Property and Freedom Podcast, Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 356.
My friend @ClaudioGrass summarizes my recent talk on the disastrous cultural ramifications of the state/banking fiat cartel.https://t.co/7k36dJKWEP
— Jeff Deist (@jeffdeist) August 25, 2026
Redirect: See: PFP356 | Jeff Deist on the collapse of saving, sound money, and the case for a deflationary reset
PFS Member Sean Ring’s Rude Awakening column is on fire lately: in August alone we have several excellent ones, including—
To highlight just a couple:
Living in Italy has taught me many things.
The food is better. The wine is cheaper. The bureaucracy isn’t so much a contact sport as a collision sport.
And air conditioning is treated like a vice.
Italians will warn you about the dreaded colpo d’aria, the “hit of air” that supposedly causes everything from stiff necks to pneumonia. A cold draft is a health hazard. A ceiling fan is a gamble. An AC unit set below 26C (that’s 78.8F, you imperial standard lovers!) is practically a death wish.
To be fair, in Northern Europe, you don’t really need AC. But in the South, it’s a must.
And yet, Europe just lived through another killer summer. The June heatwave claimed an estimated 20,000 lives across the continent. Only about 20% of European homes have air conditioning. In America, it’s over 90%.
Heat kills roughly 11 people per 100,000 in Europe. In the United States, it kills about 2.
and
June 25, 1876. Little Bighorn.
George Armstrong Custer looked down at an encampment and saw a fight he could win. His scouts saw something else. The village below was bigger than any of them had ever counted. Custer split his command anyway and charged.
The reinforcements he counted on never arrived. [continue reading…]
Len D. Pozeram, “Let the American Middle East Die,” Libertarian Alliance (26 August, 2026).
What if the decline of American power in the Middle East is good news for Americans?
Marc Lynch begins a recent Foreign Affairs essay with a declaration that would have been unprintable in the respectable journals a few years ago: “The American Middle East is finished.” He means the regional system built after the 1991 Gulf War, when the United States emerged from the Cold War as the only superpower and decided that this entitled Washington to supervise everything from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.
That system rested on American bases and security guarantees. It protected Arab monarchies, contained Iraq and Iran, and placed Israel at the center of a regional order assembled under American management. Oil would flow. Israel would receive protection. Arab governments would be brought into line through weapons sales and diplomatic pressure. Any state that refused the arrangement would be sanctioned, bombed, or isolated until it submitted. It looked formidable on a map. Then came the American-Israeli war with Iran. [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.
The first entry was republished at Property, Freedom, and Society Bookstream: Introduction, Hülsmann and Kinsella. Links to the remaining chapters may be found at the book’s landing page here, which will be updated as the book is streamed here. Here’s the next entry. [continue reading…]
The topic of “anti-semitism” has gained increasing prominence again recently with the Israel-US vs Iran war. But as Rothbard has noted, there is no real problem of anti-semitism in the US; the real problem is anti-anti-semitism. See, e.g., “Pat Buchanan and the Menace of Anti-Anti-Semitism.”1
Those ranting about anti-semitism are not really concerned with genuine anti-semitism, anymore than the antifa is really anti-fascist2 or the Southern Poverty Law Center is really aimed at fighting poverty.3
From the Swiss NZZ (leading Swiss daily): Malte Fischer (Wirtschaftsredaktor der NZZ Deutschland, Düsseldorf), “Linke werfen Liberalen und Libertären eine Nähe zum Rechtsextremismus vor. Dahinter steckt blinder Antikapitalismus,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Der andere Blick) (24 August 2026) (published as part of the “Der andere Blick am Abend” newsletter).
English translation below (translated by Nick Hoppe).
Note that the Bayrische Hof is host to the annual International Security Conference that regularly features multitudes of war criminals.
Update [SK]: See also Rothbard Takes Portugal: 100 Years with Rothbard: A Personal Account:
Manuel had originally intended a smaller, local event, but we ended up needing a larger space for the almost 400 attendees, which were about 80% Portuguese but many others from Spain, Europe, and elsewhere. The first venue booked ended up canceling the booking, due to local political concerns over our libertarian views. A second venue was booked. They also backed out. Finally, a third venue was booked, which thankfully did not end up backing out.
Related:
Wow. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Capitalism” (Aug 5, 2026) is a doozy. As my friend @NotGovernor pointed out, the Encyclopedia chose as the author of this entry is
a University of Chicago political theorist [Chiara Cordelli] whose published brand is the normative critique of privatization, whose prize-winning book treats outsourcing government functions as a regression to the “state of nature,” whose personal site lists “critiques of capitalism” among her core topics, and whose current book project is explicitly titled toward a “normative critique of capitalism and a defense of financial democracy.”
And it doesn’t even mention Rothbard. WTF.
Related: Kinsella, Slate’s Metcalf on Libertarianism and Nozick.
Grok summary and analysis:
Len D. Pozeram, “America’s Singapore: The Iran War and Imperial Collapse,” Libertarian Alliance (22 August, 2026)
What happens when an empire built by men of ability falls into the hands of placemen?
Britain supplied the classic answer at Singapore in February 1942. Before the Second World War, Singapore was the great British naval and commercial base at the bottom of the Malay Peninsula. It guarded the sea route between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. British officials called it the “Gibraltar of the East” and encouraged the world to regard it as an impregnable fortress. Its guns, docks, fuel tanks, warehouses, and reputation were supposed to secure British power across Asia. [continue reading…]
That genocide could be so expensive, asks retired U.S. Airforce Lieutenant Colonel (and self-described “aspiring anarcho-capitalist”) Karen Kwiatkowski. She refers of course to the Israeli state’s “thugacracy” and its wars of genocide in Palestine, Lebanon, and elsewhere.
The Israelis should study the history of the American West. As soon as the “Civil War” ended the U.S. government commenced a war of genocide against the Plains Indians “to make way for the [government-subsidized] transcontinental railroads,” as General William Tecumseh Sherman, the commanding officer of this quarter-century war of genocide, said. Sherman was known for his statement that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” and regretted in his memoirs that his armies did not kill every last one of them. It took 25 years to kill most of the Indians (some 60,000 according to some estimates) with the rest sent to concentration camps called “reservations” under the supervision of the “Bureau of Indian Affairs.” There is no other such “Bureau” for Mexicans, Italians, Irish, or any other ethnic group. Keeping a standing army for all of this for twenty-five years must have cost a pretty penny.
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.
The first entry was republished at Property, Freedom, and Society Bookstream: Introduction, Hülsmann and Kinsella. Links to the remaining chapters may be found at the book’s landing page here, which will be updated as the book is streamed here. Here’s the next entry: 11. The Vegas Circle, by Lee Iglody. See also idem, “A Beacon of Light,” ch. 5 in A Life in Liberty: Liber Amicorum in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, edited by Jörg Guido Hülsmann & Stephan Kinsella (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2024), and idem, “The Man Across the Hall: My Time with Professor Rothbard,” ch. 6 in Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Papinian Press and The Saif House, 2026). [continue reading…]
[Cross-posted at StephanKinsella.com]
Ryan McMaken, in “Why the French Revolution Was Not a Libertarian Revolution,” Mises Wire (08/20/2026), quotes Ralph Raico’s The Struggle for Liberty (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2025) to persuasively argue that the French Revolution was not “some sort of classical liberal or libertarian revolution.” McMaken writes: it is a mistake
when modern libertarians attempt to rehabilitate the French Revolution to portray is as pro-freedom phenomenon. For example, in an essay titled “Thinking about the French Revolution,” David Boaz—a libertarian, although of the ultra-milquetoast regime-libertarian variety—lists the French Revolution among [the triumphs of liberalism.”
As Raico writes,
We further see the lack of liberalism among the revolutionaries in the fact that the French revolutionaries’ Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” is in no way as unequivocal as the American Bill of Rights. The French declaration says, for instance, there shall be freedom of thought, even for religion, “within the limits of the law.” They never got to the American point [as shown by the American Bill of Rights], which was that Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “On the American Ideology and its Proponents and Beneficiaries,” Property and Freedom Journal (Aug. 23, 2026). Edited transcript of a speech delivered in German at the Austrian National Library in Vienna on 3 December 2016, during the tenth-anniversary conference of scholarium, which had the theme “The Future of Europe.” The translation (by Ohad Osterreicher) and original German text are provided.
See also Hoppe, Die Amerikanische Ideologie (Wien, 2016)
Hans Hermann Hoppe – The American Ideology with English Subtitles (Ohad Osterreicher) (Facebook video)
Hans-Hermann Hoppe – Die Amerikanische Ideologie (scholarium)
From “Court slashes $50M judgment against Alex Jones over falsely calling Sandy Hook shooting a hoax,” NPR (Aug 21, 2026):
A Texas court on Friday slashed a $50 million judgment to about $6 million against Infowars founder Alex Jones after he falsely claimed the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooting was a hoax.
Of course:
The ruling does not affect a $1.25 billion judgment against Jones in Connecticut, but is a legal victory for him after he and his company, Free Speech Systems, were found liable for damages for claiming the mass shooting didn’t happen.
Of course, all types of intellectual property, including trademark and reputation rights/defamation law, should be abolished:
Even years later, Donald Trump still sends photos of his hands to Spy magazine’s founders with a note reading “see, not so small.” | AP Photo
Hilarious insult of Trump from Spy Magazine years ago. From Nick Gass, “Trump’s ‘short-fingered vulgarian’ tormentors speak out,” Politico (03/07/2016):
Nearly three decades after the long-defunct Spy magazine mocked Donald Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian,” one of the publication’s co-founders says the Republican front-runner is likely still not over the epithet.
In a joint interview with NPR published Monday, co-founders Graydon Carter, now the editor of Vanity Fair, and Kurt Andersen, now a novelist and radio show host, remarked upon the phrase’s origins as well as Trump’s long-running dispute over his anatomy. The phrase’s staying power was evidenced in last week’s debate after Trump guaranteed that there was “no problem” with the size of his fingers, or more pointedly, with the correlation of that size to another body part.
“[Trump] blames me for this more than Kurt. He’ll send me pictures, tear sheets from magazines, and he did it as recently as [last] April. With a gold Sharpie, he’ll circle his fingers and in his handwriting say, ‘See, not so short,'” Carter recalled. “And this April when he sent me one, I just — I should have held on to the thing, but I sent it right back by messenger with a note, a card — stapled to the top, saying, ‘Actually, quite short.’ And I know it just gives him absolute fits. And now that it’s become sort of part of the whole campaign rhetoric, I’m sure he wants to just kill me — with those little hands.” [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.
The first entry was republished at Property, Freedom, and Society Bookstream: Introduction, Hülsmann and Kinsella. Links to the remaining chapters may be found at the book’s landing page here, which will be updated as the book is streamed here. Here’s the next entry: 10. A Student’s Appreciation of Professor Hoppe, by Jeffrey Barr. See also idem, “Principled,” ch. 12 in A Life in Liberty: Liber Amicorum in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, edited by Jörg Guido Hülsmann & Stephan Kinsella (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2024), 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 The Demolition: Jeff Barr’s Memories of Hoppe as Teacher. [continue reading…]
From soi-disant libertarian Ilya Somin, “Routledge Handbook of Classical Liberalism Available for Free on Amazon Kindle,” The Volokh Conspiracy (Reason) (
Here is Somin’s post:
It is edited by Richard Epstein, Mario Rizzo, and Liya Palagashvili. I am one of the contributors.
The Routledge Handbook of Classical Liberalism is now available – for free! – on Amazon Kindle. I don’t know how long this generous offer will last, so interested readers should act fast. The volume is edited by big-name libertarian/classical liberal scholars Richard Epstein, Mario Rizzo, and Liya Palagashvili. Epstein, of course, is probably the most prominent living libertarian legal scholar in the world. There are chapters on a wide range of issues in law, economics, and political theory, including one by me on “Land-Use Regulation.” A version of my chapter is also available on SSRN here. Other contributors include such luminaries as Peter Boettke, Tom Merrill, Richard Wagner, Alex Nowrasteh, and many, many more. [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.
The first entry was republished at Property, Freedom, and Society Bookstream: Introduction, Hülsmann and Kinsella. Links to the remaining chapters may be found at the book’s landing page here, which will be updated as the book is streamed here. Here’s the next entry. [continue reading…]
Evening light in Zug’s old town. © Daniel Hegglin / Zug Tourism
Rahim Taghizadegan, “Zug: A Trading House for the World: How a poor little canton learned to connect capital and strangers productively,” scholarium (19 August 2026)
In July 2024 I closed my Vienna base and moved to Zug with my family. Choosing Switzerland still felt like a vote for Austria and the Alpine region: close enough not to sever the old links. A short thread on what Zug gets right—and what it risks losing. 1/5 pic.twitter.com/fGz4RBxE2P
— Rahim Taghizadegan (scholarium.at) (@scholarium_at) August 20, 2026
How a poor little canton learned to connect capital and strangers productively
When I moved with my family from Vienna to the canton of Zug in 2024, I arrived in a place whose everyday achievement becomes fully apparent only through living there: safety and reliability, short distances, an astonishing proximity of global business and nature, authorities who answer, and a landscape that is not merely admired but inhabited. A newcomer has, at first, nothing to explain about this. He has to notice what generations before him built and to be grateful for it. [continue reading…]
Robby Soave, “Ibram X. Kendi Is Wrong About Jason Arday: Are the media responsible for the demise of a famous black professor at the University of Cambridge?,” Reason (8.18.2026).
Are the media responsible for the demise of a famous black professor at the University of Cambridge? Jason Arday was found dead last week after resigning from the university following widespread serious plagiarism allegations. But his defenders say Arday was unfairly targeted by racist reactionaries. Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, assailed the media for engaging in a campaign of “pernicious public shaming,” and the activist group Stand Up to Racism said he’d been subjected to a racist witch hunt.
Most notably, the anti-racist activist Ibram X. Kendi stated unequivocally that “the media lynched Jason Arday.”
As outlined earlier, an individual must be a fully qualified member of their local militia in order to be eligible to hold any form of public office and, while required to maintain proficiency, is suspended from enforcement operations for the duration of their time on the tax dole. Legislation may be set by public officials but is executed by the people themselves, as militia or their subordinates. [continue reading…]
[C4SIF cross-post]
Excellent recent column: Adam Haman, “Copyright’s Dirty Secret: It Was Born in the Inquisition,” Haman Nature (Jul 30, 2026).
***
In my journey from political blank slate, to rejecting both Democrats and Republicans, to embracing Randian minarchist libertarianism, and then (six months later, as the joke goes) full anarchism, my biggest stumbling block wasn’t the roads (ha ha) or even the police, courts, or military.
Nope, it was so-called “intellectual property (IP).”
Indoctrinated as I was, I couldn’t see how creativity and productivity could exist without patent and copyright protections. Worse, I thought IP was good and true, just and moral, as Rand (and my college professors) insisted. [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.
The first entry was republished at Property, Freedom, and Society Bookstream: Introduction, Hülsmann and Kinsella. Links to the remaining chapters may be found at the book’s landing page here, which will be updated as the book is streamed here. Here’s the next entry. [continue reading…]
Complementing other online resources gathering work of the Austrian school and Austro-libertarianism, such as the Austrian Economics Wiki and The Liberty Archive, see the quite impressive collection of resources at Mises Austria (Mises.at), The Original Austrians, a digital library of thinkers and works from the Austrian School of economics, published by scholarium.at, founded by longtime PFS member Rahim Taghizadegan.
The repository has an impressive and growing host of useful information organized into various subsections, including:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:05 — 11.1MB)
Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 355.
Audio version of Ken Yamarashi, “Restrain the U.S. Navy to Save American Jobs,” PFS Blog (July 12, 2026).
by Jeffrey F. Barr*
Author’s note: This year marks the 100th anniversary of Murray Rothbard’s birth, and much has deservedly been written to mark the occasion. But any understanding of Rothbard at UNLV in the early 1990s would be incomplete without a corresponding discussion of the impact of Hans-Hermann Hoppe. It was a magical, if abbreviated, time for Austrian Economics.
Hoppe walked into the seminar room, set his notes on the table without sitting down, and started talking before most of us had our pens out. No preamble, no small talk about the reading—just straight into the labor theory of value, mid-thought, as if we’d been in the middle of a conversation he was simply resuming. That was how every one of his lectures began, and by the third week I’d stopped being surprised by it and started scrambling to keep up instead.
He was tall and gaunt, with glasses in that unmistakably ‘eighties style—sleek, contemporary, of-the-moment, not the thick, heavy frames people tend to picture on a European academic—and a Germanic inflection so thick it seemed less like an accent and more like a warning. He looked like a man built specifically to deliver bad news to bad ideas, and that, it turned out, was exactly his function in the seminar room. [continue reading…]
As noted here, the 2026 Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society will be held from Thursday, September 17, 2026 to Tuesday, September 22, 2026.
*
PFS Members/Attendees may sign up to the PFS-Announce Google Group or email Stephan Kinsella ([email protected]).
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/iaEh0bk5G0 pic.twitter.com/bapPGmhFHb
— Saifedean Ammous (@saifedean) June 22, 2026
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.” — 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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