Hoppe often calls his idea for the future (of which he also says he is realistic enough to see that people will reject it since democracy is in their minds) natural order.

Natural order is what has run human interactions for the most of mankind'S time. It means direct trading between two private people who exchange items, because what you give away you value as lesser than what you negotiated to get in return. The other side sees it the same way, just it'S value-attribution is just 180° around.

Over time, the limits of this scheme became apparent, when you were dealing with trading items that could not be split in their value, hindering you from giving them to get something you wanted, but was of much lesser value. Like a barn for a can of milk, for example. Production cycles and trading schemes of higher complexity and order are not possible, and so civilizational development is not possible, because everybody is limited to what he can achieve with just his very own hands. You can do the work on a field that way. But you cannot build cathedrals over several centuries.

So people found that using intermediate trading items did the trick. You exchanged your one huge value item not for what you finally wanted to get, but for different items of smaller values, but in bigger quantities. These then were used to be trade for the final objects of desire.

Important for this was that these tool-items were available easily on the market of traders. In past times, it was salt, or tobacco. Rare furs. Then it became teeth by precious or rare or dangerous animals. Or snailS' houses or seashells that were collected on a line and were used like coins "on" a purse". Later, silver and gold became the most popular item for trading, because no matter whether you formed it in bars or coins or necklaces, the value is according to its weight, and thus the value does not change no matter in what form it is traded. So: money is nothing special: it is just like any other trading item, and it has a material value in itself. The latter is what makes todays paper FIAT money completely different from money founded on a gold standard. A state or a central bank cannot make real money. It cannot priodcue it by just printing it. Money - real money - is exclusively appearing from and on the free market, by being an ordinary trading good in demand. And that is also part of the natural order. Free tgrade between two free idnioviduals that negiatiate the conditions of their deal freely. Money being an freeely traded trading good only. No state needed. Especially no authority usurping authority that originally it does not have, and demands only to justify its own useless existence.

You do not need a state to oversee such trading, nor do you need a state to monitor the develoepment of currency value, to add money to the market, to put a foot on the brake, or whatever. In the past, coin-makers were private people. And the system worked. It worked much better than the sh!t we have today, this govenrment-created paper-ticket stuff that is no value money, but is just a debt bond without guarantee that you will get something for it - you are completely depending on the good will of the other owing you something when you want to trade your bond for a material value. If the other says No, there is nothingn you can do about it, your money is worthless then. Cannot happen with gold and silver coins - these are material value money.

It is argued that the only function of the state should be to service trade by protecting it against (criminal and military) aggressors and guaranteeing the right to hold private property. I have in an earlier post summarised how an insurance system providing both legal mediation and military protection services for a fee would both produce better quality in security services at lesser bureaucracy and lower costs than the state. The state as a territorial monopolist steals private wealth (taxes), legalises the crime (law-making) and does a poorer and poorer job in legal and policing services. Like any monopolist you see the porices going up with the quality offered declining. I must not explain that once again, even less so when some of the essay I lined explain it much better than I could in some lines. I think the model is worth to be given a try. It cannot become any worse than the mess we have now.

There are many implications and details that Hoppe adresses as well, one can get them when reading him a bit, many of them are vital elements to be considered: the need to cap undiscriminating migration for example (the clear conclusion there is that freedom needs discrimination), and what that has to do with street-building and access of owners to their property - and access by the state to their property. It cannot be my duty or interest to repeat them in same detail when it all is available, for free. Where question arise, I can try to answer them within the standards of a forum entry. For more specific stuff, read the man himself. I said it before, and say it again: Hoppe to me is best where he attacks, where he establishes the diagnosis of the many bad things and what goes wrong, and where he demonstrates why they necessarily MUST go wrong in a democratic system. Here he is feared because he is hard to be shown wrong. The alternative he offers is unusual, maybe even contra-intuitive when looking at it from a socialist or democratic perspective. But it makes sense when putting it all together. There are criterions though that must be met: self-governing communities must stay small (city states for example), and the insurance companies must be of a size where they can guarantee their services even against agressors, nevertheless they must be subjected to any mans that safeguard against them turning into monopolists themselves and erect interlocal cartels. This is the greatest trick and the most critical detail in the model.

Our governments, democratically elected, mess up things, they lie and cheat and betray and make it worse and worse. We have no reason to trust them, when considering that it is not in the politicians' interest to look into the future, to free us from this suicidal currency madness that is the basis of their own power. Hoppe shows at some opportunities that it is in the interest of today'S politicians to have instabile, critical, endangered society status - to present themselves as the shining heroes solving the issues. The evil proverb says that politicians solve problems that without them would not even exist. I agree.

We must realise that olur political system and today'S fiscal order and perverted understanding of money is the reason and cause of our problems that nothing less than threaten the existence of the Western culture itself. If we contnue to follow these, we will fall for sure. The often claimed link between democracy and prosperity, is an illusion. Not only shows the present the prospering of regions and places and economies that are not democratically governed, nor is the prospering of nations in the past correctly attributed to their claimed democratic form of government. This claim is as wrong and malicious as the claim that without the Euro there would already be war in Europe, and that the freedom after WWII was only there becasue of the EU. That are lying stinking cheating lame self-justifications only. They do not meet historic or present realities.

There are several reasons why I don't think that would work, but as you say that's food for a different debate and I won't go into it here unless you want to discuss arguments. In it essence, I believe that the "state" as permanent organization is better to preserve certain interests and freedoms. How big it is, and how those called to govern it are designed is something entirely different and I agree with your critics to democracy there.

In that regard, I also agree completely with the idea of small communities being much better for everything. "Representative" government is a flawed concept in itself, and while it had to naturally appear with bigger communities, it just illustrates the fact that those bigger communities themselves are the underlying problem. Men are not designed by nature to live in such big groups. In groups, yes, in societies, yes, but not so big ones that you can't know well every other member.

What possible guarantee could you or Hoppe or these private insurance and military firms give that they would not be equally corrupt. And who keeps them in line?

not sure the private sector does a better job:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

I also already adressed this in an earlier posting.

In an environment where they cannot become monopolists: competition that they cannot avoid. If people are not satisfied with their services or fees, they move somewhere else or make contract with somebody else. Too bad service? The company looses customers. Same service like others, but too too expensive? They loose customers. It is in their very own interest to also contribute to an environment where the risk that they must pay out compensations or need to send their army, is getting reduced. They also have an interest to negotiate and establish standards with other companies for negotiating conflicts between customers having hired different, rivalling companies. As a matter of fact, you already have that in the insurance business today.

State governments do not have such interests, since their governments coinsit of plolticians who cannot own the public porperty, only can gain limited oppiortunity to use it for creating benefit for thmeselves. Therefore they do not really care for efficiency in their mneasures and discipline in the long run, but they care for maximising short term profit for themselves tzhat they can invest into boosting their unaffordable promises at the next elections. So, more taxes, more state income, more debts, more expenses, more bureaucracy, less efficiency in services. The carousel goes round and round on and on, and with every turn it moves faster.

"Thank you for calling your local branch of Fire Department, Inc.™! Para continuar en español, marque el dos. To report a fire, press one. To hear a listing of our convenient FireStation™ locations, press two. To speak to a customer service representative about protecting your property and loved ones from the ravages of an inferno, press three. If you need a cat rescued from a tree, press four. To repeat these options, press five."

*BEEEEP*

"You have chosen to report a fire. Please say the address of the location of the fire."

"comeoncomeoncomeonhurryhurry....123 Main Street. I'm at 123 Main Street!"

"We're sorry. That address lies outside of Fire Department, Inc.™'s service area. We have determined that the population density does not allow for Fire Department, Inc.™ to provide award-winning service at a profit to that area. Please use your garden hose instead. Goodbye!" *click*

If you really think the Comcast, ATT's, United Airlines and EA Softwares of the world can provide better service when it comes to things like national security....hoo boy. Businesses have entrenched themselves using regulatory capture and litigation so that the barriers to entry are too high. Thus we the consumers are stuck with crappy service and no options.

I would not trust fire, police and military services to that sort of system. Infrastructure is inherently unprofitable. That's why it's a governmental responsibility and not a private sector one.

Firefighting is not about providing security in the meaning of liberal economics, Mookie. It can be left to people living in a region how they want to arrange it all by themselves, there is no state needed to tell people that they must have a firebriagde and how to organise it. Leave it to themselves. If they fail and the fire hurst them sufficiently, next time they will do it better, promised. ;) Protection in liberal economic model as propagated here means the protection of private property against aggression since this guarantee is th every basis of every conception of the term "freedom" worth the name. If property is not respected and state or aggressors are allowed to interfere with how and what you do with your property, can enforce access to it, can legally steal it, then freedom is taken away more and more. So, protection means: guarantees in terms of juristic, policing and military terms. In a self-governing local community, people are free to organise their firefighting according to the way they like it. If they do not like it, they move away, or do it differently. Mind you, the model implies a huge number of small local, self-governing communities like you had in Europe and especially Germany before Germany became a unified national state. The time when Germany consisted of dozens and hundreds of regional autark and independent kingdoms and small "countries", was the time when German culture blossomed more than ever before and after. The regions competed for the best artists, thinkers, scientist, engineers, and they had to.

Firebrigades in Germany today by majority are the work of volunteers, and it is very effective a system especially in regions with small population levels . The EU now wants to enforce rules that they shall not volunteer anymore at all if the total working hours per week from their regular jobs and their volunteering mission lies beyond the legal maximum.

In other words, the EU demand control over people voluntary engagements and the their private time. Another of these so very very typical EU stunts that aim at subjecting every aspect of people's lives and thoughts and acts and doings to Brussel'S supervision.

Firebrigades across all of Germany and many stations are threatened by this. If this law comes, the German system will simply collapse.


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u_crank again, the question before, this reading maybe:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe16.html

At roughly the middle, under the subtitle "The Idea of a Private Law Society". Cannot hurt to read the first half before as well, since it deals with criticism of democratic and classical liberalism and the role of the state in both.

not sure "private" firefighters are the way to go either...:yep:

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2011...fee-again?lite

And if thousands of people die or lose their property before your local city-state gets its crap together and organizes an effective fire protection plan, so what, eh? "Well dang ol' shoot, that horse drawn pump didn't work real good. hyuk, hyuk."

No thanks.

I work in a business where we deal with local governments regularly. Especially in a smaller municipality, the level of sophistication isn't always that great. There are economies of scale in having a coordinated emergency infrastructure set up by the federal and state governments.

And what if that happens under administration by a parasitic state government where polticians have very different interests, necessarily?

Hongkong is what comes very close to a city state. Do you claim they are incapable to maintain a good firebrigade becasue the Chinese or British government do not tell them how to do it?
Can people not learn from experience if there is no big state that tells them how to do things? Have we already come this far...?

Some of you guys simply are used to get annied by a superstate all the time, could it be? Not to bear respknsibility, but being able to always point demands at the state that he should proivide this, and that he shpould do that? Well, thatr is exactly the root evil that is the basis for all the deformations and perversions we see today.

If there is a city state like Hamburg, for example, or New York city, then apparently they can perfectly set up a police department and fire department without Berlin or Washington managing it.

And what about the German system of volunteers serving in firebrigades and maintaining them? The system worked well until here. If the public tax system gets abandoned where poltiicians claim the right to decide what your property is beign consumed for, and in autonomous regions the people decide that themselves without a distant central giovernment, they will see whether or not it is in their interest to voluntarily set up a fire brigade and contribute to it. A central state government is not needed there. Like I do not need a EU commission telling me what to eat and what not. When i feel sick, I go to a doctor all by myself. When he tells me this and that, I will decide myself whether consequences for me will include changes of my diet, or not. I do not need any EU messias telling me what I have to do and what not in order to get saved from myself.

Sorry, yours is a complete non-argument there.

And what'S wrong there? You cannot claim services if you do not fulfill your returning part of the deal. You want a service, you pay. You don't pay, you get no service. Also, that example is outside the context of Hoppe'S model, but is embedded in the context of a completely different system.

Having a competition between service providers, cannot hurt. May it be within or between autonomous regions.

Too many people today take many things all for granted, mas if they would have a right to demand a free ride here, a free service being given there. I totally disagree with that attitude of ever growing expectations. It is one reason why we are bancrupt and our social nanny system are no longer affordable.

Anyhow, you guys now come with very specific things that to debate maybe is a bit pointless at this stage. Not even Hoppe argues anywhere in such microscopic detail already, and even says that that is impossible as long as no general draft has been established.

So what about all the places that aren't Hong Kong, one of the most densely populated places in the world? What about the lower density places? How do they organize themselves? How do they fund their infrastructure when they don't have the cash flow from taxes to do so?

Yeah, if you didn't pay, your family dies and your property is destroyed. Sucks for you, eh?

Good god that's brutal and cruel. I want no part of your world.

Hoppe is an ignoramus. No such 'natural order' ever existed.

The move together, arrange themselves, live by what they can afford, try to attract newcomers by making themselves attractive by the means they have. In other words: they compete with other communities.

In Germany, we have a big problem with many rural places especially in the five Eastern federal states. The young have moved away, the older who want to stay, die and reduce their own numbers. Still, some claim the normal network of infrastructure, supply and so forth must be maintained.

But it cannot be afforded. One wan ts more than one can afford. Taxes directed there, are missing in more vital parts. Debts accepted to maintain it, punish others, and the young, and will deliver an even bigger bill in the end.

Some things just cannot go on. People must learn that. People will adapt. Give them the freedom to do so. Tell them that it is their responsibility to live their life - not the state's. And leave them the freedom to live up to that responsibility, instead of endlessly nanny them from the cradle to the grave.

Maybe we should also ban air traffic. Some days ago a pilot made an error and missed the runway and crashed the plane.

Let'S check the facts on your example.

Well, that is sane, healthy reason, and no sign of "social cold" at all.

Sounds okay. And whooot - sounds like the counties mentioned have quite some independence in how to organise their fire protection policies. Washington seems not to tell them how to do what. Nor do they seem to be in need for that.

Well, they took a gamble, they lost. Their responsibility. I took a gamble when for many years living without a liability insurance - until I realised that I took a gamble there. Since then I have one.

And why should they? Why should others pay more just because a gambler or a parasite expects them to pay his share? Or demands to get the service for free? Or the service being payed by making more debts in the budget, debts that others, sooner or later must pay for?

Maybe you would argue with social hardness now, and poverty. They the question would be why people who cannot afford to own a house nevertheless think they must own a house - if they cannot afford it.

Moral of the story by the end of the day: you want protection from something, you pay the insurance or service fee or whatever it is. If you do not, you have no claim to make. You also have no claim to demand others to bail you out. If they voluntarily do it, fine. But an obligation ? No.

You give only mockery and rants on the fly in this thread. But so far not a single thought-out argument for or against anything. That makes it yourself being the ignoramus.

Skybird, as I have already pointed out, I have a degree in anthropology (A first-class honours degree, from a leading British university, to be specific). Economic relations in hunter-gatherer societies are of course very much a subject of anthropological interest - and if any societies could be described as 'natural' (a questionable proposition), it is those of hunter-gatherers. And though there is considerable debate on the subject, I can assure you that one thing that is entirely certain is that such societies did not function on the basis of the simplistic 'trade between individuals' that Hoppe describes. But don't take my word for it - do some research for yourself, and discover how such societies actually functioned. Hoppe is simply projecting his own ideas backwards, to justify them by making them out to be the 'natural order', without evidence. He isn't the first to do this, of course - Marx famously described such societies as living under 'primitive communism'. Though he at least bothered to look at what little evidence there was available at the time, and even after all these years, appears not to have been entirely wrong. But like I say, don't take my word for it. Learn from those who study the subject, rather than those who make up complete bull***t to justify their ridiculous utopian fantasies.

I already had my share of history, you know. Rome. Greece. The Italian city states. The British empire. The Dutch empire. Th Spanish empire. And so on.

Trade was key to their rise and collection of knowledge and developement of new thoughts.

The issue here is not so much one of anthropology, but of history, and politics, and that is not the same. From the far east and Polynesia, over the deserts in africa, to the Western/European sphere, you could see that tokens that turned into a standardization method for abstract trading processes (establishing trading and complex production lines that in direct 1:1 trade without such tokens was not possible) emerged from more primitive trade-exchange. As I said: money is just ordinary trading goods which are seen by people as vlauable, desirable, and are available in sufficient quantity to really penetrate and become omnipresent in the market.

"Natural order" has nothing to do with primitive tribes of hunter gatherers living in a jungle just because the word "natural" appears in the term. It refers to a most basic interaction only that must not get regulated by an artificial, unnatural authority, between two unregulated free individuals, where both have an item and agree to exchange the one for the other. Money allowed more complex sequences of trades: A is traded for B that allows to buy C in order to get D that was the real desired item from beginning on. My god, that is so basic and elemental that Hoppe really is not the first one having pointed out this .

It may or may not have been like this in most societies. But it has been like this for most of those societies that made themselves known for huge power and influence, leaving a mark in history that lived far beyond their reign. And if some local tribe in a prairie stayed for themselves and lived in an early form of a kibbuz without trading beyond their borders, what difference does that make? they get overlooked today, and also back in their time.

This German Wikipedia entry is better than the English pendant, it lists several of the early primitive currencies that were used to standardise the value of items in an indirect way so that things could be calculated in their value to each other and trading became able even if you needed to accept to trade for something that weas not immedioately offering you the thing that you originally wanted. Yolur cow does not help you if the other needs no cow or you only need three planks of wood, sine your cow is too vlauable to trade it for just thjree pansk of wood. But by trading it for coins, you get the market-agreed value of the cow, and can use that to pay a craftsman and to buy a piece of wood so that he makes three planks from it for you. That is the difference from primitive to complex trade, and wothout this expanding of trading complexity you cannot hope to form a huge and influential civilization, culture, empire.

And in my understanding this is not so much some sub-branch of anthropology, but simply history lessons. But maybe that is just me.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitivgeld

They used: salt, cacao and plant semen, tealeafs, seashells, peas, teeth, hair, bones, textiles, "Spangengeld" (bronze era 1200 B.C.), "Axtgeld" (middle America until 1500), Messergeld (knife coins, China 12th-3rd century B.C.), Larin (16th-18th century from the Persian gulf to the Bengalian sea, kind of a metal wire), "Hackgeld" (bars of precious material where slides got cut off when needed to pay something), and then the wide variety of natural produce. Trading with these intermediate tokens allowed complex trade. When rare metals like silver and gold entered the trading scheme, these primitive forms of a currency transformed into the money currency that we knew until last century. But in principle a currency until today, no matter what currency it is, always means: a certain quantity/weight of a material that is agree by the market to serve as a carrier material for standardizing these quantities: by forming them into coins with a certain specified amount of that material, or bars.

Skybird, I'm not the slightest bit interested in your 'history'. Hoppe made a specific claim (or you say he did), regarding the 'natural order' - and I have shown that it simply isn't true. Like so many other armchair social theorists, he projects his own biases backwards, and then claims them as evidence for his pet theories. As such, his arguments are worthless.

Hoppe is like Marx, some people look at it, swallow it and spout it as the new truth they have discovered. Others look at and look at it and the more they look at it they realise the less sense it makes.

You showed nothing. You claimed.


Maybe I share some responsibility by not being precise enough in this paragraph:
Maybe I should have worded it like this:

Natural orders are what has run human interactions since most of mankind'S history. In the context of libertarian economic school and the Austrian school to which Hoppe belongs, it means that in the cultural settings of the past 3000 years the most basic scheme of social interaction between foreigners was that of changing things between two unregulated, free people (trading). People need no administration to judge by themselves what of their items they value less so that they give it away in exchange for an item that they value more so that they want to own it. where the other side sees the hierarchy of value in items just the other way around, a windows of opportunity for trading opens.

If that clears it up, then it was my fault when I lacked needed precision, but I have several times in the past weeks now linked to original texts by Hoppe and other authors close to his thinking, so who would have wanted it could have dealt with the original by now already, easily.

"Natural order" and "private law society" are used synonymous in Hoppes thinking and to some parts in the thinking of authors from his direction as well. It means the natural principle by which to do something, in this case: trading. that has nothing to do with Green policies, more with not making something more complicated and regulated than originally it must be in order to function well. Why you think you must go back to hunter gatherers when reading that terminology, is slightly beyond me. Fact is that trade, the ability to establish complex production chains by using higher forms of value-money, is key for civilizations becoming great and influential and blossoming, that trade is what earned civilizations the knowledge and the wealth to grow and blossom and become string and influential, and that this is directly linked to the question of freedom being understood to ground and base on guaranteeing the right to own private property and do with it and live by and on and in it as long as this use does not damage the rights of others to possess their own private property. where this principle of the right for private property gets attacked and reduced, freedom gets limited, no matter whether the limit is established by state's taxes, general laws regulating how you may and may not use your property, and forcing you to give up rights to use your property.

Money tokens get used since 3500 years in some parts of the world.