KOL488 | My Years with the Mises Institute

My Years with the Mises Institute by Stefan Canella on May 2nd, 2026. Introduction. Hans Hopper recently published Misesus Institute Quo Vadis, which contains various criticisms of the Misesus Institute, MI as it is currently organized. He has since been removed as distinguished senior fellow by the Misesus Institute. I fully support Hance and do not disagree with anything he wrote. Here I would like to mention my own experience with the Misesus Institute with which I have been associated on and off for over 30 years since 1994. I have discussed some of this history previously for but as my experience has certain parallels to that of Hance, I will go into more detail here than I have in the past. Despite my critical remarks here, I too share Hans's admiration for Lu Rockwell discussed below and what he achieved with the Misesus Institute. I love the mission of the Misesus Institute and the role it has played for the last 44 years. It is due to my concern over the decline of the Misesus Institute and its treatment of Hance that I publish these remarks. Pursuit of liberty is always a quest for truth. But truth is fragile and seems easily cast aside by those with more base motives. With that in mind, I offer some of my own thoughts on these matters in treating the reader to judge the reasonleness of my position and that of Hopper. The Misesus Institute as intellectual home. Since its founding in 1982, the Misesus Institute has served as a kind of intellectual home for many people. It was a place that spread the ideas of liberty and Austrian economics and after it found its permanent location in Auburn and then later its main campus and building there, a place where people could meet, network, learn, make friends and so on. This was true during its first years from 1982 to the advent of the internet in the mid 1990s. From the late 1990s to about 2012 after the internet, websites, YouTube, blogs, and digital files started to emerge. Its popularity and impact only increased when under Jeffrey Tucker's initiative and also Doug French joining as president in 2009, the Misesus Institute and Misesus.org or took advantage of the internet and digital information to make a mammoth amount of Austrian and libertarian material available free and open online. The Misesus Institute became Rothbard's intellectual home upon its founding in 1982 during its pre-in phase. It also became hops soon after he joined Rothbard in 1985 and closely worked and associated with him as well as the Mises Institute until Rothbard's death a decade later in 1995. Thus, Hans opens his recent missive Misus Institute Quo Vadis with an acknowledgement of his long-standing close connection to the Misus Institute. My close personal association with the Misesus Institute goes back more than 40 years to 1985 only three years after the institute's founding. In the course of the years, I have given dozens upon dozens of lectures. I have been awarded its Scab Prize and the Rothbard Medal. For a decade, I served as editor of its journal of libertarian studies. I am the Misesus Institute's only long-standing distinguished senior fellow. Only two years ago in 2024, I was a featured speaker at the institute's human action conference and my 75th birthday was celebrated at the occasion. In the same year, I sent this congratulatory note to Lou Rockwell at the occasion of the festivities organized in honor of his own 80th birthday. Dear Louu, to your 80th birthday, I send you my best wishes and want to say thanks for by now almost 40 years of friendship and intellectual camaraderie. I know you are too humble to say this, but I can certainly do it. You rank among the most brilliant commentators and analysts of the present age. And you are the world's greatest living promoter of sound economics in the tradition of Levid von Misus and Marian Rothbard and more generally of liberty, peace, common sense, and reason. Your legacy is assured. You are already a legend. Yours truly, Hans. As noted above, I share Hans's admiration for what Lu achieved achieved with the Misesus Institute. Returning to Hans's connection to the Misesus Institute, as he said in one recent talk here though, I thank Lou Rockwell, Tom Dorenzo, and Joseph Solerno for the invitation. And to clear up the veteran part in my lecture, I should point out that my first visit to Orin took place in I think in the fall of 85 or in the spring of 1986. So Orin for me is my sweet home in Alabama. End of quote. In coming of age with Murray, Hans recounts moving to New York in 1985, specifically to work with Rothbard. Then details how the Misesus Institute became the crucial institutional support for him and Rothbard and others when academia and limited government outfits shunned radical Austrol libertarianism until the arrival of Lu Rockwell and the Misesus Institute. I have remained closely connected from its humble beginnings to the present day. The Misesus Institute itself in its 2024 human action conference announcement explicitly noted this close relationship. Misus Institute senior fellows, fellows and associated scholars will deliver presentations on the significance of human action. Returning to his intellectual home for the first time since co Dr. Hans Herman Hopper will deliver a keynote lecture. These thinkers contributions will be compiled into a commemorative volume in honor of Misesus's seinal work. End of quote. The Misesus Institute has played a similar role for countless others. It was what drew them to the Mises Institute to its people, publications, resources, conferences, and events. As Brettin Schaffer, the daughter of Butler Schaffer, longtime legal scholar affiliated with the Misesus Institute, recently wrote, "It is also a home for many intellectuals who might otherwise have found themselves homeless." She recounts how the Misesus Institute and Lu Rockwell.com offered a lifeline to Butler and it also became his intellectual home and also mine. Starting a bit in the middle of my story, in 2002 when I was 37 years old and practicing law in Houston, after a 3-year stint in Philadelphia from 1994 to 1997, about 8 years after becoming associated with the Mises Institute, I concluded my 2002 lu rockwell.com article, how I became a libertarian. us. Since then, meeting Rothbard and Hopper in 1994, I have attended many Misesus Institute conferences, including every one of the annual Austrian scholars conferences initiated in 1995. Over the years, I gained more appreciation for Misus and Austrian economics and for the unparalleled scope of Rothbard's scholarly contributions to economics and political philosophy and related fields. I am now not only an anarcho libertarian but a misesian Austrian. I have gained an increasingly deeper respect for Lu Rockwell and the singular achievement that is the Misesus Institute. It has become my intellectual home. End of quote. While my appreciation of the ideas of Misesus, Rothbard, and Hopper has only deepened and grown over the years, and as I have integrated it more and more into my own understanding of liberty, as can be seen in the book I recently edited and published with Hans Rothbard at 100, a tribute and assessment, as well as my chapter, Misesus, Rothbard, Hopper, an indispensable framework. Its status as my intellectual home began to decline around 10 years later in 2013. first contact but let me go back to the beginning as is my won't as I have recounted elsewhere as an adolescent but always interested in books science and philosophy but was essentially a political politically tabular raza as for so many others for me it also began within Rand a librarian at Catholic high school in Baton Rouge who knew I love to read and talk about ideas commended the fountain head to me in my sophomore year in 1980. And also, as for so many others, this soon led me to libertarianism and to Austrian and other free market economics. By college, I was a very Randian libertarian. I went to hear Ron Paul speak at the LSU campus during his 1988 Libertarian Party run for president. At the time, I was more Randian and pro-choice and still suspicious of the Libertarians because of Anran's critical comments and went there to find out if Libertarians were pro-choice or not. Ron's ambiguous answer to my question made me suspicious. I ended up voting for him anyway in 1988. I loved technology and the natural sciences. Electrical engineering was my undergrad and grad school major. But for various reasons, including an interest in economics, philosophy, and the social sciences, and even the humanities in general, and increasingly in law, I entered law school in 1988. Right as I was transitioning from Randian minikism to Rothbard and an arco capitalism. As the joke has it, what's the difference between a minarchist and an anarchist? A about 6 months. It took me a bit longer, but I've seen that process play out many times. I was influenced by many anarchist works. Rothbards for a new liberty, the Tan Hills, the market for liberty, Bruce Benson, David Freriedman and so on. And then in my first year of law school, I read Hop's article, The Ultimate Justification of the Private Property Ethic, in the September 1988 issue of Liberty, which at the time I would read cover to cover along with other periodicals like the Freeman, the free market, reason, access to energy, the Kzac report, the Rothbard Rockwell report, the intellectual activist, impremise, the less a fair books catalog and so on. This article changed my life. Hop's argument captivated and fascinated me and drew me to his work, to his powerful intellectual framework. After a Eureka moment in contracts law class, fall semester 1988, it stimulated me to build on it using the estoppel concept I had been learning about in contract law class to develop my own complimentary theory of rights. In January 1992, while in grad school pursuing an LLM in international law from King's College London, I wrote a handwritten letter to Hopper Jan 31, 1992 to introduce myself and mention my draft article based on my estoppel-based rights theory. I submitted it to King's College London's law journal which was my first try, how naive I was and other fora such as Liberty, Reason, Jeffrey Freriedman's critical review and so on. It was rejected by all of them, but someone at T-Backs Reason papers liked it. I found out just recently that it was Eric Mack writing, "This is a clever and for the most part meticulously developed essay." my first serious published academic article. It was ultimately published there in 1992 just as I was beginning my first year of legal practice in Houston. Hop's argument was elaborated on in his 1989 a theory of socialism and capitalism and also in his 1993 the economics and ethics of private property. I wrote a lengthy review essay the undeniable morality of capitalism published in St. Mary's Law Journal in 1994 and a shorter review for Fee's Journal, still called the Freeman. I sent the longer one on to Hopper in August 1994, and he sent me back a warm thank you note, referring to me as Dr. Canella, the first time that happened, but not the last. In the intervening years, many people assume I'm a PhD, a sort of honorary doctorate I take more pride in than the meaningless PhDs most academics have. In his letter, he told me he thought my estoppel argument beautifully complemented his argumentation ethics. I had actually mildly criticized some of Hop's arguments in the review, but he still liked it. It was favorable after all and published in a respectable mainstream publication. This feedback, as well as that of the Reason Papers referee, belated thanks, Eric, was very encouraging to a young independent scholar. By this time, I had moved to Philadelphia for a few years for career reasons, and got wind of a meeting of the Mises Institute Paleo Libertarians and the Chronicles crowd, Paleoconservatives, held October the 21st to the 22nd, 1994 at the Crystal City Marriott Hotel in Arlington, Virginia. Maybe Ho or someone at the Misus Institute told me about it. I don't recall. Maybe it was Lou Rockwell I had met by telephone years before. This was during one of the fusionist phases attempts of conservative libertarians and conservatives to unite. But I went there primarily to meet Hopper and Rothbard. I actually already knew Lou since about 1988 or so. As I wrote previously, I was visiting my friend Jack Chris, then a Libertarian AM radio talk show host in Jackson, Mississippi, and was in the studio while Jack interviewed Lou by phone. During a commercial, I talked to Louu and told him how much I admired his superb The Free Market Reader 1988 and other work. We had already corresponded. I believe it wasn't until the 1994 conference that we met in person. I didn't much care for the Chronicles crowd I met there. Sam Francis, Tom Fleming, and others, though I did like Paul got friend and over the years got to know him better as he has also attended several PFS events. Some of them seemed to be doing the creepy sovereign thing of worshiping the rebel flag and the Confederacy, smoking cigars, and holding court in their hotel rooms and so on. I did not feel welcome or especially want to be. I was from Louisiana, but only geographically, so to speak. At the event, I had a long talk with Rothbard when we both arrived at a meeting room early and got him to sign my copy of Man, Economy, and State. When he died unexpectedly 3 months later, the following January, H took over the editorship of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, as he was the obvious choice. I started regularly attending the Austrian scholars conference held every spring in Auburn starting in about 1992 and going until about 2012 I believe. I would sometimes attend other Mises Institute conferences but I almost always presented something at the ASC always with HOPs encouragement and sometimes guidance. Many of these papers were published in the JLS. Many were incorporated in my 2023 book LFS. So my current intellectual framework clearly developed and grew out of my early scholarly years at the Misesus Institute and my exposure to the ideas of Misesus, Rothbard and Hopper and so many others. I made a host of friends and contacts at the Misesus Institute events over the years. Many of them by now lifelong friends including Guido Hoolsman who I happened to sit next to on the shuttle from ATL airport to Orbin for our first ASC together in 1995. We were both going there for Hance. Guido was an economics PhD student and I was an aspiring Austro libertarian legal theorist. Guido and I quickly became close friends at that very event. And though we lived far apart, we have remained friends, collaborators, and supporters. and students of Hance. H and I became closer as well, and I eventually helped him with the JLS, first with an attempted but short-lived feature, the Libertarian Literature Review, and then as Book Review editor, 2000 to 2004. The first sign of trouble in paradise occurred in 2005 when, to our surprise, after a decade of editing the JLS, Hance was removed as editor. He was thrown a bone and relegated to some meaningless title like editor emmeritus or at large. It was not clear why this happened, but Hance was upset and a bit mystified. It made no sense to me. It was great under his tenure and he was the obvious and best person to do it. I heard later that the reason given was that he was behind schedule. This was untrue. I can see now in retrospect after a great deal of experience writing, publishing, and editing many books and my own journal that it was a makeweight reason. Left libertarian Rodrik Long, who was still affiliated with the Mises Institute and apparently a senior fellow, more on this below, was hired. He was a disaster as editor. He started publishing more left libertarian material like that of Kevin Carson, and in any case, it fell far behind schedule. Tom Woods was briefly enlisted to take over, but that did not last long. With the JLS falling apart, I had the idea to replace it with a new online and print journal embracing the internet. I brainstormed this with Jeff Tucker one night, got Hans's enthusiastic support, and with Tucker's help, I quickly formed a website, recruited an editorial board from contacts I had developed through the Misesus Institute, and we were off to the races with the innovative new journal Libertarian Papers. I published Libertarian Papers for 10 years, at first somewhat informally under the Misesus Institutees opaces. I retained ownership and control of the domain and website, but less clearly so over time, and after a few years enlisted Matt McCaffrey to step in as day-to-day editor. More on this later. In any case, in 2005 or so, Hance was removed as editor of the JLS. He was upset at the time, but he accepted it. He had been paid a mega stipend of $500 per month and was told this would continue. It did not. This lie, as well as his senseless demotion to executive editor or editor at large, I cannot recall, and the lame excuses behind his demotion should have raised suspicions. But we were naive, and I at least mostly shrugged this off. But this event must have alerted Hops Spidey sense. He must have sensed that being dependent on such fickle people was a precarious position to be in. The next year in 2006 founded the property and freedom society PFS in Bodram, Turkey, the site of the hotel Karia Princess, a family hotel owned by the family of his soon wife Gulch in Imray, an Austrian economics PhD student who had also begun attending the Mises Institute events as she worked on her PhD. With the recent troubles exposed in Hans's recent article, we can see how precient he was to establish his own base of operations. Staying independent, I had an obvious academic and scholarly bent, and for a time I flirted with the idea of academia. To that end, as a young attorney, I enrolled in the University of London's PhD laws program from 1996 to 2000 with renowned walk-in scholar Dr. Steven Guest as my adviser. My application was supported by helpful recommendation letters from Hopper, Randy Barnett, and Saul Litino. I eventually decided not to join academia, but to maintain my legal career and treat my scholarly interests as an avocation or side pursuit. I thought being an independent scholar was the best path for me. thus for similar reasons was also uninterested in joining the think tank world in any dependent capacity or having a career in the liberty world. So when some opportunities arose, I never pursued them. For example, early in my career in studying argumentation ethics, I came across similar or related arguments which I wrote about in a 1996 JLS article, New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory. One of these was the interesting libertarian oriented rights theory of Roger Pilon of Kato. So I began corresponding and talking to him as I recounted in disinvited from Kato. Pon and I continued to correspond such as this letter May 6th, 1997. He wrote me in 1997 proposing possibly commissioning a study about how to improve property rights in the international arena probably in response to some of my recent legal writing in that area. For example, my book Protecting Foreign Investment Under International Law: Legal Aspects of Political Risk, Dobs Ferry New York, Oceanana Publications, 1997, and related articles. A couple years later, in 1999 or so, I distinctly remember I was on a vacation with my wife and brother in beautiful Capri, Italy, and was checking my work email from a laptop from the hotel room. Yes, apparently it was possible back then somehow. I think via long-d distanceance dialup modem and received an inquiry from Pilon as to whether I was interested in a new position Kato was creating, editor of a Supreme Court Law Review. It would involve a career change, a move to DC, being a talking head on TV on occasion, and a generous salary, but still for me, a cut in pay since I was by then a successful large firm patent attorney, and so on. It was never even a question for me. I did not hesitate or agonize about it. I didn't even run it by the wife. I immediately said no politely, but decisively. I didn't want to move to DC or take a pay cut or be beholden to nonprofit bosses. I'm so glad I said no and that I've remained intellectually independent since. I never wanted to be a kept or house intellectual and am glad of my decision and related ones in years following. To this day, I liked keeping my libertarian intellectual interests as an avocation and being my own benefactor from my normal job. Thank you. That way, one can maintain independence and integrity. My mind is my own man. End of quote. Turning back to the Misesus Institute around the same time, Lu Rockwell hinted at a similar opportunity with the institute. I believe it was around 2000 or so or perhaps a bit later before the Mises Institute had completely moved its conferences such as the ASC to their new building in Orin. In 1995 and for a few years after the ASC was held at the Orin Hotel and Conference Center, Doug French was hired as Misesus Institute's first non Rockwell president in 2009, but Lou must have been considering hiring a successor for some time before Doug was finally hired. I recall Lou and I were alone in the Orban Hotel conference center area where coffee was served between presentations. He mentioned to me he was looking for a president to replace him. I must have said something like, "Perhaps some smart and ambitious young economics professor is who you need." He looked at me and said something like, "Or maybe a smart young lawyer." I was not sure if he was serious, but I changed the subject and never brought it up again. That career path did not interest me at all. I was doing well as a big firm attorney and would never take a pay cut. And as noted above, I preferred to be my own benefactor and keep my vocation and avocation, my career and calling separate. Getting more involved, the open publishing revolution, increased involvement and libertarian papers. In any case, my involvement with the Misesus Institute only increased. I kept speaking at the ASC and helped hence with the JLS, becoming book review editor and so on. In 2002, I was invited to deliver three lectures in the week-long Rothbard graduate seminar, July the 28th to August 2nd, 2002. As I became more prominent and started being invited to speak, such as at Misesu or other events, I would usually decline the fee or reimbursement. Or I would take part of it to have some speaking income to justify treating that side hustle or avocation as a schedule C business for tax purposes, for deducting business expenses and the like. I also had a lucrative legal publishing side gig going at the time and donate money separately. In addition to speaking regularly at Misesus Institute events, I attended the inaugural meeting of HOPS PFS in May 2006 in Bodram, Turkey. I blogged a lot on the Mises blog. I also on occasion gave free legal advice. I co-edited with Guo Hoolsman the Misesus Institutees 2009 Festrift for Hopper, Property, Freedom, and Society essays in honor of Hance Herman Hopper. This was Guido's idea, but it was supported and published by the Misesus Institute. After the disastrous and inexplicable decision to fire Hance from the JLS and Rodrik Longs short-lived tenure, one night chatting with Jeffrey Tucker and lamenting its fate, I had the idea of starting a fully online replacement journal, which became Libertarian Papers. I registered the domain that night, and Tucker helped me quickly set up a site. I released our first batch of articles just a few weeks later in 2009. A few years into it, Matt McAffrey joined as editor. We published it for 10 years until 2018, closing it after Judy Tomson and Timothy Terrell approached me at an event in Orburn and said that the Mises Institute was ready to resume the JLS. We felt we had had a good run and were tired of the hard work, so agreed to close up shop and turn over to them the articles in our pipeline and our network of contacts and referees. I recall I also suggested to Tucker around 2010 that its daily article needed an official name for citation purposes. So they started calling it Mises Daily. This lasted for many years until the Misesus Institute after Tucker and French left inexplicably changed the name to Mises Wire just like they also inexplicably bifocated the successful ASC into the Austrian Economics Research Conference ARC and Libertarian Scholars Conference LSC and got rid of comments on the blog and purged old comments for no obvious reason, broke links and reversed course on their CC by policy. But more on all this later. becoming Mr. IP. In addition, I was showered with unexpected and unasked for honors and invitations to speak. As I have elsewhere noted, my main interests have always been in libertarian legal theory, in rights theory, causation, contract law, and so on, and in incorporating the insights of Austrian economics to libertarian and legal theory. It was never intellectual property, though by now I have become somewhat known as Mr. IP. As I have explained by now many times, since I switched from oil and gas law early in my career to patent and IP law in about 1993, for career purposes, I thought I ought to finally address the IP issue from a libertarian perspective. Since previous arguments for IP all seemed flawed to me, I thought IP must be justified. Even if the arguments by Inrand and others all seemed flawed to me. After studying the issue in depth for a year or two, I finally came to my current conclusion that IP is totally unjust and incompatible with libertarian property rights. Around the same time that I passed the patent bar, 1994, I began to practice patent and IP law full-time and also in parallel began to write articles critical of IP. The first in 1995, a bit tentatively at first, for fear it might harm me in my career. But before long, I gave up my reticence and I decided to go for it. when I realized that it was not going to hurt my career. Clients don't care what your personal politics are and don't read such things anyway. Maybe I just didn't care. I was just not made to hold my tongue. This led me to prepare a more systematic paper, the legitimacy of intellectual property, which I presented at the law and economics panel at the Austrian Scholars Conference in Auburn, March 25th, 2000. I remember George Riseman, a proip objectivist, in attendance and asking at the end if I really meant that all IP law should be abolished. When I answered yes, he seemed a bit stunned and said no more. I published a condensed version of this argument in defense of Napster and against the second homestadding rule later that year in lu rockwell.com and a longer article against intellectual property ape in the spring 2001 issue of the JLS. It was long enough to be republished by the Misesus Institute as a monograph in 2008. To my surprise, for my 2001 JLS article, APE, I received the Mises Institute's first awarded Opalford three prize for scholarly article published during 2001 to 2002 that best advances libertarian scholarship at the Misa Institute's 8th Austrian Scholars Conference, March 16th, 2002. When I showed up for the 2002 ASC, I had no idea this was in the works. I remember Karen D. Costa and I walked in and encountered David Gordon who muttered something like, "Oh, I see you are getting a prize." Karen and I exchanged glances as we didn't know what he was talking about. Sensing he had possibly let the cat out of the bag, he changed the subject and scured off. Hence, as editor of the JLS, selected the winner. Years later when the JLS had mostly disappeared and I published and edited libertarian papers in itsstead from 2009 to 2018 initially under the Mises Institute's opaces I was tasked with choosing the Alford prize winner for the best article in that journal. Over the next few years the article attracted lots of controversy and attention but I believe it began to change minds. It is my impression that today most Rothbardians, Austro libertarians, and anarchist libertarians of all types are overwhelmingly anti. Not that I take sole credit for that. I was not the first and never claimed to be, but a good deal of it for sure. I just happened to be the right guy at the right time when the emergence of the internet and digital copying began to make more than a sleepy issue that could be ignored. I was the right guy because I happened to be interested in libertarian theory, young enough to be energetic and ambitious and stubborn and confident I could figure it out, who also understood principled libertarianism, law and IP law very well and misesian Austrian economics and who was steeped in Misesus, Rothbard and Hopper. There is a reason in fact why Hopper back in 1988 before the internet age before any of the more recent systematic libertarian criticisms of IP by Tom Palmer, Rodrik Long, myself, Butler Schaffer, and others already saw the fundamental problem with ownership of patterns of information with IP law. Well, before I did, and even before the emergence of the internet and digital copying made it a more pressing issue, Hopper already had the essentials. Mesian praxiology, Rothbardian radical politics, and Hoppianism. I don't know. Is Hopper a hoppine? Was Jesus a Christian? Incidentally, let me pause to mention that none of this explanation is meant to boast. It is to explain how from my perspective I was obviously closely integrated into the intellectual fold at Misesus. I was writing for them, speaking, working with and studying under their chief intellectual. I had been given a major award. I was soon to start the successor journal for the JLS and to be a major part of their Misus Academy program. More on this below. Honors, invitations, and senior fellowship. In any case, I was soon to be pulled even closer into the Misesus Institute inner circles. In 2008, I was invited to deliver the Rothbard Memorial Lecture for the Austrian Scholars Conference 2008 entitled the intellectual property quagmire or the perils of libertarian creationism. Lu Rockwell also invited me to appear on the Lou Rockwell show to discuss IP. The next year I was invited to present a paper for the 2009 Misesus University intellectual property and libertarianism. And yet again in 2011 I was invited to lecture again on IP at Misesus University. So it was quite obvious to me that my work on IP was appreciated at Misesus Institute. I had every reason to think that not only Tucker and French and Hopper and other scholars at Misesus Institute did too. I had received the Alford Award for IP paper, I had been invited two years in a row to speak on this topic. Mises was adopting an open publishing policy clearly influenced by my IP ideas. More on this below. Countless people, including senior scholars at Misesus Institute, made it clear to me they agreed with my IP views and thought it was important. This includes Lu Rockwell himself. When I appeared on his podcast in 2008, he said he's Canella is the author of many legal books published in this country and abroad in his area of specialization. Today I want to talk to him about intellectual property, about the whole concept of government patents and government copyrights. He's really enacted a revolution in this area among libertarians. End of quote. And in fact, the day after my July 30th, 2009 talk on IP at Misesu, I had the following email exchange with Lou. Subject: Brilliant from Luwellyn Rockwell. Date Thursday, July 30th, 2019 at 10:03 p.m. Two. Stefan Canella. Your talk tonight, I am listening to the MP3, is brilliant. I am just sorry I missed the actual presentation, but when I got to the room, not only were all seats taken, but so was my reserved and marked one by a lady, so I had to content myself with the recorded version, which I will send out as a podcast from Stefan Kinsella. Date: Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 12:10 p.m. to Luwellin Rockwell. Thanks so much, Lou. The Misesu is just amazing. I think it's one of the most wonderful things I've ever seen. SK from Luwellin Rockwell. Date Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 12:16 p.m. Two. Stefan Canella. You are an important and creative libertarian intellectual. So stay close to the institute. It is an increasingly fruitful relationship from Stefan Kinsella. Date July 31st, 2009 1219 p.m. to Llewellyn Rockwell. Thanks. Of course I will. End of quote. I thought it was very nice. But then I returned to my day job to normal life. A couple months later, Joe Salerno invited me to be a senior fellow. This was again unexpected. Subject invitation from Joseph T. Solerno. Date: Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 3:22 p.m. Two. Stefan Canella. Hi, Stefan. I would like to address a long-standing oversight, or to use Hans's favored term, scandal in not having you listed among the senior faculty of the Misesus Institute. So in view of your long record of outstanding contributions to Msizian and Rothbardian political and economic thought, I am very pleased to invite you to join other distinguished scholars on the senior faculty of the Ludvig von Mises Institute. I look forward to hearing from you and hope that you will accept this invitation. Here is a link to the list of current senior faculty. http/misesus.org/faculty. org/faculty.asper archive. Best regards, Joe from Stefan Kinsella. Date Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 3:53 p.m. to Joseph T. Salerno. Joe, what an honor. I am not worthy of this, but gladly accept. I'll prepare a little bio if you want. Thanks, SK. End of quote. So, I became a senior fellow archived page from 2011, which I thought would be for life or for a long time, but which lasted a mere 4 years till 2013. More on this below. Tucker IP and open publishing. Returning to the impact of the anti-IP ideas on Jeff Tucker, at first he thought my IP views were the typical obstruuse, academic, impractical nonsense of pie in the sky theorists and that the attention it was receiving was somewhat ridiculous. But finally, he became convinced as he wrote in January 2009, reviewing Boldrin and Lavine's against intellectual monopoly 2008. Canella's antiip argument initially struck me as crazy on its face. As I considered it further, my own view gradually changed. It's not crazy, I thought. But it is still pie in the sky theorizing that has nothing to do with reality. Canella's article appeared just before the explosive public interest in this subject. The patent regime has in the meantime gone completely wild with nearly 200,000 patents issued every year in the United States and half a million more in other countries with 6.1 million patents in effect worldwide and large firms collecting stockpiles of them. And the copyright issue has led to a massive struggle between generations. Young people live by pirating music, movies, software, whereas the old consider this practice to precage the end of the capitalist system as we know it. The music industry has spent billions trying to contain the problem and only ended up engendering consumer imbitment and terrible public relations. Canella's article continued to haunt me personally. It took about 6 years or so, but I finally worked through all the theoretical problems and came to embrace his view. So, you might say that I was predisposed to hear what these authors have to say. What I hadn't realized until encountering the Boldin/Lavine book was just how farreaching and radical the implications of a detailed look at IP really is. End of quote. But eventually he reread it and was eventually persuaded becoming a convert. The John the Baptist to my Jesus, the Boswell to my Johnson, the Engles to my marks, his colorful words something like this. The Mises Institute goes open source. For years, we would both write on IP on the Misa blog and elsewhere and repeatedly discuss these issues. We collaborated on what we both regard as an important piece, goods scarce and non-scarce, which I included in my 2023 book, LFS. More than that, he began to adopt an anti-copyright and open publishing model, putting Mises Institute works online for free and with a non-restrictive CC by license on each book and on the site's footer. See this archived page, archivemeus.org, or June 2011 showing CC by footer. As Tucker explained in a Misesus Institute speech in April 2009, I want to talk a little bit about what we're doing today that makes such a difference. You know, you can't even compare the intellectual environment of then with today. The prominence of the Austrian explanation and of free marketage generally today is astonishing by comparison. the number of books that are coming out. You know, we're putting out, as I say, sometimes several books a week and these are selling. The distribution is wide. And of course, digital media has made a huge difference. Mises.org remains, I believe, the largest, most well-traedicked economics website in the world. And I didn't bring any data with me. It changes every day and it's impossible to keep up with, but it's massive. And it's true that misuses.org gets more traffic than the Fed or the UN or anybody else. So, this is great. And we have, of course, now thousands of books online and tens of thousands of articles. And I don't know how many hours of media we have recorded now. And I know many of you listen to the podcasts constantly and watch the videos constantly. I mean, I think you could probably live a full-time misus.org life if you wanted to. You know, just wake up in the morning and just live in misuses.org until you go to bed. And this could last for years. So, one of the problems we faced recently is that our traffic has just really gotten larger than we can handle, and we wanted to create space for uploading ever more books. For example, Doug French mentioned that we're putting 50 years of the Freeman online. Very exciting stuff. We want to have the freedom to do that. There's lots more out there. We want to work on many more. You look at the bookshelves of the Misesus Institute. All this stuff needs to get out and nobody else is doing it. Somebody's got to do it. So, we're going to do it. But we had to create the space. We have to have the server space. You bump again up against the limits of physical reality at some point. So our web master David Vexler had this idea that in light of all the recent studies we've been doing on intellectual property and the virtues of going open source. Now that phrase is not going to mean a lot to everybody in the room. What it really means is being as open as you possibly can with your copyright permissions. We put the whole of misus.org or on Creative Commons so that anybody can take anything without permission. Part of the driving force is we get so many requests for reprint rights, we don't even have the staff to handle it. So, we just said, "Oh, to heck with it. Take whatever you want and print it." Leonard Reed had the same view as far as Fee was concerned. End of quote. And as he noted in a more recent interview with me, I am very pleased today to have with me Stefan Kinsella, an attorney who is the author of a 2001 article called against intellectual property and more recently a large treatise called the legal foundations of a free society. He is one of the most important thinkers of our time and I think he has had a huge influence on me. At some point in the mid210s because his article came out I thought it was probably not correct. I thought it was wrong. At least I thought it was a distraction. Essentially what the article says is that intellectual property is an illegitimate concept that ideas cannot be commodified and turned into property and that the attempt to do so is destructive of market forces, information flows and society in particular. This pertains to copyrights, patents and yes even trademarks. The thesis is shocking and probably as you listen to this you are thinking that cannot be true. then nobody would have the incentive to create and so on. These are the usual comebacks. But I promise you, if you think about it long enough, as I did for years, you eventually come to be persuaded. Because of that, I shifted in my own career to only publishing within the Commons. There was at some point in this period an innovation of the copyright status that made available to publishers what is called creative commons with a number of different licenses and terms of use. So in my own work I embraced the creative commons license with only one provision of attribution that has been I think a real key to the success of many of my own personal projects. Also, as a publisher, Brownstone only publishes in the Commons. As far as I know, we are the only ones. There may be other nonprofits that do it, but I am not familiar with them. It is a completely different model. End of quote. French joins Mises Global, Misesus.org as hub of or libertarian thought. When Doug French joined shortly after Tucker's 2009 speech, he joined this mission. As noted in Doug's talk at the Misesus Institute's 2011 supporters summit in Vienna, the Misesus Institute's publishing program that they embarked on took formally hard to find and expensive books and digitized them, put them up free online and in multiple formats, PDF, HTML, Kindle, EPUB, audio, and physical editions. In one anecdote 353 first video 449 of the second Dod recounts how hard it was to obtain Austrian books and articles before the internet and the books you couldn't find them. I mean you absolutely couldn't find the books and you know they gathered dust in libraries if the libraries had them at all. In fact, I studied under Murray Rothbard and I read one of his books in the UNLV library. It was called The Mystery of Banking and I read it while working in the banking industry. This was the clearest explanation of fractional reserve banking I'd ever read. I mean, I couldn't believe it. So, I had to have a copy of this book, but I couldn't get it. Nobody had it. It was out of print. So, one Saturday I went to the UNLV library. I bought a couple rolls of dimes and I plugged the dimes into the copier, put a page down, turned the page, and so on. It took what seemed like hours to create my own copy of the mystery of banking. End of quote. I loved hearing this as it mirrored a similar experience of mine. As I noted in a previous post, in grad school in London 1991-92, I found a copy of Rothbard's Ethics of Liberty in the University of London library. It was then out of print and hard to find. So I paid something like 10p a page to photocopy it by hand. Vellum bound it. And for years that was my main markedup copy of that classic text until the 1998 edition was released by the Mises Institute with an amazing introduction by Hans Herman Hopper. End of quote. In any case, it is my view and that of Doug and Jeff that for a key period of time, the Mises Institute became the hub of Austro Libertarian information partly because of this open publishing program. People still talk about it. I was literally at a Ron Paul Institute event recently and several people told me that they vividly remember how useful misuses.org was in those days as a marvelous font of free information on liberty and sound economics. the natural successor to the role played in the previous two or three decades by less a fair books. This was before there were as many other similar centers around world and when the other foundations and think tanks and centers still largely relied on stingy payw walls and copyright. Mises institute would grant permission to anyone who asked for rights to republish or translate. And when other Mises institutes started cropping up and gingerely asking permission to use the Misesus Institute name, he told them go ahead. He even showcased them on the right side of the website. Who does that? People interested in spreading the ideas of liberty. That's who. It was even called Misus Global for a while listed under Mises Global on the now inoperable Mises Wiki. There was a Facebook page, a short-lived and now defunct website, misses global.org archive started, I believe, by Jeff Tucker after he left Misesus Institute. See these screenshots from 2011 from archive.org. Misus.org archive 2011. Misus global misus.org archive 2011. Showing Misus global links displayed on right sidebar. Misus.org archive 2011. Showing Misus global links displayed on right sidebar. Closeup. As Helio Beltra said in his Luvig von Misus memorial lecture delivered on March 10th, 2011 at the Austrian Scholars Conference 11. And if we are talking about people that would like to start an Austral libertarian cell, you don't need more than to put up a site and start translating and publishing material. Just do it. It's simple and virtually costless. We've done it in Brazil. Gabriel Kalsarda has done it in Spain. The Yoakims have done it in Sweden. Vlad in Romania. And likewise in Poland, Japan, Russia, Belgium, and other places. To build a great team of course is more of a challenge, but they are sprouting because we have the example of Lu and the LVMI team. End of quote. And CEO Akim Camper, Helio Beltra, and Misesus Global, Misesus Daily, June 14th, 2011. Regarding Lvig von Misesus Institute in Sweden, one thing that needs to be mentioned before moving on is that none of this would have been possible if it hadn't been for the totally open and generous policy of the Mises Institute, which allows anyone anywhere to use whatever material they publish. Before starting up, we had many conversations with Mr. Jeffrey Tucker about this, and we were amazed by his open attitude and extreme generosity. He truly understood not just the power of ideas but also the importance of spreading them in a completely decentralized way. Of course, without this attitude, we would not be where we are today. And on a global scale, you can see that this attitude is really having an impact. When we started the Swedish Misesus Institute, there were maybe five other Misesus Institutes around the world. And today, one and a half years later, there are almost 20. The Austro Libertarian starfish is truly here to stay. End of quote. Nowadays, the repository of information at misesus.org is of perhaps less importance than it was in those days because there are more liberty-minded groups and sites with this and other content. But from the early 2000s, for a good 10 to 15 years, the role of misuses.org was crucial. We could all feel it. Tucker even summises that this all perhaps played some non-trivial role in the world we see now when the Tea Party sputtered out and the 2008 to 2009 financial crisis and Ron Paul's 200 and 8 presidential run expanded the number of libertarians misuses.org with its antiip inspired policy and mission were there to help at some intellectual ammunition to the remnants of the Tea Party that Trump tapped into to win in 2016. Who knows? But a fun theory, libertarian legal theory with Stefan Kinsella, Misesus Academy, and the high water mark. Meanwhile, Tucker and French spearheaded the formation of the Misus Academy, taking advantage of live remote courses delivered over the internet. I conducted several from 2010 to 2011. These included multicourse lectures, rethinking intellectual property, history, theory and economics twice, libertarian legal theory, property, conflict and society, libertarian controversies and the social theory of hopper and one webinar Obama's patent reform improvement or continuing calamity. Students loved it, one said of the first IP lecture series. Thank you so very much for all the excellent work. Very few classes have really changed my life dramatically. Actually, only three have, and all three were classes I took at the Misus Academy, starting with PP350. Keep up the good work." End of quote. I recall being paid perhaps over $100,000 for my role. I had assumed Mises Institute must have made at least this much from their cut. Doug French tells me now that in the early days of Misesus Academy, they perhaps goofed and the split with the speakers was too generous. It was more like 50/50 paid to early instructors like me, Bob Murphy, and Tom Woods. I was unaware of this until Doug just told me this at the time of writing this article. So in my view in addition to forfeited speaking fees and reimbursements, various volunteer activities, their Mises Academy profits, my own significant financial donations and so on, I have been a major contributor. Not that I was recognized as such. In recent years, when attending events, I was told by Mises Institute fundraiser Christy Holmes that to attend VIP receptions, I would need to contribute $10,000. I doubt this was asked of other VIPs or significant donors, but by then I was used to this shabby treatment, but I am skipping ahead. In any case, I thought things were going well with my relationship with Mises Institute. So, it was quite surprising and upsetting when Tucker quit in November 2011. French followed in early 2012. At the time, I was not sure why. Despite this and even after Hop's demotion from the JLS, I would have assumed things for me would continue as before. But soon after they quit, things started to change. Tucker and French v. Rockwell behind the scenes 2008 to 2012. I ended up resigning my position as senior fellow in 2013, which I'll explain below. Only later did I begin to understand why this happened. At the time, I was mystified. Before I turn to 2013, let me set out some of the background events between about 2008 to 2012. Some of the following is based on conversations with Doug French, Jeff Tucker, and others. I first met Jeffrey Tucker around 1995 when I started attended Misesus Institute events in Auburn. He has been a friend of mine and collaborator of sorts for perhaps 25 years since my against intellectual property article in 2001. Had been with Mises Institute since about 1985 about when Hance moved to the US to study and work with Rothbart. And as noted, he was the force behind Misesus.org and opening up its content to the world. He was behind Misesus Academy and supported me in helping start libertarian papers. After Doug French joined as president, they worked together on this exciting mission of providing the texts of liberty and sound economics to the world just as the internet made this possible. while others were relying on copyright payw walls. Doug had of course been Rothbard's student at UNLV and he was the recipient in 2005 of the Center for Libertarian Studies Maren Rothbard Award and in 2012 of the Maren Rothbart Medal of Freedom. He also endowed the Misesus Institutees Douglas E. French Prize. the author of several influential books such as Early Speculative Bubbles and Increases in the Supply of Money, fourth expanded edition, Palmetto Publishing 2024, and Walk Away, The Rise and Fall of the Homeownership Myth, Orbin, Alabama, Mises Institute, 2010. His most recent is When Movements Become Rackets and Other Swindles, The PFS Trilogy, Stefan Canella, Ed. Houston, Texas. Pinion Press and Property and Freedom Society 2025, which Hans and I encouraged and supported him in publishing. When Doug accepted the position as president, Doug and his wonderful amazing wife Danna Forbush, both longtime supporters of Mises Institute, uprooted their lives and moved to Orburn. Danna, a successful attorney in Las Vegas working for a Philadelphia firm, managed to move her practice there. No easy feat. Doug was and is a wonderful man and was a great first successor president to lose initial reign. We have since become close friends. He and Danna are among the finest people I know and are both longtime supporters of Mises Institute. In fact, Diana was part of the equation when Doug was offered the role of president. She was very important to Bert and Lou. She had purchased coins from Camino Coin and spoke to Bert and George Rush often and developed a relationship with them. With Doug as president, they envisioned her as the first lady of the institute. Under Tucker and then French, Mises Institute kept publishing books and under a CC by model where possible. They started the Mises Academy and so on. As noted, Rockwell had been president, but the plan was to eventually hire a president. Bert Blumut, who died in early 2009, an early key figure in setting up Misesus Institute, along with John Densson and others, pushed for this. Bloom was then chairman and offered Doug the job of president. He moved to Orin in 2009 with plans to buy a house. His wife Diana worked to relocate her Las Vegas practice with a Philadelphia law firm to Orin. They sold their house in Vegas. Lou was supposed to turn over his office to Doug and step down. But when Doug showed up, Lou was not happy and not ready to step down. He never did give up his office then or under Deis or Dorenzo's tenure. Grudgingly, he allowed Doug to assume some temporary title of executive vice president. Not an apicious start, but eventually after a few months, he was officially named president, and Doug and Deanna bought a beautiful house there befitting a new president and his Mises Institute first lady, intending to make Orin his long-term home. I visited him thereafter and after conference gathering shortly after he moved in and it was on its way to becoming a hub for activity and visits related to the institute conferences and events. Doug told me people asked me what I did at the Misesus Institute and I would say alls I do is make sure Jeff Tucker comes to work. Doug tried to expand Misusu as did Jeff Deest under his later tenure since there was room and Misus Institute had plenty of money. Most recent filings indicated as over 80 million in assets as of the end of 2025 plus Misesu was used to solicit funds from donors who were happy to contribute to the mission of educating new minds. According to Doug, previously Misesu would take about 80 to 100 students and was turning kids away. Doug asked Pat Barnett and others and learned that there was capacity to take more, perhaps up to 140 or so. So he attempted to expand the number of students accepted so that not as many would need to be turned away. This angered Louu. He told Doug that the purpose of Misesu is for Mises Institute to raise money. Money was raised from donors to support 140 students, but numbers were cut off at 100 so Misesus Institute would make money. The goal was not to try to break even, but to make as much profit as possible. Doug made the mistake of thinking like a donor, of thinking about the Misesus Institute's stated mission. Mises Institute supporters summit 2009 and awarding of Slabam Prize for lifetime achievement in liberty Salamanca Spain October the 21st to the 24th 2009. Now in addition to the ASC and Misusu Mises Institute would hold other conferences throughout the year sometimes in Auburn sometimes in other locations such as Misuskal events. For example, there was an annual supporters summit often held at a resort in some other city such as the Misesus Institute supporters summit 2009 held in Salamanca, Spain in October 2009 in conjunction with the institut Marana at which the Slab Prize was awarded to Jesus Huerta Doto. In other years, the prize was given to Hans Herman Hopper, Ron Paul, Ralph Reiko and other Austro Libertarian luminaries. And incidentally, just the next year I worked with Wa Dotto, Steve Baker, Toby Baxendale and others affiliated with Mises Institute and the Cobden Center to try to propose a bill to eliminate fractional reserve banking in the UK. Given the success of this event, French is joining as president soon after Salamanca, the increasing popularity of Misesus.org due to Tucker and French's efforts with open publishing, Misesus Academy and so on, and the need to have an annual supporters summit and the special connection of Austrian economics sometimes called the Vienna School or vianese economics to Vienna, the home of Carl Manga, Eugen Vonboom, Bovk, Misus, Hayek, Whisa and so on. and the fact years earlier there had previously been a Misesus Institute conference in Vienna. Given all this, French and Tucker organized a supporters summit in Vienna in 2011. Needless to say, it was a very popular and successful event. People still talk about it to this day. I wanted to go, but with my career and a young child at home, I was unable to attend. Lou Rockwell was scheduled to speak, but canled. When French got back, Rockwell was not pleased, and he read dug the riot act. Lu acted like he didn't know anything about it and had not approved it, even though he had and had even been scheduled to speak. In Doug's speech in Vienna, Freedom Through Technology, he had promoted the website and basically talked about how the Misesus Institute was going to change the world via misuses.org and all the open publishing and initiatives around it. Doug had said that for a lot of people around the world, the Misesus Institute begins and ends at misuses.org. The speech incensed Lou. Lou said the speech was terrible and that what donors want is not the website but a building in Orburn. Of course, the supporters, speakers, and attendees loved the conference and it was more expensive than most, but it still broke even. But most Mises Institute donors are locals and Americans. So Lou did not think it made any sense to hold such a conference in Austria instead of a local one that he thought would be more likely to be attended by local donors. And then he started fussing at Tucker and French about the book publishing. He wanted them to stop. He told Tucker he had to shut down the book publishing program and run all editorial content by Joe Salerno. He said Mises Institute is not Walmart or Amazon.com and was not in the book publishing business. Tucker noted that when Lou Rockwell.com linked to books available at the Misesus bookstore, Lou would link to the Amazon version with his referral code in the link so that he would get a cut of book sales instead of Misesus Institute getting a cut via its online bookstore. Two days later, Tucker gave his notice to take a new position at Les Fair Books. As he told me, it was clear to me that my work there was done. It is not quite clear to me why Lu had this vaulty face. Perhaps it is because he or Mises Institute had purportedly had inherited Rothbard's copyrights and he started having second thoughts about the open publishing model. Tucker told me Lou said to him one time, "This is not the Canella Institute." Perhaps Lu started to regret Tucker's hype about open publishing and the anti-copyright message I and others had adopted. Even though he had previously said of me in 2008, he's really enacted a revolution in this area among libertarians. Even though he had broached the topic of becoming president with me years earlier, even though he/meises Institute had praised me and invited me to lecture many times, given me an award and senior fellow status. Maybe he was paring Tucker's proincella/anti line and never really believed it and was starting to regret it. Maybe he is just fickle. I have been told that because he agrees to something and then later criticized Ta for then doing it as when French moved to Orin to become president and Lou resisted this after extending an offer to him. Staff got in the habit of making him sign something as proof that he wanted something done so that this could be produced later if he changed his mind and denied having agreed to it. See the Vienna example above. I don't know. I was unaware of all this at the time. It also could be, and this is just a guess, that David Gordon had some role in this. When Rothbart took Hance under his wing in 1985 and started promoting Hance and his argumentation ethics, he was the only voice in the Liberty Symposium commenting on it to wholeheartedly endorse it. Most others were critical. David Gordon also had a comment, "It is not critical, but says very little. It is basically non-committal. I noticed this when it came out, but no one else seemed to. I noticed over the years Gordon has studiously avoided saying one way or the other. I developed the view, which I still hold, that Gordon does not agree with the argument, nor with Rothbard's ringing endorsement. But he did not want to descent in public from Rothbart's praise. So, he simply said something vanilla, non-committal. It could be that he was not happy about Hopper moving to the US in 1985 and working closely with Rothbard for his final 10 years, but could do nothing about it. The same could be true to some extent of Lu. I don't know. When my IP ideas caught on and had influence at Mises Institute, it also involved my criticism of Rothbard's mistakes on IP. I have also pointed out some missteps in his revolutionary and pioneering title transfer theory of contract. If I may be allowed to use the verboten term revolutionary ahem maybe Gordon didn't like this maybe Lou didn't enter Mises Institute affiliated scholar Butler Schaffer to his credit seemed Schaffer posed IP I liked Butler good guy he moderated an IP panel I was on at Liberttopia in 2012 in his 2009 book boundaries of order, private property as a social system. He had some brief comments that patents and copyrights are difficult to reconcile with property principles. And then in 2013, Gordon started trying to promote a little pamphlet by Schaffer as the libertarian case against IP. His little barely 15page essay was published as a book stretched to 60 PDF pages by using small pages and large print and adding an index and introduction by Gordon. As the Mises Institute page promoting the work states, a libertarian critique of intellectual property is a major contribution to libertarian legal theory and an indispensable guide to a vital topic. But is it? This is a book that is barely 15 pages long. Butler's treatment of IP is a bit muddled, unsistatic, and not comprehensive, and at most a minor compliment to my own work on this topic. It does not even mention my work. And yet Gordon writes in his introduction, "Who ever heard of an introduction to a book that is only 15 pages long? Intellectual property is a difficult topic and a lesser author could easily get bogged down in legal technicalities. Not so shaffer. As always, he penetrates to the fundamentals. End of quote. H a lesser author. Gee, I wonder who he had in mind here. Maybe Gordon was acting as Lou's attack dog. Or maybe he sensed this would please Louu given the growing tension between Tucker and Rockwell in Tucker's final years at Misesus Institute. And given Lou's side comments to Tucker that Misesus Institute is not the Canella Institute. In any case, when he was ordered to put the brakes on the publishing project, Tucker quit as noted in November 2011. Rockwell hired Danny Sanchez to replace him. All publishing decisions were run through Sanchez going around Doug. Doug was nominally president but kept finding out things secondhand. One day Lou said things aren't working out. Doug agreed and so he quit. Lou had purged both Tucker and French. I didn't know I was next. Canella out. Now, as previously noted, I was not aware of much of this. I stayed friends with Jeff Tucker even though he was increasingly badmouthed by those still associated with the institute. Hopper did as well and in fact invited Tucker to attend PFS the next year in 2012 and I stayed an increasingly close friend with Doug French who was also a regular and founding member with me of the PFS. H and I were both independent, you see, and paid no heed to subtle pressure to break with our old friend just because some people at Misesus Institute were badmouththing him. Little did I know that resentment among some at Misesus Institute had been building against me for some of the reasons mentioned above. Perhaps because Tucker had promoted my antiip work too excessively in his attempts to justify his open publishing program. Perhaps because I refused to join in the blacklist of him. Perhaps because I had had the tmerity to point out Rothbard's mistakes on IP. Perhaps because Gordon or Louu or others never liked Hans's connection to and status as Rothbard's obvious intellectual successor in both Missesian economics and libertarian theory. Oral history David Gordon part 1 2000 and 23104. But it became apparent that I was no longer one of their inner circle. That my ideas were not in fact embraced by the major figures at the Mises Institute when in an October 4th, 2013 interview of David Gordon by Joe Salerno and Lou Rockwell, Gordon went after my IP and other views. Recall that this was in the aftermath of Jeff Tucker and Doug French's departure from Misesus Institute in late 2011 and early 2012 and was in the first seven or so minutes of part two of a two-part 2-hour entry in their oral history project, the entry focusing on Rothbard. Gordon said Jeff Tucker had promoted the idea of the Canella IP revolution, but that it was not in fact a revolution, that it was minor work building on some previous critiques of IP, full of flaws and much to do about nothing. As he said, Solerno David, what's your general position on IP? Or can you give us a criticism of sort of the antiP position, Gordon? Oh, yes. Well, I agree as in so many things with what Murray Rothbart's view and as he said in man, economy and state, his view was that patents and copyrights both are acceptable only to the extent that people could arrive at the protections they provide by contractual arrangements on the market. And patents generally would be very difficult to get under that. But copyright, you thought you could get some but not all the protection of copyright by just having agreements to say if you sold a book, the person got it, couldn't reproduce it, and then that person would have to incorporate the same proviso into any sale that he made of it. And at the time Murray was writing in 1962, there was quite a good deal of discussion of patents in the economics literature. I think Fritz Mckloop discussed it other people and the argument Murray had on patents was you couldn't really show that patents were necessary for economic progress. This seemed to be kind of a consensus position. At least a lot of people thought that it was very difficult. People might think, you know, when they first hear about patents, don't you have to have patents so inventors will have some incentive to invest? But it doesn't turn out to be that way. But when Murray wrote about this, although that was certainly his view, he didn't attach overwhelming importance to that. It's just a couple pages in man, economy, and state. It wasn't one of the bases of a free society that we don't have standard patents and copyright. But after Murray wrote, there were several libertarian writers, including Sam Conin and Wendy Mroy, also Tom Palmer, who wrote general criticisms of intellectual property just as part of a libertarian political philosophy. But in recent years, there's been a great deal of emphasis in certain quarters on being against intellectual property. Jeff Tucker, who is one who has had a number of articles, he's promoted what he calls the Canella Revolution. And what this involves is that Stefan Canella published an article on patents and copyrights. And this was, I think, originally in the Journal of Libertarian Studies and then it had been reprinted as a small book. It had been translated into Italian, maybe other languages. But he summarized a lot of the standard antiip arguments, most of them taken from Tom Palmer. He had in my view some of the arguments weren't all that good. In any event, that article that was pushed by Jeff Tucker attracted a great deal of attention. They have the view, which I don't see any basis for, that abolishing IP, particularly ending copyrights, would promote some sort of tremendous growth in the economy. That there'd be avenues of information would suddenly become available to people. And as far as I can see, that's just claims. I don't see any basis for it. There is a book that came out by Boldrin and Lavine that I reviewed with critical patents and copyrights, and I thought they had some reasonable arguments. They suggested maybe if copyrights were abolished, we shouldn't think that people would stop writing. There are other ways writers can earn money other than by having copyrights on their books. But they didn't claim there'd be some kind of enormous benefits just by ending copyright. So in my view, the whole issue of IP has been blown totally out of proportion. It's one issue, but it's not one of the central issues of libertarianism like opposition to war or sound money. It's just a minor point that's been blown up. And also there isn't in my view a canellar revolution. Salerno, just to add on to that, Mises in human action pointed out that patents were a monopoly and whether or not society should have them as a matter of efficiency. And Hayek later on said that regarding copyrights that it's a state intervention that creates a class of people that live on books and he didn't know whether that was a good thing or not. But to follow up, I understand with the Rothbard and proviso, what if someone were to say, someone who is antiP, well, you really can't have this because that would be already presupposing the right that you have the right to prevent anyone from copying. How would you respond to that argument, Gordon? Actually, that's an argument Canella uses in his article. But in my view, it isn't a very good argument because see what he says is you're begging the question in favor of IP. If say you took it that the author doesn't have the right to control who copies it. Suppose you start with what can seller would want. Everybody has the right to copy whatever they want. You would still have a contract. Someone would give up that right on condition that the person selling him the book as a condition the person selling him the book. So I think Cancella is wrong there in saying that the copyright arrangements who contract are begging the question in favor of IP that that argument just doesn't work. Solerno, yeah, it seems very weak. Gordon, I will say going on a limb, you'll find if you look at many of Canella's arguments on political philosophy, there's something wrong with the argument. In my view, he will take certain figures. He'll say, "Oh, Misesus." Like he said, for example, he said Mises view on creation of money was that it was just a historical point that money had originated from a commodity. But Mises didn't think that it had to originate that way and that Mises did think that and he gets things wrong on what Loach said and other people. So generally when he takes an interpretation of somebody, it's very often wrong. End of quote. I guess I was not too surprised by Gordon at this point, who seems to be sort of a snake or two-faced, and given my suspicions about his non-committal comments in Liberty in 1988 on Hop's argumentation ethics article. Of course, it is still somewhat odd and out of place to do so in the first 7 minutes of part two of a 2-hour oral history of Rothbard and to aim it at an existing Misesus Institute senior fellow. But I was more surprised by Lu and Joe. I was sure they both agreed with my IP views, even the previous history I have recounted above. Lu had previously said that I had really enacted a revolution in this area among libertarians. Now to be clear, I have never made such a weird grandiose earning claim, but Lou did. And here he is on a podcast about Rothbard with Salerno who is also anti you know the guy who invited me to be a senior fellow after they invited me at least three times to come lecture on IP at Mises Institute chlingling along or at least not disagreeing when Gordon mocks the idea that I had made some important contributions to this topic. Yet when Gordon said, "So in my view, the whole issue of IP has been blown totally out of proportion, it's one issue, but it's not one of the central issues of libertarianism like opposition to war or sound money. It's just a minor point that's been blown up. There isn't, in my view, a Canella revolution." End of quote. Lou said nothing. WTF? the same for Salerno. He even seemed to join in, agreeing at one point that of David's critique of my criticism of Rothbard's proposed contractual common law copyright/patent IP scheme, yeah, it seems very weak again. WTF? Are they now proIP? The new restrictive copyright policy sure would seem to indicate this. See the section open publishing abandoned below. Shades of Tom Palmer, an early anti-IP pioneer who also seemed to have crawfished later on on IP. Damn, Salerno and Rockwell in the company of their old nemesis Tom Palmer. That's just weird. So, against this backdrop, I was flabbergasted and surprised by these comments. Now, I hasten to add that thing Gordon is confused about and wrong here, but that is really irrelevant. Everyone thinks of David Gordon as some rare genius, but he is basically just an odd character with an above average memory. Regardless, in this case, he is deeply confused and simply wrong on the IP issue, if he is even sincere in what he was saying. The point is they went after me like this. Perhaps Lou had another agenda and wanted to erase the history of Tucker at Mises Institute and I was connected to that. I don't know. As for Salerno, I had thought of him as a friend. I have often referred to him as one of the few hypraxiologists along with Hance Hopper, Guo Hoolsman, Jeff Herbner, those who swim in the plasma of praxiology. I do e those who actually use and apply praxiology and integrate it into their work rather than occasionally sprinkling the term into their comments. Hopper also like me respects Salerno's scholarship. He even recently praised Solerno's genuinely excellent book, Money, Sound and Unsound, and wrote, "I had considered Solerno and still consider him the foremost contemporary monetary theorist in the Austrian tradition." Yet in the meantime, I have heard about Solerno being two-faced. For example, according to Tucker, he and Solerno were sitting in the room organizing an upcoming Misesu, and they were discussing inviting me to do a series on law. Solerno enthusiastically agreed. A few minutes later, Lu walked in and pulled up a chair and Tucker mentioned that they were planning a law track taught by Canella. Joe interrupted and said, "Kinella is not an economist and should not be speaking at Mises Hugh." He instantly flipped his position. So, I guess it is not that surprising that he also seemed to follow Gordon's lead and join in the attack. Even though he had previously agreed with me, I still find it hard to believe Solerno was not from the beginning with me 100% on IP and still is, which makes his joining in with Gordon here even more pathetic. Anyone with integrity and a pair of balls would have demurred and defended me and my IP ideas, but I guess they had some goal in mind other than truth. A few days after the podcast came out, October 4th, 2013, when I became aware of it, I mentioned it in a Facebook post, October 8th, 2013. See screenshot below. I described what had been said. It was public after all. I wasn't going to pretend like it hadn't happened. Canella Facebook post 2013 Gordon criticism. By the way, here are some of the comments on that post. Just to let you know, you converted me from my IP loving ways a few years back. And now I can't imagine why anyone would support IP laws. It seems logically inconsistent for libertarians to support IP. Ash Smith, Salerno, and Gordon are no surprise, but Lou, Michael Barnett, I'm surprised by all of it. They aren't convinced. We need the full Canella argument in a fulllength treatise. Colin Sleuth Knight, I'm actually most surprised by Gordon Matt Gilland. There totally is a Canella revolution. Anna Christa Canella played a key role in getting me to let go of IP. Today we published a paper in Nature Biotech describing a method to navigate 1,000s of gene patents. Sadly, the article is behind a payw wall, but I felt this topic was best broadcasted in the arena of the IP believers, lest I waste time preaching to the choir. I am hopeful someone will air and swarts it. If Gordon thinks it's no grand insight to view IP in this light, who cares? He did zero to convince me of the fallacy of IP. Canella is making an impact on others by building a sound and rational argument against IP to the point where it's motivating others to change their actions on it. My post above is proof of that. If Gordon knew this all along, he was less effective at convincing others of it. And it's really irrelevant ego-driven criticism centered on who had the idea first type of criticism. A priority date argument is circular logic in any discussion about the fallacy of IP. I finally listened to Gordon's 7 minutes and I think he lacks information in regards to the negative impact of IP. I wrote a blurb at the Daily Paul McCernome and the freedom to read your own genes 2013 which highlights how IP hinders one's ability to read your own genome and how this is a very big deal considering we now have the tools to read everyone's and personalized medicine. The ability to read one's own genome is as important as Bitcoin in that it enables freedom from the medical grid and it is the Lakian equivalent of owning yourself. It's not as obvious today, but will become so over time as people recognize how life extending this technology will become. For him to state the antiip position is overblown is simply to not understand the hindrances it causes. Kevin Mccernan TLDDR: Gordon proves that he's not much of a thinker. Michael Mobron. End of quote. Now at this time Peter Klene whom I also thought of as a friend was the temporary acting executive director C archive faculty and staff page bridging the gap between French's departure in 2012 and late 2013 when Jeff Deis joined as president to succeed French. I remember discussing with Klene his decision to take on this temporary role. He was not interested in a permanent position. He was able to take a two-year sbatical from his teaching position. Probably he did not want to give up a secure job as a professor to take on a precarious job as president of Mises Institute, given how French's job had only lasted a couple years under the fickle Rockwell. In any case, after my Facebook post pointing out that Mises Institute had posted a podcast attacking me, Peter messaged me to ask me if I thought it was appropriate for a senior fellow of the Mises Institute to be criticizing other senior members of the Misesus Institute. I was thinking, um, what's actually inappropriate is for them to be attacking me, their senior fellow. What they should have done was apologize, cut out the inexplicable attack on me, and repost the podcast and focus on Rothbard. But I immediately said, "You know, Peter, you're right. Remove me. Purge away, boys. I did not want to be associated with these snakes. I had had enough. I had bought and paid for my independence. Now I was going to spend it. So I was no longer a Misesus Institute senior fellow. My decision to stay independent and to be my own benefactor paid off yet again. At the time I felt a bit bad for Peter that he had been put in this position. But as far as I know now, and given his complicity with Salerno on Mises Institutees insider board with ousting Hans, his friendship was all along just as fake as that of Solerno's. And he is just as two-faced. I don't know. It's beyond my control. After an earlier post about this incident last month, I was sent this note. I listened to the 7 minutes of David Gordon bashing you on IP. It's important to understand this was not about ideas or arguments, but rather about excommunicating you. A decision had been made for whatever reason. The IP discussion was just a convenient way to declare to the world can sell a bad. If you were in their good graces, David would have praised you for developing Rothbard's nent ideas on IP. End of quote. So, I feel like now I am in good company. At least I was removed by a communication with the acting executive director, a fellow scholar, not a couple of non-academic low-level staffers as Hopper was. aftermath. I was not really bitter about it. I didn't need these people really. After all, I stayed close with Hopper and PFS and French and Tucker and did my thing. I figured, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice. In other words, I merely adjusted and realized, okay, that's who you really are. Good to know. I didn't need these people or depend on them in any way. The wonderful ASC, which began in about 1992, I believe, and ran for about 20 years, was terminated after Tucker left. It was split for no clear or stated reason into the terribly named and impossible to remember Austrian Economics Research Conference, ARC, and the at first sporadic and occasional Libertarian Scholars Conference, LSC, which appeared to be a revival of an older LSC put on by Rothbards and Blumuts Center for Libertarian Studies, a sort of predecessor to the Mises Institute. It was the original publisher of the JLS, for example. On occasion, I have entertained the half-p paranoid suspicion that the reason Mises Institute split the ASC into the egg and LSC was to keep me, Kinsella, away. The ASC was interdisciplinary, so legal and libertarian scholars like me were welcome along with economists and others. I had been a regular fixture at ASC since about 1995. So I thought maybe they were thinking that I won't attend the egg which is economics focused and the new LSC will be only sporadic and occasional anyway. But this is a bit too narcissistic and conspiratorial. Tucker thinks the reason such changes were made, disbanding and bifocating the ASC, changing the name of the Misus Daily which he had pioneered and which I had named, changing the blog format and comments policy and copyright/open publishing policy was to erase and memoryhole his influence there. As is summised in Mises Institute oral history project, the lost Rothbart history 2013 after Tucker and French left. The main purpose of the oral history project and other changes was perhaps to rewrite the Misesus Institute history minus their central roles. But who knows? But in the end, I even half made up with Mises Institute later, see below, more or less, and even spoke at and sponsored some of their events. But it was now with eyes wide open, and I was never really an insider anymore, as I had been during the Tucker years. One brief aside, after this happened, other than complaining privately to Hopper and Tucker, I was mostly quiet about it. Hopper was incensed, but there was not much he could do. I had already nuked the relationship. Tucker and French commiserated, having also been on the receiving end of Misesus Institute treatment, but I was talking to Walter Block one day a few years later, and he said something about me being a fellow senior fellow. I corrected him and explained that this was no longer the case. I told him what happened. As I recall, he was fairly silent and just changed the subject and moved on. When Walter was himself recently ousted from Mises Institute and other libertarian anti-war groups and condemned by Hance because of Walter's pro-Israel views in an email where he was complaining about this, I reminded him of this that when I had basically been driven out of Mises Institute, he hadn't seemed to care. He did not reply. Dipping one toe back in. Hopper Kinsella and Michael Malice's toy helicopter. Misus 35th Bakar Hotel, New York. October 7th, 2017. After I righteously rage quit in 2013, something I am still very proud of, I steered clear of Misus Institute and went my own way. I continued to write, speak, attend PFS and other libertarian events as usual. But four years later in 2017, Mises Institute was holding its 35th anniversary gala in New York City, October the 6th to the 7th, 2017 in honor of Rothbart. Like Doug French, I'll do anything to promote and celebrate the memory and ideas of Rothbard. Hopper was giving the keynote dinner speech, coming of age with Murray, and it promised to be an elegant affair, and in one of my wife's and my favorite cities. Because of my wife's busy career and different interests, she could rarely over the years attend any of my libertarian events. She only met a few of my Misesus Institute associated friends on the occasions when they passed through Houston, and stayed at my house. So in this way she had met Tom Woods, Jeff Tucker, Wido Hoolsman, Doug French and so on, but had never yet met Hance whom she knew was important to me. Doug French, Joe Becker, Lee Iglady, Jeff Bar, James Yohi, Murray in Las Vegas panel, conversations about Murray Sessions. October 7th, 2017, Misesus Institute 35th anniversary gala in New York City. So I wanted to go but I had self-deported from Mises Institute in 2013 so to speak. I was whining about this to my wife and she said well aren't you buddies with Hopper and isn't he a big shot at Mises and tight with Rockwell. Yes I conceded. Well ask him to feel it out for you. So I called Hance. He called Lou. Said Canella wants to come to the New York event. Is it okay? Lou said, "Sure." So I went and my wife did too, and we had a grand time. We had a nice dinner with Hans and Guido and their wives at Eel Gatau one night. In fact, one night Hans and a group of us were having drinks at my hotel, the Bakar, which is very exclusive and hard to get into. Joe Solerno, Peter Klene, and some others were supposed to meet us there. Unfortunately, the dorman refused to let them in and my phone was on silent so I did not receive their calls, so they never made it up. I did apologize profusely later. After this, I started attending Mises events again on occasion. A couple times, as noted above, I was informed by Christy Holmes I could sponsor a speaker or event or that if I wanted to attend VIP receptions, I would need to contribute some large sum like $10,000. For example, Mises Institute's 40th anniversary supporters summit 2022 promo materials provided. The cost exclusive of room and incidentals is $495 for Misesus Institute members and $595 for non-members. Registration includes a reception and dinner Thursday evening, all meals Friday, including a black tie optional dinner, and all sessions and lectures. Society and gold club members also attend two VIP receptions. End of quote. So I did this also for the supporters summit 2021 for others I was invited to sponsor a speaker as when I was invited to speak on a panel at Austrian economics research conference 2019 on the significance of Hans Herman Hopper more on this below several others and I donated $500 each for the 2024 human action conference styled 75 years of human action I was invited to sponsor Hops keynote lecture, my discovery of human action and misuses as a philosopher. I split this $15,000 donation with Greg and Joy Morin. H never received these funds or even plain fair. He paid his own way. At the dinner we sponsored, with 20 or so people, Lou and I were seated next to Hance at one end of the table, but Greg and Joy were relegated to the far end of the table, which was odd. as sponsors. They should have received primo seating. Of course, when Greg raised the issue with Christy later, he was blown off. Even though he was on the fake outsider board and a major donor, it became clear that it was always about money. Even if I was a sort of VIP or attraction myself and had helped Misesus Institute in innumerable ways with the JLS, Misesus Academy and so on, if there was a chance to soak someone who could pay, so as I noted above, by then I was used to this kind of treatment. I only spoke one more time there in 2019 when I was invited to appear on a panel on the significance of Hans Herman Hopper on the occasion of Professor Hops 70th birth year. Just as Doug and I will participate in anything that promotes Rothbard, I will also participate in anything honoring Hans Hopper. He is my friend and a treasure. I agreed to attend on my own dime of course and also to sponsor the panel when asked. Also at one of these events, probably the Austrian Economics Research Conference 2019 or maybe the year before, as I mentioned earlier, Judy Tom Messon and Timothy Terrell approached me and said that Misesus Institute was ready to resume regular publication the JLS, whereupon I and editor Matt McAffrey decided to cease publication of Libertarian Papers as of 2018 after 10 years of publication. We turned over the pending articles and our referee contacts to Terrell. Ever since then, I have served and still serve to this day as a volunteer outside referee for submissions to the JLS. For me, it is the libertarian enterprise and the ideas of liberty, justice, and sound economics that matter. I am always in favor of doing what we can to promote, spread, and develop libertarian theory and our ideas. the post Tucker era from its founding in 1982 and especially under Tucker's initiative with Misus.org org and with French after he joined in 2009 and until 2012 when both Tucker and French had resigned Mises Institute continually improved and attracted more supporters but after 2012 and Tucker and French's departure Mises Institute has declined in several ways despite the efforts of Deist and Dorenzo losing presidents first after losing both Tucker and French Mises Institute lost two more excellent presidents, Jeff Deest, who served from late 2013 to 2023, and Tom Diorenzo, who served from 2023 until he was terminated only a year and a half later in 2025. All three were excellent and did what they could to keep improving Mises Institute. But due to various tensions and conflicts in goals and values, board structure issues and other problems as discussed in Hops Quo Vadis article, all three were lost. All three were substantial figures in the Austro Libertarian movement and all three uprooted their lives to move to Orburn in high hopes of being part of its mission and helping it move forward and grow. Frankly to me, the way they were treated is an outrage. All three deserve apologies. Cancelling programs. Under Deis's 10-year tenure, he supported programs such as the E4B or economics for business program that was being developed by longtime Mises Institute supporter Hunter Hastings, as well as the attempt to start an accredited graduate school offering an MA in economics, spearheaded by longtime Mises Institute supporter Joe Becker. This was all ultimately opposed by Rockwell at al as a waste of money. One of the reasons that contributed to deist quitting as noted in hopper misuses institute quoadis this led to the termination of the graduate school and of bea both deest and becka now work at monetary metals the loss of the graduate program was especially tragic. It actually had been a longtime dream of Ludvig von Mises to establish such a program potentially at University of Chicago. In fact, I recall years ago, probably around 2000, when a group of us had several meetings and did research on the viability of setting up an accredited graduate program in Austrian economics. I recall going a good deal of research myself on the arcane and difficult accredititation process. As I recall, a number of us were involved in this early effort. Guido Hoolsman, Hans Hopper, Joe Salerno, me and a couple others. But it looked to be almost impossible. So we shelved the idea. So I was delighted when Deest and Becca revived the idea 20 or so years later. I still thought it was an uphill battle, but with resources and the Mises Institute, of course, has plenty and a full-time person, Becca, working on it, it was worth attempting. Solerno and Mark Thornton hated the grad school project from day one. It meant actual work for them. For example, adjuncts had to be hired to actually teach each class. The applicants who were first thoroughly scrubbed and recommended by Joe Becka, still needed to be reviewed and assessed, which would require work from Salerno and Thornton, who after all were on staff and paid by Mises Institute. Rockwell and Pat Barnett expressed enthusiasm for the program at first, but the Christy Holmes didn't think it helped fundraising, so what was the point? Some students actually made it through the full 2 years, complete with graduation ceremony to thrill donors before it was immediately abandoned on Deists's departure in 2023. Pointless name changes, website changes, and journal confusion. In addition, as noted, various changes were made for no clear reason, such as changing the name of Misesus Daily to Misus Wire, getting rid of comments on the blog and on articles, and also deleting all the massive troves of interesting and insightful comments on past blog posts and articles. The link structure to many books and articles was changed, but without redirects, so that users often encounter 404s. It is difficult to find material now. The JLS for example is separated into two parts now older and newer articles. The library greater than periodicals link https colon/meus.org/ library/periodicals at the menu bar at the top links to older issues of the JLS. https/meus.org/ org/ library/periodiodical/journal libertarian studies while a link at the bottom part of the page goes to newer JLS issues https/jls.nnezus.org/apparently org/apparently hosted by Scholastica. The older issues are no longer sorted by issue or volume, so it is almost impossible to find some articles, issues or volumes, and nothing on the homepage explains why there are two different links to these two archives of JLS articles. The key is also bifocated for no reason. This is inexcusable given that these are the two flagship scholarly publications of the Misesus Institute. Open publishing abandoned. Under Tucker's tenure, a CC by notice was displayed on the site implying that all content was CC by. CC by meaning attribution only. You have to say who the work is by is the least restrictive creative common license. I sometimes use CC0, but its legal enforcibility may not be clear. And I think CC by is a perfectly reasonable choice if one's goal is to spread one's ideas and to make it easy for others to republish and translate your material. Otherwise, with a normal copyright or a more restrictive CC license, permission would be required to reuse the material. After Tucker and French left, the previous CC by notice was quietly deleted and is only now used sporadically. As of this writing, Misesus Institute uses a patchwork of Creative Commons license, sometimes CC by but sometimes more restrictive licenses. the JLS site. Well, one of the two asserts open access licensing and copyright. Since volume 23, 2019, papers have been published under a creative common EC by 4.0 license. The full text of all content is available for free and open access without delay. The cheap policy is similar. However, recent books such as Ralph Reiko's The Struggle for Liberty, a libertarian history of political thought, Orburn, Alabama, Misesus Institute 2025 are published under a creative common attribution non-commercial 4.0 and international license or CC by North Carolina North Carolina non-commercial. It's a bit ironic, or one might say, confused, for a pro- capitalist, pro- free market institute to adopt a policy discriminating against activity done for monetary profit. What's wrong with someone making a profit? For heaven's sake? Why is it okay for someone to copy my work attempting to spread the ideas of liberty, but only if they don't make a profit off of this? Not to mention the incoherence of the distinction for Austrians at least between usage done for profit and not for profit. After all, all action is aimed at psychic profit. Even action aimed at monetary profit as psychic aspects. The distinction between commercial or for profit and non-commercial use makes about as much sense as the distinction between private and public goods. Another distinction hopping misesians reject. The Misuswire's copyright license policy is even worse. The reprints, permissions, and copyright for Misus Wire articles page specifies that Misus Wire articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Node Derivives 4.0 International License or CC by North Carolina ND. The three Misus CC licenses, one good one and two evil ones. The problem here is that because of the North Carolina copyright license limitation used for Mises Wire and in recent books, this material cannot be used for profit or commercial use, meaning any website that has ads or any publisher that is for profit does not qualify. And the ND limitation in the CC by North Carolina ND license used for Miseswire articles means no derivative works such as translations can be made. So in practice, the CC by North Carolina and CC by North Carolina ND licenses are almost the same as a standard restrictive copyright. But unlike a normal copyright usage, which does not pretend to be open, gives the false impression that open publishing is being used when it really is not. Most users and readers are not familiar with the arcana of copyright and CC licenses, so obviously do not realize the implications and significance of this change. which is why they get away with changing it with only me shouting in the wind. In fact, I was recently talking to Manuel Gando, who runs Mises.pt. I noticed a CC by North Carolina ND license on one of its articles, see archived snapshot. Even more confusingly, the CC by North Carolina ND image actually linked to the CC bylic at creativecoms.org. Knowing he is Kinsellian on copyright, I asked him why he was using the evil illiberal CC by North Carolina ND license image. He told me he had simply copied what was on misus.org, assuming this was the old open publishing model. After I corrected him, he modified misus.pt display the correct CC by image. But this is what happens when you reverse course and betray your principles. People who admire you will follow your lead. The status of other works at misus.org is uncertain since there is no footer or notice applying a particular licensing policy to the whole sites. So presumably some material at misus.org is still under normal copyright protection. These changes have led to confusion and backtracking. For example, my 2005 Misus Daily article, there's no such thing as a free patent. Misus Daily March 7th 2005 has no notice at all and does not appear to be covered by the Misus wire policy. As there is no overall copyright page on the site setting a default policy or CC by footer covering the whole site anymore, the reader has no way of knowing. This means that anyone wishing to reuse material on the site has to assume it is covered by copyright and that permission is needed. In other words, there is no clear CC by policy at misus.org except for JLS and G articles. I did talk to Judy Tom Messon and Timothy Terrell in 2018 or so when I agreed to close down libertarian papers as the JLS was resuming regular publication and explained to them that after Tucker left in 2011, the Misesus Institute website had seemed to backtrack on its formally open publishing and CC by policy. Perhaps this is why the JLS andQ still employ CC buy while the rest of the site is either in limbo or uses more restrictive licensing policies. Or perhaps one reason the name Misus Daily was changed to Misus Wire was so that new articles could be covered under the CC by North Carolina ND license. Or maybe they are in disarray and the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. Who knows? But after several complaints by me which were ignored and knowing I am somewhat of a specialist in IP who could have been consulted, it is obvious that they do not care if they have an open or even coherent copyright policy. I guess noted IP expert Butler Schaffer was also not available. I should note that once material is published under a permissive CC by license, the publisher technically has no right to reverse this. But as I have noted, this is one problem of CC licenses in general. There is no bargained and signed license agreement. So users have no easy way of proving they did have a license. Because copyright law is arcane and unnatural, everyone gets it wrong. Copyright notices tend to be inaccurate all across the publishing industry, especially nonprofits and think tanks. And in fact, some of my own material published at misus.org and in their journals have incorrect copyright notices. If an author does not assign copyright in writing to a site or journal he retains copyright. So it is simply factually incorrect and legally ineffective to state copyright Misesus Institute on say a work I wrote. Misus Institute would only have a license to publish it but I retain copyright. This is one reason that I posted my own PDF of the Misesus Institute's version of my ape, which strikes out the Misesus Institute copyright notice and includes a CC0 license. One final note here, it is actually potentially criminal under 17 USC section 506C to put a fraudulent copyright notice on a work. So, if I were publishing others work, I would be careful not to falsely put a copyright notice on it stating that I held the copyright instead of the author. Nor would I change a previously granted CC by copyright notice to a more restrictive one, giving the false impression that the user is not free to copy under the initial CC by license. But hey, that's just me. On the other hand, I would never want to try to make a copyright license narrow on purpose in the first place. Moving forward, the problems highlighted in Hop's article concerning the Misesus Institute structure are probably one source of this decline. In one way, this a natural result of what has been called founders syndrome. After over 40 years and with the founder in poor health and after losing three solid presidents in a row, it is time for a change. In addition, the current structure of a real or insider board of subscriber members who can terminate the outside or non-subscriber members and where the real/inssider board is populated by Rockwell relatives and close associates seems to have contributed to the problem. Another is the nature of nonprofit organizations in general. They operate without clear profit and loss signals and constraints. And if successful at fundraising, it is almost inevitable that the mission becomes preserving the funds and fundraising and having comfortable jobs for oneself, one's family, and cronies. In addition, to qualify as a nonprofit and maintain public charity status and avoid being classified as a private foundation, the organization must meet the public support test. This requires the organization to receive at least onethird of its total support from the general public measured over a rolling 5-year period. This rule effectively forces many public charities to engage in ongoing fundraising even if they have substantial savings or endowments. If the organization fails to meet the test, it is automatically reclassified as a private foundation. This results in excise taxes, a requirement to distribute roughly 5% of non-charitable use assets each year, more complex filings and compliance costs and limitations on self-deing and less flexibility compared with public charities. In any case, if Mises Institute is to have a president, he has to have authority to implement his decisions and vision and support and guidance from the board and one where his subordinates such as Salerno are not also on the board. The president also needs to have the authority to fire and replace employees if necessary. I am no expert in such matters, but it seems to me it is time for something to change so that a quality president can be hired who knows he has not only the responsibility and opportunity to try to make a difference but the authority needed to do so to get a quality candidate he needs to be reassured the same fate that happened to French deist and Dorenzo will not befall him and due to this it seems obvious that the concerns expressed in Ho and Hool's man's 2025 memo should be addressed test board structure and composition. This would mean most importantly changing the board structure to a real board, not one bifocated into subscriber or inside members and outside board members who can simply be terminated by the inside board members. The current Mises Institute board and finance page confusingly refers to independent voting members and affiliated voting members, a nonsensical distinction. In reality, as noted in Hopper Misesus Institute, Quo Vadis, the real board consists of an inner board of five permanent or subscriber members. These are the board members exercising true control of the organization. Next to Lou, the inner board includes most problematically Joe Solerno, a paid employee, Peter Klene, professor at Baylor University, but also on the Mises Institute payroll as so-called senior academic adviser and Salerno's sidekick. And then there is Lou's sister and his sister-in-law, whose son and daughter-in-law are institute employees. The other board members appear to have no real power and are mostly window dressing since the inner board members can exercise an ultimate veto in that they can remove any other non-subscriber board member. As we saw with Judge Napolitano, the outside board members include Ron Paul, age 90, John Densen, age 90, Don Prince, age 85, and three lowprofile donor businessmen, Steve Terrell, Mark Mura, and Yousef Army. It is a joke to claim that this inner board could or would exercise any serious control of the inner workings of the institute's new executive directors given that over half of that group are paid employees of the organization or have close ties to such employees. Even if there is no selfdeing, the very structure invites that temptation while appearing suspicious to any outside observer. That this structure is obfiscated by a surrounding layer of outer board members is telling. End of quote. In my view, the current board structure should be changed, which would of course require support of the current five inside board members, which is unlikely to a normal flat board structure. This board would have no employees, family members and so on, but would consist of significant donors with some businesss savvy and other suitable members such as significant intellectuals who share the institutees values and mission such as Hans Herman Hopper and other relevant significant trusted Austro libertarian Missesian Rothbardian scholars those with relevant expertise in finance, fundraising, marketing, management, strategy and legal affairs and so on in this case given the Misesus Institute's embattled history and its loss of three past presidents who all faced and witnessed problems at Mises Institute I would suggest the new board include also all three of these former presidents namely Doug French Jeff Deest also helpfully a lawyer and Tom Dorenzo employees and board composition no employees would sit on the board the president or other executive director or CEO would serve as a non- voting exeicio member. No board members would receive compensation, including the chairman. Lu Rockwell currently receives a salary of $215,614 according to the most recent ProPublica report, Misesus Institute, which appears to be very non-standard in the nonprofit world. Foundation versus public charity. If all this were done, the board ought to bring in sufficient advisers to determine whether to operate as a public charity or as a foundation president. As noted above, the president should have both the obligation and responsibility to manage the Misesus Institute as well as the authority to implement his decisions and vision with support and guidance from the board. This would include the authority to fire and replace employees if necessary. None of his subordinates should sit on the board as is already implied in the criteria laid out above for the board structure and composition. misuses.org copyright and open publishing/information. The CC by policy previously used should be adopted again and the website overhauled so that old comments are restored, broken links fixed, and the JLS and Gunified in one place each with all back issues and volume easily findable. Its most useful programs, in particular the Misusu, could be expanded to invite as many students as possible, even if it is more costly. Surely the donors who have provided funds would be in favor of such expenditures. All these are easy fixes if there is a president who understands this and has the support and resources to get this done. Expand Misus University reconsider graduate school. As above remarks indicate, Misesu should be revamped as necessary and expanded to a larger number of students if feasible. The graduate school initiative started by Deaest and Becka and long a dream of Mises himself should be reconsidered. Conclusion, a hope and a forecast. And then perhaps after writing the ship and getting back on track, Mises Institute can remedy the grievous error of ousting Hopper, apologizing and humbly asking him to return, possibly as a board member, as suggested above. But what are the odds of this? Not high, I would say. Regarding democracy, Hopper wrote this. What should one hope for and advocate as the relatively correct immigration policy? However, as long as the democratic central state is still in place and successfully arrogates the power to determine a uniform national immigration policy, the best one may hope for, even if it goes against the nature of a democracy and thus is not very likely to happen, is that the democratic rulers act as if they were the personal owners of the country and as if they had to decide who to include and who to exclude from their own personal property into their very own houses. This means following a policy of utmost discrimination of strict discrimination in favor of the human qualities of skill, character and cultural compatibility. End of quote. Mises institute is the way it is because of the nature of nonprofit organizations in a society with high taxation and where the nonprofit distinction even makes sense and because of the self-interest of those in control. My guess is nothing significant will change. The board structure will not be changed and because of that there will be no new president who is actually in charge. As Hopper wrote in Misesus Institute Quo Vadis, I am not under the illusion that any of this will have any noticeable effect on the Misesus Institute and its operations. The Misesus Institute sits on an endowment of more than $70 million. Nonprofits almost never implode, and with this endowment, the institute can limp along for decades, almost regardless of what it does or doesn't do. There is always a clueless generation of older donors leaving some big estate gifts behind, and there is always another generation of new donors coming along, attracted by a good show and some freebies." End of quote. In all likelihood, it will in fact continue to limp along for decades, benefiting its staff, no doubt, and providing some type of benefit to students and others, but less than it might. I hope that even if it goes against the nature of a nonprofit and thus is not very likely to happen that I am proven