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Noted Rothbard “Expert” Shelton at the Mises Institute Supporters’ Summit

by on November 12, 2026

Longtime libertarians may remember the flap at FEE back in 2002, when its then-president, Mark Skousen, invited Rudy Giuliani—prosecutor, big-government mayor, war-on-terror cheerleader, and “America’s Mayor”—to headline FEE’s Liberty Banquet (sic) at the New York Hilton, with John Stossel as host.1 Skousen’s idea was to put FEE on the map: “I invited the #1 speaker in America.”2 After much hue and cry, the trustees eventually pulled the plug on the event and on Skousen, who resigned at the board’s request. One account says FEE was going to pay Giuliani a $30,000 honorarium.3

More recently, in March of this year, Jesús Huerta de Soto, one of Javier Milei’s leading intellectual cheerleaders, gave the Mises Memorial Lecture in Auburn—at Joe Salerno’s invitation, according to Hans-Hermann Hoppe—and closed with his standard praise of Milei, who, as Hoppe notes, is a self-professed Zionist and a supporter of Netanyahu’s war in Gaza, of Trump, and of the US-Israeli war on Iran. The audience applauded. As Hoppe put it, “And, sadly, there is applause instead of boos.”4 When Hoppe then criticized the Institute’s direction, he was stripped of his Distinguished Senior Fellow title.5

Judy T. Shelton, profile pic at the Independent Institute

And now comes the noted Austrian economist and Rothbard expert Judy Shelton (sarcasm intended; she’s no Austrian; see below), keynoting this year’s Mises Institute Supporters Summit, held in San Antonio on October 22–24 to celebrate the centennial of Rothbard’s birth.6 Her title: “100 Years of Rothbard: His Bequest for the Future.” A few weeks earlier, Shelton had become a Counselor in the Office of the Secretary of the Treasury.7 A Supporters Summit at the Institute named after leading Austrian Mises and devoted to spreading his ideas and those of Rothbard (it should really be called the Rothbard Institute)8 in the year of Rothbard’s hundredth birthday, keynoted by a Trump administration Treasury Department bureaucrat and Republican establishment economist. It’s a bit cringe. And unlike in the case of FEE there is no threat of the board firing the president for “celebrating the year of Rothbard” by highlighting a Zionist warmongering statist from Argentina and a Republican regime economist who is barely familiar with Rothbard because there is no president to fire—after DiLorenzo was fired in August 2025 by the Mises Institute knaves, there is still no President; as I noted recently, “the institute is actually run by Judy Thommesen and Chad Parish, the two low-level, subaltern functionaries”).9

See 100 Years of Rothbard: His Bequest for the Future (Mises.org):

I watched the talk and read the transcript. It was empty, self-congratulatory, and pompous. She knows the names and titles—she correctly cited Rothbard’s 100 percent gold dollar essay and the Yeager volume it first appeared in—but showed no serious grasp of Mises or Rothbard. Details below.

Related

1. The Billing vs. the Record

By her own account, Salerno—who also invited Huerta de Soto—emailed her in March to invite her to keynote.10 The Institute billed her as a gold-standard proponent and Fed critic “whose opposition to easy money likely prevented her appointment” to the Fed’s Board of Governors. That would surprise the Institute’s own writers, who covered her nomination in 2019 and 2020.

To be sure, they liked her as a Fed critic, and with some reason. She compared the Fed to Soviet central planners, opposes deposit insurance and interest on excess reserves, and once called Bernard von NotHaus, arrested for minting silver “Liberty Dollars,” the “Rosa Parks of monetary policy.”11 But none of them mistook her for an Austrian. Salerno called her supply-side position “deeply flawed on monetary policy” and noted that she confused the classical gold standard with Bretton Woods.12 Former Mises Institute President Jeff Deist wrote, bluntly, that she is “not an Austrian,” put her in the supply-side camp of her friend and mentor Larry Kudlow, and pointed out that she doesn’t want to end the Fed.13 She herself confirms it: she’s “not part of #EndTheFed.”14 Even Bob Murphy, her most enthusiastic defender, said her view “seems more supply-side” than Austrian and balked at her call to get tough with China on trade.15 Fittingly, her Treasury job is to evaluate “financial conditions in China.”16 She’s also a former Senior Fellow with the Independent Institute,17 and past chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy, long a neocon foreign policy money pit.18 And Tho Bishop reported that at her confirmation hearing she said she would answer a crisis by cutting rates to zero and expanding QE, and that she later came around to the rate cuts Trump wanted.19 Some opponent of easy money.

The talk itself confirmed all of this. Here is some of what grated.

2. Money as a “Measure”

Shelton told the audience that “money was always meant to be a measure,” and praised Jefferson’s quest for a “dependable and unchanging measure of value” and an “invariable measure” for the money unit. At the Mises Institute. Mises spent his career demolishing this. In The Theory of Money and Credit he wrote that although people commonly speak of money as a measure of value and prices, “the notion is entirely fallacious”; under the subjective theory of value, the question of measurement cannot even arise. In Socialism he put it even more simply: “Money does not measure value.” Prices are not measured in money; they are amounts of money. Value is ordinal: we rank, we don’t measure. I have harped on this for years, in the IP context and elsewhere.20 A keynote on Rothbard’s monetary legacy that gets the most basic point of Misesian monetary theory wrong.

3. Rothbard Is “Confusing”

Near the end, Shelton confessed that Rothbard’s positions are hard to classify as left or right, and that “for me it can be confusing.” Then: “Rothbard argued that the state is illegitimate, that taxation is theft. That sounds a bit leftist to my ears.” Private law, security, and infrastructure, on the other hand, sound “more rightest to me, or maybe libertarian.” And then: “I bow to the true experts in this room.” This was the keynote address of the Rothbard centennial. Taxation is theft sounds leftist? Rothbard wrote an entire manifesto on where libertarianism sits relative to left and right.21

Earlier, she read the Mises Institute’s boilerplate to the audience: that it seeks a private property order that “rejects taxation, monetary debasement, and a coercive state monopoly of protective services,” and that it opposes “all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation.” She called that conviction the “gold standard” for anyone trying to stay true to their beliefs while serving in government, and told the audience: “In a way, you are my conscience.” She said this as Counselor to the Secretary of the Treasury, the department that houses the IRS. She even joked that she keeps the Rothbard volume containing What Has Government Done to Our Money? and The Case for a 100% Gold Dollar “locked away in my cabinet.” Just kidding, she said. “Well, sort of.”22

4. Gold as a Leash, Not as Money

Shelton told the audience she doesn’t see a 100 percent gold dollar “happening soon,” because there is $2.4 trillion of Federal Reserve notes outstanding and only about $1 trillion worth of Treasury gold (261 million ounces at roughly $4,000 an ounce). But the dollar “price” of gold is just the definition of the dollar. That was Rothbard’s whole point in the very essay she keeps locked in her cabinet: the dollar was never an independent thing but a name for a weight of gold. Rothbard’s remedy was to redefine the dollar so that the gold covers it. In The Case Against the Fed he calculated that revaluing the Fed’s 260 million ounces at $1,555 an ounce would cover its $404 billion of liabilities in 1994. Run the same arithmetic on Shelton’s own numbers and you get about $9,200 an ounce, just to cover the currency. Shelton herself described an economist on a panel of AfD-linked advisers in Germany proposing exactly this move, at 35,000 per ounce.23 The obstacle is not arithmetic. It’s that the people who run the Treasury and the Fed have no intention of giving up the printing press.

And whose gold is it, anyway? Shelton calls it “our nation’s official gold reserves.” Rothbardians remember how the Treasury got it: FDR seized it from Americans in 1933, and the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 moved it to the Treasury.24 It’s loot, not a national heirloom.

What Shelton offers instead is gold as a leash on the state’s paper: a “monetary anchor” exerting “monetary discipline” through a gold-convertible Treasury security, her “Treasury Trust Bonds,” which she was careful to call her personal proposal and not Treasury policy.25 Note what this is: a way to make federal debt more attractive to lenders. Rothbard wanted to abolish the Fed and separate money from the state.26 Shelton wants to help the Treasury borrow. And we have seen this movie. The federal government sold Liberty Bonds payable in gold coin, then repudiated the gold clauses in 1933. In Perry v. United States, the Supreme Court held the repudiation unconstitutional—and then held that the bondholder had shown no loss he could recover.27 Even Jeffrey Hummel, in a mostly respectful review of her book, doubts such bonds would be issued or honored.28 Gold clause, meet the state.

Her larger vision has always been Bretton Woods redux—the very system Salerno says she confuses with the classical gold standard. Her “big dream,” she told the Financial Times in 2019, is a new Bretton Woods–style conference: “if it takes place at Mar-a-Lago, that would be great.” Rothbard, as Murphy reminds us, thought a world of fiat currencies at fixed exchange rates was even worse than one at floating rates.29

The same Cato Journal article that introduced Treasury Trust Bonds also floated a “Universal Gold Reserve Bank” with “the potential to become a sort of global monetary authority.”30 A world central bank, but with gold. Just what Rothbard always wanted.

5. Milei, Again

Shelton celebrated Milei’s election, his claim that Rothbard shaped his thinking, his cloned dog named Murray, and his April 2024 boast: “We are fulfilling Rothbard’s dream.”31 Rothbard’s dream apparently includes a central bank that is still in business and a bailout from the U.S. Treasury. In October 2025, the Treasury—Scott Bessent’s Treasury, Shelton’s current employer—finalized a $20 billion currency swap line with Argentina’s central bank and bought pesos directly, ahead of Argentina’s midterm elections, after Bessent had pledged the Exchange Stabilization Fund to the cause.32 PFS writers have been documenting the gap between Milei’s Rothbardian rhetoric and his record for some time: a central bank preserved and strengthened, more IMF borrowing, stubborn inflation, and more.33 After Huerta de Soto in March, that makes two Milei boosters at Mises Institute podiums in Rothbard’s centennial year.

6. The Greenspan Tease

Early on, Shelton mentioned an old interview in which Salerno expressed his shock at Greenspan’s sellout once he became Fed chairman, and promised to tell us about “my personal experience confronting Dr. Greenspan about just that issue.” I perked up. Here comes the tea. The payoff: when Greenspan refused to let her quote his 1966 essay “Gold and Economic Freedom” in her book, they had an “animated discussion” in his office. He assured her he still held those views, but pointed to his big leather chair and the screens full of bond and currency rates and explained that, now that he ran the central bank, his old writings could have financial implications. “He hoped I would understand,” she said, “and I kind of did.” He asked her to deliver the book wrapped in brown paper. Then he smiled.34 That isn’t a confrontation. It’s an apologia. It also sounds like a preview: Shelton now sits in a big chair of her own, her speech vetted by Treasury ethics lawyers, forbidden to discuss her work. Writing at mises.org in 2024, George Ford Smith compared her to Greenspan and concluded that she “should have stayed far away from the Fed.”35 She went to the Treasury instead.

Contrast Rothbard, who saw in 1987 that Greenspan’s real qualification was that he “can be trusted never to rock the establishment’s boat,” as David Gordon reminded mises.org readers just this June.36

7. “Trademark”?

Shelton said Greenspan “personally held the trademark” for “Gold and Economic Freedom.” She meant copyright.37 And she didn’t need his permission: quoting a published essay to discuss or criticize it is textbook fair use. As a published author, she knows this. Indeed, she quoted it at some length in this very speech.38 She refrained from quoting him at his behest, to please him. What the episode does show is copyright working as a censorship tool, here used by a powerful man to keep his own inconvenient words out of a gold advocate’s book. One more reason to abolish IP.39 No doubt mainstream Shelton is no more an opponent of copyright than she is of inflation, money manipulation, and the Fed.

8. Name-Dropping and Other Grating Bits

  • The humble-brags. The only other woman in her Hoover fellowship cohort was Condoleezza Rice. She had the same title as Milton Friedman, whose office was “just a few steps away,” and Friedman wrote her single-spaced letters. Pentagon war games. Greenspan sought her out after The Coming Soviet Crash. Some 80 Wall Street Journal op-eds. “Just over a 100,000 followers on X.” Book blurbs from Laffer, Forbes, Hanke, and Grant.40
  • The Soviet “prediction.” She told the audience that her Hoover research for The Coming Soviet Crash led her to “the rather startling conclusion at the time” that the Soviet Union was going bankrupt.41 Startling to whom? Not to anyone who has read Mises, who explained in 1920 why socialism cannot calculate.42 Hoppe’s A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism came out the same year as her book.43 To be fair, she was ahead of the mainstream: that same year, the Samuelson–Nordhaus textbook told students that the Soviet economy showed a socialist command economy “can function and even thrive.”44 But even FEE’s reviewer noted that the book hints at a Soviet collapse but “never comes right out and predicts it.”45 Her real point was that the West should not lend money to prop up a bankrupt state; asked on C-SPAN whether the U.S. should help finance the Soviet economy, she answered, “I think not.”46 Good advice. Now she designs bonds to make it easier for the U.S. Treasury to borrow.
  • She twice called Patrick Newman, Salerno’s coauthor on the new Rothbard book she says she displays in her Treasury office, “Patrick Newton.”47 Sounds like she’s really familiar with it.
  • She said “plenty of people” are already disappointed in her because “we haven’t yet abolished the Federal Reserve.” Who? She has never been for abolishing it.48
  • Europe. She spent several minutes on monetary talk among advisers to Germany’s AfD and pronounced that “Austrian school views were well represented,” Hayek-style currency competition included, though Rothbard rejected Hayek’s scheme to denationalize money. On whether Le Pen and the AfD are any good, the Treasury official’s verdict: “I’m not saying this is good or bad.”49
  • Credit where due: she told the Institute to keep her honorarium as a donation.50 So unlike Giuliani at FEE, this one was free. What a bargain.

9. Is the Mises Institute Going the Way of FEE?

FEE didn’t collapse after the Giuliani fiasco. It drifted. Nor was Giuliani its first misstep. In 1996, after The Freeman ran Hoppe’s review of The Failure of America’s Foreign Wars, which observed that Stalin had murdered millions before the war and Hitler comparatively few, a FEE trustee (Kirzner, I believe) resigned in protest, and FEE’s president, Hans Sennholz, fired the editors involved: Lawrence White, Robert Batemarco, and Robert Higgs.51 FEE has since removed the review from its site and, it appears, scrubbed Hoppe’s name from its author search.52 Today FEE is respectable, and doesn’t matter. Doug French has explained how this happens to movements.53 So: in 1996, FEE fired the editors who published Hoppe. In 2026, the Mises Institute removed Hoppe himself. Progress!

The Mises Institute won’t collapse either. As Hoppe observes, it sits on an endowment of more than $70 million, and nonprofits rarely implode; “with this endowment the Institute can limp along for decades,” almost regardless of what it does.54 I made the same forecast at the end of my own account of my years with the Institute: it will likely limp along, benefitting its staff and “providing some type of benefit to students and others, but less than it might.”55 The danger, then, is not collapse but the same drift that overtook FEE: a respectable, well-funded “free-market” outfit that invites establishment names to address its donors, applauds Milei, and removes Hoppe. Rothbard’s centennial deserved a keynote from someone who knows Rothbard’s work. Instead it got a supply-side Treasury official who thinks money measures value, wants gold to make Treasury debt easier to sell, says Milei is fulfilling Rothbard’s dream, and finds “taxation is theft” a bit leftist. Rothbard would not have been confused.

  1. “The Liberty Banquet,” advertisement, Ideas on Liberty (July 2002), issue pdf. [↩]
  2. Mark Skousen, “A Year at FEE,” MSKousen.com. [↩]
  3. J.H. Huebert, “A Great Institution in Freefall” (July 9, 2002; archive); Kinsella, “The Decline of FEE?,” StephanKinsella.com (July 9, 2002); idem, “The Decline of FEE–Part II: Schulman’s Reply,” StephanKinsella.com (July 17, 2002); Walter E. Block, “The Manifesto of Freedom,” LewRockwell.com (Aug. 2010); “Mark Skousen,” Wikipedia. [↩]
  4. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Milei Praised instead of Booed at Mises Institute,” Property and Freedom Blog (March 21, 2026). See also Fernando Chiocca, “The most Zionist president in the world is now the greatest Austro-libertarian hero of all time,” Property and Freedom Blog (March 24, 2026); Hoppe, “On Intellectual Integrity and What a Difference one Crook can Make,” Property and Freedom Blog (March 29, 2026); Oscar Grau, “The Downfall of the Spanish Armada of Austro-Libertarianism,” Property and Freedom Blog (May 26, 2026). For Hoppe’s earlier criticisms of Milei, see Hoppe, “Javier Milei” (PFS 2024), Property and Freedom Blog (Oct. 1, 2024); and “PFP290 | Hoppe: Considerations and Reflections of a Veteran Reactionary Libertarian (AERC 2025),” Property and Freedom Podcast (March 23, 2025). [↩]
  5. Hoppe, “Mises Institute: Quo Vadis?,” Property and Freedom Journal (March 25, 2026); idem, “Mises Institute: Quo Vadis?: Postscript,” Property and Freedom Journal (April 17, 2026); Kinsella, “Hoppe Removed as Mises Institute Senior Distinguished Fellow,” Property and Freedom Blog (April 1, 2026); idem, “My Years with the Mises Institute,” Property and Freedom Journal (May 2, 2026). See also León Isidoro, “The Writing on the Wall with Milei,” Property and Freedom Blog (April 16, 2026). [↩]
  6. “Supporters Summit 2026,” Mises Institute (San Antonio, Texas, Oct. 22–24, 2026). [↩]
  7. Judy Shelton, “100 Years of Rothbard: His Bequest for the Future,” Mises Institute Supporters Summit 2026, San Antonio, Texas (recorded Oct. 24, 2026; posted Nov. 7, 2026). Timestamps below are from a transcript of the video. On her appointment, see U.S. Department of the Treasury, “United States Department of the Treasury Announces New Appointment” (Oct. 9, 2026). [↩]
  8. As I noted in my Preface to Rothbard at 100, some critics—and even admirers—of the Mises Institute have suggested that it should be called the Rothbard Institute, so obviously are its members and supporters influenced by Rothbard, who was Mises’s most important student and expositor and the Institute’s primary intellectual force from its founding in 1982 until his death in 1995. The same goes for the PFS, which is “a sort of Rothbard Institute under a different name.” Kinsella, “Preface,” in Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Houston: Papinian Press and The Saif House, 2026); see also Sean Gabb, “Rothbard: An Appreciation from England,” in ibid. [↩]
  9. Kinsella, Who Is Running LewRockwell.com? Hoppe and Others on LRC, Back When Rockwell Ran It, PFS Blog (Nov. 1, 2026). [↩]
  10. Shelton, “100 Years of Rothbard,” at 15:09–15:38. [↩]
  11. Tho Bishop, “Senate Attacks Judy Shelton for Sin of Being Outside the Mainstream,” Power & Market (Feb. 13, 2020); Robert P. Murphy, “The Econ Establishment Teams Up To Denounce Judy Shelton,” Mises Wire (Aug. 8, 2019). [↩]
  12. Joseph T. Salerno, “Fed Nominee Judy Shelton Wants Sound Money—and Lots of It,” Mises Wire (2019; the page now shows Jan. 21, 2020). [↩]
  13. Jeff Deist, “Judy Shelton’s Remarkable Attack on the Fed,” Power & Market (June 11, 2019). [↩]
  14. “In Gold We Trust? Ex-Trump Economic Advisor Makes the Case for a Dollar Reset,” Fox Business (n.d.), linking the video “Judy Shelton: I’m not part of #EndTheFed.” [↩]
  15. Murphy, “The Econ Establishment Teams Up To Denounce Judy Shelton.” See also Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, “Judy Shelton: Good as Gold?,” Econlib (May 1, 2026), rejecting her “currency manipulation” diagnosis and her call for tariffs. [↩]
  16. U.S. Department of the Treasury, “United States Department of the Treasury Announces New Appointment.” [↩]
  17. Not a big surprise, I guess. See my criticisms of their abysmal IP stance: Kinsella, “Shughart’s Defense of IP,” C4SIF (Jan. 29, 2010); idem, “Classical Liberals, Libertarians, Anarchists and Others on Intellectual Property,” C4SIF (Oct. 2015); idem, “Independent Institute on the ‘Benefits’ of Intellectual Property Protection,” C4SIF (Feb. 15, 2016); idem, “Speaking at APEE IP Panel in Guatemala,” C4SIF (April 2025); idem, “Reason, Big Pharma, and Patents,” C4SIF (Feb. 2026). [↩]
  18. U.S. Department of the Treasury, “United States Department of the Treasury Announces New Appointment”; National Endowment for Democracy, About. See also Center for Renewing America, Primer: The National Endowment for Democracy and an NGO Ecosystem Actively Undermining America by CRA Staff  (Feb. 7, 2025); Militarist Monitor, National Endowment for Democracy (March 2, 2012); and, from Taco, Barbara Conry, Loose Cannon: The National Endowment for Democracy, Cato Institute Foreign Policy Briefing No. 27 (Nov. 8, 1993). [↩]
  19. Bishop, “Senate Attacks Judy Shelton”; Bishop, “Shelton Derangement Syndrome: Which Republicans Will Side with Fed Groupthink?,” Power & Market (July 29, 2020). [↩]
  20. Shelton, “100 Years of Rothbard,” at 26:41–27:43. Ludwig von Mises, “On the Measurement of Value,” in The Theory of Money and Credit, H.E. Batson, trans. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, [1912] 1980), p. 51; Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, 3d rev. ed., J. Kahane, trans. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), p. 99; see also Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Scholar’s ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 1998), pp. 96, 122, 205, 211, 218, 286. See Kinsella, “Money Prices Not a Measure of Value,” StephanKinsella.com (July 21, 2025); idem, “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023), ch. 15, text at n.35; idem, “The Problem with Intellectual Property,” C4SIF (May 2025), n.49. [↩]
  21. Shelton, “100 Years of Rothbard,” at 46:40–47:41; Murray N. Rothbard, “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,” Left and Right 1, no. 1 (Spring 1965): 4–22; see also Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “A Realistic Libertarianism,” LewRockwell.com (Sept. 30, 2013), reprinted in Hoppe, Getting Libertarianism Right (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2018), ch. 1; Kinsella, “Classic Hoppe on the Realistic Right vs. the Egalitarian Left,” Property and Freedom Blog (June 9, 2026); Hoppe, “Where the Right Goes Wrong,” Rothbard-Rockwell Report (April 1997): 7–14, reprinted in Property and Freedom Blog (July 17, 2026). [↩]
  22. Shelton, “100 Years of Rothbard,” at 12:36–13:46, 19:25–19:38, 20:52–21:12. For the boilerplate, see the bottom of the site. [↩]
  23. Shelton, “100 Years of Rothbard,” at 28:27–30:27, 35:43–36:53. Murray N. Rothbard, “The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar,” in Leland B. Yeager, ed., In Search of a Monetary Constitution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962); Rothbard, The Case Against the Fed (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 1994), p. 149, as quoted in “Section 210: Remonetizing the Treasury’s Gold,” Power & Market. See also “Rothbard’s Bracing Plan for Gold,” Mises Wire. [↩]
  24. Shelton, “100 Years of Rothbard,” at 29:16–29:27; Executive Order 6102 (April 5, 1933); Gold Reserve Act of 1934. [↩]
  25. Shelton, “100 Years of Rothbard,” at 30:36–31:14; Judy Shelton, “Gold and Government,” Cato Journal 32, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 333–47, at 333, 337–41. [↩]
  26. Rothbard also wanted the federal debt repudiated, not made easier to sell: repudiation, he argued, is the one way to reduce the debt “without a concomitant increase in fiscal coercion,” and it would make future government borrowing harder. See Rothbard, The Case Against the Fed, pp. 145–46 (proposing to abolish the Fed and return to gold); Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market, Scholar’s ed., 2nd ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2009), p. 1028; Rothbard, “Frank Chodorov: R.I.P.,” in Left, Right, and the Prospects for Liberty (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2010), pp. 359–64, at 361 (originally in Left and Right [Winter 1967]: 3–8, at 5); Rothbard, “Repudiating the National Debt,” Chronicles (June 1992): 49–52, reprinted in Mises Daily (July 9, 2012); see also Kinsella, “Lowering Taxes Without Spending Cuts,” StephanKinsella.com (Nov. 8, 2024); idem, “Unlike Milei, and per Rothbard, Repudiate the Debt!,” StephanKinsella.com (Feb. 8, 2026), adapted from Hoppe, “Introduction,” in Rothbard at 100. [↩]
  27. Perry v. United States, 294 U.S. 330 (1935); see also Norman v. Baltimore & Ohio R.R. Co., 294 U.S. 240 (1935). [↩]
  28. Hummel, “Judy Shelton: Good as Gold?” [↩]
  29. “Fed Candidate Shelton Slams Central Bank’s ‘Soviet’ Power over Markets,” Financial Times (May 2019), reprinted by GATA; Salerno, “Fed Nominee Judy Shelton Wants Sound Money—and Lots of It”; Murphy, “The Econ Establishment Teams Up To Denounce Judy Shelton,” discussing Rothbard’s essay “Back to Fixed Exchange Rates.” [↩]
  30. Shelton, “Gold and Government,” at 343–44. [↩]
  31. Shelton, “100 Years of Rothbard,” at 32:29–33:31. [↩]
  32. “US Buys Argentine Pesos, Finalizes $20 Billion Currency Swap,” Associated Press (Oct. 9, 2025); Rodrigo Campos, David Lawder, and Bhargav Acharya, “Trump Boosts Argentina’s Milei with $20 Billion Lifeline as US Buys Pesos,” Reuters (Oct. 9, 2025). See also Hoppe, “Milei in Madrid – Again, Messing up….,” Property and Freedom Blog (Oct. 25, 2026). [↩]
  33. See Kinsella, “Milei, “libertarian” IP fascist?,” Property and Freedom Blog (March 18, 2026); Saifedean Ammous, “Javier Milei’s Austrian Scam By the Numbers,” Property and Freedom Blog (May 18, 2026); Fernando Chiocca, “Rothbardianism at Rothbard’s Centenary,” Property and Freedom Blog (July 1, 2026); Kinsella, “Argentina: 2.1% monthly CPI rise after 3 years of “Misesian” economics,” Property and Freedom Blog (Aug. 13, 2026); Tom DiLorenzo, “Milei “hearts” the IMF and embraces Keynesian Demand Management,” Property and Freedom Blog (Nov. 5, 2026). [↩]
  34. Shelton, “100 Years of Rothbard,” at 14:22–15:04, 38:07–43:03. [↩]
  35. George Ford Smith, “Judy Shelton’s Lasting Legacies,” Mises Wire (May 27, 2024). [↩]
  36. Murray N. Rothbard, “Alan Greenspan: A Minority Report,” The Free Market 5, no. 8 (Aug. 1987), quoted in David Gordon, “Greenspan: The Great Opportunist,” Friday Philosophy (June 26, 2026). See also Kinsella, “Alan Greenspan, RIP,” Property and Freedom Blog (June 22, 2026). [↩]
  37. See Kinsella, “IP Proponents Do Not Even Know the Difference Between Patent, Copyright, Trademark …,” C4SIF (Dec. 11, 2025). [↩]
  38. Shelton, “100 Years of Rothbard,” at 38:54–41:06. Alan Greenspan, “Gold and Economic Freedom,” The Objectivist (July 1966), reprinted in Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1967), pp. 101–07; 17 U.S.C. § 107. [↩]
  39. See Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2008). [↩]
  40. Shelton, “100 Years of Rothbard,” at 7:14–9:57, 11:21–11:43, 17:00–17:57, 38:20–38:33. [↩]
  41. Shelton, “100 Years of Rothbard,” at 8:21–8:52; Judy Shelton, The Coming Soviet Crash: Gorbachev’s Desperate Pursuit of Credit in Western Financial Markets (New York: Free Press, 1989). [↩]
  42. Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, S. Adler, trans. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 1990; originally published in German in 1920). [↩]
  43. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics (Boston: Kluwer, 1989). [↩]
  44. Paul A. Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, Economics, 13th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), p. 837, quoted in Mark Skousen, “The Perseverance of Paul Samuelson’s Economics,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 11, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 137–52. Yes, that Skousen. [↩]
  45. Lawrence Person, “Book Review: The Coming Soviet Crash,” The Freeman (Sept. 1, 1990). [↩]
  46. “The Coming Soviet Crash,” C-SPAN Booknotes (April 9, 1989). [↩]
  47. Shelton, “100 Years of Rothbard,” at 19:56–20:46; Joseph T. Salerno and Patrick Newman, Murray N. Rothbard: The Making of an Austrian Economist (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2026). [↩]
  48. Shelton, “100 Years of Rothbard,” at 21:43–22:03; Deist, “Judy Shelton’s Remarkable Attack on the Fed.” [↩]
  49. Shelton, “100 Years of Rothbard,” at 33:31–37:25; David Gordon, The Essential Rothbard, ch. 6, discussing Rothbard’s 1985 essay “The Case for a Genuine Gold Dollar.” [↩]
  50. Shelton, “100 Years of Rothbard,” at 18:46–19:17. [↩]
  51. Kinsella, “Day of the Long Knives,” Property and Freedom Blog (July 14, 2026; originally StephanKinsella.com, June 15, 2009, and LRC Blog, May 20, 2004); idem, “Foundation for Economic Excitement,” StephanKinsella.com (May 2004). [↩]
  52. Kinsella, “Hoppe, Book Review, The Failure of America’s Foreign Wars (1996); and Day of the Long Knives (FEE),” Property and Freedom Blog (Oct. 28, 2026). [↩]
  53. Douglas E. French, When Movements Become Rackets and Other Swindles: The PFS Trilogy, Stephan Kinsella, ed. (Houston: Papinian Press and Property and Freedom Society, 2025); see PFS books. [↩]
  54. Hoppe, “Mises Institute: Quo Vadis?” [↩]
  55. Kinsella, “My Years with the Mises Institute,” “Conclusion: A Hope and a Forecast.” [↩]
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A Life in Liberty Bookstream: 14. The Pope of Libertarianism — Sean Gabb

by on November 12, 2026

Hoppe A Life in Liberty, coverIn 2024, the Property and Freedom Society published A Life in Liberty: Liber Amicorum in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Jörg Guido Hülsmann and Stephan Kinsella, eds. (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2024), on the occasion of Professor Hoppe’s 75th birthday on Sept. 2, 2024.

Most of the the pieces were not published in HTML text form as separate articles; we will be posting them in this Bookstream. The Preface was republished in the inaugural post in this Bookstream: A Life in Liberty Bookstream: Preface — Hülsmann and Kinsella. Links to the remaining chapters may be found at the book’s landing page here. Here’s the next entry—

[continue reading…]

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Kinsella on the Conflict Between AI and Copyright: World Liberty Summit 2026–Bolivia

by on November 11, 2026

My talk on AI and copyright at the Tenth Annual World Liberty Summit in La Paz, Bolivia, is now available as episode 505 of the Kinsella on Liberty Podcast.

From Stephan Kinsella, “KOL505 | The Conflict Between AI and Copyright: World Liberty Summit 2026–Bolivia,” Kinsella on Liberty Podcast (Nov. 11, 2026):

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 505.

As noted in Kinsella Lecturing at World Liberty Summit 2026–Bolivia: “Conflict between AI and Copyright” and “Private law and the Universal Principles of Liberty”, I am participating in this event:

The Tenth Annual World Liberty Summit 2026 (Nov. 10 and 11, 2026), organized by the think tank Sociedad de la Libertad (SDL Latam, @SDLPeru), based in Lima, Peru. This year’s Summit will be held in La Paz, Bolivia. The general theme is the future of anarcho-capitalism and the State in the 21st century.

Last night (Nov. 10, 2026) I spoke on “The Conflict Between AI and Copyright” on the Technology Panel. My speech (including Spanish translation) is below. [continue reading…]

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“The Great Betrayal”

by on November 11, 2026

Tucker Carlson has put together a collection of video clips showing how Trump has done exactly the opposite of every single one of his main campaign promises.  Boobus Americanus, which is what H.L. Mencken called the American electorate, was not entirely fooled by it as the recent election results show.

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Hoppe and the Mises Seminar, Sydney (2011)

by on November 10, 2026

We previously posted, at Hoppe and the Australian Mises Seminar, about professor Hoppe’s appearance at this seminar in 2011. We repost this information now that additional videos from the seminar have been identified.

Professor Hoppe was the keynote speaker at the the Australian Mises Seminar, 25-26th November, 2011, held in a private club in the Sydney CBD. (See Mises.org.au Historical Events—Mises Seminar 2011.) Various posts about the event (some links are bad or archived), and the videos released to date, are embedded below. See the complete set of videos linked at the Liberty Australia Youtube Playlist for the Mises Seminar 2011.

Note that the Seminar Guide (pdf archive; local pdf) is a beautifully produced, 108-page programme, full of nice pictures and illustrations of Mises, Rothbard, and others, inspiring quotes, and an overview of the seminar. The main reason for its length is that it contains “Pre-Seminar Reading” including text of: [continue reading…]

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New Book: Shepard Humphries, The Consent Principle

by on November 10, 2026

Shepard Humphries, a.k.a. “Shepard the Voluntaryist” (one of my new Wyoming neighbors) has a new book out: The Consent Principle: The Moral Line Between Freedom and Force (2026), available on Kindle and in paperback.

The book’s thesis is simple: any human interaction can be judged by one question. Was there genuine, voluntary agreement? Humphries applies that test to laws, institutions, and relationships, and he applies it consistently, with no carve-outs for the reader’s favorite causes. Along the way he covers the nonaggression principle, self-ownership, political authority, “manufactured consent,” spontaneous order, and voluntary alternatives to the state. He builds the argument on what he calls his REELS framework (Reason, Empirical Evidence, Logic, and Scientific Methodology), and he writes for general readers, not just the already converted. [continue reading…]

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Ron Paul, “Will Republicans Learn Their Lesson from the ‘Disastrous’ Midterms?”

by on November 10, 2026

Ron Paul on the GOP’s midterm wipeout: voters noticed the broken promises on Iran, and the party won’t recover until it purges its neocons. From Ron Paul, “Will Republicans Learn Their Lesson from the ‘Disastrous’ Midterms?” LewRockwell.com (Nov. 10, 2026; originally published by the Ron Paul Institute, Nov. 9, 2026):

Politicians break campaign promises with hardly any hesitation and usually they get away with it. Americans have come to put up with broken promises for so long, they hardly even seem to notice. Last week, however, voters noticed. They showed the Republican party just how angry they were over President Trump’s decision to attack Iran, and how angry they were with Congress for abandoning its Constitutional authority over matters of war and peace.

The results were dramatic. Voters even turned Texas blue, as Democrats took firm control of both the House and Senate. …

… The pain will continue until the Party finally rids itself of the neocons and warmongers and returns to its roots as exemplified in the past by the late Sen. Robert Taft and in the present by Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Joe Kent, Tucker Carlson, and many others who genuinely care about peace and liberty.

Read more>>

Related

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Katz, Hierarchy, Oligarchy, and Democracy

by on November 10, 2026

Ira Katz, “Hierarchy, Oligarchy, and Democracy,” IK’s Substack (Nov. 6, 2026), reprinted at LewRockwell.com (Nov. 10, 2026):

Illustration from Katz’s article

Everyone lives within hierarchies. They are natural and necessary. This is obvious in our daily working lives. This short video is good at explaining hierarchies in organizational structure, Are Hierarchies Evil? | Jacob Morgan. Thinking way back in my life, I recall playing time on the high school baseball team as my first overt hierarchical experience. I am amazed that as a young 24 year-old engineer I had the foresight to keep a copy of the organization chart of Y-12 ENGINEERING BOMB SEARCH COORDINATORS shown below and the insight that this would be the highpoint of my organizational life. My managers did not even know what the bomb search coordinator was supposed to do. I might have been the only person to investigate the library of notebooks with procedures to find the page that explained that I, and my team, where to stay in the building to look for the bomb after an alarm was sounded. I did exhibit my leadership potential in the unprecedented practice of holding an occasional meeting where we ate the best donuts I could find.

[continue reading…]

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Crack-Up Scholarship: Slobodian on Hoppe, Rothbard, Deist, Model, and the PFS

by on November 10, 2026

The historian Quinn Slobodian has built a career out of discovering that libertarians are secretly what his colleagues already assumed they were. His 2023 book Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy is ostensibly about “zones”: free ports, charter cities, tax havens, Liechtenstein, Dubai, Honduras, the metaverse. Their sin, he says, is that they are part of “a decades-long effort to pierce holes in the social fabric, to opt out, secede, and defect from the collective.”1 Defecting from the collective. The horror. [continue reading…]

  1. Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2023), Introduction, pp. 5–6. [↩]
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Saifedean Ammous vs. MMTers Hickel and Tcherneva: What Is Money?

by on November 10, 2026

From Saifedean Ammous’s The Bitcoin Standard Podcast, Ep. 351. What Is Money? Debating MMTers.

The Doha Debates hosts Saifedean to debate the nature of money with two MMT economists, Jason Hickel and Pavlina Tcherneva. Many thanks to the Doha Debates for hosting this great discussion, and I strongly recommend you check out their Youtube channel for many interesting debates. @DohaDebates

[continue reading…]

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Kinsella Lecturing at World Liberty Summit 2026–Bolivia: “Conflict between AI and Copyright” and “Private law and the Universal Principles of Liberty”

by on November 9, 2026

[StephanKinsella cross-post]

Update: my first talk is now podcast at KOL505 | The Conflict Between AI and Copyright: World Liberty Summit 2026–Bolivia.

The Tenth Annual World Liberty Summit 2026 (Nov. 10 and 11, 2026), organized by the think tank Sociedad de la Libertad (SDL Latam, @SDLPeru), based in Lima, Peru. This year’s Summit will be held in La Paz, Bolivia. Th general theme is the future of anarcho-capitalism and the State in the 21st century.

I will be providing two short 15-minute lectures (with Spanish translation interspersed): “The Conflict Between AI and Copyright” (Technology Panel, Nov. 10, 20.15 hrs Bolivia; 6:15pm Central Time) and “Private Law and the Universal Principles of Liberty” (Anarcho-Capitalism Panel: The Future of Anarcho-Capitalism and the State in the 21st Century; Nov. 11, 20.15 hrs Bolivia; 6:15pm Central Time).

See Sociedad de la Libertad, por su quinto aniversario, anuncia la semana de la libertad del 6 al 11 de noviembre: Abordan el futuro del anarcocapitalismo y el Estado en el siglo XXI en la X Cumbre Mundial de la Libertad Bolivia 2026.Apoyar una ONG (To mark its fifth anniversary, the Society for Liberty (Sociedad de la Libertad) announces “Liberty Week,” taking place from November 6 to 11. The event will explore the future of anarcho-capitalism and the State in the 21st century as part of the 10th World Liberty Summit (Bolivia 2026).

The Summit is free; donations are accepted. See Inscripción al Evento «El Futuro del Anarcocapitalismo y el Estado en el Siglo XXI». [continue reading…]

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PFP361 | Andreas Tögel, The Meaning of Left and Right in Modern Times (PFS 2026)

by on November 9, 2026

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 361.

This talk is from the recently-concluded PFS 2026 Twentieth Annual Meeting (Sep. 17–22, 2026, Bodrum, Turkey).

Andreas Tögel (Austria), The Meaning of Left and Right in Modern Times.

Why do the far left and the far right keep turning up in “unnatural alliances,” from Greece’s left–right coalition government to joint votes in the European Parliament? Tögel traces the confusion to the flat, one-dimensional left–right spectrum and its “horseshoe” variant. Drawing on Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s catalog of leftist thinking and on Gramsci’s strategy of cultural hegemony, he argues that a two-dimensional scheme shows communism and National Socialism to be siblings in the same totalitarian quadrant, with today’s woke, degrowth left as their heirs. Or, as Kuehnelt-Leddihn put it: “Right is right and left is wrong.”

An edited transcript is appended below.

[continue reading…]

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A Life in Liberty Bookstream: 13. My Dinner with Professor Hoppe — Gregory Morin

by on November 9, 2026

Hoppe A Life in Liberty, coverIn 2024, the Property and Freedom Society published A Life in Liberty: Liber Amicorum in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Jörg Guido Hülsmann and Stephan Kinsella, eds. (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2024), on the occasion of Professor Hoppe’s 75th birthday on Sept. 2, 2024.

Most of the the pieces were not published in HTML text form as separate articles; we will be posting them in this Bookstream. The Preface was republished in the inaugural post in this Bookstream: A Life in Liberty Bookstream: Preface — Hülsmann and Kinsella. Links to the remaining chapters may be found at the book’s landing page here. Here’s the next entry—

[continue reading…]

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Thomas Jacob Interview on a Stateless Society According to Hoppe

by on November 8, 2026

PFS member Thomas Jacob of Switzerland, editor of Hoppe Unplugged, initiator of the Swiss Gold Coin Initiative, and creator of OboxPlanet, was recently interviewed by Benjamin Mudlack on the German YouTube channel Der Ökonomische IQ. See: Thomas Jacob, interview by Benjamin Mudlack, “A Stateless Society According to Hoppe! But How?” [“Staatenlose Gesellschaft nach Hoppe! Aber wie?”], Der Ökonomische IQ (YouTube, Nov. 5, 2026; 1:00:45; in German, with English auto-dubbed audio and subtitles).

The interview is in German, but English speakers can follow along: YouTube provides an English auto-dubbed audio track (click the gear icon, then “Audio track”) and English subtitles (the CC button).

[continue reading…]

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45 Illinois Counties and Counting: Downstate Votes to Explore Secession

by on November 6, 2026

Bret Buganski, “Illinois secession movement grows as 12 more counties back split,” Fox 32 Chicago (Nov. 4, 2026).

On Tuesday, voters in twelve more Illinois counties, along with several Adams County townships, approved nonbinding referendums to explore separating from the state, bringing the total to 45 counties since 2020. The organizers’ grievance is simple and familiar: as one of them put it, “The state legislature tends to not take us into consideration when they’re making their laws.” The votes are only advisory, of course; carving a new state out of Illinois would require the consent of the Illinois General Assembly and Congress—that is, permission from the very rulers these voters want to leave. And Alberta’s roughly three-to-one vote last month to remain in Canada is a reminder that such movements do not win overnight. Still, PFS readers should welcome every one of these votes, for as Hoppe has long argued, in Democracy: The God That Failed and elsewhere, smaller political units must compete for residents and capital and so tend to be less exploitative than large ones. Each referendum chips away at the notion that existing borders are sacred and helps normalize peaceful exit from political arrangements nobody consented to. Who knows—someday the rest of Illinois may simply leave Cook County to govern itself.

Related:

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Pozeram, The Wreck

by on November 5, 2026

Len D. Pozeram, “The Wreck,” Libertarian Alliance (UK) ().

I am going to enjoy this, and I won’t pretend otherwise. I stayed up till nearly three watching the returns on the lobby TV, with a pot of coffee and a trucker who had come in off the interstate and couldn’t sleep either. When the networks called Kansas for a Methodist preacher, he laughed so hard he spilled his cup over the counter. I mopped it up without a word of complaint. It was the best night of television I have watched in years. For a decade Donald Trump told us we would get tired of winning. Last night the Republican Party found out what the other thing feels like, and it found out in places where it had forgotten that losing was possible. [continue reading…]

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Milei “hearts” the IMF and embraces Keynesian Demand Management

by on November 5, 2026
Juan Marcos Pollio, “IMF backs Milei government measures to boost growth, domestic demand,” Buenos Aires Herald (Oct. 29, 2026): “The Executive Board is expected to approve the review in early December, paving the way for a US$900 million disbursement”
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Did Trump Just Admit Failure for the First Time in His Life?

by on November 5, 2026

Trump’s Republican party was wiped out in the mid-term congressional elections, going from a majority in the House and Senate to huge majorities for the opposing Demo-Bolshevik party.  They also lost almost all the gubernatorial races and the government of Texas, long considered the most conservative state in America, became totally controlled by Demo-Bolshevik party politicians, including the governor and attorney general of the state.  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis described it as a “near extinction” of the Republican party.

Vice President J.D. Vance huddled with the Republican party “pollsters” immediately after the results were in.  He announced what they told him:  The party was wiped out in the election because millions of voters were so supremely pissed off that Trump promised to end the Middle East wars while starting a new one with Iran, and had been revealed to be a bootlicking, subservient tool of Israeli billionaires posing as “American political donors.”  He put Israel first and America last, in other words.  These of course are my words and not Vance’s but he said the exact same thing in less colorful language.

As for Trump himself, he said he agreed with Vance about the war, but then announced that he would do the same thing all over again.  He also ludicrously claimed that he had nothing to do with the election results since he himself was not running.  If he was, he said, the results would have been the opposite.  And to think that he used to call Joe Biden “demented.”

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A Life in Liberty Bookstream: 12. Principled — Jeffrey F. Barr

by on November 5, 2026

Hoppe A Life in Liberty, coverIn 2024, the Property and Freedom Society published A Life in Liberty: Liber Amicorum in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Jörg Guido Hülsmann and Stephan Kinsella, eds. (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2024), on the occasion of Professor Hoppe’s 75th birthday on Sept. 2, 2024.

Most of the the pieces were not published in HTML text form as separate articles; we will be posting them in this Bookstream. The Preface was republished in the inaugural post in this Bookstream: A Life in Liberty Bookstream: Preface — Hülsmann and Kinsella. Links to the remaining chapters may be found at the book’s landing page here. Here’s the next entry: ch. 12, “Principled,” by Jeffrey F. Barr. See also Jeff’s entry in the previous Hoppe Festshrift, “A Student’s Appreciation of Professor Hoppe” and “The Demolition: Jeff Barr’s Memories of Hoppe as Teacher.” See also idem, “The Last Lecture,” ch. 2 in Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Papinian Press and The Saif House, 2026), and “PFP252 | Bonus: Murray Rothbard as a Teacher: The UNLV Years—A Panel with Rothbard’s Former Students (AERC2023),” Property and Freedom Podcast (Oct. 2, 2023).

[continue reading…]

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Bylund, “Austrian Economics and Knowledge”

by on November 4, 2026

[Cross-posted at StephanKinsella.com]

And update to Bylund’s Typology of Knowledge: Physical vs. Catallactic; General vs. Applied:

Interesting new paper: Per L. Bylund, “Austrian Economics and Knowledge,” Q. J. Austrian Econ. 29, no. 2 (2026): 1-24.

Abstract: This article develops a typology of knowledge in economics, drawing on the works of Carl Menger and F. A. Hayek, to clarify how different types of knowledge affect production, coordination, and entrepreneurial profit. It organizes economically relevant knowledge along two axes—the physical world versus the catallactic world, on the one hand, and general versus applied, on the other—and adds a temporal dimension to distinguish knowledge problems from uncertainty. The framework reveals that while physical-world knowledge sets the boundaries of what can be produced, catallactic-world knowledge guides what should be produced and how. The article applies this typology to Austrian theories of the market process, showing that uncertainty arises when value knowledge is unavailable at the time of action and that entrepreneurial profit stems from bearing this uncertainty rather than from superior knowledge. This conceptual separation advances the understanding of economic causality and the distinct functions of knowledge in market processes.

See also Kinsella, “Bylund’s Typology of Knowledge: Physical vs. Catallactic; General vs. Applied,” PFS Blog (Aug. 13, 2026).

I steered Claude to write some commentary on this–have not reviewed yet completely so might not agree with it all but it has good references to other related writing of mine. [continue reading…]

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Midterm Elections in America, Then and Now

by on November 4, 2026

From PFSer John Leask,”Midterm Elections in America, Then and Now,” Madness of Crowds (Nov. 4, 2026).

 

Well, the midterms in the United States are finally done. And as predicted by many, the “midterm penalty” or “midterm curse” played out once again.

Even though I follow politics pretty closely, I’ve never cared much about the midterms, particularly since I became aware that libertarian politics (free market capitalism, peace, and liberty) would remain inconsequential in the short-term, mid-term, and perhaps long-term. This year, however, the barrage of intrusive ads and other communications really did force me to pay a little attention. On top of that, the ever-so-disappointing 2nd Trump term had me curious enough to wonder just how widespread that view has become. Before getting to the 2026 results, though, it’s worth covering the history of midterm elections. [continue reading…]

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Philosophical Notes, No. 1: The Alibi Principle or Popper’s Falsificationism Falsified

by on November 3, 2026

The alibi principle: two clocks show the same time above two doorways; a man stands in one, while his dashed outline in the other is crossed out.Beginning herewith, at irregular intervals and in unsystematic order, I am planning to publish occasional philosophical notes, some brief, some a bit longer, but all inspired by the intellectual tradition of rationalist philosophy and critical of the rival tradition of empiricism and skepticism. [continue reading…]

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Tucker and Brownstone: The Fauci Diaries: Three Volumes, Fully Indexed

by on November 3, 2026

The Fauci Diaries: Three Volumes, Fully Indexed

  November 3, 2026

For more than two decades, Anthony Fauci kept a private diary. It was discovered by the new administration more than two years after Fauci had resigned. The contents were treated as private. In fact, the diaries were a public record because he wrote them on government computers with the assistance of staff of the National Institutes of Health.

To be sure, Fauci never intended them to be seen in this form. They were notes toward an autobiography. He left a copy behind because of public-records preservation requirements. Once they had been discovered, they went through various channels and finally landed in the offices of Senator Rand Paul, who in 2026 released them in four separate installments. [continue reading…]

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Bhandari: The Third World’s Cargo-Cult Modernity

by on November 3, 2026

From long-time PFS member Jayant Bhandari, who spoke at PFS 2024 on “Understanding India”: Jayant Bhandari, “The Third World’s Cargo-Cult Modernity,” LewRockwell.com (Nov. 2, 2026).

The Third World’s Cargo-Cult Modernity

By

November 2, 2026

For most of my life, I have watched the Third World supposedly emerge. Roads seemed to improve, universities multiplied, incomes rose, smartphones appeared, elections became more elaborate, and Western technology penetrated ever more deeply. The euphemism “emerging markets” came into use, carrying within it the assumption that eventual emergence was somehow baked into the cake.

Yet modernization and civilization are not the same process.

The mistake is easy to make because civilization is most visible through its products. We see the airport, the university, the constitution, and the skyscraper. We assume that acquiring these things means acquiring the civilization that produced them. This assumption becomes particularly seductive if we regard human beings as blank slates and imagine that installing civilizational software in the Third World is merely a matter of education and the transplantation of Western institutions. [continue reading…]

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Call for Papers: Special Issue of the JLS: “Whither Libertarianism?”

by on November 2, 2026

[Cross-posted at StephanKinsella.com]

From Per Bylund, guest editor of an upcoming symposium issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, is announcing: “Call for Papers: Special Issue of the JLS: “Whither Libertarianism?”,” JLS Blog (Nov. 02, 2026).

Bylund1 sees the core issues as the meaning and application of the non-aggression principle amid thick-vs-thin debates, open-borders vs. property-rights views on immigration, principle vs. efficacy/utilitarianism (including in the Libertarian Party), assessments of Milei’s record, and some libertarians’ support for political Zionism (viewed as endorsing aggression and statism), plus related institutional failures (e.g., during COVID), progressive shifts, and alliances with the New Right or left that risk diluting radical libertarianism. This frames a call for philosophical clarification of where libertarianism is headed, focused on the NAP.

As he concluded his call for papers: [continue reading…]

  1.  Bylund’s Typology of Knowledge: Physical vs. Catallactic; General vs. Applied; The Austrian School Was Right Again: Abolish IP in the EU; Austrian Economics Center and Hayek Institute Support IP Socialism and 2026 World IP Day Coalition; “My Years with the Mises Institute,” n.106.  [↩]
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A Life in Liberty Bookstream: 11. A Series of Fortunate Events — Caner (Jay) Baykal

by on November 2, 2026

Hoppe A Life in Liberty, coverIn 2024, the Property and Freedom Society published A Life in Liberty: Liber Amicorum in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Jörg Guido Hülsmann and Stephan Kinsella, eds. (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2024), on the occasion of Professor Hoppe’s 75th birthday on Sept. 2, 2024.

Most of the the pieces were not published in HTML text form as separate articles; we will be posting them in this Bookstream. The Preface was republished in the inaugural post in this Bookstream: A Life in Liberty Bookstream: Preface — Hülsmann and Kinsella. Links to the remaining chapters may be found at the book’s landing page here. Here’s the next entry—

[continue reading…]

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2027 Annual Meeting of the PFS

As noted here, the 2026 Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society was recently held from Thursday, September 17, 2026 to Tuesday, September 22, 2026. Information on the 2027 meeting will be released in early 2027.

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“Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.” — Frédéric Bastiat

“Because the concept of property, for instance, is so basic that everyone seems to have some immediate understanding of it, most people never think about it carefully and can, as a consequence, produce at best a very vague definition. But starting from imprecisely stated or assumed definitions and building a complex network of thought upon them can lead only to intellectual disaster. For the original imprecisions and loopholes will then pervade and distort everything derived from them. To avoid this, the concept of property must first be clarified.” —Hans-Hermann Hoppe, TSC, ch. 2

The Property and Freedom Society (PFS; Facebook) stands for an uncompromising intellectual radicalism: for justly acquired private property, freedom of contract, freedom of association—which logically implies the right to not associate with, or to discriminate against—anyone in one's personal and business relations—and unconditional free trade. It condemns imperialism and militarism and their fomenters, and champions peace. It rejects positivism, relativism, and egalitarianism in any form, whether of "outcome" or "opportunity," and it has an outspoken distaste for politics and politicians. As such it seeks to avoid any association with the policies and proponents of interventionism, which Ludwig von Mises identified in 1946 as the fatal flaw in the plan of the many earlier and contemporary attempts by intellectuals alarmed by the rising tide of socialism and totalitarianism to found an anti-socialist ideological movement. Mises wrote: "What these frightened intellectuals did not comprehend was that all those measures of government interference with business which they advocated are abortive. ... There is no middle way. Either the consumers are supreme or the government."

(A more complete statement of our Principles can be found here.)

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