So what's your general ex- uh, impression from, from these two events? Like, what's, what's your big takeaways?

Well, I'm-- so I'm, I'm home in Houston now.

Um, I, you know, my friends don't believe me when I say I don't like to travel, because this has been the bus-busiest travel year of my life.

Um, and I, I have this list, uh, this, this blog post I update on occasion on my website where I talk about what I'm gonna do next year.

And I always say, like, for, like, ten years I've said, "I just want to stop traveling for-- I want to take a year off, a gold strike." And, um, and I, and then, then I add one event and another one, they, they open up.

And, uh, my, my dad asked me the other day, "Why do you travel so much?" I said, "Well, that's where the things are." You know, um, I think I was lucky to travel more than most Southern middle-class Americans in my youth.

Uh, when I s-- around college, I started going to Europe with, with people, and so I've s- kind of seen the world.

[chuckles]

The Genius Act is legitimately genius, true to its name.

Hey, s- hey, speaking of, uh, the, the payment systems of some of these, uh, restaurants and shops, uh, I was at, uh, in Helsinki for this Bitcoin conference, uh, last week.

And, uh, the, the closing event was at a, uh, a restaurant which had, which had a floating saun- sauna.

And they claimed they took Bitcoin or, or Lightning that night.

And, uh, so I, I paid for my meal, the $20.

I happened to have a wallet of Satoshi which I'd never used, and I had, like, 50 bucks on it, so I paid for it, and it actually worked.

I was surprised.

Uh, Stephan Kinsella, what do you think about Donald Trump, his meme coin, and, uh, he didn't get a lot done, uh, for being the so-called crypto president.

Um, so I s- I suppose a good way to open this up would be what is like sort of the basic case that, uh, you make on why property is requiring scarcity? 'Cause that's not necessarily obvious to people, and it's not common to all sorts of property theories.

Right.

Um, yeah, I, um...

Okay, the best way to approach this.

Um, yeah, I think the case against intellectual property is pretty easy to see once you just explain it.

It took me a while to figure it out.

Um, you know, originally, I was i- interested in libertarianism and objectivism based on Ayn Rand's, um, you know, her kind of common sense and very principled view that the only way to violate rights is by physical force, and she says that explicitly.

What's, like, the strongest argument you've heard for it, and, like, what's the least strong argument you've heard in favor of IP, that is?

I think prior to that you had almost hoped that he had, uh, something more meaty there, but, uh, I listened to it too live and was like, "Yeah, that's a little more typical."

Yeah.

But, um, but I mean, I, I, uh, I was interested to h- You know, I've, I've been a little bit dismissive in the past of all these libertarian seasteading projects and Project Lifeboat because there's always one thing after the other, and they're usually vaporware or they're half the time hoaxes like Gallsville's Chili.

But, um, my impression is that, um...

I mean, look, I do all kinds of things over the world, um, and over the last decades and i- it's, it's, it's amazing to me that if you take the perspective of forty or fifty years ago, that we have such a rich international and multi-segmented liberty space.

Um, you got the Austrians like Mises Institute, you got the Libertarian Party, you've got, uh, like the Tom Woods crowd type people who are more pragmatic and, uh, life-oriented.

You've got, um, Hans Hoppe's Property and Freedom Society, which is like European American-oriented Austro-libertarians.

Could you tell me how close that comes to the mark?

I think prior to that you had almost hoped that he had, uh, something more meaty there, but, uh, I listened to it too live and was like, "Yeah, that's a little more typical."

Yeah.

But, um, but I mean, I, I, uh, I was interested to...

You know, I've, I've been a little bit dismissive in the past of all these libertarian seasteading projects and Project Lifeboat because there's always one thing after the other, and they're usually vaporware or they're half the time hoaxes like Gallsville's Chili.

But, um, my impression is that, um...

I mean, look, I do all kinds of things over the world, um, and over the last decades, and it's, it's, it's amazing to me that if you take the perspective of forty or fifty years ago, that we have such a rich international and multi-segmented liberty space.

Um, you've got the Austrians like Mises Institute, you got the Libertarian Party, you've got, uh, like the Tom Woods crowd type people who are more pragmatic and, uh, life oriented.

Could you tell me how close that comes to the mark?

I believe he studied law.

Oh, well, well then that explains it.

So, um, um, so, uh- Uh, on the corporation issue, I think really the, the, the key book to read on this, and by the way, I, I don't remember my disagreement with Kevin Carson.

I remember I disagreed with Carson and Roderick Long and some others on, um, on, um, abandonment, neutralism and abandonment.

Um, uh, and also I've disagreed with Sean Gabb, who's a friend of mine, um, and he, he's an English anarchist libertarian, but he also has this opposition to corporations.

But again, he's also not a lawyer.

Um, uh, uh, Frank van Dun, I've also disagreed with, but he, again, he's a law professor, but he doesn't have a lot of practical sort of understanding of the legal system, I think, that, in the, in the fields we've been discussing.

Right.

So Stephan, that, what does time preference exactly mean in the, in the Austrian, Austrian tradition?

Yeah, so the Austrian school again, is not empirical.

We, we use reason to understand what is already present in the way human action is structured.

So there are many what, what is in Kantian language is called categories of action.

Um, time preference is one of them.

Time preference simply means the tendency of people to prefer satisfaction in the present rather than the future.

Now, that's implicit in the very fact of action because every time we act, we're, we're always acting now.

And especially like pointing out that it's not the AI and also the same ar-argument also, uh, like alternatively also like, uh, applies to the question that why there isn't just one big firm in the world that could control everything.

[laughing]

Um, this is my fifteenth, I, I counted, my fifteenth, uh, PFS meeting.

Uh, I came to the first and, um, it's quite a pleasure.

This feels like a little bit like church to me.

Um, um, and I am, I'm wearing my, uh, my, my grandfather's Freemason pin to give the conspiracy-minded, uh, some fodder.

Um, so, uh, welcome everyone.

And I'd like to encourage everyone who's, um, been here more than a few years to just make sure you make an effort to, uh, meet the newer people and introduce them to the older people and everyone.

[laughing]

Stephan, if you don't mind, could you, uh, kick us off?

All right.

I'd be happy to.

Uh, hello, everybody.

Um, I'm happy to be here r- representing Ireland as well as my partner, so there's one and a half Irish guys up here.

Um, I started practicing law in 1992.

I started practicing patent law in 1993.

Most ad- it- most advanced yet acceptable.

And yeah, just tell us a little bit about this document.

All right, so as I was saying off air, so I've written a lot of things.

Well, I spent years understanding liberty and economics and then trying to write about my opinion about how to correct it and the right way to do things and how to extend it.

That's what libertarian writers do.

We discuss, we inquire, we learn, we talk, we develop.

I think around 2022, I was at the Reno Libertarian Party Convention, and I was a delegate.

And that was the year that the Mises caucus took over and made it temporarily a little bit more Austrian and radical.

So there's like a genuine grey area there, but there's not necessarily a genuine grey area over the mother's self-ownership giving her the right to kill a baby.

Uno es un nuevo artículo titulado La teoría de la transferencia de título en los contratos, que se publicará a finales de este año y que ya está disponible en su sitio web, www.stephankinsella.com. Y el otro es un capítulo de su libro Fundamentos legales de una sociedad libre, capítulo nueve: Una teoría libertaria de los contratos.

I also gave a speech on this at the Property and Freedom Society in 2017.

It's on my podcast, Kinsella on Liberty, episode two twenty-five, Re-Reflections on the Theory of Contract.

This is on my website, stephankinsella.com. And I gave a long interview on the Tom Woods Show about a few years ago.

It's episode one nine seven of my podcast.

And back in 2011, I gave a Mises Academy course on libertarian legal theory, lecture number three, which is episode twenty of my podcast.

These all go into more detail about my topic today.

En definitiva, el resultado del incumplimiento de un contrato es simplemente que el tribunal otorgue una indemnización económica, porque casi nunca se ordena el cumplimiento específico.

[audience laughing]

Okay.

Uh, all right, let me start here.

Uh, so the book, our book today was published actually today, uh, in print.

Uh, Hans and I thought of this a few months ago.

Uh, it's, uh, as you know, Rothbard at 100, a Tribute and Assessment, and it's just a wonderful collection that came together pretty quickly, and, uh, I think it's a very meaningful tribute to Rothbard.

Um, and it's out there for sale today.

[laughs]

How do you even approach this from first principles?

Right.

And so, yeah, my approach, I was always drawn towards like Ayn Rand's – originally Ayn Rand, but then later other thinkers like Rothbard and others.

But her principled approach to matters, like the basic approach is one of individual rights, like – Realizing that the only way to violate rights is through the use of physical force, that was what the non-aggression axiom or non-aggression principle was about.

I mean Ayn Rand had a character in Atlas Shrugged say – or John Galt say, no man may start or initiate the use of force against another.

And so that always – from the beginning, that highlighted in my mind the importance of principles, libertarian principles, and distinguishing it from right and wrong.

So we strictly say that some things – it's not enough to be wrong or immoral to be outlawed.

And so tying this back to the intellectual monopoly and patents, How about the pharmaceutical industry is something that a lot of people have already brought up to you and said, well, how about things that require $2 billion to invest to begin with and don't have anything guaranteed behind them of having a profit? And it can be easily copied.

Go to Saifedean.com and sign up now.

Preface, by Stephan Kinsella.

The Property and Freedom Society was founded in two thousand and six by Hans Hoppe eleven years after Murray Rothbard's death.

As Hoppe was Rothbard's most intimate associate, partner, friend, and student for the last decade of his life, the PFS is naturally home to admirers of Rothbard and his brand of Austrian economics and anarcho-libertarianism.

Many of its founding members knew Rothbard personally, and all were admirers.

Most of its other members are also heavily influenced by and indebted to Rothbard's powerful body of ideas.

The PFS and all its members are, in an important sense, Rothbard's children.

This may be a question of semantics, but you say libertarian, and I want to know what your distinction is or preference for describing yourself as libertarian or anarchist.

Yes, I've always been – so in my view, there are two types of – well, there's many axes you can describe these things.

There's two types of libertarians – … in the sense of your interest.

One is activism, that is being part of some movement trying to make change, and then the other is just being interested in the ideas.

And then the other is just being a libertarian, like acting in a peaceful way and following those rules.

But I've always been interested in the theory, like the arguments for rights and for… … for law, things like that.

But, of course, I'm also interested in achieving such a world, and so that's where the activism side comes in.

And I feel like the younger generations today in the United States who do live under more of an inflationary environment, right? Yeah, I guess even a question of like what advice would you like to give the upcoming generations?