Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 501.
This is my discussion with Mark Maresca, of The White Pillbox, about my recent travels: episode. (Previous episode: Kinsella as “White Pill”: Maresca, “From the White-PillBox: Part 29. Achilles Heel edition 3”; KOL473 | The Universal Principles of Liberty, with Mark Maresca of The White Pillbox.)
My shirt (from the PFS Merch Store):
Mark's Shownotes:
No, it’s not a new WWF hero. It’s Stephan Kinsella (the Kinsellanator) returning to the White Pillbox, to smash a folding chair over the head of statism.
Together we bob and weave across the landscape of libertarianism and the transition to a free society. And we see tangible building blocks forming, as Stephan discusses the three important conferences he recently attended: The Free Cities Conference held in Prospera Honduras, the Property and Freedom Society annual conference in Bodrum, Turkey, and The 2026 Bitcoin Conference held in Helsinki Finland.
Stephan Kinsella is an intellectual property attorney and a major contributor to libertarian thought and scholarship. His work is consolidated at his main website: https://stephankinsella.com/ Just a handful of his publications include: Against Intellectual Property: https://c4sif.org/aip/ Legal Foundations of a Free Society: https://stephankinsella.com/lffs/ The Universal Principles of Liberty: https://stephankinsella.com/principles/ Check out Stephan’s podcast Kinsella On Liberty: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Links to the organizations of the events he attended: The Free Cities Foundation: https://free-cities.org/ The Property and Freedom Society: https://propertyandfreedom.org/ The Nordic Bitcoin Conference held in Helsinki, Finland, 2026: https://btchel.com/ Other general items we covered: The Great Fiction, by Hans-Hermann Hoppe: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Fiction-...
https://youtu.be/YR9EficG7MQ?si=jSLbmlweC4DZg9f9
Related
The Golden Age of America is Now (March 14, 2013)
Shownotes (Grok)
Kinsella reported on three recent trips: the Free Cities Conference in Próspera, the Property and Freedom Society’s 20th meeting in Bodrum, and the Nordic Bitcoin Conference in Helsinki. He liked the people at Próspera and may return, though he doubts the project will become a tech metropolis. A debate on intellectual property, moderated by Alex Voss, stayed polite but thin. He still sees most seasteading and startup-country schemes as long shots, including Liberland and unflagged floating nations, and is more interested in places like Brunei or a UAE common-law zone. The Free State Project will not free New Hampshire, and he would not move there just to live among libertarians.
What struck him is how large and segmented the liberty world has become: Austrians, the Libertarian Party, the Tom Woods crowd, Hoppe’s PFS, free cities, and Bitcoin, overlapping and feeding one another. His “way-station libertarians” are activists who arrive through a frustration, often Ron Paul, and leave. Since 2008 the movement is bigger, more anarchist, and less well read, but anarchism is now the default, and younger grounded libertarians sound more optimistic than his generation did. A working enclave would undercut the claim that without the state people descend into cannibalism. He also thinks drug legalization overpromised.
Maresca argued that the state is personnel-limited and more fragile than it looks, using a dance-floor metaphor for how fast disobedience could spread. Kinsella agreed: the Soviet collapse, COVID, BlackBerry, Kodak, and bond markets show that what looks inevitable can fail quickly. He doubts another lockdown would be tolerated, and dislikes governors taking credit for opposing lockdowns they first imposed. On Hoppe, the future is uncertain but not radically so. Praxeology constrains forecasts without guaranteeing them. Both treated rising cynicism about doctors, cops, and Congress as realism, and statism as a scam best met with mockery.
Bitcoin, he said, cannot go to zero and cannot sit still, so “up” is the logical bet, though still a long shot he would not stake everything on. Cash still works for spending, so Lightning and ease of use can wait. Fungibility is holding. Anonymity is the gap. Helsinki was Bitcoin-maxi and lighter on scammers than altcoin events. At PFS, Guido Hülsmann was the lone gold bug. Finland’s economics minister, Sakari Puisto, met Kinsella, Adam Back, Martti Malmi, and others for two hours on tax, innovation, IP, mining, and AI. A normie heard “Hoppe” as ABBA.
PFS remains the highlight: a salon plus Club Med, Hans’s wife’s family’s hotel, late starts, long lunches, and a beach day at the Kempinski. People from constrained countries can speak freely. Coming releases include the Knut Svanholm interview, the Free Cities speech, the Helsinki panel with Rahim Taghizadegan, and a PFS talk on Adolf Reinach. Next he wants to write Copy This Book, a full IP treatment. Maresca credited that work with pulling him off the Galambos view of intellectual property. Kinsella closed by showing the PFS shirt: Schwarzenegger was the Governator; he is the Kinsellanator.
Transcript (Grok)
Stephan Kinsella (The Kinsellanator) Returns to Dispense Some White Pills
Mark Maresca interviewing Stephan Kinsella, The White Pillbox.
Opening
0:00:08
Announcer: You're skeptical of the state. You're getting over the myth of authority. But the state is still formidable. Or is it? You've got a front row seat in the transition to a free society. Let's dive headfirst into the White Pillbox with your host, Mark Maresca.
Welcome and Introductions
0:00:28
Mark Maresca: Greetings all. Thank you so much for joining today. Today I'm happy to welcome back as my guest, Stephan Kinsella. Stephan, great to have you here.
Stephan Kinsella: Hey Mark, glad to be here.
Mark Maresca: In case any of you are not familiar with Stephan, he's an intellectual property attorney and a major contributor to libertarian thought and scholarship. Just a few of his publications include Against Intellectual Property, Legal Foundations of a Free Society, and The Universal Principles of Liberty. And you can see all his work via his main website, StephanKinsella.com, which will be provided in the show notes.
Stephan, you're back from a whirlwind tour that took you to, among other things, three major conferences around the world, and I want to hear about your experiences and your take on them today. They were the Free Cities Conference held in Próspera, Honduras, the Property and Freedom Society annual conference in Bodrum, Turkey, and the Nordic Bitcoin Conference held in Helsinki, Finland. So if you don't mind kicking it off, just your overall impression of the first one, the Free Cities Conference.
Free Cities in Próspera, and a Near Miss at Miami
0:01:27
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, Free Cities was great. I went to their events and I think they alternate between Prague and some other city. And last year I happened to go to Prague for the first time ever and enjoyed it. And I also went back to Prague for the Liberland Christmas party.
And I happened to visit Próspera, which is in Honduras, last year when I was on the Tom Woods cruise last year. And we took a side trip to Próspera, or Roatán in Honduras. And so when I heard that the Free Cities event was in Honduras, and it was at Próspera, I thought I would go. And plus I figured it would be a short plane ride from Houston to Honduras, and I didn't realize, well, when I booked my ticket, they said that, oh, you had to go through Miami. There was no direct flight.
So I went through Miami, saw my buddy, and interestingly I was coming home from Miami on that Sunday after the event, and everyone there, I was saying they were about to fly home through Houston to other countries. And I said, why are you going through Houston? Doesn't it take two flights? And they said, no, there's a direct flight.
So somehow I missed the fact that there was a direct flight. So I changed my flight on that Sunday, which was going through Miami on American. I changed it to United to go home directly. And that was the day that there was that disaster at Miami Airport, where that plane overshot the runway and hit those cars. So I'm glad that I heard from these people, because I would have been in the air on an American flight when the airport was shut down. I don't know where I would have ended up. So I'm glad I missed that excitement.
But some people I know were there, some friends I know were there, and I did a debate, which is not my normal type of debate, against a fellow patent lawyer, an Irish patent lawyer from California, on intellectual property, moderated by Alex Voss, which went over well. We were both polite to each other. I think he just didn't really have a good argument. It was more like just spouting the let's-be-moderate kind of stuff, you know, like let's not go to extremes. But, like, okay, he didn't really have a—I honestly, I couldn't tell you what his argument was. Something like let's not be extreme.
Mark Maresca: Yeah. Yeah, it was more along those lines. I think prior to that you had almost hoped that he had something more meaty there, but I listened to it too, live, and was like, yeah, that's a little more typical.
A Richer, Segmented Liberty Movement
0:04:05
Stephan Kinsella: Yeah, but, well, I mean, I was interested to hear. You know, 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 Galt's Gulch Chile. But my impression is that, I mean, look, I do all kinds of things over the world and over the last decades, and 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.
You've got the Austrians, like Mises Institute....
