Love this LRC ad. LOVE it. Would love to buy this tee-shirt.
Hilarious set of “facts” by Evan Isaac on his Facebook page (and some great Hoppe tee-shirts and images interspersed)
1) Hans Hermann Hoppe can see the invisible hand.
2) There is only one risk that is random yet still un-insurable: The risk of Hans Hermann Hoppe.
3) Hans Herman Hoppe can homestead intangible concepts and ideas.
4) Hans Herman Hoppe possess the worlds only free market monopoly. on fear.
5) Ron Paul tells people to google Hans Hermann Hoppe.
6) Hans Hermann Hoppe’s icy stare can breach the non-aggression principle.
7) Hans Hermann Hoppe wasn’t born. His existence is an a priori statement.
8) It turns out Ayn Rand actually wasn’t an atheist. She was a mystic who worshiped Hans Hermann Hoppe.
9) The score for Jaws originally had lyrics, but Speilberg removed them due to an entire screening audience dying from shock. The lyrics consisted of 3 words: “so to speak”.
10) When God made the world, he originally intended air to be a scarce resource, until Hans Hermann Hoppe told him otherwise.
11) Friedrich Nietzsche isn’t a philosopher, but merely a witness to the above altercation between God and Hans Herman Hoppe.
12) Hans Hermann Hoppe has 2 speeds: walk, and logically deduce.
13) The leading causes of death in the United States are: 1. Heart Disease 2. Chuck Norris 3. Cancer. The leading cause of death OF the United States will be: 1. Hans Hermann Hoppe
14) John Galt asks: “Who is Hans Hermann Hoppe?”
15) Hans Hermann Hoppe’s e-mail password is the entire memorized text of Human Action.
16) When Hans Hermann Hoppe and his wife got married, they didn’t exchange wedding vows… they administered Mundliche Prufung’s to each other.
17) Hans Hermann Hoppe scored 140 & 140 on ‘The Worlds Smallest Political Quiz’: http://www.theadvocates.org/quizp/index.html (the highest score is 100 & 100)
18) Hans Hermann Hoppe doesn’t need to trade essential liberty for temporary security. He trades steely glares for absolute security.
19) The 3/5 clause was not originally meant to count slaves as 3/5 of a person. It was meant to count regular people as 3/5 of Hans Hermann Hoppe.
20) The Supreme Court has ruled that it’s not protected speech to shout “Hans Hermann Hoppe” anywhere, public or private. It always results in unsafe stampedes of adoring Austrians Economists.
21) Hans Hermann Hoppe co-wrote a paper once. The co-author: Hans Hermann Hoppe.
22) Hans Hermann Hoppe says that Chuck Norris has a high time preference. Chuck Norris is too scared to debate with Hans Hermann Hoppe about it, and instead ran crying to UNLV. (See this if you don’t get this one: http://chronicle.com/free/2005/02/2005021406n.htm)
23) Due to recent competition, the webmaster at www.chucknorrisfacts.comwill soon have to realize his value to society in a free market – working the mechanics of a gas pump.
24) Contrary to popular belief, America is not a democracy, it is a Chucktatorship. Hans Hermann Hoppe’s next book is entitled “Chucktatorship: A God That Cried”
***
Some more added in the comments:
- Hans Hermann Hoppe is the only professor who would not be attending the mechanics of a gas pump in an anarcho-capitalist world.
- Hans-Hermann Hoppe thinks in paragraphs.
- Hans Hermann Hoppe and his wife didn’t “decide” to “have a baby”… they “logically deduced” that a “lowered time preference” was consistent with their “subjective value functions”.
- That roaring sound you hear when listening to Hans Hoppe speak for the first time is the implosion of your thoughts that minarchy might work.
- Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth is impossible… unless Hoppe is doin’ the calculating.
From LRC blog:
Lew, your post contains a depressingly good summary of the primary unlibertarian and un-Austrian positions propounded by Cato: as you note, the policies they push expand the State:
massive money printing (for the big banks and big companies), school vouchers (to deliver private schools into the hands of government), the Ownership Society (every person a homeowner through Greenspan’s housing bubble), Social Security Privatization (a new layer of forced savings on top of the present SS taxes, to benefit Wall Street), etc.
In a previous LRC post, What Kind of Libertarian Are You?, I assembled some links to cases where Cato unfortunately strays from the troika of basic libertarian principles of free markets, non-interventionism, and civil liberties, in particular where various Catoites:
- have opposed tax cuts;
- think people who advocate the aboliton of all medical licensing are “moonbats”;
- think we need inflation to counter irrational exuberance;
- defend the Iraq war (not all of them, thank goodness);
- praise socialist-welfarist John Rawls;
- defend federal surveillance and the “Police America Act”;
- prefer Hamilton to Jefferson;
- are tepid in criticizing state-imposed intellectual property (and many of them support IP);
- support centralized federal supervision of states;
- praise “sensible gun regulations“;
- sought $3.5M in DC taxpayers’ money for reimbursement for helping to foist a national rule on the entire country that redefines the natural right to bear arms as a limited State-conferred privilege, clearing the way for all manner of gun regulations;
- flirt with the idea of carbon taxes;
- support NAFTA’s managed trade system;
- laud Ben Bernanke’s performance as Fed Chairman and distractingly focus on the importance of the “independence” of the Fed;
- want to run the TSA (and see Bob Poole on the TSA);
- opposed Ossetian independence from Russian in the name of “territorial integrity”;
- consort with Russian dictators.
My article, Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics, was published today (Oct, 22, 2010) on Mises Daily. It details the content and purpose of my upcoming Mises Academy course, “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics,” Mises Academy (Nov.-Dec. 2011) (discussed on the Mises Blog in Study with Kinsella Online). Sign up!
From Mises blog. Jeffrey Tucker interviews Stephan Kinsella, instructor of the Mises Academy’s forthcoming course, “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics.” Audio of the original interview, recorded October 9, 2010, is available in Mises Media.
Understanding IP: An Interview with Stephan Kinsella
October 21, 2010 by Mises Daily
“Finally, everything fell into place, primarily from Rothbard and Misesian theory. I found that this issue is difficult, but once you see it, it’s one of these issues that sets peoples’ minds on fire. It frees you to think about other things in different ways.” FULL INTERVIEW with Jeffrey Tucker
The following is a lightly-edited transcript of my speech, “How Intellectual Property Hampers Capitalism,” presented at the Mises Institute Supporters’ Summit 2010 (Oct. 8-9 2010, Auburn Alabama) (audio and video).
[Update: see the article based on this talk: “How Intellectual Property Hampers the Free Market,” The Freeman (June 2011), republished as “How to Slow Economic Progress,” Mises Daily (June 1, 2011).]
How Intellectual Property Hampers Capitalism
Stephan Kinsella
Mises Institute Supporters’ Summit 2010
“The Economic Recovery: Washington’s Big Lie”
Auburn Alabama * Oct. 8–9 2010
As Doug [French] mentioned, I am a registered patent attorney. I try not to do too many patents anymore. I find it a little bit distasteful. It’s not the most enjoyable profession to have when you mention to people you’re a patent attorney, they always want to tell you their inventions. I was sitting on the plane and some guy asked, “What do you do”?
I said, “I’m a patent lawyer.”
He said, “Oh, let me tell you about the time I invented One Click before Amazon patented it.”
I’m thinking, “oh God, I have a three hour flight with this guy.” Maybe I should have told him I was a proctologist. But I guess that could have actually been worse!
So, David [Gordon], that’s joke #1 that I saved for you today. [continue reading…]
[From my Webnote series]
On adding contingent postulates to make analysis “interesting” and useful, see
- Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023) ch. 5 n.36
No, he was not talking about marriage. He was talking about an aspect of the praxeological approach to economics, in which we start with certain incontestable (apriori) propositions (related to human action and its categories), and we explicitly introduce certain contingent facts to make the inquiry interesting. For example, we posit a society with money instead of a barter society. This insight of Mises has long intrigued me.
As I wrote in my article Knowledge, Calculation, Conflict, and Law (a review essay of Randy Barnett’s The Structure of Liberty):
… Barnett does not provide a rigorous argument showing where are the exact limits of the ability to deduce concrete rules. He evidently feels that the more abstract principles can, for some reason, be established by armchair theorists. If denizens of the ivory tower can do this, why can they not deduce or establish more concrete rules by simply considering more and more contextual facts? In the Roman law system—a somewhat decentralized legal system superior in many ways to the common law—Roman jurists (jurisconsults) helped develop the great body of Roman law by providing opinions on the best way to resolve disputes. These disputes were often purely hypothetical or imaginary cases, in which the jurists asked: “under such and such a possible or conceivable combination of circumstances, what would the law require?” 1 It is conceivable that a large part or even all of the legal code existing in a given society can be “deduced” in this fashion, and then these rules applied like precedents to actual controversies as they arise. As a libertarian (and, I confess, a lawyer), I must say that I believe I would be more comfortable living under a set of concrete rules deduced by libertarian philosophers than the (perhaps more concrete) set of rules developed under the actual common law.
Still, Barnett’s argument in favor of a common-law system makes sense, even to libertarians who favor a deductive approach to rights …. Legal rules must be concrete in the sense that the rules must take into account the entire relevant factual context. Since there are an infinite number of factual situations that could exist in interactions between individuals, a process which focuses on actual cases or controversies is likely to produce the most “interesting” or useful rules.26 It probably makes little sense devoting scarce time and resources to developing legal precepts for imaginary or unrealistic scenarios. If nothing else, a common-law type system that develops and refines legal precepts as new cases arise serves as a sort of filter that selects which disputes (i.e., real, commonly-encountered ones) to devote attention to.
26This is analogous to Mises’s method selecting certain empirical assumptions (e.g., assuming there is money instead of barter) to develop “interesting” laws based on the fundamental axioms of praxeology, rather than irrelevant or uninteresting (though not invalid) laws. …
As discussed in my TLS post Stefan Molyneux’s “Libertarian Parenting” Series, there are some who advocate “unschooling.” Some of the ideas, as best I can understand them, make sense, but overall I think they are lacking in any systematic basis for their views and a coherent, systematic approach to education. I just read the following post by John Long, in which Maria Montessori, writing decades ago, criticized what appears to be what is now called unschooling. I agree with her.
Comic-book making instead of calculus?
Students direct their education at Manhattan Free SchoolThat is what people FEAR Montessori education to be: comic-book making instead of calculus.
It is not.
E.M. Standing collaborated with Dr. Montessori on the book Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work. The chapter about elementary education includes this section:
Freedom of Choice Must Still Be Based on Knowledge…Some of the new educationists—says Montessori– in a reaction against the old system of forcing children to learn by rote a tangled skein of uninteresting facts, go to the opposite extreme, and advocate giving the child “freedom to learn what he likes but without any previous preparation of interest….This is a plan for building without a basis, akin to the political methods that today offer freedom of speech and a vote, without education—granting the right to express thought where there are no thoughts to express, and no power of thinking! What is required for the child, as for society, is help towards the building up of mental faculties, interest being of necessity the first to be enlisted, so that there may be natural growth in freedom.”
Here, as always, the child’s liberty consists in being free to choose from a basis of real knowledge, and not out of mere curiosity. He is free to take up which of the “radial lines of research” appeals to him, but not to choose “anything he likes” in vacuo. It must be based on a real center of interest, and therefore motivated by what Montessori calls “intellectual love.”
Montessori was a revolutionary thinker. And she pointed to the middle path: FREEDOM…within limits.
Posted by john long at 12:39 PM
Update: see KOL062 | “Intellectual Freedom and Learning versus Patent and Copyright” (2010)
On Saturday, Nov. 6, 2010, I’ll deliver the dinner speech on “Intellectual Freedom and Learning versus Patent and Copyright,” for the 2010 Students For Liberty Texas Regional Conference, University of Texas, Austin. I’ll follow the keynote speaker, the libertarian-leaning former Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico.
Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics: An Interview with Jeff Tucker, Mises Podcast (Oct. 9, 2010) (discussing the upcoming “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics,” Mises Academy)
I have just founded the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF). The inaugural message announcing it is reproduced below:
Welcome to the website for the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF), a new center formed to build public awareness of the manner in which laws and policies impede innovation, creativity, communication, learning, knowledge, emulation, and information sharing. As noted in the sidebar, the Center opposes state intellectual property (IP) law as contrary to private property rights, and in particular seeks abolition of patent and copyright and other state laws, policies, and practices that distort or impede innovation. We intend to provide news commentary and analysis and scholarly resources from our unique pro-property, pro-market, pro-innovation, anti-IP perspective.
Our Advisory Panel comprises most of the leading radical, pro-market, anti-IP thinkers in the world. Our home, for now, and main activities, will be centered around this Site. Key anti-IP publications are collected on our Resources page; on our blog we intend to carry regular news and analysis, including that of many of the members of the Advisory Panel. Please feel free to contact us with any questions or suggestions.
—Stephan Kinsella
Most recent link: https://c4sif.org/2011/05/how-ip-hampers-the-free-market/
Update: now on my podcast feed: KOL061 | “How Intellectual Property Hampers Capitalism” (Mises Institute 2010)
***
My speech, “How Intellectual Property Hampers Capitalism,” presented last weekend at the Mises Institute Supporters’ Summit 2010 (Oct. 8-9 2010, Auburn Alabama), is online now; here is the Audio file; the video is below. A transcript of the speech is available here. The conference’s theme was “The Economic Recovery: Washington’s Big Lie.”
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