StephanKinsella.com

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.

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.

Classic piece from Hoppe: The Intellectual Incoherence of Conservatism, Mises.org, March 4, 2005. Regarding conservatism, in his opening address to the PFS in 2006, Hoppe wrote, “As culturally conservative libertarians, we are convinced that the process of de-civilization has again reached a crisis point and that it is our moral and intellectual duty to once again undertake a serious effort to rebuild a free, prosperous, and moral society.” But Hoppe is clearly not a traditional conservative; see, for example, ch. 5 of A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, bearing the title “The Socialism of Conservatism.” See also Hoppe’s comments on Marxism in this post.

Great article by Jeff Tucker, from 2003: Five Books That Explain It All, which are: The Costs of War, ed. John Denson; America’s Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War by Ludwig von Mises, Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom edited by John V. Denson; and A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II by Murray N. Rothbard.

See Tucker’s article for elaboration.

This is the practice of doing something your wife will permit, while she’s awake (such as taking a nap), and saving till she’s asleep the things she would bitch about if you were doing while she’s awake (such as surfing the Internet–“why don’t you spend time with me?!”).

This could also be called nap-shifting, or “surfing dogs”. In the nap case, if you take a one hour nap, you can stay awake an extra hour, after the house is quiet. (Of course, she may not let you nap earlier, or will contrive some way wake you early–turning on the vacuum cleaner, claiming she needs you to help her open a jar or lift something heavy, etc. But on occasion she may let you nap.)

Another example: suppose you have an hour’s worth of bills to pay. It’s stupid to do this at night, during your time. If your wife is sauntering around the house and catches you surfing the internet, she is bound to cock her eyes and try to drag you into her activities, even if it’s just abject boredom. But if she catches you sitting at the desk, paying bills, she will leave you alone since you are doing something that needs to be done for the family, something she might otherwise have to do if you don’t. So it’s much more efficient to save your surfing for later and do the wife-approved things while the beast is prowling. When she finally tires out and retires to her lair, then you can do what you want.

From Mises Blog, Sept. 19, 2009:

(Archived comments below; the last comment has a valid point about Murphy & Callahan)

Hoppe: Habermas’s Anarcho-Conservative Student

Just came across an interesting blogpost by one Bary Stocker, a “British philosopher based in Istanbul”. Pasted below (and see also Revisiting Argumentation Ethics; Discourse Ethics entry in Wikipedia (which yours truly started); Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics; my New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory):

Monday, 22 June 2009

Hoppe: Habermas’ Anarcho-Conservative Student

I like this post:

The Property and Freedom Society

And so the journey will shortly begin to the Hotel Karia Princess, to attend the annual conference of the Property and Freedom Society.

This leaves me with a seventh pilgrimage to Auburn to get the full set of:

=> Ayn Rand’s apartment where she wrote Atlas Shrugged
=> Murray Rothbard’s New York apartment
=> The site of Ludwig von Mises’ Vienna home
=> The quadrangle at Vienna University
=> Ludwig von Mises’ New York apartment
=> The annual Property and Freedom Society conference

And don’t give me that ‘You’re simply using Austrianism to fulfil an otherwise empty quasi-religious void in your futile and meaningless life’ stuff. I am well aware of the possibility. But still, there are worse hobbies to have.

Wish me luck.

My friend Rob Wicks said this in an email discussion:

Minarchists, while practically better than socialists, strike me as perhaps more intellectually dishonest. The better socialists don’t believe they are doing evil. Minarchists, it seems to me think that by “properly” doing wrong, you get to lower the overall amount of wrongdoing. They believe in evil management. They make no distinction, essentially between doing evil themselves, or having others do evil. Whichever one seems subjectively better is the one they would support. Minarchists cannot coherently object to black slavery, if it could be shown to lower the overall murder rate, for example.

Interactive Graphic Illustrates How U.S. Patent System Has Driven American Economy notes:

Last month, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published two articles documenting the current state of the U.S. patent system (see “The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Gets It Right about Patents“). The authors of those pieces, John Schmid and Ben Poston, have now compiled an interactive graphic that shows how the U.S. patent system has shaped American history and innovation. The graphic contains a number of elements, including a timeline of key patents and significant events in American history, a comparison of domestic and foreign patents issued between 1790 and 2009, and charts showing the top countries and states in which U.S. patents originated, the number of pending applications between 1981 and 2009 and average application pendency between 1983 and 2008, fee diversion between 1992 and 2004, and rapid growth of the Chinese patent system between 1999 and 2008.

Some asked me if this proved patents do encourage innovation. But of course it does not. This proves absolutely nothing, in fact, except that there can still be growth despite state intervention such as intellectual monopoly grants. Correlation is not causation. I hope Obama doesn’t see this–I’m sure he could whip up a similar chart correlating growth over the last two centuries with, say, increasing taxes, increasing federal spending, increasing federal size/employment, increasing military size, increasing efficiency at mass murder, and so on.

Further, note the flaw in using China to prove the patents-drive-growth hypothesis: China’s economy has been growing for a good decade even though it has had and continues to have very mild and tepid IP laws. In fact, Chinese IP laws are gradually being reformed under pressure from the industrialized Western nations–no doubt to please large Western pharmaceutical, software, and other firms that stand to benefit from extending their Western-state-granted artificial monopolies to the growing Eastern economies (see my posts Russian Free Trade and Patents, IP Imperialism (Russia, Intellectual Property , and the WTO), Bush Wants More Jailed Citizens in Russia and China, and China, India like US Patent Reform). Do these intellectual monopolists really expect us to believe that China owes its recent growth to Disney and Big Pharma’s lobbying efforts?! Thank God the Western White Man saves the poor benighted Yellow Eastern man. What would they do without us? Who needs capitalism and increasing institutionalized respect for property rights–if you are a third world economy and want to grow, just let America strong-arm you to adopt their type of IP laws–along with their FDA regulations, antitrust law, and IRS. Give me a break.

[Mises blog cross-post; Against Monopoly cross-post]

Steve Horwitz delivered a nice talk on “Austrian Economics Today” at a FEE Seminar on June 8, 2009. In the talk, Horwitz is very complimentary of the Mises Institute [6:14 et seq., et pass.]. He focuses on their online publications and resources as their main contribution. [continue reading…]

In reference to my 2002 LRC article Extreme Prefixes, Stephen Fairfax sent me this:

***

The CNN Bailout Tracker presently shows total commitments of 11 trillion dollars and total spending (not “investments”) of 2.8 trillion dollars.  The Inspector General for the TARP program tallied total government exposure of 23.7 trillion dollars in a worst-case scenario.

In a world where there is already hyperinflation in the monetary base, just awaiting the proper moment for the fed’s dam to burst (or be deliberately breached) and bring on the full-fledged crack-up boom, I’ve been advising anyone who cares to listen to get comfortable with the SI prefixes, particularly the larger ones.  Looking at all those zeros is hard, and a simple mistake in counting the number of zeros can lead to a 10x or even 1000x error.

I think most people have heard the term megabucks, it’s used as the name of several state lotteries.

Here’s how International System of Units (SI) prefixes can be applied to dollars:

1 megadollar  = ten to the 6th power Federal Reserve Notes = $1,000,000
1 gigadollar =  ten to the 9th power FR Notes = $1,000,000,000
1 teradollar =  ten to the 12th power FR Notes = $1,000,000,000,000
1 petadollar = ten to the 15th power FR Notes = $1,000,000,000,000,000
1 exadollar  = ten to the 18th power FR Notes = $1,000,000,000,000,000,000
1 zetadollar = ten to the 21st power FR Notes = $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
1 yottadollar = ten to the 24st power FR Notes = $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

See what I mean about reading those zeros?

It wasn’t so long ago that a gigadollar was a lot of money even for free-spending  congressmen. Now the government tosses around teradollar budgets, proposals, and deficit estimates daily.  The global GDP, the total value of all goods and services produced on the planet in a year, is about 70 teradollars (PDF).  How long before we see the first petadollar figure?  The notional value of all derivatives presently comes closest, about 0.6 petadollars. (PDF)

A yottadollar may seem unthinkable, but the Zimbabwe hyperinflation took their currency well past that point, as the accompanying image from the Wikipedia entry on the Zimbabwe dollar hyperinflation shows.

Mr. Kinsella’s article notes that the term xenna is unofficially used for ten to the 27th power, but to fully describe the Zimbabwe hyperinflation one needs a term for 10 to the 30th power, which is presently undefined.  Shall we call them Bernadollars?

[Mises blog cross-post]