Life before the Industrial Revolution was not simpler, slower, or more humane. It was short, violent, filthy, and saturated with grief, and almost nobody alive today can picture it accurately. That gap is not harmless. It shapes how people respond to economic growth, to AI, and to every technology that promises to change how we live.
Chelsea Follett, research fellow at the Cato Institute and the mind behind HumanProgress.org, returns to the show with a new book, The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past. The argument is blunt: we have not only solved many of the problems our ancestors faced, we have erased the memory of them. Nostalgia fills the vacuum, and nostalgia is a terrible guide to policy. What follows takes the romantic version of the past apart and argues that gratitude for what we have is the first step toward keeping it.
Libertarian and Objectivist commentary on the Anti-Industrial Revolution
Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., “My Vice: Hating the Environment” (LewRockwell.com, August 11, 2000). The piece usually cited in place of the 1990 manifesto: nature as dangerous until tamed, environmentalism as an official religion, and a rejection of “free-market environmentalism” for accepting the greens’ ends. The 1990 “An Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto,” written for Pat Buchanan’s From the Right, is not freely online.
Murray N. Rothbard, “Conservation, Ecology, and Growth” (chapter 13 of For a New Liberty, 1973). Pollution as a failure to defend property rights, not a case against industry; the zero-growth and back-to-nature program as a demand to freeze living standards.
Murray N. Rothbard, “Conservation in the Free Market” (1970; chapter 9 of Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature). Against the Romanticist abhorrence of technology: the market already conserves resources by price, and pollution is invasion of property, not a reason to scrap industrial civilization.
Murray N. Rothbard, “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution” (Cato Journal, Spring 1982). The strict tort standard: enjoin proven invasion, reject statistical and administrative substitutes for proof of harm. The Rothbardian alternative to both ignoring pollution and regulating industry out of existence.
Ayn Rand, “The Anti-Industrial Revolution” (The Objectivist, January–February 1971; collected in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 1971, and Return of the Primitive, 1999). The direct Objectivist attack on the New Left ecology movement: technology as life-saving, a restricted technology as a contradiction, and the pre-industrial past as the thing the anti-industrialists want to restore.
Ayn Rand, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), later expanded as Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1999, ed. Peter Schwartz). Essays on the campus New Left, “The Age of Envy,” and the claim that once the old Marxists learned a modern factory could not shoe the world by expropriation, they decided going barefoot was superior to wearing shoes.
George Reisman, “The Toxicity of Environmentalism” (1990; excerpted from Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics). Argues that the ecology movement’s premise of nature’s intrinsic value implies hostility to man and to industrial civilization, and that the greens are the death rattle of socialism: control no longer in the name of prosperity, but in the name of forbidding engineering.
George Reisman, “The Global Warming Bugaboo” (Mises Daily, March 8, 2006). On the demand to abandon the Industrial Revolution on the strength of a weather forecast, and the inversion in which destroying refrigerators, tractors, and hospitals is treated as the way to cope with heat, hunger, and disease.
George Reisman, “Wages: The Anti-Capitalist and Pro-Capitalist View” (Mises, April 1, 2019). The rising age at which children go to work, from about four in 1780 to the twenties now, as a product of rising real wages under capitalism, not of the anti-industrial story that the factories created child labor.
George Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (1996; free PDF from the author). The long treatment of the Industrial Revolution as the escape from mass poverty, famine, and child mortality, against both the Marxist immiseration thesis and the later environmentalist case for reversing it.
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—
“That it is better 100 guilty persons should escape, than that one innocent person should suffer.” — Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
The hardest decision a government prosecutor may ever face is also one of the most important tests of the rule of law: What do you do when you believe a crime occurred, and you believe you know who committed it, but you do not believe you can prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty?
The temptation is obvious. A prosecutor is a public official. The alleged victim wants justice. The public demands accountability. The alleged offenders appear unsympathetic. The known facts produce moral outrage. Yet none of those considerations changes the prosecutor’s constitutional obligation.
A criminal prosecution is not a referendum on whether something terrible probably happened. It is an attempt to prove, in a courtroom, that a particular defendant committed a particular crime beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty.
The recently renewed investigation into an alleged sexual assault involving seven Cornell University fraternity members illustrates this dilemma. The woman has alleged that she was sexually assaulted by multiple men at a Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024. The case initially was not prosecuted, but it has now been reopened and reassigned amid the emergence of additional information and intense public scrutiny.
See David Rode, “Murphy Brown: Why The Popular ’80s Sitcom Is Impossible To Stream,” TV Line (Sept. 20, 2026). Anyone who is in favor of copyright and also a fan of Murphy Brown or any other show that can’t be accessed now due to these problems–kwitcher bitchin’.
Wow. h/t @gregmorin “One for the “copyright destroys culture” files. Tv show lost due to intractable IP rights.”
No offense, Objectivists and fascist pro-IP “libertarians”
https://t.co/NtSPVpFglo nb @jeffreytucker
Here’s Why You Can’t Stream ‘Murphy Brown’ (Decider, 2018) — music rights plus the fact that Warner Bros., not CBS, produced it, so it was never in the CBS All Access library.
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—
The political circus is set up in Brazil, as the democratic sect will perform its grand ritual in October: the presidential elections. With a second round already defined, those who choose to vote will be sucked into a spiral of narratives and will end up falling into one of two wings, on the right, represented by Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is in prison, or on the left, represented by Lula. Although failing to vote is prohibited in Brazil, voting is still an option, not an obligation. Despite of a legal requirement to vote, people can choose not to attend and justify their absence, and even those who neither vote nor justify are subject to an extremely light punishment: a merely symbolic fine of US$0.70. I have chosen this option for the last 20 years, not voting nor justifying, completely ignoring the liturgy of democracy. [continue reading…]
Interesting tweet from Steven Nekhaila, former Chairman of the Libertarian National Committee:
Ironically, AI may force the world to go more analog.
Or at least us. As many books written after the dawn of AI are AI written, news reports online are faked, AI voice scam calls, government propaganda, AI tinder profiles and online interactions are replaced by AI agents, hell, even restaurants are using pictures of AI food.
At the end of the day, those seeking contact with reality will lose trust in digital, and be forced to trust their senses even more. Local news may become relevant as entire foreign events could soon be faked, it will be much more difficult to disseminate what is real from what is fake, and the urge to authenticity shall rise.
Others, perhaps, will embrace the AI tsunami, and whatever awaits from the other side, perhaps drown in.
But those who seek authenticity will look back at the 2020’s, at books, ideas, and content of old.
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—
As longtime PFSers know, we have a tradition of posting accounts of the annual PFS meeting on our Press page and usually on the individual annual meeting pages. They include accounts by first-timers and for special meetings or occasions and multiple commentaries by repeat attendees, from Sean Gabb’s always-elegant accounts of the first, and other, PFS meetings,1 to Doug French’s rhapsodies of the wonders of a Turkish haircut,2 to Hans and Gülçin’s retrospectives,3 to my memories of the first PFS,4 the Hoppe Festschrift event in 20245 and our defiant rebound from Covid bullshit in 2021 (which caused us to cancel PFS 2020).6
I formed the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF) back in October 20131 to separate my libertarian-related anti-IP writings from my other IP writings and to form a center dedicated to freedom and innovation. As our mission statement in the sidebar clearly states:
We are for property rights, free markets, competition, commerce, cooperation, and the voluntary sharing of knowledge, and oppose IP laws, which systematically impede or hamper innovation.
In other words, we are against IP because we are in favor of innovation and property rights, and freedom, liberty, and justice. We are not against IP just for the hell of it, but because we recognize that IP law violates property rights, is unjust, commits aggression, restricts human freedom, impedes and distorts innovation, creativity, free expression, artistic freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. [continue reading…]
I have no time for watching videos. But I will read their transcripts when made available. Therefore, if I did not watch it, I have read Tucker Carlson’s interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg, published on the 2nd October 2026. The most revealing part of the interview with comes towards the end. After nearly an hour discussing Russia, deterrence, the world wars and the international order, the conversation reaches the freedom of British people to speak in their own country. Rees-Mogg supplies this extraordinary reassurance:
“They’re not oppressing anything that I’ve tried to say…” — 58:04
He immediately seeks to qualify it. Nevertheless, the instinct is revealing. Here is a former senior minister, confronted with the suppression of other people’s opinions, reaching first for the fact that his own opinions remain comfortably expressible.
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.
. .. who prostitute themselves for the favors and benefits of Benjamin Netanyahoo and Zionist Israel,” says Pastor Chuck Baldwin.
As for Trump, he behaves like “Stalin, Hitler, and Ghengis Kahn,” thinks “he is God,” but is in reality “a servile water boy for the Zionists in Israel who believe they are God,” says retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor, as quoted by Pastor Baldwin.
I have occasionally corresponded with Deirdre McCloskey, and met the good doctor in person at FreedomFest in Rapid City, South Dakota (with my buddy Juan Carpio) in July 2021.
I re-post it here since it’s not unsound, and as I apparently qualify for the very restrictive fascist copyright license the Mises Institute is trying to slap on this piece—CC-BY-NC-ND (no doubt without the author’s knowledge or consent, making this license’s effectiveness questionable)1 —since my site is (I guess?) “non-commercial,” whatever that means. I guess they don’t want a “commercial” site (whatever that is; why an ostensibly pro-capitalist, pro-free market organization hates the profit motive is unclear) republishing their pro-freedom message—wouldn’t want to spread the ideas of liberty without some control and oversight! And I guess they don’t want any translations made—that is prohibited by the “ND”, or no derivative works, part. [continue reading…]
I just came across this column I had not seen before: Reginald Godwyn,
“Copyright, AI, and the Great Illusion,” Libertarian Alliance (28 June, 2025):
I have just looked at the judgment in Bartz v Anthropic, a case decided in California, but which is likely to have a broader reach by its example. Three authors—a novelist and two non-fiction writers—accused the AI company Anthropic of “stealing” their books to train a large language model named Claude. What the California court ruled was this: training AI on books may well constitute “transformative” use under American copyright law, and thus may not, in itself, be illegal. However, he refused to dismiss the case outright, allowing a trial to proceed on the question of how the books were obtained and stored. The case has been hailed as a copyright milestone. It possibly is that, but is also a symptom of a deeper decay in legal reasoning and our understanding of what machines, and laws, are for.
Let us first deal with the word “stealing.”
Anthropic did not reprint the authors’ books. It did not sell them under its own name. It did not post them online for free. It fed them into an algorithm that adjusted statistical weights across billions of nodes to predict language. This is not theft. It is not publication. And—despite the hyperventilations of rights-holders and their lobbyists—it is not infringement in any meaningful sense. It is the digital equivalent of reading, something no regime has yet dared outlaw outright. But if the plaintiffs and their backers in the publishing world succeed, reading may soon be an activity subject to rent.
What Anthropic did is no different in substance from what any literate man does when he reads a book and allows it to shape the way he speaks. The model, like the man, absorbs patterns. The man is praised for being learned. The machine is sued for being trained.
The idea that reading a book—even by machine—constitutes infringement is as grotesque as accusing a violinist of “stealing” Brahms by practising his Violin Concerto. But grotesque ideas live long when they serve those who collect fees.
Funny clip of Hoppe saying he would do the Joe Rogan show if asked. From the PFS 2023 Annual Meeting, when some of us stayed a few days after and had a nice dinner at Nusr-Et, near Bodrum. (Other photos below; one of them was used for the back cover of A Life in Liberty: Liber Amicorum in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (2024), presented at the 2024 PFS meeting a year later.) Hans mentions Dave Smith, whom we tried for a while to have appear at a PFS meeting, since Hans has pointed out how important it is to laugh at the state, to mock the regime.1
In 2009, the Mises Institute published Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a project Guido Hülsmann and and Stephan Kinsella spearheaded to honor Hans Hoppe on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Only a few of the pieces were published independently; we are posting some of them here in this Bookstream.
Saifedean Ammous was recently interviewed on Bitcoin Magazine TV discussing his work on bitcoin mining and stablecoins, as well as the US fiscal outlook. Saif examines whether growing stablecoin demand can reduce price inflation & help US fiscal solvency. He focusses on often-overlooked trade-offs: lost seigniorage, displaced long-term Treasury demand & bank credit, & more fragile short-term funding & rollover risk.
On occasion, and more frequently in recent years, I’ve been asked for links to online Austrian and Austro-libertarian works and resources. It used to be easy to point to Mises.org or other sites, but with the proliferation of groups and websites promoting these ideas, and with the decline or Mises.org’s usability1 and relevance, this has become more of a challenge.
Recent efforts by DavidVeksler (The Liberty Archive: Millions of Words of Libertarian and Austrian Books, Journals, Courses Liberated) and Rahim Taghizadegan (Mises.co: The Original Austrians: A Digital Library of the Austrian School of Economics) inspired me to create a page for Austro-Libertarian Guide and Libraries to link to these and other projects and resources. Check it out. We expect this guide to to develop and grow over time but for now it is a good place to start.
In 1884, a dollar bought roughly what it had bought before the Civil War.
America had fought its bloodiest war, printed greenbacks by the wagonload, and endured a roughly 75% surge in prices. And then the inflation went away. Twenty years later, prices had made the round trip. [continue reading…]
In 2009, the Mises Institute published Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a project Guido Hülsmann and and Stephan Kinsella spearheaded to honor Hans Hoppe on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Only a few of the pieces were published independently; we are posting some of them here in this Bookstream.
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.
Rothbard at 100 is in production! As you can see, the books are printed in premium hardcover with gold foil stamping, and then they will be covered with a dust jacket. Also available as an audiobook and eBook. Preorder your copy now: https://t.co/iaEh0bk5G0pic.twitter.com/bapPGmhFHb
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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.)
Interesting interview from the Libertarian Christian Institute (@LCIOfficial) Podcast of Chelsea Follett discussing her forthcoming book The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past (Cato; forthcoming October 20, 2026). The book sounds really good, despite praise from the usual suspects like Stephen “Pinker.” (Overcast; youtube below)
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