As many of my readers know, I often lecture and speak and give podcast or radio interviews on various libertarian topics and issues, such as intellectual property (IP), anarcho-libertarians, Austrian law and economic, contract theory, rights and punishment theory, and so on. I also blog and comment regularly on such matters in various blogs (primarily The Libertarian Standard, on general libertarian matters, and C4SIF, on IP-related matters), Facebook, and so on—often posting my take on a given issue in response to a question emailed to me or posted online.

This month I am launching a new podcast, Kinsella on Liberty. I expect to post episodes once or twice a week. The podcast will include new episodes covering  answers to questions emailed to me (feel free to ask me to address any issue of libertarian theory or application) as well as interviews or discussions I conduct with other libertarians. I’ll also include in the feed any new speeches or interviews of mine that appear on other podcasts or fora, as well as older speeches, interviews, and audio versions  of my articles, which  are collected for now on my media page). Audio and slides for several of my Mises Academy courses may also be found on my media page, and will also be included in the podcast feed later this year. Feel free to Subscribe in iTunes or Follow with RSS, and spread the word to your libertarian friends. I welcome questions for possible coverage in the podcast, as well as any criticism, suggestions for improvement, or other feedback. My general approach to libertarian matters is Austrian, anarchist, and propertarian, influenced heavily by the thought of Ludwig von Mises, Murray N. Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. My writing can be found in articles here and blog posts at The Libertarian Standard and C4SIF, such as:

• How I Became A Libertarian, December 18, 2002, LewRockwell.com (published as “Being a Libertarian” in I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians (compiled by Walter Block; Mises Institute 2010))
• “What Libertarianism Is,” Mises Daily (August 21, 2009)
• What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist, January 20, 2004, LewRockwell.com
• How We Come To Own Ourselves, Mises Daily (Sep. 7, 2006)
• Causation and Aggression, The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, vol. 7, no. 4 (Winter 2004)
• A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability, Journal of Libertarian Studies 17, no. 2 (Spring 2003)
• Inalienability and Punishment: A Reply to George Smith, Winter 1998-99, Journal of Libertarian Studies
• Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide, Mises Daily (May 27, 2011)
• New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory, 12:2 Journal of Libertarian Studies (Fall 1996)
• Punishment and Proportionality: The Estoppel Approach, 12:1 Journal of Libertarian Studies (Spring 1996).
• Defending Argumentation Ethics: Reply to Murphy & Callahan, Anti-state.com (Sept. 19, 2002)
• Montessori, Peace, and Libertarianism, LewRockwell.com (April 28, 2011)

On IP in particular, which I’ll also cover from time to time in the podcast, see:

• C4SIF Resources page;
• The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide
• Against Intellectual Property
• Selected Supplementary Material for Against Intellectual Property

[C4SIF; SK; PFS]

I delivered this speech in September 2012 for the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society in Bodrum, Turkey. The audio of my speech was corrupted due to a technical error, so I re-recorded a version of the speech (available for streaming and download below). For others, see the links in the Program, or the PFS Vimeo channel.

The talk was largely based on two previous papers:

• “Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 11 (Summer 1995), p. 132.
• Condensed version: Legislation and Law in a Free Society,” Mises Daily (Feb. 25, 2010)

Update: see also Is English Common Law Libertarian?

(Powerpoint; PDF)

[PFS; SK]

I was a guest on Jeff Berwick’s Anarchast (ep. 51, 36 min), released today. We discussed anarchy and how such a society might be reached; the basis and origin of law and property rights and its relationship to libertarian principles, and implications for legislation versus law and the legitimacy of intellectual property; also, utilitarianism, legal positivism, scientism, and logical positivism. Description from the Anarchist site below; MP3 download. For more background on IP, see the C4SIF Resources page; on legislation vs. private law, see The (State’s) Corruption of (Private) Law.

 

Anarchast Ep. 51 with Stephan Kinsella

Jeff Berwick in Acapulco, Mexico, talks with Stephan Kinsella in Houston, Texas

Topics include:

- Stephan explains how he became an anarchist and some of the books that pointed him in the right direction including
- The Fountainhead (http://amzn.to/VnZwSL)
- Stephan is a practicing attorney that applies his legal knowledge with his libertarian philosophy
- He believes a free law society will only come about if a majority of people agree in libertarian principles
- Law is defined as a concrete body of rules that permits a group of people that want to be able to cooperate to be able to do so
- Jeff asks if it is necessary for everyone to agree with libertarian philosophy in order to have a free society
- Stephan thinks that a majority of people already have libertarian principles but have not been educated correctly in constancy
- He is more optimistic that most because he sees more people not accepting central planning than in the past
- Jeff thinks that there could be a backlash against free market ideas during a financial collapse where the people believe capitalism is to blame
- Stephan hopes that people will slowly find the state to be irrelevant and this will bring about a free society
- Jeff thinks that there will be a financial collapse that will make this transition unpredictable
- Stephan is an expert in libertarian Intellectual Property theory
- He explains the principles of property law
- What most people think is law today is not what law would be based on in a libertarian society
- Stephan explains the problem with legal and economic positivism
- The proper libertarian view is to be opposed to making law through legislation
- The problem with intellectual property is that you are able to use the force of the government against someone who has not aggressed against you
- Stephan explains the problems with the utilitarian Intellectual property justification
- The intellectual property system forces everyone to participate even if they don’t agree with it

Stephan is doing astounding work in libertarian legal theory you can find more in formation on his sites

http://www.stephankinsella.com/

http://c4sif.org/

For more information on The Dollar Vigilante, go to http://dollarvigilante.com. For more information on Jeff Berwick’s anarchist enclave, Galt’s Gulch Chile, go to http://galtsgulchchile.com. And, for more on the anarchist enclave in Acapulco go to http://dollarvigilante.com/acacondos. Come on down and be a guest on Anarchast and live relatively free amongst other anarchists.

Source: http://financialsurvivalnetwork.com/2012/12/anarchast-ep-51-with-stephan-kinsella/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=anarchast-ep-51-with-stephan-kinsella

 

 

[Cross-posted from C4SIF]

No.

Contrary to the hyperbole of the blogosphere, this year neither the US nor China will burn to the ground in some grotesque fashion.

No the Chinese yuan (RMB) is not taking over the international markets (it accounts for a mere 0.6% of letter-of-credit transactions), no there is no concerted war on the USD.  In fact, despite incredulous hypotheticals to the contrary, China is still buying US treasuries.  The RMB has also depreciated relative to the USD.

Exaggerations sell and exaggerating more than the next Joe is even more sellable (sic).   Or  as Matt Ridley wrote in a recent Wired piece, many westerners have become apocaholics.

There won’t be a nuclear exchange between the US and China or China and Japan (the Chinese arsenal by the way, is overstated and exaggerated by the same hawks that brought us the second Iraq wars).  In fact, Bill Gertz, among others is flat out wrong regarding his assertions of China’s secret nuclear stockpile.

In fact, despite a concerted effort by the CCP and state media (like Xinhua) to paint Japan (and the US) as foreign devils, there probably will not be any military confrontation between China and Japan.  In part because there is approximately $350 billion in bilateral trade and also, for what Bill Bishop has recently written: cooler heads on both sides want a dialogue.   Similarly, never in the history of the modern world have the two largest trading partners, let alone the two largest economies, gone to war with one another.

Or in other words, US and Chinese businesses would not want to torpedo their cargo ships, bomb their own factories, blow up their employees, burn their shareholders, decimate the infrastructure that provides electricity, water and telecommunication services to their retail stores and/or otherwise destroy their property.  (As an aside, to assuage those electoral fears of a purported Chinese invasion: the Chinese military complex can’t even make decent jet engines yet, what jets will protect this phantom invasion fleet?)

Pandemonium might be the lucid dream of certain bloggers who enjoy hyping a story but wishful thinking is of course, fallacious at best.

What problems will China face internally?

Michael Pettis’ latest newsletter is fantastic, he highlights many of the problems that a China bull faces and how these “small hiccups” have turned into large quagmires.

In particular he takes to task a recent piece from The Economist which stated:

But China’s high investment is backed by even higher saving. As a consequence, China does not need its investment to generate high returns in order to pay back external creditors. China has, in effect, already set aside the resources that will be lost if its investments turn sour.

Here was Pettis’ excellent reply:

This doesn’t make sense to me at all and illustrates, I think, some of the confusion about what savings mean. The passage seems to assume that the main economic problem facing a developing country is paying back external creditors.

But this isn’t the case. External debt is generally is a problem for smaller countries, but as the Reinhart and Rogoff book, This Time is Different, makes clear (and this is something that most financial historians already knew), most economic or financial crises are domestic, not external. It is true that many of the crises in the 1980s and 1990s were external debt crises, and this has colored our view of what a financial crisis must be, but this shouldn’t lead us to think that countries only have crises if their savings are insufficient to cover investment (I.e. they are running a current account deficit).

After all the US had no problem paying back external debt in the 1930s and Japan had no problem paying external debt in the 1990s. In both cases domestic savings far exceeded domestic investment – or, to put in the same terms as The Economist, their high investment was backed up by even higher savings – and yet both suffered tremendous slowdowns in economic growth and the US had a financial crisis.

Likewise China of course will also have no problem paying back its external debt, but losses do not occur when you borrow in foreign currency to fund investments. They occur when you invest in projects that are not economically viable, no matter how they are funded.

What is more important, it is not meaningful to say that China’s high investment is “backed” by higher savings. The Chinese growth model forces up savings, by constraining consumption growth, in order to fund investment (a higher savings rate is the same thing as a lower consumption rate) just as Alexander Gershenkron prescribed in the 1950s and 1960s. But once investment is misallocated (or “malinvested”, as The Economist prefers) higher savings is not a solution to the problem but rather a manifestation of the problem itself. If you do not believe this, then Japan’s Lost Decade(s) is very hard to explain.

Perhaps the easiest way to prove this is with a simple thought experiment.  Let us assume that Beijing decides immediately to tax half of Chinese household income and to use the money to build a bunch of useless bridges. Would this be good for China? Certainly not, and the impact would be more debt and slower future growth as the cost of the excess debt was absorbed. What happens to the investment rate? It goes up, of course, along with GDP.

But what happens to the savings rate? It also goes up. Why? Because if you cut the disposable income of Chinese households in half, presumably you would cut consumption by nearly that amount. Since savings is simply GDP minus consumption, savings will soar.

Notice that the condition – that savings exceed investment – will still be met, and by definition as long as China runs a current account surplus savings must exceed investment. And yet it doesn’t help. Wasting money is always value destroying, and the fact that it is funded by domestic savings – as in Japan in the 1980s, the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s, and Brazil before 1975 – or foreign savings – as Latin America after 1975 and much of Asian in the 1990s – makes little difference except in the resolution.

Pettis also raises a few question of his own and notes that hidden bad debt (e.g., an additional 1 trillion RMB of non-performing “stimulus” loans on top of the 17 trillion RMB of possible non-performing loans) must be accounted for in any system, especially one like China that lacks transparency.

Here is a quick taste of the relevant news coming out of the land I currently reside:

• Ghost warehouse stocks haunt China’s steel sector (Reuters)
• Construction and Real Estate Hinder China’s Growth (NYT)
• End of Construction Boom Sparks Frenzy of Sales Aided by Credit—And Worries of Customer Defaults (WSJ)
• Car Dealers See Market Shift to Lower Gear (Caixin)
• Economist Lin Yifu on State-Sustained Growth (Caixin)
• China’s urbanization lacks quality, requires huge investment: green paper (Xinhua)
• Moneyless Pensions Yield No Gold for the Old (Caixin)
• China to Expand Insurance So Sick Don’t ‘Lose Everything’ (Bloomberg)
• China Stocks Fall to Lowest Level Since 2009 on Japan Row, Data (Bloomberg)
• Wu Jinglian: Local Governments’ CNY17Trl Investment Unsustainable (Caijing)
• China’s Slowdown May Be Worse Than Official Data Suggest (DallasFed)
• China’s a ‘Roach Motel’; Don’t Trust the Numbers: Chanos (CNBC)
• Building And Operating A China Factory. Why Even Bother? (CLB)
• BHP Says Pace of China Iron Ore Demand Has Slowed by Half  (Bloomberg)
• Re-Examining Re-Education Through Labor (WSJ)
• China builds its own military-industrial complex (Reuters)

Notes in the margin

A friend recently asked me if he should buy property in China.

My response was that you actually wouldn’t “own” the land.  You take out a lease that is at maximum, lasts for 70 years.  Here is a detailed NYT piece on this issue as it pertains to Chinese men without brides and an in-depth FT article on the same topic (speaking of which, here is an excellent piece on China’s gender imbalance from TCS) .

Furthermore, it can be confiscated without restitution.  Unlike the US and other western countries with lawyers and legal recourse, trying to own property in China would be risking a lot because if your is successful, and even if you are not, a local gang/politician could easily confiscate it and/or demand some kind of bribe.  All without any compensation.  Caveat emptor.

It is the tendency of the state to compile as much information as possible about its subjects, but to persecute individuals who collect and divulge information about its agents and the way they operate. The state and its supporters want to keep tabs on you, but angrily (and violently) protest when you try to keep track of state actors. In the news today we saw two examples of this:

• WikiLeaks has fallen victim to a major distributed denial of service attack for which the regime apologists at Anti-Leaks have taken responsibility (though there is speculation about this being a state-sponsored action). The attack, now more than a week in duration, coincides with the whistle-blower site’s recent release of the lastest dump of documents gleaned from the Stratfor intelligence leak. Recently released documents detail a privately administered domestic intelligence-gathering operation called TrapWire. According to PC Magazine and Russia Today, the leaks reveal that the TrapWire program is designed to compile information on targets across the United States from a network of surveillance cameras, incorporating vehicle locations and behavioral data in order to detect patterns that may signal that someone is involved in undesirable activity. The companies behind TrapWire, Abraxas and Stratfor, are reportedly chock full of former U.S. intelligence officials still serving their former masters.

• Adam Mueller (a.k.a. “Ademo Freeman“), a liberty activist in New Hampshire and founder of CopBlock, was convicted of multiple counts of felony wiretapping for his efforts relating to the publicizing of  a video-recorded attack by police officer Darren Murphy on a West High School student in Manchester. Mueller recorded conversations with the Manchester Police Department and school officials about the incident, and was charged under New Hampshire’s wiretapping statutes. This article at Pixiq about Mueller’s prosecution does a good job of explaining the “two-party consent” wiretapping laws in New Hampshire that provide the legal basis for Mueller’s persecution, as well as outlining Mueller’s unsuccessful pro se defense strategy. (Mueller was successful in another police recording case in Massachusetts last year.)

Last year saw the release of two books on the U.S. courts’ history of (not) protecting the liberty of contract: David Bernstein’s Rehabilitating Lochner and David N. Mayer’s Liberty of Contract: Rediscovering a Lost Constitutional Right.

My review of Bernstein’s book appeared in the Winter 2012 Independent Review; my review of Mayer’s book has just been published in The Freeman.

Which book is better? I couldn’t say. Both cover a lot of the same ground, and both are well-done. (Oddly, both were published at about the same time, and both appear to have been sponsored by the Cato Institute, though Bernstein’s book was published by the University of Chicago Press.) I recommend either or — if you really want to be an expert on all facets of New York v. Lochner and the courts’ inconsistent protection of economic liberty — both.

Here’s an excerpt from my Liberty of Contract review:

The U.S. Supreme Court has no coherent ideas about—or real respect for—individual rights. It generally allows governments to do whatever they want, with limited exceptions for a handful of rights it has deemed “fundamental,” such as the right to free speech (in some areas) and the right to sexual privacy (in some respects). Other rights, such as the right to economic liberty, receive almost no protection at all.

Why so much protection for some rights and so little for others? Because the Court has arbitrarily said so.

Libertarians, of course, think differently about rights. Libertarians think that our rights exist independently of government, and that if government has any legitimate purpose at all, it is to protect those preexisting rights.

Libertarians also think that all our rights are really property rights. We each own ourselves, and from that follows a right to own private property that we acquire through voluntary exchanges with others. Other rights, such as the right to free speech, derive from our right to use our own property as we see fit. And the right to economic liberty—that is, to trade your property and your labor freely with others—is just as “fundamental” as any other right.

In Liberty of Contract: Rediscovering a Lost Constitutional Right, law professor and historian David N. Mayer shows how Americans went from embracing the libertarian conception of rights reflected (imperfectly) in the Declaration of Independence to the statist conception of rights reflected in modern Supreme Court decisions.

Read the rest.

What does it take to be considered a legitimate news organization?

Gothamist, the operator of nine city-centric blogs that cover local news, events and culture have finally received their NYPD press credentials which allows them access to on-scene reporting or press events that are otherwise closed to others. This was after almost 8 years, countless emails, phone calls, two appeal hearings, $5,000, and getting high-profile civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel involved.

In their very detailed guide they explain how the process works, and how it favors the establishment players:

If you work for a mainstream outlet, like a newspaper, radio, or television station, you can stop reading right now. Your boss has no doubt processed dozens of press pass candidates through DCPI, and will have no trouble getting you a pass. This seems to apply to any old media outlet, no matter how small, so if you write the produce column for your food co-op newsletter, you’re gold.

As part of the process, the applicant has to show proof that he or she covered a certain number of major events within the past two years, a barrier-to-entry hurdle for those in a fledging news organization denied access to many major events. Furthermore, the qualification for these major events are those that give deference and respect to the powers that be– events that had an NYPD detailed presence, and mayoral and/or city council press announcements.

In other words, the only news that counts is that which covers officially-sanctioned events which flatter the egos of politicians, which is why Gothamist’s “Occupy Wall Street” coverage was rejected(!) even though there was an overwhelming police presence at what could anyways be considered a significant news event absent the NYPD.

Ladies and gentlemen, so much for an “independent” news media.

Many libertarians, perhaps most notably Thomas E. Woods, support the decentralization of power from the federal government, including the power of nullification. Many people fear and denounce this power, often because they like the immense power of the central state and are supporters of big government. There are, however, some very real concerns by people who desire freedom as their highest political goal. A simple question, which is asked in various forms is “if decentralization leads to more freedom, why did African slavery thrive in a more decentralized America, and only go away (well, sort of) when the central state forced it to go away?” Similar statements could be said of Jim Crow.

Tom Woods briefly addresses a critical point which bears emphasis: a major problem with decentralization is that decentralizing power may have huge negative effects for people who cannot vote.  The very people who are most obsessed with them not having political power are the people who are most empowered by the receding power of the central state. This points to the people that libertarian activists should concentrate on protecting: non-citizens (including both legal and illegal immigrants) and convicted felons in states which strip them of the franchise. As most minorities have the ability to exercise the vote, the greatest evils of the past have no chance of being repeated. And some unprecedented benefits may come about. Without the significant support of the federal government, individual states could not maintain the murderous drug war at the levels at which it is currently prosecuted.  Family and morals-destroying welfare programs would have to be greatly scaled back without the ability to print money. Taxes would have to be levied to pay for these things, forcing citizens to carefully evaluate just how much they wish to impoverish themselves in the attempt to eradicate various victimless crimes.

The benefits don’t end there. Freedom would be catching in this country for several reasons. Our national myths support the value of freedom. The proximity of states and the freedom of movement among them, in the face of massive differences in the amount of liberty inside them, would mean that the most inventive, industrious people would tend to leave less free areas and go to more free ones. This would impoverish the most oppressive states, further pressuring them to liberate. Perhaps the single most important factor which would allow liberty to really catch in the United States is that the US military would not be looking to crush these efforts, as it does in other countries. If liberty is to be permitted by any government, it is likely that it will have to be permitted in the USA, as the American government is among the world’s most fervent supporters of foisting government on people, whether they like it or not, in the name of “stability.”

Just a couple days ago the New York City council voted to ban the practice by sanitation workers to sticker the window of vehicles that were violating the alternate-side street cleaning rules. Whilst the vehicle’s owner would still receive a parking violation fine, they are no longer allowed to punish drivers by defacing their vehicles with the hard-to-remove stickers. While I find the ban agreeable, I have a bone to pick with the general legislative approach.

One of the problems with positive law is that the mindset it encourages is antithetical to what should otherwise be a presumptive prohibition of aggression and the security of both property and personal liberties. Unlike the “negative” rights of common law, the legislative process of positive law will all too often err and enshrine legal principles that are unjust. This is not to say that legislators do not get it right sometimes– for example laws that prohibit murder, theft and fraud are all [potentially] perfectly just laws.

With a positive law mindset, actions that are not yet defined in the statutes lie in a grey area neither prohibited nor permitted “under the law”.  And later, if ever, when the statutes are codified, the result could be in having laws that don’t prohibit or permit enough, or in fact laws that prohibit or permit too much.  This is a problem inherent to a process that tries to encapsulate the entire range of possible actions and to explicitly codify them into the written law.

The presumptions now change- anything not explicitly forbidden is arguably permissible. Actions which are now prohibited lie beyond the reach of justice if they were carried out before the law was passed under the legal principle ex post facto. Of course it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way– laws that forbids theft and injury could already be understood to include all forms of theft, damage and injury without the codification of specific actions, i.e. “killing with a knife in the right hand using a stabbing motion”. What the positivist mindset encourages is the tendency to look at the codified word as the source of justice, so that one could then hair-split it so that the actual action is not specified and thereby not prohibited.

That said, property defacement should be considered a forbidden action (regardless of the actual codified law) and therefore there was no actual need for a specific law to ban the stickering practice. Instead the government could have enforced the already existing laws against property defacement to stop this punitive, vindictive crime.

In the Winter 2012 Independent Review, I review David Bernstein’s Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform. Here’s how it starts:

Few Supreme Court cases receive more scorn in U.S. law schools than Lochner v. New York (198 U.S. 45), the 1905 decision that struck down a New York law limiting the number of hours that bakers could work as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. It’s safe to say that most legal academics and judges today believe that the Lochner Court engaged in extraordinarily outrageous “judicial activism” motivated by a devotion to extreme libertarian ideology, big business, or both.

In Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform, George Mason University law professor David Bernstein makes the case that the conventional view is wrong. He provides persuasive evidence that Lochner does not deserve to be singled out as an especially activist or offensive case and that Lochner‘s Progressive critics were the real activists with a much more disturbing agenda.

Read the rest.