Author: Hans-Hermann Hoppe

The social theory sailing nowadays under the label “Austro-Libertarianism” has a long and prominent history going back many centuries, culminating, during the second half of the 20th century, in the work of Murray N. Rothbard, and continued today by his various intellectual disciples and students, including myself. The theory provides a simple, argumentatively irrefutable (without running into contractions) answer to one of the most important questions in the entire field of the social sciences: How can human beings, “real persons,” having to act in a “real world” characterized by the scarcity of all sorts of physical things, interact with each … Continue reading →

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[From Chapter 4 of The Economics and Ethics of Private Property by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.] I will do the following in this chapter: First, I will present a series of theses that constitute the hard-core of the Marxist theory of history. I claim that all of them are essentially correct. Then I will show how these true theses are derived in Marxism from a false starting point. Finally, I want to demonstrate how Austrianism in the Mises-Rothbard tradition can give a correct but categorically different explanation of their validity. Let me begin with the hard-core of the Marxist belief system:1 (1) “The history … Continue reading →

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[The Brazilian Philosophy Magazine Dicta & Contradicta interviews Hans-Hermann Hoppe. July 15, 2013.] Would the change from a statist to a libertarian society help or hinder the production of high culture? Hoppe: A libertarian society would be significantly more prosperous and wealthy and this would certainly help both low and high culture. But a free society — a society without taxes and tax subsidies and without so-called “intellectual property rights” — would produce a very different culture, with a very different set of products, producers, stars, and failures. Time to buy old US gold coins You see a causal link between a society’s … Continue reading →

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[Transcript of a speech delivered at the 2009 Mises University.] At the beginning, I want to repeat a few points that I have made in my previous lecture on law and economics, and then I want to get to an entirely different subject than the one that I dealt with in that previous lecture. Because there is a scarcity in the world, we can have conflicts regarding these scarce resources. And because conflicts can exist whenever and wherever there exists scarcity, we do need norms to regulate human life. Norms – the purpose of norms is to avoid conflicts. And … Continue reading →

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The following interview with Hans-Hermann Hoppe first appeared in the German weekly Junge Freiheit on November 2, 2012, and was conducted by Moritz Schwarz. It has been translated here into English by Robert Groezinger. Are taxes nothing but protection money? The state a kind of mafia? Democracy a fraud? Philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe is not only considered one of the most prominent pioneering intellectuals of the libertarian movement, but also perhaps the sharpest critic of the Western political system. Professor Hoppe, in your essay collection “Der Wettbewerb der Gauner” (“The Competition of Crooks“) you write that “99 percent of citizens, asked … Continue reading →

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This book was published first in English more than 25 years ago, in 1989, the same year when the infamous “Berlin Wall” fell and rang in the rapid implosion and dissolution, within only a couple of years, of the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European Empire. For more than forty years, ever since the “Cold War” had broken out immediately following the end of World War II between the two major former war-Allies – the USA and the USSR (Soviet Russia) –, the post-war European border between a US-dominated “West” and a USSR-dominated “East” that both sides had delineated, … Continue reading →

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This keynote address was delivered at the 2016 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society. I At repeated requests from many sides – and given my already advanced stage in life – I have deemed it appropriate to take this opportunity to speak a bit about myself. Not about my private life, of course, but about my work. And not about all subjects – and there are several to which I have made some, however, little contribution in the course of the years – but one subject only. The one subject, where I consider my contribution the most important: the … Continue reading →

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Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek are widely considered the most eminent classical liberal thinkers of this century. They are also the two best known Austrian economists. They were great scholars and great men. I was lucky to have them both as my teachers.… Yet it is clear that the world treats them very differently. Mises was denied the Nobel Prize for economics, which Hayek won the year after Mises’s death. Hayek is occasionally anthologized and read in college courses, when a spokesman for free enterprise absolutely cannot be avoided; Mises is virtually unknown in American academia. Even among … Continue reading →

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This article is excerpted from the author’s A Realistic Libertarianism. Left-libertarians profess to apply libertarian principles more consistently than other libertarians. In fact, their role is to serve as Viagra to the State. This becomes apparent when one considers their position on the increasingly virulent question of migration. Left-libertarians are typically ardent advocates in particular of a policy of ‘free and non-discriminatory’ immigration. If they criticize the State’s immigration policy, it is not for the fact that its entry restrictions are the wrong restrictions, i.e., that they do not serve to protect the property rights of domestic citizens, but for … Continue reading →

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An Interview With Hans-Herman Hoppe in the Polish weekly Najwyższy Czas! What is your assessment of contemporary Western Europe, and in particular the EU? All major political parties in Western Europe, regardless of their different names and party programs, are nowadays committed to the same fundamental idea of democratic socialism. They use democratic elections to legitimize the taxing of productive people for the benefit of unproductive people. They tax people, who have earned their income and accumulated their wealth by producing goods or services purchased voluntarily by consumers (and of course especially the ‘rich’ among those), and they then re-distribute the … Continue reading →

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Because every action requires the employment of specific physical means – a body, standing room, external objects – a conflict between different actors must arise, whenever two actors try to use the same physical means for the attainment of different purposes. The source of conflict is always and invariably the same: the scarcity or rivalrous-ness of physical means. Two actors cannot at the same time use the same physical means – the same bodies, spaces and objects – for alternative purposes. If they try to do so, they must clash. Therefore, in order to avoid conflict or resolve it if … Continue reading →

This article is excerpted from the author’s A Realistic Libertarianism. Left-libertarians profess to apply libertarian principles more consistently than other libertarians. In fact, their role is to serve as Viagra to the State. This becomes apparent when one considers their position on the increasingly virulent question of migration. Left-libertarians are typically ardent advocates in particular of a policy of ‘free and non-discriminatory’ immigration. If they criticize the State’s immigration policy, it is not for the fact that its entry restrictions are the wrong restrictions, i.e., that they do not serve to protect the property rights of domestic citizens, but for … Continue reading →

The classical argument in favor of free immigration runs as follows: Other things being equal, businesses go to low-wage areas, and labor moves to high-wage areas, thus affecting a tendency toward the equalization of wage rates (for the same kind of labor) as well as the optimal localization of capital. An influx of migrants into a given-sized high-wage area will lower nominal wage rates. However, it will not lower real wage rates if the population is below its optimum size. To the contrary, if this is the case, the produced output will increase over-proportionally, and real incomes will actually rise. … Continue reading →