Hans Hermann Hoppe — let us be honest about this — is a significant contributor to modern libertarian thought. He has seen deeply into the nature the state and into the phenomenon of time preference, using basic praxeological theory to successfully explain the decline of traditional religious values, increases in drug use, social disarray, and the breakdown of our inner cities. He has dared to look long and hard at the general feeling that culture is slipping, going far beyond the standard non-explanations about “kids these days” and “all that new-fangled technology” and suchlike.
At the same time, Hoppe is a deeply bigoted man. Fancying himself a libertarian, he advocates the marginalization of non-white peoples by means of strict immigration policies. He wants gays, environmentalists, hedonists, welfare recipients, and communists “physically removed from society,” because of the threat they pose to “libertarian order.” He wants the government to close our borders to anyone who doesn’t have an above-average IQ, and to anyone who is not “European” (read: white).
So what are we to do? How do we correctly respond to Hoppe? In order to understand a healthy response, we must avoid two different rash approaches. First, we must not let our admiration for his insights lead us to sweep his bigotry under the table. To do so is not only to sell out our integrity for the sake of a little intellectual stimulation, but also to undermine any credibility libertarianism as a philosophy may have. People will see through our clumsy attempts to sweep the dirt under the rug.
Just as importantly, we must not burn Hoppe out of the grand adventure that is the construction of libertarian thought. Systematic libertarian thought is relatively young at this point, and contributions that move it forward in a constructive manner cannot be ignored, however distasteful we may find their authors. We can come to a truly libertarian understanding of Hoppe’s teaching on social decay only when we discover exactly where he’s gone wrong.
Where Hoppe errs is where all too many so-called libertarians err. They start with a vision of a better world, a more free world. And whatever irks them in the present world, they imagine it disappearing in the utopia of their imagination. But then their mind’s eye is jolted back to the present world, which is so far from their dreams of perfection. And they think to themselves, we are so far from liberty that we cannot get there. So long as we’ve still got an invasive government, let’s use it to artificially simulate the conditions that we imagine under freedom. After all, because it’s the government that causes the bad things to happen, in a sense using government to force a better world into being is really a reduction in the destructive force of government. We must abandon the outward form of libertarianism to save its soul. In the end, the idealist has swung to the opposite extreme, someone still carrying the mantle of “libertarian” about with them while really advocating radical force-based restructuring of society. The self-styled libertarian who has undergone this Orwellian mind-warp is no more a libertarian than a communist is. After all, Marxists believe ultimately in the shrinking away of all government and endless freedom, but only after using violent force to utterly reshape all of society.
If you think I’m being overly dramatic, think through what Hoppe has done. He has begun by imagining a free world, and he imagines that in such a world, absent a variety of government manipulations, every race and tongue and tribe would keep to itself. But alas! There is government here, and it is cause us to rub shoulders with nasty non-English speakers who talk funny and come from poor homes and have a different culture. So, given that democratic government is here to stay, at least until the millennial kingdom of freedom comes, we need to clamp down and make the smelly foreigners go away, enforcing a strong national barrier. In the name of freedom, he wants to make America in impenetrable box of noble whiteness. He has betrayed libertarianism. He is no longer a libertarian in any real sense: he advocates spreading liberty except when it interferes with the creating the sort of world he wants. So do Democrats, Republicans, Communists, Socialists, and Fascists.
We need to abandon any pretense that Hoppe is a libertarian. We need to read him critically, combing his writings for nuggets of insight while being prepared to treat his shortcomings as what they are. To save what is good in Hoppe, we must learn to hold him at arm’s length, viewing him as the brilliant but confused soul he is, regarding him soberly as neither friend nor foe, but rather as a contributor to what libertarianism is today who is also an example of how a love for liberty may go sour in anyone not willing to face their own blind prejudice for what it is. Only once we have learned to view Hoppe in this light can we see the good and bad in him and not confuse the two.
5 Comments
I dont know where this is coming from. But you do not have it straight. The hoppian argument seeks to avoid transfers against the will of individuals. In particular, for the benefit of the statists who will then continue their appropriations. ie: if you can make the case for any of the issues that you state, that do not involve inventory theft, then you might have a point. But I’m pretty sure that I can argue Hoppe’s thinking on any of the accusations you’re making, and what it will come down to is that you think it’s OK to take from someone to give to someone else, and hoppe says that any such thing should require voluntary exchange, and in particular, where even under voluntary exchange, there can be no possibility that the state can be appropriated — and that under democracy it can be.
You are welcome to try. But I have been through this before. And he would argue that he supports none of those things. If anything he **may** think that we were closest to the ideal social model under the german princedom’s (private states) where racial and cultural groups could aggregate into communities within these states — prior to the move for nationalism, but these groups had no chance of obtaining political power, and had to compete in the marketplace.
But the ideas that you’re supporting, if are pursued by any state, can only be achieved by very many forms of redistribution from one class of people to another.
“Inventory” should be “involuntary”
Mr. Doolittle,
Thanks for dropping by. I generally like most of what Hoppe has to say, and it is with his critique of violent transfer that I agree most. But his closed-border policy of using the state to forcibly segregate people by racial/cultural characteristics and earning potential is incompatible with the ideas of libertarianism.
Though he may claim that his ideal is stateless, in the meantime he wants to increase state immigration controls, a decidedly unlibertarian stance. He assumes that in a free world rigid segregation would naturally occur, and that therefore in the absence of freedom government must enforce such segregation. I’m not willing to hand government extra power in order for them to approximate someone’s imagined utopia. To my mind, that’s decidedly unlibertarian.
My opposition to taxing the people who live inside of an arbitrary set of borders to pay for keeping them from freely associating with people who live inside other arbitrary lines is not at all redistributionist.
>>My opposition to taxing the people who live inside of an arbitrary set of borders to pay for keeping them from freely associating with people who live inside other arbitrary lines is not at all redistributionist.
Actually, his insight is that it is PRECISELY REDISTRIBUTIONIST.
And while I use a different formal logic, I end up with the same conclusion.
Open borders are by definition, redistribution. Under democratic government they are redistribution. Redistribution of opportunity, redistribution of capital, redistribution of political power, redistribution of the costs paid by individuals to create any number of institutions, but most especially trade routes.
THe libertarian ‘religion’, requires that all people believes a similar thing and act by a similar code of conduct, which is effectively a prescription for the means of transferring resources owned by individuals. But it expressly –and I would argue, consciously — ignores the fact that individuals form alliances for the purpose of securing future opportunity. And one of the most important opportunities is to hold land and trade routes, and to demand that others within that geography adhere to the same system of property-concepts (including manners morals and ethics), and they PAY for, ie OWN, those opportunities (They buy options on the future) by doing so. What open immigration does, especially under democracy, is to redistribute those capitalized opportunities – those ‘bank accounts’ that shareholders (citizens) have paid into with their behaviors, to others, for the benefit of a) the state, b) those people who wish to trade with others despite not paying the same costs of maintaining those opportunities.
So yes, immigration is redistribution of forgone opportunity costs, that are the very costs that pay for the institutions of property, and the very costs that make institutions and trade possible within a geography. And as such open borders produce the precisely same results every time (as has been demonstrated by every synthetic historian): cultural homogeneity concentrates wealth, because wealth is possible only where institutions are present.
I can go on. But please understand, if you do not have a formal logic behind your belief system you are simply trying to obtain the fruits of the market without PAYING FOR IT. As such your religion is a moral system for justifying theft. Libertarianism with open borders is simply a transfer of wealthy – yet another form of appropriation – whether it uses government institutions or not.
if you understand this it will not only help you understand hoppe, it will also rock your world. Libertarianism as you mean it is derived from the jewish landless class of merchants, and the classical liberal from land holding christians who were forced out of participation in the formal economy by the loss of the english civil war. These two philosophies are simply the modern expressions of older sentiments of cultural minorities seeking to preserve their existing social structure. As such they are not economic models supported by formal logic or empirical results.
Without Hoppe’s logic, you’re just a middle class version of a communist relying upon a pseudo religion posing as a political philosophy in order to obtain transfers from another class.
I understand that his may be earth shattering to you, or uncomfortable to you, but it is invaluable knowledge, and it appears that you have worked hard enough to gain enough knowledge to be able to have the opportunity to understand it.
Jews for example failed to hold land. The story of the bible is the rise and fall of the kingdom of Israel. But one must draw the proper conclusion from that story: that if you cannot hold land, you cannot maintain a people, except a minority dependent class. Therefore, if your VALUES AND CULTURE cannot sustain land and trade routes, they are not just a disadvantage: THEY ARE A FALSE PROPOSITION, since those values and culture are the economics of land holding, without which one cannot create and maintain institutions. THerefore, also, land holding requires inter-temporal cost payments in many forms of behaviors that are not expressed by the process of trade and exchange. Anda s such trade and exchange are an insufficient ethical expression to hold land, and therefore LIBERTARIANISM as you mean it is SELF-CONTRADICTORY and therefore logically FALSE.
Given the existence of a government which has some sort of welfare system, I will grant to you that the entrance of poor immigrants will be the occasion for redistribution from the net tax contributors who live inside the nation to the net takers coming in. And I will grant that given the way government management works, you will wind up with social friction and increased deficits as a result.
But my problem with closed-borders libertarianism is that it takes one instance of government aggression (welfare, in the form of public schooling, medicine, WIC, welfare, social security, etc.) and uses it to justify another form of government aggression (keeping people enclosed by force). It’s reminiscent of Mises’ argument that middle-of-the-road policy tends to lead toward socialism, as each government intervention creates problems which can only be solved by additional government intervention.
What I’ve read of Hoppe would seem to suggest that a consistent application of his system of logic would demand the dismantling of each facet of state aggression (i.e., the opening of borders, the dismantling of social welfare systems, the abolition of public schooling, the privatization of roads), rather than demanding that the state add new regulations to counteract some of the effects of preceding regulations.
I’d be interested to hear more of what you have to say about the libertarian “religion,” perhaps by way of comparison and contrast against what you consider to be true libertarianism. I’d also be more than willing to hear you expound on the different formal logics that you and Hoppe use.
I’m still working on figuring out social/economic principles better, so if you think there are any particular works that you consider must reads, I’d be more than happy to take a look at them.
Thanks,
Mitchell.
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