Introduction to Hoppe's main work

[Takeda Shingen]

Originally Posted by Oberon

Coming back to the Crusoe analogy, what is there to stop Crusoe from smashing Fridays head open with a rock because he wanted his coconut?

And there you have it. Anarcho-capitalism is great until you have your first murder. Then what happens to the murderer? Is he killed? If so, by whom? Is he detained? If so, by whom? Does he get a trial? How? By what method? With what consequence? What if he flees to the next community? He didn't murder anyone there, so is he bound by the same law? Is one community obliged to extradite him so that he may face trial?

In a larger society with policing the knowledge of potential punishment by an external source provides the deterrent, however if that overarcing governance is removed then absolute freedom is indeed obtained but that absolute freedom gives people the opportunity to commit acts of good and of great evil alike.

Exactly. After all of this dreaming we still have the need for overarching laws to govern the behavior of individuals. Going further, what happens when when two communities cannot agree on a geographical boundary? We've got two private law systems, how will they agree? We either have bloodshed or a higher system of common law that allows for disputes to be resolved without violence. And if we have the common law, how is that legal entity staffed? To whom are they answerable? How is the solution enforced, and by whom? We end up right back at where we are now.

No, democracy is not a perfect system, which is the argument presented. However, anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-socialism, anarcho-anything doesn't even make it off the drawing board. The holes are so numerous and so large that anyone can see them. It's the worst type of academic work; sloppy garbage that gives people in my profession a bad name.

[Hottentot]

Originally Posted by Cybermat47

Thank you for describing the rise of the Roman Empire and thus most of western culture

Except that the Romans were a society that deeply believed in making pacts and agreements and especially during its early days relied on diplomacy and laws more than to the strength of arms. "Roman legions smash everything LOL" is a one-sided myth.

And there you have it. Anarcho-capitalism is great until you have your first murder. Then what happens to the murderer? Is he killed? If so, by whom? Is he detained? If so, by whom? Does he get a trial? How? By what method? With what consequence? What if he flees to the next community? He didn't murder anyone there, so is he bound by the same law? Is one community obliged to extradite him so that he may face trial?

A good example of community/tribal society would be the spate of drug rapes that hit the Amish communities in South America.
In the end they had no options left but to hand over their rapists to the government and ask the state to solve their problem.

[Bilge_Rat]

"It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of Government except all the others that have been tried"

- Winston Churchill

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Oberon

Coming back to the Crusoe analogy, what is there to stop Crusoe from smashing Fridays head open with a rock because he wanted his coconut?
In a larger society with policing the knowledge of potential punishment by an external source provides the deterrent, however if that overarcing governance is removed then absolute freedom is indeed obtained but that absolute freedom gives people the opportunity to commit acts of good and of great evil alike.

You have not read the link on Private Law Society. A state is not needed to have a security service working for the overwatching and monitoring of rules that the local community agreed on. It's just that the community is small enough to decide int he rules itself in a more basic-democratic understanding, and the laws not formed up by a government. Instead of giving a monopole for force and executive power to a political caste that in a democracy, for the already explained reasons, has an inbuilt interest to abuse its power due to the limited time it is available to it and because politicians have no private property at stake but only waste the property of other people, security becomes a service item that you order and pay for like you pay a craftsman for painting your wall, a baker to bake bread or a trainer to train you in something. This is what is meant with private law society. Hoppe refers to it also as "natural order".

Obviously, it cannot be allowed that companies providing such services become so big that they no longer offer their service under the valid rules, but that they can actually make the rules. In other words, the corruption of power and the forming of monopoles. Both size of companies and size of communities must stay that limited that the population of the community can oversee the general developments and actions taken, and can then vote against something people do not like by moving into a neighbouring community with different rules. What you get is a competition between communities to be attractive for people.

It is of the essence I think, that we say good-by to this idea of thinking that bigger always is better. It is not. The bigger the system, the more complex it is, the more options there are for hiding corruption and abuse. Transparency depends on system dimensions that are such that it does not take an elitist caste or informed insiders to "interpret the signs", but that people with ordinary solid education can see the links and contexts, can see how the action of others of their community effects themselves, and how their own actions effect the others. This alone sets rigorous size limits to communities.

Service companies must be prevented form becoming so big that they can form monopoles that enables them to dictate the conditions to the community. while people can vote with their feet and move elsewhere, monopolist companies of several communities may be tempted to form up a cartel, a mega-monopoly that dictates conditions to not just one but several communities. Obviously, this is no desirable condition.

Service like a "privatized police" are needed only for the very obvious violation of common sense rules in this model. Many other rules for business contracts, social interaction and social self-organisation can be left to the participating people in place, it doe snot take a state to tell them what rules they must follow. Communities can only blossom when sufficient people want to live min them, it is in the very own interest of communities to be attractive for people, and thus: to compete with others.

LINK with subtitles, 3 minutes: Germany's fall began with the founding of the national state.

I think that excerpt is from

I took me quite some time to come around to an old argument by Steve which he raised very early, in some forgotten discussion years ago. Steve said something like this: state all nice and well, but why trusting in that politicians are the better managers, enabling them to define good and solid rules of regulations? He was and is right. Even before that, Neal once said something like that, too, asking me why I thought that politicians would be handling business rules better than the corrupted economic leaders that at that time I was attacking. Next he perplexed me with the simple question why people should pay taxes (which back then I still took for granted...) Hehe, those were the days... Now, Hoppe in general questions that in a democracy politicians ever could have an interest to serve the common good, the common sense reason, the bets longterm interest. He argues it is the explicit interest of democratically elected politicians to abuse the system. Because they do now own its properties, but have only limited time in which they can make use of its resources. So they make hay while the sun shines. They make expensive promises that should get them reelected (as long as the people do not realise that debts and interests in the future will be even ore expensive). They bribe the people with giving them back taxes - that before had been robbed from the people on grounds of that the state should have the authority to do so. Why should it? Why not leaving the question whether that school gets build, that highway or railway gets build, to those people being effected by it - the people living right in place?

International relations, some may say. Well, everybody is free to travel, to visit places that he wants to visit and where his presence is tolerated. But international globalised trade: must we build TVs in Japan and have them shipped around the globe to the US - can the Us manufacturers not build TV themselves? Why must butter from Ireland be delivered to Holland, Dutch butter to Germany, German butter to Denmark, and Danish butter to Ireland? Why must German potato farmers fear for their existence when their sales drop because somebody thinks it is a clever idea to help the Egyptians by buying Egyptian potatoes and ship them to Germany? Germany is drowning in potatoes, the whole damn EU does. What kind of frikking madness is all this? "Freedom"...? No, parasitism. The parasitism coming from people forcing themselves into the middle position. A wants to buy from B, but here comes C, taking A's money and a fee and handing the money to B, and taking B's item for a fee and giving it to A. That is nice where A and B live a good distance apart and C can offer the needed transportation. But it still only makes sense when B's goods and items are something that A does not have and cannot produce. Sending Green tea from asia to Europe, makes sense, we cannot plant green tea in Middle Europe. But shipping butter from Denmark to Austria makes no sense at all or potatoes from Egypt to Germany makes no sense at all. International trade should focus on items that are rare, while items everybody has or can produce himself must not be shipped around at all.

The rules by which this form of trade is handled, again do njot need government, but can be organised and settled by the participating partners: the Japanese regional community producing the tea, and the European local community ordering it. The shipping company can settle the contract for transportation with the partner in negotiations that need to government and no politicians. If people think it becomes too expensive, they will not agree to a deal. Where is a state needed that robs taxes and claims the right to limit people'S freedoms? The longer i think about it, the less I can see any such need.

Like democracy always leads to growing totalitarianism and socialism, capitalism always wants to turn into monopolism, one has to ensure that this does not happen, with enforcing conditions for basic minimums of competition never beeing bypassed or eroded and violated. Transparency< and limited dimension/size of companies and communities and administrating structure I consider to be vital here.

Even cases of military defence against the inevitable evil-doers and conquerers can be handled this way, though there is a risk. A huge cooperation between many regional communities is needed to organise a military defence effort powerful enough to repel any thread by an aggressor. The mere size of such an effort holds risks to the construction of communities that are designed to be not as big but as small as possible. We recall the times when mercenary armies in Europe helped to keep wars alive and prevent peace, because thy made their living by fighting wars, not earning money when there was peace. So, there is a critical point. Right now, I have no satisfying complete solution. I could point at the Hanse alliance that was a very powerful trading alliance of over 200 cities around the Baltic with my beloved city of Lübeck being the capital - but also maintained the privatised military forces needed to protect itself and its trading routes.

The EU is the opposite, the total opposite of all this. It claims more and more rights for itself, and wants more and more control over national taxes, and wants more and more of these taxes for itself. It regulates people to death, and produces an overboarding flood of laws and regulations that strangle us and tell us what to do, what to think and what to say. Commissioners release rules just because as commissioners they are expected to release rules. Commissions departments get build not because they are needed but because every nation should have one. that'S why the EU has - how many? 28 commission departments now? And they claim to fight against bureaucracy...? The EU claims totalitarian control over our private issues and private lives. And it tries to keep itself alive by grabbing more and more of people'S savings and rights and freedoms. That is not only totalitarianism - the redistribution it runs also ironically is truly socialistic where the money flows into the planned channels, and it is pure corruption and abuse where it ends in dark channels and for bribery. On national levels, it runs the same way, only that the EU administration has no legitimation whatever to speak on behalf of 500 million people, while governments got elected, which is not really a compliment from my point of view - no compliment for the voters, I mean. It's like freely and voluntarily choose which criminal you want to break into your home and steal your jewels when you are not there, and it is as if you are choosing which fraudster you prefer to lie to you and trick you into a thimblerig match where you will get ripped off. By making your vote, you legitimise them to rob you, no matter your choice.

A last argument against democracy, that has become very evident in the euro crisis, but also in German inner politics and any national policy in any state, is that of the stable reliability of the law. Where you have a government democratically elected that is aiming by definition to stay in power by abusing the system and ruining the state for the community, the law cannot be trusted as a long term basis on which to make long-termed decisions, maybe even very costly decisions. A law is a rule made by the legislation, the government. The next government can scrap it with one woooosh with the red pencil. And actually, that is what is happening all the time. In Germany, we have many such short-interval changes when it comes to pensions. Ecological regulations. Tax regulations. Investment regulations. The history of the Euro is a perfect, flawless parade of broken promises, violations of laws, bendings of the law, violation of treaties, changing additions to a treaty afterwards, and eroding the already mutilated result. I am surprised that companies still dare to found new factories and enterprises in an environment that legally is s instable and unpredictable as that we have over here, with an every greedy EU commissions produces a never-ending plethora of more and more regulations and micro-regulations - and some Eu players threatening openly to expropriate company's rights that result from the status of "private property".

I agree completely with Hoppe where he says that democracy is neither a precondition to economic prosperity - see the many emerging economies that are wealthy, have less debts and are anything but democratic -, nor is democracy the precondition the come to a state of law and order - democracies tend to erode law and order, while having been emerging on the basis of law and order that existed before. And in many places, people are not so much craving for what Westerners understand as individual freedom -. they want to live in conformity with their cultural habits, and want to enjoy a relative amount of pragmatic freedom and a moderate amount of material wealth. Democracy does by far not top the list of most-wanted political virtues in the world!

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat

"It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of Government except all the others that have been tried"

- Winston Churchill

Oh these never changing reflexes.

Now think that through. The last part of that sentence ("except the others...") often is mistaken by people to be a defence of democracy by relativising the criticism of the first part. But it isn't.

What Churchill did by these words, was this: slamming ALL forms of governments by declaring them all as unsuitable.

Churchill also said this:

The best argument against democracy is having a five minute talk with just any ordinary voter.

Who wnats to vote, should have pri8vate prooerty at stake. He should contribute more to the community than he gets back from it. He should not live by it and hang on itsa drip. He should be qualified and educated enough to oversee coplex economical, fiscal and other poltrial issues of high complexity and information density.

That's why I finally found a personal position of being against a general right to vote. If you let every uneducated unqualified incompetent dillettant Peter and Paul vote, you get uneducated, incompetent, dilletant politics. No surprise.

In the first German federal state, the SPD and the Green - in an attempt to battle massive rates of desinterest and loss of voters by cosmetical manipulation of statistics - have lowered the voting age from 18 to 16.

It is so very easy to look through this underhanded move.

That's why I finally found a personal position of being against a general right to vote.

So you are talking about one of the previous forms which Churchill said is worse.
You didn't think it through did you.
Since you clearly cannot think on such simple informational issues you have by your own words banned yourself from any input on complex issues.
You are duly appointed as a lowly rightless serf in your glorious new world order

[Bilge_Rat]

"It has been said that capitalism is the worst form of economy except all the others which have been tried"

-Bilge Rat with apologies to a great englishman.

[Takeda Shingen]

Originally Posted by Skybird

You have not read the link on Private Law Society. A state is not needed to have a security service working for the overwatching and monitoring of rules that the local community agreed on. It's just that the community is small enough to decide int he rules itself in a more basic-democratic understanding, and the laws not formed up by a government. Instead of giving a monopole for force and executive power to a political caste that in a democracy, for the already explained reasons, has an inbuilt interest to abuse its power due to the limited time it is available to it and because politicians have no private property at stake but only waste the property of other people, security becomes a service item that you order and pay for like you pay a craftsman for painting your wall, a baker to bake bread or a trainer to train you in something. This is what is meant with private law society. Hoppe refers to it also as "natural order".

So when that murderer runs we've got to hire Skybird's private bounty service to hunt this man down and exact justice upon him. And I assume that we'd have to pay in gold, because there is no system of organized currency. The only resource that my immediate locale has is lumber, so I suppose the only way I am going to survive in this new utopia is to become a logger. With only four households (communities must be as small as possible), we're not going to have a whole lot of logging output. So what happens when we can't afford the bounty hunters? Moreover, how does the next feudal kingdom down the road react when corporate assassins that they didn't hire arrive and shoot the place up as they go after that murderer?

It doesn't work.

Obviously, it cannot be allowed that companies providing such services become so big that they no longer offer their service under the valid rules, but that they can actually make the rules. In other words, the corruption of power and the forming of monopoles. Both size of companies and size of communities must stay that limited that the population of the community can oversee the general developments and actions taken, and can then vote against something people do not like by moving into a neighbouring community with different rules. What you get is a competition between communities to be attractive for people.

If companies have to stay small, where is the power coming from? Who owns the infastructure? Or are we all supposed to go neo-luddite? How are roads going to get cleared? Are 1500 little feudal kindgoms each going to be responsible for 1/4 of a mile of the highway that intersects their territory? How are four families supposed to clear these roads ourselves?

It is of the essence I think, that we say good-by to this idea of thinking that bigger always is better. It is not. The bigger the system, the more complex it is, the more options there are for hiding corruption and abuse. Transparency depends on system dimensions that are such that it does not take an elitist caste or informed insiders to "interpret the signs", but that people with ordinary solid education can see the links and contexts, can see how the action of others of their community effects themselves, and how their own actions effect the others. This alone sets rigorous size limits to communities.

Service companies must be prevented form becoming so big that they can form monopoles that enables them to dictate the conditions to the community. while people can vote with their feet and move elsewhere, monopolist companies of several communities may be tempted to form up a cartel, a mega-monopoly that dictates conditions to not just one but several communities. Obviously, this is no desirable condition.

As I hinted at above, you're going to need big companies, and more than a few of them.

Service like a "privatized police" are needed only for the very obvious violation of common sense rules in this model. Many other rules for business contracts, social interaction and social self-organisation can be left to the participating people in place, it doe snot take a state to tell them what rules they must follow. Communities can only blossom when sufficient people want to live min them, it is in the very own interest of communities to be attractive for people, and thus: to compete with others.

The problem with this islands of humanity argument is that no community can create what it needs to survive. Power, water, etc. It just doesn't work.

I took me quite some time to come around to an old argument by Steve which he raised very early, in some forgotten discussion years ago. Steve said something like this: state all nice and well, but why trusting in that politicians are the better managers, enabling them to define good and solid rules of regulations? He was and is right. Even before that, Neal once said something like that, too, asking me why I thought that politicians would be handling business rules better than the corrupted economic leaders that at that time I was attacking. Next he perplexed me with the simple question why people should pay taxes (which back then I still took for granted...) Hehe, those were the days... Now, Hoppe in general questions that in a democracy politicians ever could have an interest to serve the common good, the common sense reason, the bets longterm interest. He argues it is the explicit interest of democratically elected politicians to abuse the system. Because they do now own its properties, but have only limited time in which they can make use of its resources. So they make hay while the sun shines. They make expensive promises that should get them reelected (as long as the people do not realise that debts and interests in the future will be even ore expensive). They bribe the people with giving them back taxes - that before had been robbed from the people on grounds of that the state should have the authority to do so. Why should it? Why not leaving the question whether that school gets build, that highway or railway gets build, to those people being effected by it - the people living right in place?

This is a contradiction in itself. Communities have to be as small as possible, but then they have to not only build schools, but infastructure as well? I have to build a railroad? Do I have to pay for the trains? Who maintains this infastructure? Companies cannot get too big. Communities cannot get too big. It doesn't work.

International relations, some may say. Well, everybody is free to travel, to visit places that he wants to visit and where his presence is tolerated. But international globalised trade: must we build TVs in Japan and have them shipped around the globe to the US - can the Us manufacturers not build TV themselves? Why must butter from Ireland be delivered to Holland, Dutch butter to Germany, German butter to Denmark, and Danish butter to Ireland? Why must German potato farmers fear for their existence when their sales drop because somebody thinks it is a clever idea to help the Egyptians by buying Egyptian potatoes and ship them to Germany? Germany is drowning in potatoes, the whole damn EU does. What kind of frikking madness is all this? "Freedom"...? No, parasitism. The parasitism coming from people forcing themselves into the middle position. A wants to buy from B, but here comes C, taking A's money and a fee and handing the money to B, and taking B's item for a fee and giving it to A. That is nice where A and B live a good distance apart and C can offer the needed transportation. But it still only makes sense when B's goods and items are something that A does not have and cannot produce. Sending Green tea from asia to Europe, makes sense, we cannot plant green tea in Middle Europe. But shipping butter from Denmark to Austria makes no sense at all or potatoes from Egypt to Germany makes no sense at all. International trade should focus on items that are rare, while items everybody has or can produce himself must not be shipped around at all.

The rules by which this form of trade is handled, again do njot need government, but can be organised and settled by the participating partners: the Japanese regional community producing the tea, and the European local community ordering it. The shipping company can settle the contract for transportation with the partner in negotiations that need to government and no politicians. If people think it becomes too expensive, they will not agree to a deal. Where is a state needed that robs taxes and claims the right to limit people'S freedoms? The longer i think about it, the less I can see any such need.

If I want to order Japanese tea, I go online using Verizon's internet service (a big company), purchase from the company's website, and the tea is shipped using a carrier (another big company). To do this in feudal land, I have to inquire by word of mouth to a regional trade company, who in turn must inquire with the next and the next and the next until we reach someone who deals with Japanese goods. So now we have taken something in three steps and turned it into dozens of steps. I might get my tea in a few years, provided I can get that railroad built. It doesn't work.

Like democracy always leads to growing totalitarianism and socialism, capitalism always wants to turn into monopolism, one has to ensure that this does not happen, with enforcing conditions for basic minimums of competition never beeing bypassed or eroded and violated. Transparency< and limited dimension/size of companies and communities and administrating structure I consider to be vital here.

Even cases of military defence against the inevitable evil-doers and conquerers can be handled this way, though there is a risk. A huge cooperation between many regional communities is needed to organise a military defence effort powerful enough to repel any thread by an aggressor. The mere size of such an effort holds risks to the construction of communities that are designed to be not as big but as small as possible. We recall the times when mercenary armies in Europe helped to keep wars alive and prevent peace, because thy made their living by fighting wars, not earning money when there was peace. So, there is a critical point. Right now, I have no satisfying complete solution. I could point at the Hanse alliance that was a very powerful trading alliance of over 200 cities around the Baltic with my beloved city of Lübeck being the capital - but also maintained the privatised military forces needed to protect itself and its trading routes.

You'd better find a more than satisfying and complete solution, because I think that you've forgotten just how bloody this period was. Expect lots of violence.

[Skybird]

Two quote-collections. The first especially gives a basic oversight.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hans-Hermann_Hoppe

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quot..._Hermann_Hoppe

A selection from the wikiquote page, sorted by me in order to give the very basic of his logic that democracy means abuse of the capitalstock by winners in the competition for power who are embedded in a mutually parasitc relation with those who vote them for the very purpose of takiung profit from the selected leaders abusing the capitalstock. By empiric economic and tax data from the past Hoppe can show extremely clearly that in monarchies this abuse by the elites was much smaller than it is in democracies. Hoppe also argues that this demand by the governed to get nannied and fed., leads to expropriation of those who work and are expected to pay, leading to a socialist-communist expectation model that necessarily leads the state to act more and more oppressive and totalitarian, denying people what they wrongly think democracy is about: freedom.

However, I recommend to check the wikiquote page instead just the few snippets I copy here. It's maybe twice or three times as much.

Hoppe is not shy of using very clear words on occasion. He does not stop of calling anti-social behavior as what it is, and an uneducated mob of animals right that. The point is that he does so with precision, were calling the target of his criticism any different would mean to distort truth and gloss over unwanted reality.

He is also perfectly right on target when claiming that democracy promotes legal, juristic instability. Temporary caretakers abusing the capital stock also havce no longterm interest instable law, but prefer to tailor the laws opportunistically for the shortsighted interest of maximising their income from the capital stock in the immediate present. If you do not believe that, study the Euro crisis and its perfect record of bended and violated laws and treaties carefully. There is no longterm and trustworthy stability of the law in democracy. Our present demonstrates us that instead our laws, especially those regulating expropriation and taxation become more and more short-living. This does not really encourage investments in large. - The FED has just reported a profit of so and so much. But that proifit was generated by printing more and more mopeny, it is no gold the FED produced, but FIAT paper money. The amount of profits the FED gained just illustrates the amount of general money-devaluation int he whole system. These losses by far outlass these wins in total. What the FED therefore really is reporting without people - even at the FED - realising, is this: it all has become worse, there is more money, and this money is less of worth.

According to the pronouncements of our state rulers and their intellectual bodyguards (of whom there are more than ever before), we are better protected and more secure than ever. We are supposedly protected from global warming and cooling, from the extinction of animals and plants, from the abuses of husbands and wives, parents and employers, from poverty, disease, disaster, ignorance, prejudice, racism, sexism, homophobia, and countless other public enemies and dangers. In fact, however, matters are strikingly different. In order to provide us with all this protection, the state managers expropriate more than 40 percent of the incomes of private producers year in and year out. Government debt and liabilities have increased without interruption, thus increasing the need for future expropriations. Owing to the substitution of government paper money for gold, financial insecurity has increased sharply, and we are continually robbed through currency depreciation. Every detail of private life, property, trade, and contract is regulated by ever higher mountains of laws legislation), thereby creating permanent legal uncertainty and moral hazard. In particular, we have been gradually stripped of the right to exclusion implied in the very concept of private property. ... In short, the more the state has increased its expenditures on social security and public safety, the more our private property rights have been eroded, the more our property has been expropriated, confiscated, destroyed, or depreciated, and the more we have been deprived of the very foundation of all protection: economic independence, financial strength, and personal wealth.

Predictably, under democratic conditions the tendency of every monopoly - to increase prices and decrease quality - will be only more pronounced. Instead of a prince who regards the country as his private property, a temporary caretaker is put in charge of the country. He does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and his proteges’ advantage. He owns its current use - usufruct - but not its capital stock. This will not eliminate exploitation. To the contrary, it will make exploitation less calculating and carried out with little or no regard to the capital stock, i.e., short-sighted. Moreover, the perversion of justice will proceed even faster now. Instead of protecting pre-existing private property rights, democratic government becomes a machine for the redistribution of existing property rights in the name of illusory `social security.’

The American model – democracy – must be regarded as a historical error, economically as well as morally. Democracy promotes shortsightedness, capital waste, irresponsibility, and moral relativism. It leads to permanent compulsory income and wealth redistribution and legal uncertainty. It is counterproductive. It promotes demagoguery and egalitarianism. It is aggressive and potentially totalitarian internally, vis-à-vis its own population, as well as externally. In sum, it leads to a dramatic growth of state power, as manifested by the amount of parasitically – by means of taxation and expropriation – appropriated government income and wealth in relation to the amount of productively – through market exchange – acquired private income and wealth, and by the range and invasiveness of state legislation. Democracy is doomed to collapse, just as Soviet communism was doomed to collapse.

In a covenant...among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society.

In every society, a few individuals acquire the status of an elite through talent. Due to superior achievements of wealth, wisdom, and bravery, these individuals come to possess natural authority, and their opinions and judgments enjoy wide-spread respect. Moreover, because of selective mating, marriage, and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance, positions of natural authority are likely to be passed on within a few noble families. It is to the heads of these families with long-established records of superior achievement, farsightedness, and exemplary personal conduct that men turn to with their conflicts and complaints against each other. These leaders of the natural elite act as judges and peacemakers, often free of charge out of a sense of duty expected of a person of authority or out of concern for civil justice as a privately produced "public good."

We must promote the idea of secession. Or more specifically, we must promote the idea of a world composed of tens of thousands of distinct districts, regions, and cantons, and hundred of thousands of independent free cities such as the present day oddities of Monaco, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Greatly increased opportunities for economically motivated migration would thus result, and the world would be one of small [classically] liberal governments economically integrated through free trade and an international commodity money such as gold.

As soon as a crisis breaks out, within the given institutional framework, the same mistake will be made over and over again, on a larger and larger scale. Every future crisis will be bigger than the crisis that we had before.

History is ultimately determined by ideas, and ideas can, at least in principle, change almost instantly. But in order for ideas to change it is not sufficient for people to see that something is wrong. At least a significant number must also be intelligent enough to recognize what it is that is wrong. That is, they must understand the basic principles upon which society — human cooperation — rests ... And they must have sufficient will power to act according to this insight.

Families, authority, communities, and social ranks are the empirical-sociological concretization of the abstract philosophical-praxeological categories and concepts of property, production, exchange, and contract. Property and property relations do not exist apart from families and kinship relations.

Egalitarianism, in every form and shape, is incompatible with the idea of private property. Private property implies exclusivity, inequality, and difference. And cultural relativism is incompatible with the fundamental----indeed foundational----fact of families and intergenerational kinship relations. Families and kinship relations imply cultural absolutism.

Well there you have it, Hoppe is nuts.

[MH]

It is getting worse and worse.
I think you must be kidding.

[August]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Oh these never changing reflexes.

Now think that through. The last part of that sentence ("except the others...") often is mistaken by people to be a defence of democracy by relativising the criticism of the first part. But it isn't.

What Churchill did by these words, was this: slamming ALL forms of governments by declaring them all as unsuitable.

No, I think he was addressing those doubting Nancies who find fault with everything regardless of quality or improvement over all previous methods. It's pure English sarcasm and understatement delivered by a master of the art.

Winston Churchill may well have held a jaundiced view of democracy. It is ludicrous however to suggest that a man who had been at the head of arguably the most state-controlled economy in western Europe - Britain during the dark days of WW2 - could ever have been some sort of Anarcho-capitalist. Sheer lunacy...

It is getting worse and worse.

Correct.

I think you must be kidding.

Unfortunately wrong.