Writing at the Libertarian Alliance, Alan Bickley responds to a radical-right Counter-Currents essay defending “conservative socialism,” which argues that conservatives can’t defend both tradition and capitalism. Bickley accepts part of the diagnosis. He dislikes big corporations and enforced conformity, and he is conservative by temperament. But he rejects the remedy, a bigger State with a racial mission. Free exchange is not the problem, he argues. Booms and busts come from credit manipulation, and big business owes its dominance to State privileges: regulation, patents, monopolies, government procurement. He defends unlimited technological progress and says traditions should survive only through voluntary practice. He would abolish privileges first and let the welfare state shrink afterward.
He ends up calling himself a “radical liberal of the old sort,” in the line of Adam Smith, Hodgskin, Cobden and Bright, Auberon Herbert, and Benjamin Tucker, rather than an anarcho-capitalist, left-libertarian, or paleolibertarian.
I agree with much of this, especially on patents and on the State as the real threat to tradition. But I don’t accept that limited liability is a State-granted privilege. That is a long-running and friendly disagreement I’ve had with Sean Gabb and others in the LA orbit; see my PFS 2013 talk and other posts in the Related list below.
Here is the second of my occasional philosophical notes. Like the first, it presents a counterexample to Karl Popper’s falsificationism drawn from the work of the late German philosopher Peter Janich, and then considers its bearing on Ludwig von Mises’ account of the method of the natural sciences.
2. Popper Falsified Again: The Three-Plate Method and Ampliative Induction
Peter Janich further offers a second instructive counterexample to Popper’s falsificationist thesis.1 Planes as forms of surface pieces of objects (such as drawing planes) have the property that all planes (pair-wise) fit on each other, and can be rotated and moved at will. Here Popper’s condition for theories is fulfilled such that some All-statement is given, which refers to real objects.2 And yet, no one will release this theorem for falsification. Rather, if two objects that are considered plane do not fit together, at least one of these objects will be considered not a plane or flat one. The proposition in question, then, is true a priori. [continue reading…]
“All-statement” renders Popper’s Allsatz, which the English edition of his work calls a “strictly universal statement”: a statement about all things of a kind which, according to Popper, can never be verified by any finite number of observations but can be falsified by a single counter-instance, and which therefore qualifies as an empirical-scientific theory. See Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1959), §§ 6, 15. [↩]
I want it to be as clear as possible that anyone may use my work, past or future, without my permission. In short: you may copy, publish, translate, adapt, sell, or otherwise use any of my published work, for any purpose, without asking me, paying me, or crediting me.1
This site’s footer has long stated that its content is dedicated to the public domain under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. But a footer notice covers only this site, and as I’ve noted before, it’s not clear that CC0, or even CC-BY, is legally enforceable (see the posts listed below). So, out of an abundance of caution, I have also signed a written public domain dedication (pdf) covering all my works, wherever published, including works I publish in the future. [continue reading…]
On attribution as a matter of social convention rather than justice, see Kinsella, “Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe: An Indispensable Framework,” in Stephan Kinsella & Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds., Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment (Houston: Papinian Press and Property and Freedom Society, 2026), “Excursus: The Role of Ideas in Human Action.” See also David Koepsell, “A Question of Authorship? (attribution),” C4SIF Blog (Oct. 3, 2012). [↩]
An Austrian-school writer in China, Lao Gu, “Never Introduce an Inheritance Tax,” Ludwig von Mises Substack (Nov. 13, 2026), on why an inheritance tax is never just a tax on the rich: it raises almost nothing, and enforcing it means monitoring everyone’s gifts, trusts, and transactions for life.
I’d add a deeper problem: it blunts one of the most important limits on state power, one that lies outside the state and its constitution altogether. Most discussion of limits on state power focuses on internal, structural checks: vertical ones like federalism and enumerated powers, horizontal ones like separation of powers and bicameralism, a bill of rights, juries, due process, and so on. But the state has also always been checked by independent centers of power in civil society: a free press, the church, and wealthy, long-established families (dynasties) with the means, connections, and long time horizons to resist the state’s encroachments. As Hoppe observes, “The fortunes of the great families have dissipated through confiscatory taxes, during life and at the time of death.” An inheritance tax is designed to break up these independent fortunes every generation, so that nobody outside the state is ever rich or established enough to stand up to it. [continue reading…]
Earlier this month Ryan McMaken published “Jefferson, Secession, and ‘All Men Are Created Equal’,” Mises Wire (Nov. 3, 2026), which doubles as a hit piece on John C. Calhoun. Calhoun, we learn, “was an anti-Jeffersonian who disliked the Declaration of Independence,” whose chief concern besides the presidency was “crafting defenses for slavery and the planter class.” McMaken then serves up Calhoun’s most politically incorrect remarks on race, such as blacks being “utterly unqualified to possess liberty.” Shocking stuff, if you’ve never read Lincoln: “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”1 Somehow that never seems to disqualify the Great Emancipator, as Tom DiLorenzo has been pointing out for over twenty years. (Nor, it seems, does such talk disqualify Jefferson, whom McMaken lionizes, though Jefferson, like Calhoun, owned slaves, and suspected that blacks “are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”)2
Abraham Lincoln, Fourth Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Charleston, Illinois, Sept. 18, 1858, in National Park Service, “Fourth Debate: Charleston, Illinois.” [↩]
The original: Murray N. Rothbard, Education: Free and Compulsory (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999), with a preface by Kevin Ryan. It first appeared in the April and July–August 1971 issues of The Individualist, and was then revised and published by the Center for Independent Education in 1979; the Mises Institute edition restores Rothbard’s original text. The English version is available on Mises.org in HTML, PDF, and EPUB.
Rothbard shows that the problem with today’s school system is that “at every level, from financing to attendance, the system relies on compulsion instead of voluntary consent,” whereas a market-based system of schools “would adhere to a purely voluntary ethic.” He also traces the history of compulsory schooling in Europe and America. Fittingly, the Russian title renders Rothbard’s “free” not as бесплатное (“free of charge”) but as добровольное (“voluntary”), which is precisely his point. [continue reading…]
Mchangama documents how Argentina’s “libertarian” president, who told the UN that “we believe in freedom of speech for all,” has filed criminal defamation complaints against a string of journalists and commentators (several since dismissed by the courts). His government’s military security agency filed secrecy complaints against two reporters for recording in public areas of the Casa Rosada; Milei called them “DISGUSTING TRASH.” And this July he signed an emergency decree, bypassing Congress, empowering the government to deport or bar foreigners who direct “hate messages” at Argentines or “desecrate” national symbols. There’s supposedly an exception for “legitimate” criticism, but no guidance on how to tell the difference. As the government put it: “Anyone who attacks the Argentine Republic is not welcome in our country.” [continue reading…]
My talk on private law and the Universal Principles of Liberty at the Tenth Annual World Liberty Summit in La Paz, Bolivia, is now available as episode 506 of the Kinsella on Liberty Podcast.
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[continue reading…]
“The Liberty Banquet,” advertisement, Ideas on Liberty (July 2002), issue pdf. [↩]
In 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—
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.
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…]
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.
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…]
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…]
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.
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.
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…]
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
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.
@NSKinsella desde EEUU saluda a Sociedad de la Libertad (SDL Latam) por su V Aniversario
💥Mañana nuestros referentes del anarcocapitalismo ofrecerán potentes discursos
💛Feliz Dia de la LIBERTAD MUNDIAL
Un dia como hoy se fundó SDL LATAM en Lima
🖤VIVA EL ANARCOCAPITALISMO!💛 https://t.co/KKuIkkW0NA
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).
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.”
In 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—
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).
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:
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Small is Beautiful,” Property and Freedom Society (June 7, 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…]
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.
To donate with BITCOIN please use the address below. If you would like us to credit your payment (for dues, conference fees, etc.) please email Stephan Kinsella ([email protected]) when you make the bitcoin payment.
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“Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.” — FrédéricBastiat
“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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