Front Matter

Legal

Foundations

of a

Free Society

Stephan Kinsella

Papinian Press • Houston, Texas

Copyright © 1994–2023 Stephan Kinsella

Second printing, with corrections, August 2024

Published under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) 1.0 License

No Rights Reserved

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

To the extent possible under law, the author has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

Cover Design & Interior Formatting by Susi Clark of Creative Blueprint Design

Main text font for the print version is Adobe Caslon; headers are LeMonde

ISBN Paperback 979-8-9890306-1-3

ISBN Hardcover 979-8-9890306-0-6

ISBN Ebook 979-8-9890306-2-0

To Ethan, and his generation, in hopes that they and their descendants live in a freer world.

Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

—Samuel Johnson

even if the libertarian ethic and argumentative reasoning must be regarded as ultimately justified, this still does not preclude that people will act on the basis of unjustified beliefs either because they don’t know, they don’t care, or they prefer not to know. I fail to see why this should be surprising or make the proof somehow defective. More than this cannot be done by propositional argument.

—Hans-Hermann Hoppe