More general libertarian question if that's okay - any opinions on intellectual property law? It seems incompatible with libertarian views on the economy, but it's hard to imagine a functioning commercial entertainment industry without it.
Rothbard argues that an author can own their book similar to the way they own their land. It's property in both cases. But why is this the case? I can't simply "copy + paste" a piece of land, so there is an obvious case of outright ownership. Why can't anyone simply reprint Harry Potter and sell the books? Essentially, you can own an intangible idea thanks to copyright law. I'm not against this, but I don't see how it's compatible with libertarianism.
Better example, you can't own recipes outright. If you string some ingredients together, you don't suddenly "own" the output, similar to how you don't automatically own a sentence after stringing together some words. You can own some of the processes of creating a food (e.g. the machinery that makes it), but not the actual food itself, which is how grocery stores can sell off-brand products that are essentially identical to the name-brand ones.
Film is excludable through theaters and distribution can be limited by contract. It should also be obvious at this point that large budgets do not equate to quality. The larger the budget these days, the sloppier the writing if anything. The duration of copyright also insulates bad faith producers from market pressures when it comes to sloppy film. Disney is the poster child for this, they produce trash like a snow white rehash and can incur those losses easier because they are still profiting off of decades worth of quality media. This would not occur if their older media was now public domain, they would likely be bankrupt and that would be a good thing. Musicians mostly benefit from their craft by touring, again that is excludable. Whereas its record labels that largely benefit from sales of mp3s and licensure of music on many platforms. Further, pirating is extraordinarily easy for that medium anyways so IP is probably a moot point in the music industry. Video games actually rely heavily on software level protection not IP (since IP failed for a few decades in the early years of the media 1999 till 2009 was peak pirating, yet arguably it was peak craft). Also many major titles earnings' are driven by additional content packs or online asset sales which are much easier to exclude. If anything IP in gaming has made the industry worse; for instance when you purchase a title you actually really do not own the title, this opens the door for all sorts of abuse. The possibility of legally pirating software would return some pressure on existing producers to offer more value not less. This is because today we see something akin to film in video games, where you have the 40th title of the same game, but this version is actually much worse than its predecessors when it comes to substance and features (EA is notorious for that). If their software barriers can eventually be broken. The pirating of older titles would force producers to compete by creating novel features or different assets altogether; as opposed to gutted and polished (in the graphics sense) rehashes of older stuff we get now.
The question I always have about more radical forms of libertarianism is: what about research?
Public basic research funding today seems to generate tremendous positive externalities, and the short term research that companies do today tends to depend on government enforced intellectual monopolies on generated ideas.
A deeper issue about Rothbard would be what you think the more fundamental sources of your disagreements with him are. Personally, I don't have a problem with Rothbard's unconditional preference for the libertarian non-aggression principle, but the libertarian principle by itself doesn't tell you how to evaluate one's engagement in possible enforcement actions and how to coordinate such actions with others, nor how to integrate the libertarian principle with knowledge of particular social circumstances so that the applicable legal code can be optimized. Tackling these broader issues requires additional principles, but I don't think Rothbard was all that conscious of the need for them in order to derive a reasonably complete political philosophy, nor do I think the sort of quasi-Objectivist understanding of natural law that Rothbard favored is up to the task of furnishing such additional principles.
I get the impression that you are perhaps more bothered by Rothbard's attempt to deduce an entire ethical system (and to deduce economic theory as well) from a few starting premises in the first place--maybe you think Rothbard was just too much like Ayn Rand in that respect. Is my impression correct, and if so, in what sense do you adhere to libertariansm and how would you reframe the book's main premises to promote your understanding of liberty?
There is nothing self-contradictory or crazy about some instrumental evaluative principle being universally necessary for optimizing some higher principle. Propositions in the form of "X is necessary for optimizing Y" is neither inherently more nor less sensible than propositions in the form of "X is necessary for optimizing Y except when condition A exists."
Whether exceptions exist for certain people or for certain circumstances or not for a given optimization is a question of fact regarding the causal relationships between the instrumental principle, the higher principle, and other factors present, but optimizations specifically involving the operation of innate properties shared by all human beings would indeed be independent of personality and circumstances and therefore would give rise to exceptionless principles.
I agree with you and Huemer (contra Rothbard) that self-evident truths (or "axioms" or "synthetic _a priori_ propositions" if you prefer) don't provide the right kinds of facts about human nature for fully justifying an exceptionless libertarianism, but that doesn't mean that such facts don't exist or that we are incapable of grasping them. It merely means that such facts would fall under a different category of propositions, and valid generalizations about them would have to be reached through a different methodology.
In regards to Chapter 12: Suppose that Dave the Drunkard refuses to buy police or court insurance. One day his body is found on the side of the road riddled with gunshot wounds. Since on one particularly cared about Dave no one is willing to contribute to a fund to solve his murder. Question: Would it be a greater injustice to (a) let Dave's murder go unpunished or (b) for a minimal state to coerce people into funding the investigation. My intuition is that even if you consider taxation to be theft that murder is worse than theft, and that indeed it takes a good deal of taxation-theft to sum to the level of injustice of 1 murder. Therefore it seems like a minimal state can be justified in at least some instances.
If the benefit of the public good is greater than the cost, there is at least a potential for profit there. Would it be so unlikely that an entrepreneur would find a way to collect it?
Where was Dave when he was murdered? The owner of the property has at least some interest in solving his murder, especially if they are a business.
It may make more economic sense to cover territories than individuals, in which case, competitive protection agencies are likely to work on that basis.
And remember, we are not comparing reality with an ideal, but trying to compare different possible realities. In the status quo, many murders go unsolved. Perfection is not an option.
It is, but outside a world of super-abundance there will probably be people and crimes not covered by charity. I'd still say it's an injustice for those people to be victimized, and that coercion used to stop that abuse is often less unjust than the abuse itself.
Why should everyone have to be victimized for the sake of a handful of irresponsible people? Seems much less unjust to leave it to charity, come what may.
I suppose it depends on the level of taxation needed to prevent abuse towards the irresponsible. It seems to me if you accept that some amount of taxation (n) is less unjust than letting the murderer of an irresponsible go free (m) than there are exists at least some situation when state coercion is justifiable, so long as n < m.
Yes on the last one. But no, not sympathetic to defamation in general. If I'm free to irrationally hold false views about a person, why can't I spread irrationally false views?
I’m guessing the reasoning is that making a false allegation of crime is similar to ordering someone else to commit a crime, or inciting a crime, since you are provoking other people to coercively punish an innocent person, which under a libertarian view is itself a crime.
But the defamatory nature of the allegation is not itself what makes false allegations criminal on the libertarian view. Is that right?
Rothbard says, “empirically, taking the twentieth century as a whole, the single most warlike, most interventionist, most imperialist government has been the United States.” You disagree, but do you think that is at least closer to true of the post Cold War era? Who have been the most war like few countries since the collapse of the Soviet Union?
That's more reasonable. But given how eager the US government is to find an "exit strategy" in the post-Cold War era, the "imperialist" part fits poorly.
Really? When you say somebody in charge of the US government has been trying to exit from imperialism, who exactly do you have in mind? Would that be the neoconservatives pretending to democratize the world while promoting a unilateralist encirclement of America's adversaries (if not subjecting them to regime change), or maybe the "rules-based order" multilateralists working with World Economic Forum crowd to globalize the blessings of corporatist exploitation, or maybe the second Trump administration channeling Teddy Roosevelt in lusting after the natural resources of other countries?
The US pulled out of Afghanistan after trying to "surge" to the point where the local government could fend off attackers (which worked better in Iraq).
Regarding your comments on the War and Foreign policy chapter, you say, “…the main thing decent people around the world have had to fear from the U.S. is that they’ll get killed in the crossfire if their government or fellow citizens resist.” Is that a judgment on more recent American foreign policy, or foreign policy throughout our history? Specifically, do you think that was true for most Native Americans?
Much less true, though most of the Indian wars could probably have been averted if the Indians had practiced abject appeasement. Military resistance was hopeless anyway, and early surrender would have saved a lot of lives.
You appear to accept both the costs of monopoly provision and the reality of market failures. How do you determine when a market failure is severe enough that government provision is preferable to a competitive market despite the inefficiencies of monopoly?
I'd start by looking at the performance of actually-existing governments. Since it's very poor, (see https://www.betonit.ai/p/unbeatable-round-up), market failure has to be quite awful to be worse. But that's just a presumption, not an algorithm. If you really want to know with confidence, you've got to do a lot of painful, boring cost-benefit analysis. See e.g. my spreadsheets on the return to education. https://www.betonit.ai/p/no-one-cared-about-my-spreadsheets
More general libertarian question if that's okay - any opinions on intellectual property law? It seems incompatible with libertarian views on the economy, but it's hard to imagine a functioning commercial entertainment industry without it.
Here's Rothbard's take: https://mises.org/online-book/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/10-monopoly-and-competition/7-patents-and-copyrights
Rothbard argues that an author can own their book similar to the way they own their land. It's property in both cases. But why is this the case? I can't simply "copy + paste" a piece of land, so there is an obvious case of outright ownership. Why can't anyone simply reprint Harry Potter and sell the books? Essentially, you can own an intangible idea thanks to copyright law. I'm not against this, but I don't see how it's compatible with libertarianism.
Better example, you can't own recipes outright. If you string some ingredients together, you don't suddenly "own" the output, similar to how you don't automatically own a sentence after stringing together some words. You can own some of the processes of creating a food (e.g. the machinery that makes it), but not the actual food itself, which is how grocery stores can sell off-brand products that are essentially identical to the name-brand ones.
Film is excludable through theaters and distribution can be limited by contract. It should also be obvious at this point that large budgets do not equate to quality. The larger the budget these days, the sloppier the writing if anything. The duration of copyright also insulates bad faith producers from market pressures when it comes to sloppy film. Disney is the poster child for this, they produce trash like a snow white rehash and can incur those losses easier because they are still profiting off of decades worth of quality media. This would not occur if their older media was now public domain, they would likely be bankrupt and that would be a good thing. Musicians mostly benefit from their craft by touring, again that is excludable. Whereas its record labels that largely benefit from sales of mp3s and licensure of music on many platforms. Further, pirating is extraordinarily easy for that medium anyways so IP is probably a moot point in the music industry. Video games actually rely heavily on software level protection not IP (since IP failed for a few decades in the early years of the media 1999 till 2009 was peak pirating, yet arguably it was peak craft). Also many major titles earnings' are driven by additional content packs or online asset sales which are much easier to exclude. If anything IP in gaming has made the industry worse; for instance when you purchase a title you actually really do not own the title, this opens the door for all sorts of abuse. The possibility of legally pirating software would return some pressure on existing producers to offer more value not less. This is because today we see something akin to film in video games, where you have the 40th title of the same game, but this version is actually much worse than its predecessors when it comes to substance and features (EA is notorious for that). If their software barriers can eventually be broken. The pirating of older titles would force producers to compete by creating novel features or different assets altogether; as opposed to gutted and polished (in the graphics sense) rehashes of older stuff we get now.
The question I always have about more radical forms of libertarianism is: what about research?
Public basic research funding today seems to generate tremendous positive externalities, and the short term research that companies do today tends to depend on government enforced intellectual monopolies on generated ideas.
Not totally on point, but relevant: https://www.betonit.ai/p/educational-austerity-and-progress
A deeper issue about Rothbard would be what you think the more fundamental sources of your disagreements with him are. Personally, I don't have a problem with Rothbard's unconditional preference for the libertarian non-aggression principle, but the libertarian principle by itself doesn't tell you how to evaluate one's engagement in possible enforcement actions and how to coordinate such actions with others, nor how to integrate the libertarian principle with knowledge of particular social circumstances so that the applicable legal code can be optimized. Tackling these broader issues requires additional principles, but I don't think Rothbard was all that conscious of the need for them in order to derive a reasonably complete political philosophy, nor do I think the sort of quasi-Objectivist understanding of natural law that Rothbard favored is up to the task of furnishing such additional principles.
I get the impression that you are perhaps more bothered by Rothbard's attempt to deduce an entire ethical system (and to deduce economic theory as well) from a few starting premises in the first place--maybe you think Rothbard was just too much like Ayn Rand in that respect. Is my impression correct, and if so, in what sense do you adhere to libertariansm and how would you reframe the book's main premises to promote your understanding of liberty?
A Non-Aggression Presumption is totally sensible. An exceptionless "Axiom"? Crazy. See https://www.betonit.ai/p/huemers-common-sense-libertarianism.
There is nothing self-contradictory or crazy about some instrumental evaluative principle being universally necessary for optimizing some higher principle. Propositions in the form of "X is necessary for optimizing Y" is neither inherently more nor less sensible than propositions in the form of "X is necessary for optimizing Y except when condition A exists."
Whether exceptions exist for certain people or for certain circumstances or not for a given optimization is a question of fact regarding the causal relationships between the instrumental principle, the higher principle, and other factors present, but optimizations specifically involving the operation of innate properties shared by all human beings would indeed be independent of personality and circumstances and therefore would give rise to exceptionless principles.
I agree with you and Huemer (contra Rothbard) that self-evident truths (or "axioms" or "synthetic _a priori_ propositions" if you prefer) don't provide the right kinds of facts about human nature for fully justifying an exceptionless libertarianism, but that doesn't mean that such facts don't exist or that we are incapable of grasping them. It merely means that such facts would fall under a different category of propositions, and valid generalizations about them would have to be reached through a different methodology.
In regards to Chapter 12: Suppose that Dave the Drunkard refuses to buy police or court insurance. One day his body is found on the side of the road riddled with gunshot wounds. Since on one particularly cared about Dave no one is willing to contribute to a fund to solve his murder. Question: Would it be a greater injustice to (a) let Dave's murder go unpunished or (b) for a minimal state to coerce people into funding the investigation. My intuition is that even if you consider taxation to be theft that murder is worse than theft, and that indeed it takes a good deal of taxation-theft to sum to the level of injustice of 1 murder. Therefore it seems like a minimal state can be justified in at least some instances.
And why is charity not an option?
If the benefit of the public good is greater than the cost, there is at least a potential for profit there. Would it be so unlikely that an entrepreneur would find a way to collect it?
Where was Dave when he was murdered? The owner of the property has at least some interest in solving his murder, especially if they are a business.
It may make more economic sense to cover territories than individuals, in which case, competitive protection agencies are likely to work on that basis.
And remember, we are not comparing reality with an ideal, but trying to compare different possible realities. In the status quo, many murders go unsolved. Perfection is not an option.
It is, but outside a world of super-abundance there will probably be people and crimes not covered by charity. I'd still say it's an injustice for those people to be victimized, and that coercion used to stop that abuse is often less unjust than the abuse itself.
Why should everyone have to be victimized for the sake of a handful of irresponsible people? Seems much less unjust to leave it to charity, come what may.
I suppose it depends on the level of taxation needed to prevent abuse towards the irresponsible. It seems to me if you accept that some amount of taxation (n) is less unjust than letting the murderer of an irresponsible go free (m) than there are exists at least some situation when state coercion is justifiable, so long as n < m.
Are you at all sympathetic to any variants of defamation law? Should deliberately false allegations of crime be illegal?
Yes on the last one. But no, not sympathetic to defamation in general. If I'm free to irrationally hold false views about a person, why can't I spread irrationally false views?
I’m guessing the reasoning is that making a false allegation of crime is similar to ordering someone else to commit a crime, or inciting a crime, since you are provoking other people to coercively punish an innocent person, which under a libertarian view is itself a crime.
But the defamatory nature of the allegation is not itself what makes false allegations criminal on the libertarian view. Is that right?
Rothbard says, “empirically, taking the twentieth century as a whole, the single most warlike, most interventionist, most imperialist government has been the United States.” You disagree, but do you think that is at least closer to true of the post Cold War era? Who have been the most war like few countries since the collapse of the Soviet Union?
That's more reasonable. But given how eager the US government is to find an "exit strategy" in the post-Cold War era, the "imperialist" part fits poorly.
Really? When you say somebody in charge of the US government has been trying to exit from imperialism, who exactly do you have in mind? Would that be the neoconservatives pretending to democratize the world while promoting a unilateralist encirclement of America's adversaries (if not subjecting them to regime change), or maybe the "rules-based order" multilateralists working with World Economic Forum crowd to globalize the blessings of corporatist exploitation, or maybe the second Trump administration channeling Teddy Roosevelt in lusting after the natural resources of other countries?
The US pulled out of Afghanistan after trying to "surge" to the point where the local government could fend off attackers (which worked better in Iraq).
Regarding your comments on the War and Foreign policy chapter, you say, “…the main thing decent people around the world have had to fear from the U.S. is that they’ll get killed in the crossfire if their government or fellow citizens resist.” Is that a judgment on more recent American foreign policy, or foreign policy throughout our history? Specifically, do you think that was true for most Native Americans?
Much less true, though most of the Indian wars could probably have been averted if the Indians had practiced abject appeasement. Military resistance was hopeless anyway, and early surrender would have saved a lot of lives.
You appear to accept both the costs of monopoly provision and the reality of market failures. How do you determine when a market failure is severe enough that government provision is preferable to a competitive market despite the inefficiencies of monopoly?
I'd start by looking at the performance of actually-existing governments. Since it's very poor, (see https://www.betonit.ai/p/unbeatable-round-up), market failure has to be quite awful to be worse. But that's just a presumption, not an algorithm. If you really want to know with confidence, you've got to do a lot of painful, boring cost-benefit analysis. See e.g. my spreadsheets on the return to education. https://www.betonit.ai/p/no-one-cared-about-my-spreadsheets
I cared about your spreadsheets https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2026/02/27/the-case-against-education/
I also agree on the importance of doing the cost-benefit math, which got me blocked by Phil Magness on the subject of Covid https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2026/02/04/blocked-by-phillip-magness/
Question: You're really going to respond to comments here? Wow - a first.
Not really. I respond to comments on Book Clubs and AMAs, though rarely on regular posts.