Libertarian Papers vol. 1 (2009), Art. No. 38: “Areopagitica: Milton’s Influence on Classical and Modern Political and Economic Thought,” by Isaac M. Morehouse.

Abstract: This article draws general economic arguments against central planning, state licensure and regulation from Milton’s Areopagitica, a 17th Century pamphlet on free-speech. Though Milton’s work was written primarily as a defense for moral man and a warning against religious encroachment by government it provides some of the best and most foundational general arguments, both moral and practical, against government intervention in any field. Milton’s accessible and persuasive style and his ability to combine practical and moral arguments made his work a monumental case against censorship. However, the work has more to offer than a defense of free-speech. Libertarian economists can find in Milton many compelling arguments against central planning, licensure and regulation which have been and should continue to be reiterated.

[Mises blog cross-post]

Libertarian Papers vol. 1 (2009), Art. No. 37: “Minarchy Considered,” by Richard A Garner. This paper, a thorough and withering analysis of defects of minarchist theories, highlights one advantage of the online format of Libertarian Papers: the 62-page length of the article, necessary for the in-depth case the author makes, would have been rejected or arbitrarily pared down by most journals.

Abstract: Whilst some defenders of the minimal, limited state or government hold that the state is “a necessary evil,” others would consider that this claim that the state is evil concedes too much ground to anarchists. In this article I intend to discuss the views of some who believe that government is a good thing, and their arguments for supporting this position. My main conclusions will be that, in each case, the proponents of a minimal state, or “minarchy,” fail to justify as much as what they call government, and so fail to oppose anarchism, or absences of what they call government.

[Mises blog cross-post]

Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe, himself the recent recipient of his own festschrift, Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Jörg Guido Hülsmann & Stephan Kinsella, eds., Mises Institute, 2009), was a contributor to Rothbard’s festschrift, Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard (Walter Block and Llewellyn H.Rockwell, Jr., eds., Mises Institute, 1988). Hoppe’s chapter, “From the Economics of Laissez Faire to The Ethics of Libertarianism,” reprinted as Chapter 8 of his The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, is a thorough presentation of his “argumentation ethics” defense of libertarian rights.

Hoppe also published an insightful book review of the Rothbard festschrift in the Review of Austrian Economics in 1989. The review presages themes Hoppe would elaborate later, such as his criticism of both Nozick’s and Locke’s “provisos” (pp. 255-57; see my post Down with the Lockean Proviso for discussion of other criticisms by Hoppe of the Lockean proviso); his criticism of Israel Kirzner’s critique of Pareto optimality, views on coordination, and his “notion of utter ignorance” (pp. 257-60); and Leland Yeager’s approach to welfare economics (pp. 260-62). He also pithily summarizes his argumentation ethics approach (elaborated in further detail in his own chapter in the volume) as follows:

by engaging in discussions about welfare criteria that may or may not end up in agreement, and instead result in a mere agreement on the fact of continuing disagreements–as in any intellectual enterprise–an actor invariably demonstrates a specific preference for the first-use-first-own rule of property acquisition as his ultimate welfare criterion: without it no one could independently act and say anything at any time, and no one else could act independently at the same time and agree or disagree independently with whatever had been initially said or proposed. It is the recognition of the homesteading principle which makes intellectual pursuits, i.e., the independent evaluation of propositions and truth claims, possible. And by virtue of engaging in such pursuits, i.e., by virtue of being an “intellectual” one demonstrates the validity of the homesteading principle as the ultimate rational welfare criterion. [emphasis added]

By Andy Duncan, 2003

(2)

Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy fans will remember the ultimate cocktail drink; the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. Imbibing this infectious blend was like being hit in the head by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. But does the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster remain the ultimate cocktail? I think I may have stumbled across something even stronger.

Imagine a blowtorch. A really fierce one glowing bluely in the dark. Turn it up a little, hear that roar. Stuff a small lemon into the top of an Irish whiskey flagon. Lay the flagon on its side, perhaps propped up on some old hitchhiking towels, and place the blowtorch against the flagon’s newly exposed underside. Retire to an unsafe distance. When the flagon explodes, try to catch the whiskey-flavoured lemon between your teeth. Suck it and see what you think. Because that’s what it’s like reading Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s book, Democracy: The God That Failed, first published in 2001. As the latest professor of economics at the University of Nevada, and senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises institute, this book out-Rothbards Hoppe’s old Austrian mentor, Uncle Murray Rothbard. Did you even imagine this was possible? Check this:

The mass of people, as La Boetie and Mises recognised, always and everywhere consists of “brutes”, “dullards”, and “fools”, easily deluded and sunk into habitual submission. Thus today, inundated from early childhood with government propaganda in public schools and educational institutions by legions of publicly certified intellectuals, most people mindlessly accept and repeat nonsense such as that democracy is self-rule and government is of, by, and for the people.

Schwing, Baby. And that’s just the warm-up. Try this, if you like your lemon juice even sharper: [continue reading…]

An especially pertinent article by Hoppe, in light of current events: Government, Money, and International Politics (2003).

Classic piece from Hoppe, Nationalism and Secession, from the November 1993 Chronicles.

From “Andy” on The Distributed Republic, back in 2004.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe: A Unified Theory of Everything

Submitted by Andy on Sun, 2004-07-11 17:57.

• Public

Drudge breathlessly intones: OBAMA OPEN TO NEWSPAPER BAILOUT BILL… Hmm, I wonder which way the newspaper editorials will lean on the wisdom of this idea? And I wonder how it will affect their criticism of other state bailouts?

This is the beginning of the end of freedom of the press.

From a great interview with Hoppe: Economics, Philosophy, and Politics (interviewed by Emrah Akkurt, Turkey-Association for Liberal Thinking; to be published in a forthcoming special issue of the economic journal Piyasa on socialism), Mises.org, February 26, 2004.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Interviewed by Mateusz Machaj, English version of Socjaldemokratyczny Hayek, in Najwyzszy czas, September 2004; also Economics, Philosophy, and Politics (interviewed by Emrah Akkurt, Turkey-Association for Liberal Thinking), Mises.org, February 26, 2004. See also comments to this post, noting: In the PFS “about” page, Hoppe is quoting Mises, not Hayek (the piece quoted is here, and makes it clear Mises disagreed with Hayek). Hoppe is a Misesian. Hayek was good on many issues, especially for his time, and Hoppe thus quotes him favorably on one point, but of course nowhere implies Hayek was completely on board with an agenda as radical even as Mises’s was.

See also:

• “The Hayek Myth” (PFS 2012)
• Why Mises (and not Hayek)? “I venture the guess that there exist no more than 10 people alive today who have studied, from cover to cover, his Pure Theory of Capital.“
• Hoppe, F.A. Hayek on Government and Social Evolution: A Critique (Vol. 7 Num. 1) (also in The Great Fiction)
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Interviewed by Mateusz Machaj
• This lecture is from the 2012 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Germany/Turkey), The Hayek Myth. PFS 2012 Playlist. Loosely based (?) on F.A. Hayek on Government and Social Evolution: A Critique (Vol. 7 Num. 1) (also in The Great Fiction)
• Walter Block, “Hayek’s Road to Serfdom”.
• See also Hoppe’s views critical of Hayek’s “knowledge” paradigm in Kinsella, Knowledge vs. Calculation
• Brian Doherty, “100 Years of Murray Rothbard: Remembering America’s most radical and definitive modern libertarian intellectual,” Reason (3.2.2026): “He was friend or foil—and often both over the course of his contentious life—to pretty much every other libertarian thinker and activist in the second half of the 20th century. He was an (informal) student of Ludwig von Mises during Mises’ days at New York University. When I interviewed Milton Friedman the year Rothbard died, I learned that Friedman continued to worry over Rothbard’s critiques for decades, despite being a more famous and respected Nobel winner. Rothbard’s critiques of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty were considered a subterranean scandal in the movement until published long after his death. Rothbard considered the canonical libertarian work positively “evil” both for arguing for anti-statism on strictly utilitarian grounds and for giving intellectual permission to far too wide a range of government actions.”

Additional:

From On the Non Liquet in Libertarian Theory and Armchair Theorizing:

Regarding Hayek’s view that laws should be general, predictable, and known in advance, see my chapter “Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society,” [in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023)] Part III.B.1, n.34:

The “other” fundamental requisite of law is that law be based on rules of general application, a requisite that special statutes tend to undermine. I am grateful to Leonard Liggio for calling Sartori’s works to my attention. But having statutory, artificial law be predictable, known ahead of time, and of “general applicability” is not sufficient for law to be just. If this is your only criteria, you can support all manner of statist laws, as Hayek does. See Walter E. Block, “Hayek’s Road to Serfdom,” J. Libertarian Stud. 12, no. 2 (Fall 1996), pp. 327–50.

From Kinsella, Review of Anthony de Jasay, Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order, in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023):

In the course of this essay, de Jasay also deflates the myth that Popper was a liberal.[24] Also of interest is de Jasay’s critical treatment of other prominent liberal economists and political theorists, notably James Buchanan, F.A. Hayek, and Robert Nozick. In “Hayek: Some Missing Pieces,”[25] for example, de Jasay argues that Hayek “has no complete theory of the social order to back up his liberal recommendations.”[26] In advocating that government should go beyond the maintenance of law and order to provide amorphous and endless “highly desirable” public goods, Hayek ends up supporting virtually unlimited government. De Jasay will have none of this:

A theory of social order is incomplete if it makes no serious attempt at assessing the long-term forces that make the public sector grow or shrink. This can hardly be done without relying on a defensible theory of public goods. Hayek feels no necessity for one. Strangely, the question seems to have held no interest for him.[27]

In other words, Hayek has not done his homework and his half-baked political theory endangers the very freedom that he is viewed as upholding. (The critiques of Nozick and Buchanan are discussed below in the discussion of Part 2.)

^[24] Against Politics, p. 114.

^[25] Ibid., chap. 6.

^[26] Ibid., p. 120.

^[27] Ibid., p. 125. See also Walter Block, “Hayek’s Road to Serfdom,” J. Libertarian Stud. 12, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 327–50.

Walter Block, Review of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (Kluwer, 1993), Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines, vol. 7, num 1, Mars. 1996, pp. 161-165.