Kinsella Austrian AV Club Interview—Mises Institute Canada

I was interviewed yesterday by Redmond Weissenberger, Director of the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada. We had a long-ranging discussion of intellectual property and libertarian theory, including a discussion about exactly how Ayn Rand and other libertarians got off track on this issue, in part because of flaws regarding “labor” and “creationism” in Locke’s original homesteading argument; inconsistencies between Rand’s support for IP and her recognition that production means rearranging existing property; and also the different roles of scarce means and knowledge in the praxeological structure of human action. (For more on these issues, see my blog posts Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and ‘Rearranging’, Hume on Intellectual Property and the Problematic “Labor” Metaphor, Rand on IP, Owning “Values”, and ‘Rearrangement Rights’, and The Patent Defense League and Defensive Patent Pooling, and my article “Intellectual Freedom and Learning Versus Patent and Copyright.”) The video is below; audio file is here (69MB). (Trivia: I used my iPad, running the Skype app, for this interview. More stable and better camera than a MacBook.) [C4SIF] [now podcast at KOL165]