U.S. — All of the technology in the entire United States has failed within 48 hours of firing just one Asian guy.

Writing at the Libertarian Alliance, Alan Bickley responds to a radical-right Counter-Currents essay defending “conservative socialism,” which argues that conservatives can’t defend both tradition and capitalism. Bickley accepts part of the diagnosis. He dislikes big corporations and enforced conformity, and he is conservative by temperament. But he rejects the remedy, a bigger State with a racial mission. Free exchange is not the problem, he argues. Booms and busts come from credit manipulation, and big business owes its dominance to State privileges: regulation, patents, monopolies, government procurement. He defends unlimited technological progress and says traditions should survive only through voluntary practice. He would abolish privileges first and let the welfare state shrink afterward.

He ends up calling himself a “radical liberal of the old sort,” in the line of Adam Smith, Hodgskin, Cobden and Bright, Auberon Herbert, and Benjamin Tucker, rather than an anarcho-capitalist, left-libertarian, or paleolibertarian.

I agree with much of this, especially on patents and on the State as the real threat to tradition. But I don’t accept that limited liability is a State-granted privilege. That is a long-running and friendly disagreement I’ve had with Sean Gabb and others in the LA orbit; see my PFS 2013 talk and other posts in the Related list below.

From Alan Bickley, “What Sort of Libertarian Am I?” Libertarian Alliance (Nov. 14, 2026):

A few days ago, I read a long essay on a website of the radical right that argued for something its author called “conservative socialism.” It leaned heavily on Alain de Benoist, and through him on the French writer Jean-Claude Michéa, and its thesis was easy enough to state. The modern conservative, it said, wants to defend tradition and capitalism at the same time, and cannot, because capitalism is the most destructive force ever set against tradition. The modern Left wants to fight capitalism in the name of progress, and cannot, because progress is the ideology of capitalism. The way out was a socialism of limits, rooted in nation and custom, which the author thought workable only in a white ethnostate. He ended by saying that the proper name for his position might be fascism, which he thought “quite perfect” except that nobody now knows what it means.

I should have found the whole thing easy to dismiss, and the conclusion I did dismiss. What troubled me was that I agreed with a fair amount of the diagnosis. I dislike the large corporation. I dislike the soft, smiling conformity of the human resources department, and the way that firms which owe their size to the State lecture the rest of us on virtue. I am, so far as my tastes go, rather conservative. At the same time, I believe in free markets without apology, and I believe in scientific and technological progress without any limit that I can name. On the author’s map, those commitments ought not to sit together in one head. Either he is wrong about the map, or I am confused. I have spent some time since deciding which, and this essay is the result.

The question I found myself asking was the one in my title. Libertarians are fond of labels, and we have accumulated a great many of them: anarcho-capitalist, minarchist, paleolibertarian, left-libertarian, bleeding-heart libertarian, thick and thin libertarian, and others I have forgotten or never learned. The word itself has had an odd history. It began as a term of metaphysics, meaning someone who believed in free will as against necessity, and it was only in the middle of the last century, in America, that it was taken up by people who wanted a name for classical liberalism once the word liberal had been captured by its enemies. Labels of this kind are useful only so far as they tell you what someone believes and why. I shall therefore begin with what I believe, and come to the label at the end.

First Principles

My starting point is old and simple. The State should leave people alone unless they are using force or fraud against others. Within that limit, adults should be free to work, trade, worship, write, drink, marry, associate and dissociate as they please, and to make fools of themselves if they choose. I do not think this needs elaborate justification. The burden of proof lies on anyone who wants to stop me doing something that harms nobody else, and it is a burden that the modern State seldom even tries to carry.

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Related

Labels and Terminology

• Kinsella, “What Kind of Libertarian Are You?” StephanKinsella.com (July 8, 2009) — Bickley’s title question, asked about Tyler Cowen’s five types of libertarian; I argue the taxonomy is muddled and that many Cato-style “libertarian” positions depart from principle.
• Kinsella, “What Libertarianism Is,” StephanKinsella.com (Aug. 1, 2009) — Libertarianism is defined by its rules for assigning property rights, not by labels like “capitalism” or “free market,” which are too narrow. Also why a consistent libertarian is an anarchist.
• Kinsella, “The Origin of ‘Libertarian’,” StephanKinsella.com (Sept. 10, 2011) — The “odd history” Bickley mentions: the modern political use dates to the 1950s, with Leonard Read’s FEE circle and Dean Russell’s 1955 proposal to adopt the word, though earlier uses go back at least to 1802.
  • Kinsella, “Rothbard on Leonard Read and the Origins of ‘Libertarianism’,” StephanKinsella.com (Nov. 17, 2014) — Rothbard’s 1983 Libertarian Forum obituary of Read credits him with claiming the name for the movement. Also notes a political use of the word as early as 1796.
• Kinsella, “What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist,” LewRockwell.com (Jan. 20, 2004) — One of the labels Bickley declines. Anarchism is an ethical position, not a prediction that anarchy will work, and since the State necessarily aggresses, a consistent opponent of aggression has to oppose it.
• Kinsella, “Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned?” StephanKinsella.com (Oct. 21, 2014) — My NYC LibertyFest speech. It names thick/thin and left/right as unresolved divisions among libertarians and argues that libertarianism is a radical doctrine distinct from both Left and Right, close to Bickley’s “radical liberal of the old sort.”
• Kinsella, “Call for Papers: Special Issue of the JLS: “Whither Libertarianism?”” StephanKinsella.com (Nov. 2, 2026) — A Journal of Libertarian Studies special issue, guest-edited by Per Bylund, on where libertarianism is headed. Topics include thick vs. thin and alliances with the New Right or the left, the same factional questions Bickley raises.

Capitalism, Socialism, and the Word “Capitalism”

• Kinsella, “Capitalism, Socialism, and Libertarianism,” StephanKinsella.com (April 16, 2010) — The fight over the word “capitalism” is mostly semantic and tactical. Libertarians should use it to mean private ownership of the means of production and reject corporatism. Directly on point for the Counter-Currents essay’s capitalism-versus-tradition framing.
• Kinsella, “Should Libertarians Oppose ‘Capitalism’?” StephanKinsella.com (March 3, 2010) — Sheldon Richman argued that libertarians should drop “capitalism” because the word connotes the historical collusion between business and the State. I disagreed, siding with Bryan Caplan, and Sheldon joined the debate in the comments.
• Juan Fernando Carpio, “Four questions for ‘anti-capitalist’ libertarians (Carpio)/Is Capitalism Something Good? (Richman) (2010),” The Libertarian Standard (April 21, 2010), reposted at StephanKinsella.com (Jan. 6, 2022) — Carpio challenges libertarians who want to abandon the word. The debate centers on Richman’s FEE article “Is Capitalism Something Good?”
• Kinsella, “The new libertarianism: anti-capitalist and socialist; or: I prefer Hazlitt’s ‘Cooperatism’,” StephanKinsella.com (June 19, 2009) — My reply to Kevin Carson’s call for libertarians to embrace “socialism,” the left-libertarian cousin of the Counter-Currents author’s “conservative socialism.” Socialism means collective control of production. If I had to pick a new label, I’d take Hazlitt’s “cooperatism.”

Hoppe’s Realistic Libertarianism

• Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “A Realistic Libertarianism,” LewRockwell.com (Sept. 30, 2014), reprinted in Hoppe, Getting Libertarianism Right (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2018) — Hoppe’s case that libertarianism has to be realistic about natural human inequality, which is why it has more in common with the right than with the egalitarian left. A useful counterpoint to Bickley’s “conservative tastes, radical politics” and his rejection of the paleo label.
  • “PFP128 | Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Realistic Libertarianism as Right-Libertarianism (PFS 2014),” Property and Freedom Podcast (May 19, 2022) — Hoppe’s PFS 2014 talk on the same theme.
  • Kinsella, “Classic Hoppe on the Realistic Right vs. the Egalitarian Left,” Property and Freedom Society (June 9, 2026) — My recent look at one of my favorite Hoppe pieces: the right is realistic about human inequality, the left is not, and that is why libertarians naturally lean right.

Thick vs. Thin

• Kinsella, “The Limits of Libertarianism?: A Dissenting View,” StephanKinsella.com (April 20, 2014) — Libertarianism is a political philosophy about aggression, not a complete social philosophy, and the thick/thin paradigm is neither coherent nor useful. So there is no tension between conservative tastes and libertarian politics.
• Kinsella, “Wombatron’s ‘Why I Am A Left-Libertarian’,” StephanKinsella.com (Dec. 1, 2009) — Against the claim that libertarianism is at bottom a leftist philosophy; “thick” and left-libertarianism blur the non-aggression principle with other values.
• Kinsella, “The ‘Liberty Is Your Only Value’ Canard,” StephanKinsella.com (April 29, 2025) — Liberty is not our only value, but it is the one libertarianism is about. Thickists and “humanitarian” critics who say otherwise often end up condoning aggression.
• Walter Block vs. Roderick Long on Thick vs. Thin Libertarianism, YouTube (Sept. 2, 2015) — The thick/thin debate argued out by a leading “thin” libertarian (Block) and a leading “thick” one (Long). Bickley lists “thick and thin” among the labels he finds unhelpful.

Corporations, Limited Liability, and My Friendly Disagreement with Sean Gabb

• Kinsella, “The Role of the Corporation and Limited Liability In a Free Society” (PFS 2013), Property and Freedom Society (Dec. 2, 2013) — My PFS 2013 talk arguing that the corporation and limited liability are compatible with a free society. The Q&A includes exchanges with Sean Gabb, who also wrote up notes on the speech.
• Kinsella, “Sean Gabb’s Thoughts on Limited Liability,” Mises Wire (Sept. 26, 2006) — An early round of my friendly disagreement with Sean. Holding shareholders liable for employees’ torts requires a real causal connection, and the only plausible candidate is their power to elect directors.
• Kinsella, “Mercadente, The Illiberal Nature of Limited Liability: A Libertarian Critique,” StephanKinsella.com (March 29, 2025) — My reply to Bryan Mercadente’s Libertarian Alliance critique of limited liability, which makes much the same argument Bickley does. A shareholder’s liability should turn on actual control and causal role, not on the State’s label “owner.” Sean posted a version of my reply at the LA.
• Kinsella, “Libertarian Answer Man: Do Corporations have “Privileges”?” StephanKinsella.com (May 13, 2026) — A direct answer to Bickley’s claim. Limited liability is not a “privilege,” because shareholders shouldn’t be liable for others’ torts in the first place.
• Kinsella, “Left-Libertarianism on Corporations and Limited Liability,” StephanKinsella.com (Jan. 24, 2011) — My reply to Thomas Knapp and other C4SS left-libertarians, who make the left-libertarian version of Bickley’s claim. They never show why passive shareholders should be vicariously liable for employees’ torts.
• Kinsella, “Corporate Personhood, Limited Liability, and Double Taxation,” StephanKinsella.com (Oct. 18, 2011) — The corporate features critics call State privileges (legal personhood, perpetual existence, limited liability) can all arise by contract. The State should stop chartering corporations, which would also end double taxation.
• Kinsella, “Libertarian Answer Man: Legal Entities and Corporations in a Free Society,” StephanKinsella.com (Feb. 29, 2024) — How firms, trusts, and other entities could form in a private-law society without State registration. Liability turns on causation and responsibility, and contract, reputation, and insurance can reproduce the corporate form.
• Kinsella, “How Corporate America Went Full Left,” Property and Freedom Society (May 19, 2026) — Why big business allied with the left: for power and protection, not compassion. This is common ground with Bickley’s complaint about State-fattened firms lecturing the rest of us on virtue.
• “KOL465: Sheldon Richman on Corporations, Limited Liability, Price Controls, Thickism, Abortion, Pipes,” Kinsella on Liberty Podcast (May 17, 2025) — A friendly discussion with Sheldon Richman covering two of the issues here: the corporate form and limited liability, and thick vs. thin.

See also posts tagged thickism, left-libertarianism, corporations, and limited liability.

I was sitting peacefully at my kitchen table in Vancouver, happily eating breakfast, when I was intellectually assaulted by the milk container sitting there on the table. It stated as follows: “By Choosing an Agropur Product, you are Choosing to Contribute to the Canadian Economy.” I was affronted.

To be sure, this is correct insofar as it goes. By purch…

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Here is the second of my occasional philosophical notes. Like the first, it presents a counterexample to Karl Popper’s falsificationism drawn from the work of the late German philosopher Peter Janich, and then considers its bearing on Ludwig von Mises’ account of the method of the natural sciences.

2. Popper Falsified Again: The Three-Plate Method and Ampliative Induction

Peter Janich further offers a second instructive counterexample to Popper’s falsificationist thesis.¹ Planes as forms of surface pieces of objects (such as drawing planes) have the property that all planes (pair-wise) fit on each other, and can be rotated and moved at will. Here Popper’s condition for theories is fulfilled such that some All-statement is given, which refers to real objects.² And yet, no one will release this theorem for falsification. Rather, if two objects that are considered plane do not fit together, at least one of these objects will be considered not a plane or flat one. The proposition in question, then, is true a priori.

And importantly: its status as an a priori, non-hypothetical true All-statement is not owed to induction (which Popper rightly regards as an invalid method of logical inference),³ but rather to the fact that the same-ness of all plane or flat surfaces is assured by the same-ness of their constructive realization, according to the “three-plate method” described by Hugo Dingler.⁴ Accordingly, any seeming falsification, then, of two plane or flat surfaces not fitting, would find its explanation in a faulty method of construction of at least one of the two surfaces.

Incidentally, the “constructivist” solution provided here by Janich concerning the possibility of non-hypothetically true empirical or realistic All-statements — and the generalized insight of his school of rationalist philosophy, then, regarding the methodic and methodological priority or “a priori” of technics and technology, i.e., the purposeful setup and construction of measurement procedures and instruments (in the widest sense of the term) according to some common, general, uniform and standardized construction norms, prior to and preceding any “a posteriori” empirical natural science⁵ — can also shed some light and help lend further support to Ludwig von Mises’ reference to and use of what he termed “ampliative induction” as the appropriate method of the natural sciences.⁶

Ampliative induction, according to Mises, requires the assumption that nature does not change but stays constant and the same, such that we can generalize from the outcome of one experiment or measurement to the outcome of all future experiments or measurements of the same kind without having to repeat them over and over again. Nor, for that matter, can Popper’s falsificationism do without this assumption. Only if it is assumed — in accordance with what I have elsewhere called the “constancy principle” — that causes operate in a time-invariant way can a failure to reproduce some experimental result count as a falsification of a hypothesis, rather than as merely one more, different experience.⁷

“Constructivism” makes us recognize that the same-ness condition required for all All-statements is not just a logically necessary assumption, but a condition that can be actually realized and practically assured, owing to the same-ness of the design of our various measuring procedures and instruments according to a set of common, general, uniform and standardized construction norms. The same-ness condition is not merely a formal-logical requirement; it is a real condition, intentionally brought about or constructed by everyone prior to and before even beginning with any empirical natural science.⁸

Related

• Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Philosophical Notes, No. 1: The Alibi Principle or Popper’s Falsificationism Falsified” (Nov. 3, 2026)
• Hoppe, “My Discovery of Human Action and of Mises as a Philosopher” (July 27, 2026)
• Hoppe, “The Libertarian Quest for a Grand Historical Narrative” (PFS 2018; Mises Wire, Nov. 5, 2018), reprinted as ch. 25 of The Great Fiction (2d expanded ed., 2021)
• Stephan Kinsella, “Hoppe on Falsificationism, Empiricism, and Apriorism and Protophysics” (StephanKinsella.com, June 9, 2011)
• “KOL272-2 | Q&A with Hülsmann, Dürr, Kinsella, Hoppe (PFS 2019)” (Hoppe on Janich)
• Hoppe, “Austrian Rationalism in the Age of the Decline of Positivism,” in The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (2d ed., 2006), ch. 14
• Hoppe, Critique of Causal Scientific Social Research (trans. Andreas Tank, 2025; PDF), translating Kritik der kausalwissenschaftlichen Sozialforschung (1983) (Google Doc)
• Hoppe, “Is Research Based on Causal Scientific Principles Possible in the Social Sciences?,” Ratio (1983), reprinted in The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (2d ed., 2006), ch. 10
• Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (1989; Mises Institute, 2010), ch. 6, “The Socialism of Social Engineering and the Foundations of Economic Analysis”
• Hoppe, “On Praxeology and the Praxeological Foundation of Epistemology,” in Economic Science and the Austrian Method (1995)
• Hoppe, “In Defense of Extreme Rationalism: Thoughts on Donald McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics,” Review of Austrian Economics (1989), reprinted in The Great Fiction, ch. 18
• Thorsten Polleit, “Thank You, Murray Rothbard, For Your Extreme ‘Defense of Extreme Apriorism’,” in Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds., Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment (2026), ch. 18

1. Peter Janich, Kultur und Methode: Philosophie in einer wissenschaftlich geprägten Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), pp. 38f., 439f. For the first counterexample, see Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Philosophical Notes, No. 1: The Alibi Principle or Popper’s Falsificationism Falsified,” PFS Blog (Nov. 3, 2026).
2. “All-statement” renders Popper’s Allsatz, which the English edition of his work calls a “strictly universal statement”: a statement about all things of a kind which, according to Popper, can never be verified by any finite number of observations but can be falsified by a single counter-instance, and which therefore qualifies as an empirical-scientific theory. See Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1959), §§ 6, 15.
3. Ibid., § 1, “The Problem of Induction.”
4. Hugo Dingler (1881–1954), German mathematician and philosopher, was the forerunner of the “methodical constructivism” of Paul Lorenzen’s Erlangen School, to which Janich belonged. See Hugo Dingler, Die Grundlagen der Geometrie (Stuttgart: Enke, 1933); and, on Dingler, Lorenzen, and the Erlangen School regarding the a priori character of geometry, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “On Praxeology and the Praxeological Foundation of Epistemology,” in Economic Science and the Austrian Method (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 1995), n.62. The procedure itself is old workshop practice, popularized in the 1830s by the British engineer Joseph Whitworth as a way to make true surface plates without relying on any prior reference standard: three plates are lapped or scraped against one another in rotating pairs. Two plates alone can come to fit each other perfectly while one is convex and the other concave; but if each of three plates fits both of the others, all three must be flat. See “Flatness (manufacturing),” Wikipedia; Joseph Whitworth, “A Paper on Plane Metallic Surfaces or True Planes,” in Miscellaneous Papers on Mechanical Subjects (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858), pp. 1–20.
5. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Libertarian Quest for a Grand Historical Narrative,” in The Great Fiction: Property, Economy, Society, and the Politics of Decline, 2d expanded ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2021), ch. 25, p. 476. The chapter argues, following Janich, that “Handwerk” precedes and provides the foundation of “Mundwerk,” and that “it is engineering and advances in engineering that make science and scientific progress possible.” See also Peter Janich, Handwerk und Mundwerk: Über das Herstellen von Wissen (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2015); idem, Euclid’s Heritage: Is Space Three-Dimensional? (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992); and Hoppe, “Austrian Rationalism in the Age of the Decline of Positivism,” in The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy, 2d ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2006), ch. 14, on logic, arithmetic, Euclidean geometry, and chronometry as a priori “protophysics.”
6. Ludwig von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1962), ch. 1, § 5, “Induction,” pp. 21–24. Mises there writes that the conclusions of the experimental sciences rest on “the assumption that what happened in one case must necessarily also happen in all other cases of the same type,” and that “the natural sciences are possible only because there prevails regularity in the succession of external events.”
7. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Critique of Causal Scientific Social Research, trans. Andreas Tank (2025; PDF), ch. 1, § III (“What is the condition of the possibility that one can say ‘falsified’? Such a statement necessarily presupposes the intellectual principle of ‘equal cause, equal effect’ …”), and ch. 2, § III (“In its shortest version, it states that causes have a time-invariant form of effectiveness. It represents the logical basis for the known rule ‘equal effect = equal cause’ or ‘unequal effect = unequal cause’, according to which we interpret repetitions as confirmations and non-repetitions as falsifications”) [translating Kritik der kausalwissenschaftlichen Sozialforschung (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1983), pp. 11–12, 21–23; Google Doc version]. See also idem, “Is Research Based on Causal Scientific Principles Possible in the Social Sciences?,” in The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, ch. 10, p. 298, and ch. 14, pp. 364–66; idem, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2010), ch. 6, pp. 129–30; idem, Economic Science and the Austrian Method, p. 36 and n.27; and, applying the point expressly to Popper, idem, “In Defense of Extreme Rationalism,” in The Great Fiction, ch. 18, pp. 324–26 and n.50: Popper’s claim to have solved the problem of induction is “simply an illusion,” for experiences cannot be related “as falsifying (or confirming) each other … unless one presupposed the existence of time-invariantly operating causes.”
8. Cf. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “My Discovery of Human Action and of Mises as a Philosopher,” HansHoppe.com (June 6, 2024): “as in particular the mentioned constructivist philosophers from Hugo Dingler to Paul Lorenzen to Peter Janich have demonstrated, the natural sciences all rest on some ‘technological apriori,’ in the form of purposefully constructed measuring instruments.” See also Stephan Kinsella, “Hoppe on Falsificationism, Empiricism, and Apriorism and Protophysics,” StephanKinsella.com (June 9, 2011), which collects Hoppe’s earlier remarks on protophysics and Janich’s English-language works.