Summary: Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 126.<br> <br> This is my Mises University 2011 lecture, Intellectual Property and Economic Development (July 27, 2011), perhaps one of my better talks on IP and liberty. The original PowerPoint slides are here. Streaming audio, video, and a googledocs version of the slides are below. An unedited, raw transcript is also appended below (it may be cleaned up in due course).<br> <br> <br> Transcript<br> <br> Mark Thornton: Our first speaker this morning is Stephan Kinsella. He is a patent attorney from Houston and the editor of Libertarian Papers. His lecture this morning is going to be on Intellectual Property and Economic Development.<br> <br> Stephan…<br> <br> Stephan Kinsella: Thanks Mark. I’m very glad to be here at the Mises University. I was here a couple of years ago. It is always a great thing. So let me get started. I have a lot to cover so I will try to go as quickly as possible without going too fast.<br> <br> Most of you should already be familiar with the basic idea of praxeology. There is a reason I’m going to start with this and it will become clearer in a moment. Praxeology is the formal study of the implications of the fact that men use means to attain various ends.<br> <br> What we do is we start with incontestable or a priori propositions that are related to human action and its categories. Primarily, for the purposes of our lecture today, humans employ scarce means to pursue ends. There are, of course, other categories applied in action such as causality, choice, cost, profit, and loss.<br> <br> Now another aspect of economic analysis is contingent facts. After we recognize and establish what the a priori categories of action are, we explicitly introduce certain contingent facts to make the analysis interesting.<br> <br> As Hoppe explains:<br> “Mises explains the entire body of economic theory as implied in and deducible from a conceptual understanding of the meaning of action plus a few general, explicitly introduced assumptions about the empirical reality in which action has taken place”.<br> So, in other words, we make some assumptions to make the analysis more interesting and more relevant to our lives. Mises, of course, talks explicitly about this.<br> <br> The branches of praxeology would include both catalytics and Crusoe economics for example. So, for example, we would assume private property rights and a market to make the analysis interesting. We would assume there is a money society, for example, instead of just barter. Economic analysis presupposes some legal system as well and a property rights framework. In a market economy, this include at least private property and scarce resources and related rights like contract and negotiable instruments, promissory notes and debts, service contracts, and so on. When you see economists reason about a banking system or an economy, they are taking for granted, or they are assuming, that there is in place a certain legal system, a certain respect for private property rights. These are not a priori assumptions. These are explicitly introduced background assumptions about the nature of legal rights that are possessed by actors.<br> <br> Economics is just a branch of praxeology, according to Mises. It is the most developed branch so far. What other branches of praxeology could there be? Of course, economics can include Crusoe economics and catallactics. Mieses said that other branches could include the study of war, game theory, and things like this.<br> <br> Roderick Long has a comment that the way we sometimes use economics is so broad that it is basically the same thing as praxeology so it is not clear what types of fields would not be included in economics that would be praxeology. In any case, you will see Austrians explicity use praxeological analysis and economic analysis to analyze the effects of aggression as w...
