just a few quotes here.  You’ll see the basically Misesian/Hoppian take on this is that Rothbard himself – this is before he died, 1995 – he concluded, the entire Hayekian emphasis on knowledge is misplaced and misconceived.  And Guido Hülsmann, a Hoppe student, also discusses how the knowledge problem is irrelevant.  And Salerno talks about how the price system cannot be what the Hayekians claim it is, and it I can’t go into that here.  But finally, let me just mention Hoppe comments that Hayek’s contribution to the socialism debate is false, confusing, and irrelevant. 00:07:28 So just be aware of that.  If you’re interested in going into that in more detail, I suggest some of these papers I have linked here.  But just be aware that there is a difference at least on the Misesian side.  They believe that the way the Hayekians and the Misesians view knowledge and calculation is fundamentally different.  Okay.  But you’ll hear Hayekians like, I don’t know, Steve Horowitz and Pete Boettke and these guys – Pete Boettke; I just typed his name there – who will say that the Hayekian knowledge stuff is a flipside of the coin.  Or it’s like another way of explaining the insight Mises had, or it’s complementary to it. 00:08:11 But some of the Hoppians and Misesians still believe that.  They believe that it was a misleading emphasis.  I tend to think they’re correct, although I do think there’s something about Hayek’s emphasis on knowledge that you could integrate into the way of looking at the role of knowledge in human action that I’ve been talking about lately with respect to intellectual property.  But that is neither here nor there, and I’ll leave it for now.  If anyone has any questions about this, we can maybe take it up at the end, but let’s move on now to what would have been, I think, the final topic I was going to talk about last time. 00:08:48 Some of you may have seen one of Hoppe’s graduate – advanced graduate seminar talks on Mises University from a few weeks ago where his topic was about Malthusianism.  He also gave a similar talk about this at the Property and Freedom Society earlier.  I think it was this year or last year.  I’ve got the link up here.  And he’s got a draft paper as well, which I think is not online.  I have a copy, but it’s not up yet. 00:09:17 And as Hoppe notes, Mises actually talks about, Thomas Malthus’ theories.  Now, some of you may have heard of Malthusianism, and you might have thought of it as an outmoded or crankish doctrine.  But in fact, Mises was extremely praiseworthy of it and said it was one of the most amazing achievements of human thought, etc.  The basic idea of Malthusianism, Thomas Malthus was a thinker, oh God, I don’t know, in the 1600s or something.  Maybe someone else knows when he had his ideas.  Modern-day Malthusians are people that are afraid of population increase.  They think that if we have too many people, it’s bad. 00:10:02 That grew out of Malthus’ ideas where he basically formulated some economic laws.  So he talked about, in capital accumulation in an economy, you have different factors that combine to produce your goods.  And so he said, well, you have to have an optimal combination like two parts of this and three parts of that to produce the optimal outcome.  So he said, well, if we if we focus on two of those factors, labor, human effort, or which depends upon the number of humans,

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 157. This is the fifth of 6 lectures of my 2011 Mises Academy course “The Social Theory of Hoppe.” I’ll release the final lecture here in the podcast feed shortly. The slides for this lecture are appended below; links for“suggested readings” for the course are included in the podcast post for the first lecture, episode 153. Transcript below. LECTURE 5: ECONOMIC ISSUES AND APPLICATIONS Video [fvplayer id="11"] Slides TRANSCRIPT The Social Theory of Hoppe, Lecture 5: Economic Issues and Applications Stephan Kinsella Mises Academy, Aug. 8, 2011 00:00:00 STEPHAN KINSELLA: … question about – someone sent me in the class course page.  Well, I mean if you’re just asking me my opinion, I mean I don’t think Hoppe has written very much on abortion.  I actually did include an abortion question in the questions I submitted to him that hopefully he’ll give us some feedback on it for discussion next week.  I believe he is generally pro-choice because I remember he asked me one time about, oh, 12 or 15 years ago to try to come up with an argument to justify it.  So I don’t know.  I’m not assuming there is a flaw in Rothbard’s argument about abandoning the fetus. 00:00:52 My personal view is that certain actions give rise to positive obligations.  So if you harm someone or put them in a position of peril, then – push someone in a lake who can’t swim, you have an obligation to rescue them.  And I think there’s a similar argument that, because of the nature, the dependent nature of the child, that you have positive obligations to your children because you brought them into the world.  So that’s the basic argument.  I mean another could be that the fetus is a human who has a right to life, and there is no reason the parent needs to kill it.  It’s not really a threat.  Now, there are some people written – there’s a book called Solomon’s Knife by Victor Koman, a libertarian science fiction novel, which posits this trans-option procedure. 00:01:47 And the idea is that medical technology permits any woman who’s pregnant to take the baby out and put it into another host mother.  So there’s really no reason anymore to have abortions.  If you want the baby out, you give it to another woman.  That would change the complexity of the debate.  Okay, so let’s get going.  So I have a lot of slides here.  I don’t think we’re going to cover them all.  The ones that we don’t cover we’ll talk about next time.  A lot of these topics blend into politics and economics. 00:02:20 So some of these are somewhat political as well, and so it would make sense to cover these in the next week as well.  So where we left off, we talked about epistemology, and last week, economic methodology and dualism.  Okay, so for the methodology part.  Today, I want to continue the end of that lecture and talk about a few more things, and then we’ll get to some economic issues and applications.  And you see the suggested readings I have here.  For next week’s classes, a lot of smaller topics.  A lot of blog posts cover these.  I don’t know if I will assign the reading ahead of time, but I will have links in the slides for all the things we talk about. 00:03:04 00:03:08 Okay, so let’s go to slide five.  Excuse me a second.  Let me close my door.  Excuse me.  Okay, I mentioned last time in the epistemology discussion, there’s a lot of hostility by Rand and objectivists to Kant.  And as I mentioned, that is directed towards an idealistic, subjectivist-type interpretation or construction of what Kant wrote.  And to the extent they’re characterizing him correctly, I think a lot of their criticisms make sense. 00:03:49 But there – as I mentioned, there’s a realist tradition of Kant that Hoppe and Mises share, and so actually, there’s a lot more similarity between Hoppe and Mises-style Kantianism and Rand’s own view of epistemology.  So for example, Ayn Rand talked about an axiom, if you remember, that is sort of analogous to what Kantians would call a priori statements.  And she says it’s a statement.  It’s like – it’s a fundamental statement and base of knowledge. 00:04:19 And if you look at the end of this quote in the bold, she says: It’s a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it.  So this is very similar to some of the basic a priori propositions, which you commit a contradiction if you deny them, including Hoppe’s argumentation ethics.  She talks about existing and how, if you grasp that, that implies to corollary axioms or propositions, that something has to exist that you’re perceiving and that you exist as a conscious perceiver. 00:04:58 So basically, just right recognizing that there is something gives you the distinction between an observer, a conscious person who exists, and reality.  So that’s another way of proving certain things about the world.  And again, she notes here that it’s a contradiction in terms to be a consciousness but you’re conscious of nothing outside of yourself.  So you can see how she has a similar argument structure to some of the basic operative propositions of Mises and Hoppe, anyway, the way they interpret Kant. 00:05:33 I prepared this chart some time ago trying to sort this out, trying to show the parallels between the thought of Rand on the one hand and the sort of Misesian or even Rothbardian or maybe a more normal type of terminology.  So what Ayn Rand called her philosophy of objectivism, in that philosophy, she does recognize sometimes—she’s not always consistent—that the value of things is relational.  It’s a relation between a person who values something.  Now, she might go astray on the intellectual property stuff, and they talk about creating values. 00:06:13 But, for the most part, when she talks about objectivism in terms of value, she’s talking a relation.  And this is similar to what Mises would refer to as subjectivism, that basically value is from the subject’s point of view.  Now, when Rand talks about subjectivism, she means what we would call relativism.  Okay, so when she criticizes Kant for being subjective, but she’s saying he’s a relativist or an idealist.  In other words, we can’t know anything true or certain about the real nature of the world. 00:06:49 Now, Rand has a formulation that value is something you act to gain or keep, and/or keep, and this is very similar to the Misesian notion of demonstrated preference, that you demonstrate that you value something when you act to achieve it.  Now, what Rand calls action in general, that is, just anything humans do, that is what you can think of in Misesian terms as rational action.  In other words, they think of all action as rational in that sense.  Now, what Rand would call rational action is what Misesians would call efficient or moral action, that is, action that achieves what your goal is.  So if you think about how – I have a blog post, by the way.  I think there’s a hyperlink in the title. 00:07:39 00:07:45 I think if you click on that Axioms there on the previous page, there’s a blog post I did, which explores this in more detail.  Now, as I mentioned before, Rand – her ethics is consequentialist or hypothetical because she’s like, if you choose to live as a man, or you could say, it’s what Roderick Long and others call an assertoric.  Let me type it in here, assertoric.  An assertoric hypothetical, that is, since you choose to live, then the following results.  So her ethics is consequential as is Mises’ utilitarianism.  If you want peace and prosperity and harmony and cooperation productivity, then you favor the free market, etc. (( See Geoffrey Allan Plauche, "Aristotelian liberalism: an inquiry into the foundations of a free and flourishing society" (unpublished PhD diss., Louisiana State University,  2007), p.125; Douglas B. Rasmussen & Douglas J. Den Uyl, “Why Individual Rights? Rights as Metanormative Principles,” in Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), p.125 ("the fundamental nature of an ethical imperative for a natural end ethics of the sort that we are presenting is best explained by reference to the following classifications: ‘‘Categorical imperative—regardless of what ends you seek, you must take the following steps. Problematic hypothetical imperative—if you seek this end, then you must take the following steps. Assertoric hypothetical imperative—since you seek this end, then you must take the following steps’’ (emphasis added)." (quoting Roderick Long, Reason and Value: Aristotle Versus Rand (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: The Objectivist Center, 2000), 61 n. 65.). )) 00:08:29 Now, as far as terminology Rand and even Rothbard’s terminology is more Aristotelian, whereas Kant’s is – Mises and Hoppe are more Kantian.  And finally, when Rand talks about something being intrinsic, Mises would call that objective, but not too important here but interesting nonetheless.  Oh, here’s the post here.  The top link there has more detail about this for anyone who is interested.  There’s a couple of articles that talk about this too, about the compatibility between Austrian economics and objectivism despite the protests to the contrary of the objectivists. 00:09:05 Now, there’s something we – I think I talked about logical positivism in last class.  I want to bring up one other related thing here.  Some of you may have heard of legal positivism, and for years, I struggled in my mind.  I’d think, why are they using the same word?  Is there a link between them?  Is there a relation?  And it’s hard to find anything good on this.  I’ve blogged about it a little bit.  Here’s how I think about it.  So legal positivism is a school of thought in legal theory, which says that – well, it has a couple of parts.  First,

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 156. This is the fourth of 6 lectures of my 2011 Mises Academy course “The Social Theory of Hoppe.” I’ll release the remaining lectures here in the podcast feed in upcoming days. The slides for this lecture are appended below; links for“suggested readings” for the course are included in the podcast post for the first lecture, episode 153. Transcript below. Lecture 4: EPISTEMOLOGY, METHODOLOGY AND DUALISM; KNOWLEDGE, CERTAINTY, LOGICAL POSITIVISM Video Slides TRANSCRIPT The Social Theory of Hoppe, Lecture 4: Epistemology, Methodology, and Dualism; Knowledge, Certainty, Logical Positivism Stephan Kinsella Mises Academy, Aug. 1, 2011 00:00:01 STEPHAN KINSELLA: … and methodology and epistemological dualism, the Austrian approach.  So if you recall, last time we talked about argumentation ethics and libertarian rights, and as I said, the midterm will be posted shortly.  And some of you may be interested in the IP talk I gave at Mises University on Wednesday, which I have a link to here on the slide two.   And Hoppe also gave two – he has several lectures, but two of them are particularly relevant for tonight actually.  The science of human action and praxeology as a method of economics are both great.  They cover a lot of what we’re going to talk about tonight, actually. 00:00:42 00:00:47 So we’re going to talk epistemology and methodology and dualism, which are the Misesian approach, and related aspects of logical positivism and knowledge and certainty.  And I’m just going to outline here the readings I had suggested that you read with certain pages of A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, Hoppe’s pamphlet, “Economic Science and the Austrian Method.”  I have my ragged old copy here from years in the past.  I don’t know what the current version looks like, notes, so this is my favorite copy, and another paper from EEPP and another journal article on rationalism. 00:01:25 And then there are some supplemental readings if you want to go further.  But we’re going to try to cover as much as we can here.  So let’s start off talking about what we’re talking – the subject of our lecture is the economic science and the methodology appropriate economic science or the discipline of economics.  So what do we mean by the word science?  I mean when I was in college and growing up, the word science to me meant what most people think of it now as technology, gadgets, gizmos, physics, theories, chemistry, things like this, things that are testable. 00:02:01 This is actually sort of a fairly new twist on the word science as caused by the rise of positivism and empiricism and what we might call scientism.  It’s a much older term of course.  You see the little diagram on the right of some spooky government agency, the Information Awareness Office, but they have the all-knowing eye on top of the pyramid looking at the earth and the motto, Scientia est Potentia, which means knowledge is power.  So you see the word science there, meaning just general knowledge.  In the Lionel Robbins, famous sort of proto-Austrian economist, at one point, wrote a treatise in 1932, very influential treatise until the ‘50s probably called “The Nature and Significance of Economic Science.” 00:02:57 So you can see the word science is being used for even economics, although nowadays, most people would restrict it to the technical or natural sciences.  Back in the US Constitution in 1789, in the clause authorizing patent and copyright, look at how the words are arranged here.  This is the power granted to Congress to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their writings and discoveries. 00:03:30 So I’ve got in red here the words that pair together: science, authors, and writings.  Now, most people would think science has to do with inventions and inventors and discoveries.  But no, that’s the useful arts like artisan crafts, machines, things like this.  Science meant just the general field of human knowledge, and in particular here, it was referring to artistic creatings of authors like novels or paintings, things like this.  So the word science is a general broad term. 00:04:07 Now, we’re going to talk today about epistemology and the nature of economic science.  Epistemology – I don’t want to be too basic here, but for those who don’t know, epistemology is a term that used to confuse me when I started reading it in high school and college.  It mystified me.  But basically, it’s just the study of knowledge.  It’s a branch of philosophy, and it’s what Hoppe actually specialized in, which is one reason we’re bringing it up.  Now, as Hoppe lays it out, the modern concept of science that I just explained as a narrow idea of science as being technical and causal knowledge, the natural sciences like physics and chemistry, is a fairly modern occurrence. 00:04:56 It started in maybe the 1950s with the rise Popper’s thought and empiricism.  Okay, so as Hoppe lays it out, you can think of the big battles or the big divisions in philosophy and epistemology as the rationalist versus the skeptics.  Okay, the rationalists were Plato, Kant, and now Mises you can think of some of the big ones there.  The skeptics or the empiricists were Hume and now Popper.  You can think of him as a good representative. 00:05:32 Now, Hayek and Robbins are interesting, Friedrich Hayek and Lionel Robbins.  Well, Hayek was a student of Mises and was very much influenced by him early on.  And Lionel Robbins, also in the 1932 treatise I mentioned, was extremely influenced by Mises’ epistemology.  But they were colleagues of Karl Popper, the sort of arch-positivist, at London School of Economics, LSE.  And so over time, they actually came to adopt some of Popper’s methodology and epistemology and to sort of veer away from the museum type of framework. 00:06:13 We’ll go into some detail in a few minutes.  But the basic idea here – by the way, I’ve got like 55 slides.  There’s a lot of material here.  I don’t think we’ll get to all of it.  I might lecture most of the class and try to cover as much as we can, and if I don’t finish next class in the first, say, 30 minutes, we’ll try to finish up and then get to the economic stuff next time. 00:06:33 00:06:36 Okay, good.  I will be very basic then, Jock.  That’s fine.  By the way, I am collecting questions to send to Hoppe.  I talked to him last week about this.  He is on board.  So I have some questions to send to him, and if anyone has any more questions for Hoppe that we don’t address, say, between – by the end of next class, go ahead and send them to me.  And I’ll submit them to Hans for any answers he wants to give, and then we’ll go over them on the sixth and last class. 00:07:04 Anyway, so the basic idea of the skeptics, or the empiricists, was they believe that all propositions or statements of knowledge can be divided into two types.  They’re either analytical, or they’re empirical.  So this is their basic view.  Analytic means a statement like all bachelors are married.  It’s basically a statement that’s almost true by definition.  So they think that analytic statements say nothing really real about the world.  They don’t give you any new information.  They’re just manipulation of formal rules. 00:07:44 Or the statement can be empirical.  But if it’s empirical, or another word for that is synthetic—you’ll sometimes hear analytic and synthetic used—empirical statements say something about the way the world is.  But it only says things about the way the world happens to be, and the only way we can find out these things is to use the scientific method.  That’s to test or to try to falsify these statements.  So they view any statement that is not something that’s testable as unscientific.  Okay, so this is the basic view of the empiricists, influenced heavily by Hume and lately by Popper. 00:08:24 Now, there are several words you’ll see used a lot.  It took me a while to sort of grapple with all these, and you don’t really need to know a lot of the nuances and distinctions because they’re not always used carefully by critics of these views or by the adherence of these views themselves.  But most of them are related to each other and are sometimes used as synonyms for each other.  And I will use some of them as synonyms in this lecture tonight. 00:08:49 So let’s start off with empiricism.  So empiricism – the idea is the only testable or falsifiable statements are meaningful or scientific.  You say testable or falsifiable because the older view was that you had to be able to formulate a statement so you could test it.  So like you could say I propose that there is a relationship between mass and gravitational attraction of a certain equation.  And therefore, let’s go test it with an experiment and see if the results confirm my theory. 00:09:26 Now, Popper put a different twist on this, and he said, well, you’re not really confirming it.  You’re trying to falsify it, so basically, every bit of scientific knowledge, according to the empiricists is always contingent, never, ever finally certain, and always subject to falsifications.  So all you can say is that, so far, we haven’t falsified this theory.  Now, one thing to note: Karl Popper called his own theory critical rationalism.  Hoppe’s view, and I agree with him, is that this is a misnomer.  It’s a mislabel.  He wasn’t a rationalist in the sense of Kant. 00:10:04 He was a logical positivist and an empiricist.  It’s sort of like the word liberal, how the word liberal has been hijacked in the United States by the left, by the democrats, in the last 100 or so years so that the word liberal now means the opposite of what it used to mean and what it still means in Europe, which means to refer to sort of progressive, pro-property rights,

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 155. This is the third of 6 lectures of my 2011 Mises Academy course "The Social Theory of Hoppe." I’ll release the remaining lectures here in the podcast feed in upcoming days. The slides for this lecture are appended below; links for "suggested readings" for the course are included in the podcast post for the first lecture, episode 153. Transcript below. LECTURE 3: LIBERTARIAN RIGHTS AND ARGUMENTATION ETHICS Video [fvplayer id="12"] Slides TRANSCRIPT The Social Theory of Hoppe, Lecture 3: Libertarian Rights and Argumentation Ethics Stephan Kinsella Mises Academy, July 25, 2011 00:00:01 STEPHAN KINSELLA: … later.  So tonight we’ll talk about argumentation ethics.  I have a lot of slides, but some of them will go very fast because they’re just background in case you want to look at them later or if we need some quotes.  But let’s go ahead and dive right into tonight’s lecture.  By the way, before we start, I’m curious.  Who here – well, let me get to the readings page first.  I don’t know if I have that up there.  Who here read more than the required or suggested reading and onto the more optional reading?  I’m just curious how many students have actually read into the argumentation ethics literature beyond the basic stuff I recommended.  Anyone? 00:00:49 00:00:54 Okay, Jacob has.  Jacob, I’m curious.  What did you read beyond the basic stuff?  Method essay.  For argumentation ethics?  Okay.  In any case – oh, just by the way, so we’ll have a short quiz for the first – covering the first three weeks, which will start – I’ll have it posted in a few days.  I’m leaving tomorrow morning, by the way, for the Mises University, so I’ll be traveling tomorrow, but I’ll try to get it up in a couple days.  I wanted to finish this class first before I finish the test so I could make sure I covered only what we talked about in class.  Oh interesting, Jacob.  Good, so you’ve read a lot.  Well, maybe you can help me with some of the difficult questions in here. 00:01:45 So the multiple-choice test will be up in a few days.  It’s optional.  Don’t feel compelled to take it if you don’t want to.  It’s not meant to make anyone feel like they’re going to fail or anything.  It’s just a refresher on the course.  It’s going to be fun, test your knowledge, and to get the certificate if you’d like.  And again, it’s based upon what I say in the lectures, the slides, and also the reading material I mark as suggested but not on the optional reading material. 00:02:11 00:02:15 Okay, so last class we talked about various property issues, how the state arises and the nature of the state, the types of socialism.  We started to talk about de-socialization.  I don’t know if we’ll have time to get to that tonight.  I do have some slides on it at the very end, but I doubt we’ll be able to get to it very much.  Anyway, the article is pretty self-explanatory in any case.  Maybe we can cover it in lecture number six on political topics or number five on economic topics. 00:02:46 By the way, let me – well, we’ll talk at the end a bit about – next class will be on epistemology and methodology.  Okay, so today we’re going to talk about libertarian rights and argumentation ethics.  By the way, I have this little mini ad for my last course because I just want to remind people, I did cover some of this in that course in a more summary fashion.  And some of that’s included in these slides.  I modified it for tonight, and there’s extra stuff here too, but for anyone who took the previous course, some of this I talked about before.  But I’m actually leaving out here a lot of the stuff I talked about in the Libertarian Legal Theory course because it’s not directly pertinent to Hoppe’s approach, but some of this will look familiar to some of you. 00:03:29 So tonight we’re going to talk basically about two main questions.  We’re we talk about what libertarianism is, at least in different conceptions.  And then we’re going to talk about the justification Hoppe provides for it.  And if we have time, we can talk about some related approaches to argumentation ethics.  The readings for tonight – the suggested readings were primarily my kind of concise overview and Hoppe’s article “From the Economics of Laissez Faire to the Ethics of Libertarianism.”  And also his “Justice of Economic Efficiency” and this his “Appendix: Four Critical Replies.”  So that was – there’s a lot more out there, but that’s a good sort of overview of what to read to get the flavor of this whole debate. 00:04:18 Now, this will be a little bit elementary for everybody, so I’m going to go over this quickly because I think we probably already know this, but just to kind of get us in the right framework and to refresh us on where we’re going.  So let’s think about what is libertarianism about.  So it’s a type of political theory compared to other types would be Marxism, forms of leftism and socialism, conservativism, and even modern liberalism or welfare statism or social democracy. It’s concerned with justice in a certain way, and if you think about the traditional classic formulation of justice by – in The Institutes of Justinian, the Roman emperor who helped codify a lot of Roman law, he had said “Justice is a constant and perpetual wish to render everyone his due. 00:05:08 And the maxims of law are these: to live honestly, to hurt no one, to give everyone his due.  Now, these are nice formulations.  They’re a little bit circular.  They sort of – they circle back on each other because – it’s like defining ought is what you should do, and should – what you should do is what you ought to do.  Some of these normative terms are kind of basic, and they feed back on each other. 00:05:31 So we talk about political theory and justice, and we say, well, justice means giving someone his due.  You say, well, what are they do?  Well, the most coherent way to think about it is that what you’re due depends on what your property rights are.  And you’ll see the significance of this in a second when we talk about aggression. 00:05:50 Now, what’s different about libertarians – oh, thanks Rick.  You read Hülsmann’s too.  Thanks.  By the way, the Hülsmann article and also the Larry Seacrest article as well as one of Hoppe’s and one of mine all arose from a seminar we did at Mises on Reinach, Adolf Reinach, who was an amazing and fascinating German thinker.  He was killed I think in World War I.  He died very young, but he was a brilliant guy, produced some great stuff before then that was on the a priori of the civil law and on the criminal law as well. 00:06:32 In any case, a lot of good stuff resulted from that seminar.  It’s on my website if anyone is interested.  And that’s where Guido’s piece came from.  They were all published in the QJAE maybe ten years ago.  In any case, we don’t own the word justice, we libertarians.  But we do have a particular conception of what it means.  And according to that conception – so basically, I think of it like this.  Our conception of justice tells us what the rights we have are, and that tells us what laws there should be. 00:07:06 So it tells you what we’re due, what others owe you, which are obligations and duties, and that corresponds to your rights.  So our idea is that the actual law enforced in a given society, whether there’s a state or not, should conform to what we conceive of as natural law.  So you can think of natural law as an ideal template of laws that should exist, so we’re always aspiring or trying to make laws that do exist conform to that to be just.  So you can think that a conception of justice informs your conception of what rights there are, and that informs your idea of what laws there should be.  So this is just sort of general orientation of framework here. 00:07:47 Slide number seven.  Now, libertarianism is sort of described in a lot of pithy sayings, examples, analogies, metaphors, aphorisms, and kind of summary or condensation statements.  So, for example, Leonard Read, the founder of FEE, in a famous libertarian book in ’54 said people should be free to do anything that’s peaceful.  That’s a pretty good summary of some of the basic normative aspects of libertarianism, but it doesn’t tell you too much. 00:08:21 Dave Boaz said: Libertarianism is the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others.”  That’s a pretty good – gives you the flavor of it too, but what does it mean to respect the equal rights of others?  I mean if everyone had a right to welfare, then you’re respecting their equal rights, and I mean it only gets you so far.  Ayn Rand put it a little bit colorfully in Galt’s speech: “So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me?  No man may start the use of physical force against the others.”  And this is a sort of a good capsule way of stating the – what we call the non-aggression principle. 00:09:05 Rick asks about Bastiat, whether I consider him a libertarian in the strict sense.  I mean I’ve read a lot of Bastiat.  I’ve read him early on.  He was influential to me.  I haven’t revisited him lately on a lot of his issues.  I don’t believe he was an anarchist, but I do believe that – well, for his time I’d say he was a strong libertarian, very radical, very clear thinking.  And the things I’ve heard him write on seem to be pretty much all compatible with libertarianism.  I don’t know if I heard him write on a lot of other libertarian or political views like drug regulations and social and moral regulations, but he seemed to be leaning strongly in the libertarian direction.  He seems to at least be a classical liberal. 00:09:45 So let’s go on, slide number eight.  So we’ve come to a better formulation, the non-aggression principle.

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 154. This is the second of 6 lectures of my 2011 Mises Academy course “The Social Theory of Hoppe.” I’ll release the remaining lectures here in the podcast feed in upcoming days. The slides for this lecture are appended below; links for“suggested readings” for the course are included in the podcast post for the first lecture, episode 153. Transcript below. LECTURE 2: TYPES OF SOCIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF THE STATE Video Slides TRANSCRIPT The Social Theory of Hoppe, Lecture 2: Types of Socialism and the Origin of the State Stephan Kinsella Mises Academy, July 18, 2011 00:00:00 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Can you guys hear me okay?  Video and slide showing?  Hello?  Test, test.  Okay, hey, good evening, everyone.  It’s 6 p.m. central time US, later for some of you I know.  So let’s get started.  If there’s any initial questions about last week’s lecture, which I’ll go over some of in a little bit, I’ll be happy to take them now.  But tonight, what I would like to concentrate on, I’ll catch up on some of the things I didn’t cover last time and talk about Hoppe’s views on types of socialism and the origin of the state.  And I don’t know if I’ll have time to get to de-socialization.  So, by the way, I posted last week a couple of funny things to the forums about “Drop It Like It’s Hoppe,” a sort of rap thing by a friend of mine.  And also, a Facts About Hoppe, which I thought were amusing, so hope people enjoyed that. 00:01:02 So let’s go on here.  So quick review, last class we talked about basically Hoppe’s place in the Austrian and liberal sort of literature and scheme, his influences, his style, his background, his basic orientation.  And we talked about basic fundamental property-based and human-action-based, praxeology-based foundational concepts and principles, which run through most of his work, various implications of the human action axiom like conflict and scarcity, choice and cost, and profit and loss, and ends and means and causality, and the sort of methodological dualistic approach of Mises, which basically is looking at the causal world with the scientific method approach and more empirical approach, that is paucity, physical laws, and then trying to test those laws to see if you can falsify your hypothesis, which is the sort of standard way most people think of science. 00:02:14 But the Austrian view is that’s one type of science.  Another type of science is the social sciences, which are focused on – can anyone hear me, or is it just Rick that’s having a problem?  Okay, so I’ll keep going.  Methodological dualism, which looks at the causal world in one sense and which, in the case of humans, would be human behavior, just analyzing what motions human bodies go through, or trying to understand the human ends and means and purposes – excuse me – which is the teleological realm.  And from that realm, we know certain things a priori.  We know that humans have ends or purposes.  They employ means.  There’s opportunity cost.  They have choice.  There’s a presupposition of causality. 00:03:09 If you didn’t presuppose causality, you couldn’t act because action employs means, which are scarce means in the world, which are causally efficacious at achieving your ends, which are believed to be.  So an operative presupposition of action would be causality as well.  So these are the a priori things that come from this side of dualism.  Then we talked about different property-related concepts like contract, aggression, capitalism, socialism, even the state, which are all defined in terms of this fundamental concept of property. 00:03:43 00:03:46 I’m going to go to slide three.  So today we’re going to continue the discussion of property, talk about how the state arises and what its definition is, and then talk about different types of socialism or statism.  And if we have time, we’ll get to de-socialization, which I doubt we will actually, but that’s okay.  We can cover that next time.  The readings would be chapters three, four, and five and, to some degree, six of TSC, Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, also Hoppe’s article “Banking, Nation States, and International Politics,” which is chapter three of his EEPP book, and finally, “De-socialization in a United Germany,” which we may not get to today. 00:04:33 Okay, so let me just make one note.  I don’t know if I made this clear enough last time about the concept of property.  Many of you may have noticed that this word is used a little bit carelessly by a lot of people, libertarians and others.  It’s used sometimes to refer to the scarce resource itself.  Like you’ll say my car is my property.  So they use the word property to refer to the thing that is owned.  But technically it’s more of a relationship or a denotation of the ownership right that’s a legally respected right. 00:05:14 Now, legally doesn’t mean state law.  It could mean private law, but basically some kind of institutionalized, legally recognized relationship, that is, a right to control a given resource.  So I think to be careful, we need to think most of the time of property as the ownership right in a resource, not the resource that is owned.  And this usage sort of goes back to the traditional usage of the word property, which has been used for hundreds of years in liberal thought, in classical liberal thought. 00:05:52 Richard Overton in 1646 put it this way, talking about self-ownership: “To every individual in nature, is given an individual property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped; for everyone as he is himself, so he hath a self propriety, else he not be himself.”  So you see the propriety is sort of like a proprietorship or ownership over yourself.  It’s not yourself.  It’s the ownership over yourself. 00:06:20 And John Locke in 1690 in his Second Treatise of Government has this classic formulation.  Though the Earth, and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person, and nobody has any right to it but himself.  So we need to think of property as the relationship between an actor or an agent, that is, basically a human being, and some scarce resource, including his own body, which is also a scarce resource.  So property answers the question who has the right to control this resource.  It’s not who has the actual control of the resource.  Actual control can be thought of as mere possession or – so think of Crusoe on a desert island. 00:07:07 He would actually have control of resources that he employs as means in his actions, but he really wouldn’t have ownership because he wouldn’t have any legal right, because a legal right is something that other people can respect.  So the legal right is more of a social concept, which is compatible, by the with way, with Ayn Rand’s view of rights as social sort of devices. 00:07:32 Now, there’s a really good definition by A.N. Yiannopoulus.  He is one of the world’s leading civil law scholars.  He’s in Louisiana.  The civil law is one of the two great legal systems in the world, the common law, which is in England and many of the former commonwealth or former commonwealth countries like most of the US, most of Canada, etc.  And then the other great legal system is that in the continent, so it’s sometimes called the continental system in Europe and also in Louisiana in America for historical reasons and in Quebec in Canada and Scotland to a degree actually, in England.  That’s called the civil law or code-based systems. 00:08:20 00:08:24 And Yiannopoulos – now, he’s not a libertarian, but it’s striking how compatible his analysis is with the Austrian libertarian way of looking at property.  As he defines it, his treatise, which actually I’ll show you.  I love this.  This is [indiscernible_00:08:44].  It’s the civil law theories from Louisiana, property, fantastic, very expensive books, but they’re great.  So this is this book here, such great works of scholarship.  In any case, he defines it as I have it on the page here.  I won’t read the whole thing, but basically I’ll read part of it.  Property is the exclusive right to control an economic good. 00:09:04 It’s the concept that refers to the rights and obligations that have to do with the relations of man with respect to things of value, and he even goes into here about scarcity.  He says that some things are needed, and because of the demand on them, they become scarce, and then laws help govern the use of these things.  And then he says property rights are a direct and immediate authority over a thing. 00:09:28 Now, authority is sort of a loaded normative term, which means a legally recognized authority or right to control.  He has another nice, compact expression at the bottom of the page here, on page five slide five.  Ownership is the – I’m sorry.  Possession – ownership is the right to control, or you can think of the right to possess by it where a mere possession is the factual authority that someone has over a thing.  So even a thief would have temporary possession over a car he stole, for example, but he wouldn’t have the right to control it.  He would just have actual or the factual authority but not the legally recognized authority.  So that’s how we need to think of property, and this is how Hans Hoppe thinks about it throughout his work. 00:10:18 Now, let’s continue with what we were talking about last time about homesteading.  So homesteading, or sometimes called original appropriation, would be assigning ownership.  Hold on a second.  Ethan, would you get that for me?  It’s right there behind you.  Assigning ownership to something that was previously unowned, a scarce resource that was unowned.  Hold on a second.  Okay, based upon a certain link, an objective link between the owner and the resource,

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 153. This is the first of 6 lectures of my 2011 Mises Academy course “The Social Theory of Hoppe.” See also my article "Read Hoppe, Then Nothing Is the Same," Mises Daily (June 10, 2011). The remaining lectures follow in podcast feed. The slides for the first lecture of the Social Theory of Hoppe course are provided below, as are the “suggested readings” for the course. Transcript below. [Update: see also David Gordon, “The Political Economy of Hans Hoppe” (Mises University 2021)] As general background I suggest: Kinsella, “Foreword,” in Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (Laissez Faire Books ebook edition, 2013) Kinsella, “Afterword,” in Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Great Fiction: Property, Economy, Society, and the Politics of Decline (Laissez Faire Books, 2012) “Introduction,” with Jörg Guido Hülsmann, in Hülsmann & Kinsella, eds., Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Mises Institute, 2009) (published as “Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe,” Mises Daily, Aug. 7, 2009) LECTURE 1: PROPERTY FOUNDATIONS Video [fvplayer id="1"] Slides For slides for all six lectures, plus extensive hyperlinked suggested reading material, see this Libertarian Standard post. SUGGESTED READING MATERIAL The “suggested readings” for each lecture are appended below. Links, where available, are provided; most of these materials can also be found on stephankinsella.com/publications, c4sif.org/resources, mises.org, hanshoppe.com/publications, or on Wikipedia or by google search. LECTURE 1: PROPERTY FOUNDATIONS Chapters 1 & 2, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism [TSC] LECTURE 2: TYPES OF SOCIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF THE STATE TSC Chs. 3-6 De-Socialization in a United Germany “Banking, Nation States and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order” (ch. 3 of The Economics and Ethics of Private Property [EEPP]) LECTURE 3: LIBERTARIAN RIGHTS AND ARGUMENTATION ETHICS SUGGESTED READINGS Kinsella, “Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide” Hoppe: EEPP, chapter 11, “From the Economics of Laissez Faire to the Ethics of Libertarianism,” ch. 12. “The Justice of Economic Efficiency,” and “Appendix: Four Critical Replies” OPTIONAL READINGS Kinsella, “New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory” “On the Ultimate Justification of the Ethics of Private Property,” by Hoppe “Beyond Is and Ought,” by Murray N. Rothard “Hoppephobia,” by Rothbard “Defending Argumentation Ethics: Reply to Murphy & Callahan,” by Stephan Kinsella “Argumentation Ethics and The Philosophy of Freedom,” by Frank Van Dun “Hülsmann on Argumentation Ethics,” by Kinsella LECTURE 4: EPISTEMOLOGY, METHODOLOGY AND DUALISM; KNOWLEDGE, CERTAINTY, LOGICAL POSITIVISM Suggested Readings TSC, Pages 118-144 and 152-155 Economic Science and the Austrian Method Is Research Based on Causal Scientific Principles Possible in the Social Sciences? (ch. 10 of EEPP) In Defense of Extreme Rationalism: Thoughts on Donald McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics [ch. 16 of The Great Fiction] Optional Readings Chapter 9. “On Praxeology and the Praxeological Foundation of Epistemology”; ch. 14. “Austrian Rationalism in the Age of the Decline of Positivism” (from EEPP) On Certainty and Uncertainty, Or: How Rational Can Our Expectations Be? [ch. 14, The Great Fiction] The Science of Human Action (lecture) LECTURE 5: ECONOMIC ISSUES AND APPLICATIONS Suggested Readings Hoppe on Property Rights in Physical Integrity vs Value Hoppe on Liberal Economies and War Hoppe: Marx was “Essentially Correct” Capitalist Production and The Problem of Monopoly (from TSC) Fallacies of the Public Goods Theory & the Production of Security Verstehen and the Role of Economics in Forecasting, or: If You’re so Rich, Why Aren’t You Smart? “Chicago Diversions” [in “The Ethics and Economics of Private Property,” in The Great Fiction] Kinsella, “Knowledge vs. Calculation” Optional Readings The Misesian Case against Keynes The Limits of Numerical Probability: Frank H. Knight and Ludwig von Mises and the Frequency of Interpretation A Note on Preference and Indifference in Economic Analysis Socialism: A Property or Knowledge Problem? LECTURE 6: POLITICAL ISSUES AND APPLICATIONS; HOPPE Q&A n/a *** Background: This is one of the five Mises Academy courses I presented in 2011. The others were: "Rethinking Intellectual Property"; “Libertarian Legal Theory”; “Libertarian Controversies”; and "Obama's Patent Reform: Improvement or Continuing Calamity?" (( Discussed in my article "Obama’s Patent Reform: Improvement or Continuing Calamity?," Mises Daily, Sep. 23, 2011; I discussed the AIA in further detail in The American Invents Act and Patent Reform: The Good, the Meh, and the Ugly) (audio and slides). )) The Hoppe course is discussed in my article “Read Hoppe, Then Nothing Is the Same"; see also Danny Sanchez's post Online Hoppe Course Starts Tomorrow. I enjoyed teaching all the courses, but my favorite was the Hoppe course. Hoppe has been the biggest intellectual influence of my life, as I detail in "How I Became A Libertarian" (published as “Being a Libertarian” in I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians). I agree with Sanchez that "Hans-Hermann Hoppe is the most profound social theorist writing today." This is one reason I worked with the brilliant Austro-libertarian theorist, Jörg Guido Hülsmann, to produce the festschrift Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Mises Institute, 2009). The experience of teaching the Mises Academy classes was amazing and gratifying, as I noted in my article “Teaching an Online Mises Academy Course.” This and similar technology and Internet-enabled models are obviously the wave of the educational future. The students received an in-depth, specialized and personalized treatment of topics of interest to them, with tests and teacher and fellow student interaction, for a very reasonable price, and judging by their comments and evaluations, they were very satisfied with the courses and this online model. For example, for the Hoppe course, as noted in A Happy Hoppean Student, student Cam Rea wrote, about the first lecture of the course: Move over Chuck Norris, Hans-Hermann Hoppe is in town! The introduction to “The Social Theory of Hoppe” was extremely thorough. I, a relative newcomer to the Hoppean idea, was impressed by Stephan Kinsella’s introduction to the theory. Mr. Kinsella hit upon all of those who came before Hoppe, and how each built upon another over the past two centuries. In other words, as Isaac Newton stated, “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Hoppe is the result thus far of those who came before him in the ideals of Austrian Economics and libertarian principles. Nevertheless, Hoppe takes it much further as in the Misesian concept of human action and the science of “praxeology”, from which all actions branch in life. Overall, the class was extremely enjoyable, the questions concrete, and the answer provided by Mr. Kinsella clear and precise. Like many others in the class, I look forward to more. So tune in next Monday at 7pm EDT. Same Hoppe-time, same Hoppe-channel! There were also rave reviews given by students of the other courses. For my first Mises Academy course, "Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics" (audio and slides), one student wrote me at the completion of the course, “The class (everything) was perfect. Content wasn’t too deep (nor too shallow) – the reviewed material was just brilliant and the “tuning” was great for someone like myself (engineering background – no profound legal/lawyer experience). It provided all the material to really “understand” (instead of “just knowing”) all that was covered which I find always very important in a class.” “Instruction was very comprehensive and thought provoking. The instructor was fantastic and very knowledgeable and answered every question asked.” “Learned more than i expected, the professor seemed to really enjoy teaching the class, and the readings provided were excellent. Overall for the cost I was extremely satisfied.” “Very interesting ideas I was not exposed to. Inexpensive, convenient, good quality.” “It is a very fascinating topic and I was quite eager to learn about what I.P. is all about. I thought that Professor Kinsella was able to convey complicated issues to us clearly.” “Professor Kinsella’s enthusiasm and extra links posted showed his true knowledge and interest in the subject. Great to see.” And: Thank you so very much for all the excellent work — very few classes have really changed my life dramatically, actually only 3 have, and all 3 were classes I took at the Mises Academy, starting with Rethinking Intellectual Property (PP350) (the other two were EH476 (Bubbles), and PP900 (Private Defense)). … My purposes for taking the classes are: 1. just for the fun of it, 2. learning & self-education, and 3. to understand what is happening with some degree of clarity so I can eventually start being part of the solution where I live — or at least stop being part of the problem. The IP class was a total blast — finally (finally) sound reasoning. All the (three) classes I took dramatically changed the way I see the world. I'm still digesting it all, to tell the truth. Very few events in my life have managed to make me feel like I wished I was 15 all over again. Thank you. … [M]uch respect and admiration for all the great work done by all the members of the whole team. Students would often give real-time feedback,

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 152. This is my speech “Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned?” delivered at the NYC LibertyFest (Brooklyn, NY, October 11, 2014). The original title was "Libertarianism After Fifty Years: A Reassessment and Reappraisal" but I was allotted only about 15-20 minutes so condensed the scope and could only touch briefly on many of the matters discussed. This audio was recorded by me from my iphone in my pocket; video and a higher-quality audio should be available shortly. The outline and notes used for the speech is appended below, which includes extensive links to further material pertaining to  matters discussed in the speech. An edited transcript is available here. Speech Notes/Outline Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned? Stephan Kinsella NYC LibertyFest, Brooklyn, NY October 11, 2014   Introduction Modern libertarianism is about 50 years old. Main figures: Rand and Rothbard. “three furies of libertarianism” (Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism): Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, and Isabel Patterson (1943) Mises, Hayek, Read, Friedman Rand Atlas, 1957; Rothbard, MES, 1962 From a Foreword I wrote for a forthcoming libertarian book: Modern libertarian theory is only about five decades old. The ideas that have influenced our greatest thinkers can be traced back centuries, of course,[1] to luminaries such as Hugo Grotius, John Locke, Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill, and to more recent and largely even more radical thinkers such as Gustave de Molinari, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Bertrand de Jouvenal, Franz Oppenheimer, and Albert Jay Nock.[2] The beginnings of the modern movement can be detected in the works of the “three furies of libertarianism,” as Brian Doherty calls them: Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, and Isabel Patterson, whose respective books The Discovery of Freedom, The Fountainhead, and The God of the Machine were all published, rather remarkably, in the same year: 1943.[3] But in its more modern form, libertarianism originated in the 1960s and 1970s from thinkers based primarily in the United States, notably Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard. Other significant influences on the nascent libertarian movement include Ludwig von Mises, author of Liberalism (1927) and Human Action (1949, with a predecessor version published in German in 1940); Nobel laureate F.A. von Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom (1944); Leonard Read, head of the Foundation for Economic Education (founded 1946); and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, author of the influential Capitalism and Freedom (1962). The most prominent and influential of modern libertarian figures, however, were the aforementioned novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, the founder of “Objectivism” and a “radical for capitalism,” and Murray Rothbard, the Mises-influenced libertarian anarcho-capitalist economist and political theorist. Rothbard’s seminal role is widely recognized, even by non-Rothbardians. Objectivist John McCaskey, for example, has observed, that out of the debates in the mid-1900s about what rights citizens ought to have, "grew the main sort of libertarianism of the last fifty years. It was based on a principle articulated by Murray Rothbard in the 1970s this way: No one may initiate the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. The idea had roots in John Locke, America’s founders, and more immediately Ayn Rand, but it was Rothbard’s formulation that became standard. It became known as the non-aggression principle or—since Rothbard took it as the starting point of political theory and not the conclusion of philosophical justification—the non-aggression axiom. In the late twentieth century, anyone who accepted this principle could call himself, or could find himself called, a libertarian, even if he disagreed with Rothbard’s own insistence that rights are best protected when there is no government at all."[4] We can date the dawn of today’s libertarianism to the works of Rand and Rothbard: to Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957); and, especially, to Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State (1962), Power and Market (1970), and For A New Liberty (1973), plus his journal The Libertarian Forum (1969–1984). For A New Liberty stands today as a brilliant, and early, bold statement of the radical libertarian vision. By the mid-60s, the modern libertarian movement was coalescing, primarily behind the non-initiation of force principle and the “radical capitalism” of Ayn Rand, and Rothbard’s systematic libertarian corpus based upon the non-aggression principle or axiom. It is no surprise that the Libertarian Party was founded in 1971, as these ideas, and the liberty movement, were gaining steam. In the ensuing decades many other influential works appeared expounding on the libertarian idea, such as Linda and Morris Tannehill, The Market for Liberty (1970), John Hospers, Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow (1971), David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom (1973), Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Henri Lepage, Tomorrow, Capitalism (1978), Samuel Edward Konkin III, New Libertarian Manifesto (1980), Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (1988), Anthony De Jasay, Choice, Contract, Consent: A Restatement of Liberalism (1991), Richard Epstein, Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995), Charles Murray, What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation (1996), David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer (1998), Randy E. Barnett, The Structure of Liberty (1998), and, more recently, Jeffrey A. Miron’s Libertarianism, From A to Z (2010), Jacob Huebert’s Libertarianism Today (2010), Gary Chartier’s The Conscience of an Anarchist (2011), and Gerard Casey’s Libertarian Anarchism (2012). [1] For more on this, see Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (2008), and David Boaz, The Libertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao Tzu to Milton Friedman (1998). [2] See Boaz, The Libertarian Reader, id. [3] See Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, id. [4] John P. McCaskey, “New Libertarians: New Promoters of a Welfare State” (April 14, 2014), http://www.johnmccaskey.com/joomla/index.php/blog/71-new-libertarians, See also Wendy McElroy, “Murray N. Rothbard: Mr. Libertarian,” LewRockwell.com (July 6, 2000). Still have our disagreements over issues issues like abortion, etc. But libertarian theory has developed and grown over the last five decades. At this stage in our history it is time to take stock of where we are: what we have learned, especially in light of the criticism from outsiders and criticism and debate by and among fellow libertarians. These debates and growing theoretical work in recent decades by growing numbers of scholars have highlighted some areas of progress and ways we can develop and refine going forward. First, what has become clearer: Political activism as a primary means of progress is limited at best [The Trouble with Libertarian Activism] Principled libertarianism is preferred over ad hoc, single-issue or utilitarian libertarianism Love of liberty; believe that aggression is wrong not just impractical [Why I’m a Libertarian — or, Why Libertarianism is Beautiful] Libertarianism is anti-war Not just “most” wars are bad, but all wars Libertarianism is anti-state (increasingly) [The Nature of the State and Why Libertarians Hate It] Libertarianism is radical, not incremental It is unique, radical, and different from and superior to the left and the right. Libertarianism is now overwhelmingly anti-intellectual property (patent and copyright), which upsets the old guard, which consists of a disproportionately large number of Randians and minarchists [The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide; Against Intellectual Property; Selected Supplementary Material for Against Intellectual Property; Anti-IP Resources] Legislation is not the way to make law [KOL001 | “The (State’s) Corruption of (Private) Law” (PFS 2012); Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society; summary version: Legislation and Law in a Free Society; Another Problem with Legislation: James Carter v. the Field Codes; KOL129 | Speech to Montessori Students: “The Story of Law: What Is Law, and Where Does it Come From?”; KOL020 | “Libertarian Legal Theory: Property, Conflict, and Society: Lecture 3: Applications I: Legal Systems, Contract, Fraud” (Mises Academy, 2011)] Modern liberal democracy is not “closer” on the road to libertarianism [Hoppe, Democracy: God that Failed, and Introduction] America was not a proto-libertarian utopia, the Constitution was not libertarian, the Founders were not libertarian War, corruption, slavery, sexism [On Constitutional Sentimentalism; Black Armbands for “Constitution Day”; The Bad Bill of Rights, Goodbye 1776, 1789, Tom,  Rockwell on Hoppe on the Constitution as Expansion of Government Power; Richman on the 4th of July and American Independence, The Murdering, Thieving, Enslaving, Unlibertarian Continental Army, Napolitano on Health-Care Reform and the Constitution: Is the Commerce Clause Really Limited?; Was the American Revolution Really about Taxes?; Bill Marina (R.I.P.) on American Imperialism from the Beginning; Happy We-Should-Restore-The-Monarchy-And-Rejoin-Britain Day!; Revising the American Revolution; The Declaration and Conscription; ‘Untold Truths About the American Revolution’; Jeff Hummel’s “The Constitution as a Counter-Revolution”; Bill Marina (R.I.P.) on American Imperialism from the Beginning;Happy We-Should-Restore-The-Monarchy-And-Rejoin-Britain Day!; Revising the American Revolution] Importance of re-examining traditional methods for child discipline and education

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 151. This is my recent speech “Balancing Intellectual Property Rights and Civil Liberties: A Libertarian Perspective,” presented at Branford College at Yale University, New Haven, CT, Oct. 2, 2014, in a lecture series called “The Politic Presents." It was held in the beautiful Trumbull Room at Branford Court, where the accompanying picture was taken. The initial speech is about 33 minutes and was addressed mainly to non-libertarian undergraduate students. I tried to set the stage for those not familiar with Austrian economics, IP or IP theory, libertarianism, without being too basic. These were smart Yale students, after all. This was recorded in my iPhone in my suit pocket, but the quality is okay anyway; and it includes the 33 minute initial lecture and the following 20-minute Q&A session, but then I forgot to turn off my iPhone as I walked to a restaurant with a group of students for dinner, so it also includes some informal but fun Q&A and related conversation as we walked to dinner, for the last 10-20 minutes. Transcript available here.