The following interview, conducted by prominent Mexican journalist Sergio Sarmiento, took place in conjunction with the “Una vida por la libertad” award ceremony in honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe in Mexico City on October 10, 2024. (Hoppe Receives Caminos de la Libertad “A Life for Freedom” Award.)
Libertad y Propiedad: Hans-Hermann Hoppe habla sobre la esencia del anarcocapitalismo (Freedom and Property: Hans-Hermann Hoppe talks about the essence of anarcho-capitalism)
Shownotes:
Philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe reflects on the importance of freedom in an era in which equality is considered a priority for many. For Hoppe, true freedom depends on private property, which allows people to act without restrictions from others. In this conversation, he also explains anarchocapitalism: a society governed solely by private law, without State intervention. Furthermore, it offers a critique of the policies of Javier Milei, who has presented himself as an anarcho-capitalist. Could there really be a society without a State?
The WEF officials have complained bitterly that it is “misinformation” to assert that they are power-crazed maniacs. But consider its June 2020 call for a Great Reset for humanity:
To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a “Great Reset” of capitalism.
“Misinformation” seems to include any facts which obstruct WEF cronies from ruling the earth.
Sixty heads of government from around the world attended, as did endless Lear Jet–loads of multilateral officials. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, out-blathered President Biden: “The world is not at a single inflection point; it is at multi-inflection points.” (Biden drags “inflection points” into almost every speech.)
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres told the WEF crowd that “deep reforms to global governance” were needed. And who better to deepen governance than the United Nations, the supreme tyrants’ club in the solar system?
Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, declared, “We have a responsibility to be stewards of our beautiful, small planet’s future. There is something that leaders need to embrace, and it is the responsibility to act, even if it’s not popular.” This spiel perfectly captured the prevailing disdain for democracy — or at least of any populace that fails to vote themselves into ever-greater subjection to their self-proclaimed-expert saviors. WEF Founder Klaus Schwab whooped up the Davos attendees as “trustees of the future.”
No wonder that Australian senator Alex Antic warned in the Australian Parliament: “The WEF is steeped in authoritarianism and Marxist ideology. It’s an ideology which is creeping into governments across the world.”
A world of censorship
The WEF had two big goals this year: “restore trust” and “crush dissent.” Okay, that last one is a paraphrase. Instead, the WEF is proclaiming that the greatest peril humanity now faces is “misinformation and disinformation.” And it knows this because its own truths are self-evident.
The WEF officials have complained bitterly that it is “misinformation” to assert that they are power-crazed maniacs. But consider its June 2020 call for a Great Reset for humanity:
To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a “Great Reset” of capitalism.
“Misinformation” seems to include any facts which obstruct WEF cronies from ruling the earth. The WEF’s latest Global Risks Report warns, “Some governments and platforms … may fail to act to effectively curb falsified information and harmful content, making the definition of ‘truth’ increasingly contentious across societies.” In other words, governments must suppress “falsified” information to save truth. The WEF presumes governments are founts of truth — regardless of “politician” being a term of derision going back thousands of years. Or maybe the WEF considers “truth” the same type of luxury nowadays as eating meat.
Thomas Woods has reminded us more than once that “no matter who you vote for, you get John McCain.”
The fact that the average GOP activist still hasn’t caught on to the grift can be seen in the fact that they still refer to people like Johnson as “rinos.” That is, “Republicans in name only.” Anyone who uses the term is advertising that he or she still hasn’t figured out that Republicans like Johnson, McConnell, McCarthy, and the usual beltway type are, in fact, quintessential Republicans.
Thomas Woods has reminded us more than once that “no matter who you vote for, you get John McCain.” It’s not strictly and always true, of course, but the evidence is clear that it’s often true. The latest example is the GOP’s speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) who has turned out more or less exactly like us skeptics have predicted. Johnson is a friend to the war party, a do-nothing on issues important to the rank and file (like immigration), and a true enemy of the people on issues like warrantless spying.
In recent weeks, Johnson has increasingly doubled down on supporting Washington’s foreign policy blob, and insists on spending at least a hundred billions dollars—dollars the Treasury doesn’t have and the Fed will have to print—on propping up the Ukraine regime. This regime, which Johnson tells us is essential in the battle for “democracy”—whatever that means—has abolished elections, ended the freedom of speech, and even destroyed the basic freedom of exercising one’s religion.
But none of that matters because someone at the FBI told Johnson he must keep spending taxpayer dollars on Ukraine while courting World War III. Johnson—ignoring his constituents as most members of Congress do—has assured the agents of the garrison state that he will help them. Perhaps Johnson’s biggest crime is his ongoing support for a new and vast expansion of the American police state. Johnson now supports securing greater prerogatives for America’s spy agencies who seek to spy on American citizens without warrants indefinitely.
This is obviously contrary to basic human rights (i.e., property rights), but Johnson certainly doesn’t care. After all, he told us that there are bad guys out there in the world, and that means the Bill of Rights goes right out the window.
The current drive to expand spy agencies’ power is no minor affair, and at the joint Mises Institute-Ron Paul Institute event in Houston last weekend, Daniel McAdams suggested that the GOP’s current effort to expand spy powers is even worse than the Patriot Act.
Yet, for anyone who has been around the game very long, he won’t be surprised to note that among the greatest champions of expanding unconstitutional state police powers right now is the GOP leadership. This, of course, is how it was in the early days of the Afghanistan and the Iraq wars. Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and their acolytes were on TV daily assuring us that Americans who insist on privacy and human rights are “with the terrorists.”
It is amazing how many people act as if the right to free speech includes the right to be free of criticism for what you say – which means that other people should not have the same right to free speech that they claim for themselves.
“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.”
After four years of resisting tyranny without respite, we could use a rejuvenating shot of good news. Here is a double espresso to recharge you for the battles ahead.
Canadian Government Found Guilty of Illegal Invocation of Emergencies Act
“In his 190-page ruling, Justice Richard G. Mosley said the government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act ‘does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness—justification, transparency and intelligibility—and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration.’”
Michael asked me to provide remarks on the ruling, several of which appear in the article. Below is the mini-essay I wrote in response to his query.
Remarks on Canada’s Federal Court Ruling
When I learned about Justice Mosley’s refreshingly just decision, the first words that poured out were, “It is a good day for freedom!”
Alexander News Network -Dr. Paul Elias Alexander’s substack
Breaking, Federal Judge in Canada (The Honourable Mr. Justice Mosley), stunningly, after so long, shows there is a God & there still is justice (that Madame Justice blindfolds do work) ruled that
Canadian Government’s use of the Emergencies Act during Trucker Convoy in Ottawa was unlawful & ultra vires, acting beyond the granted scope of the authority or power; TAMPON man Trudeau to appeal
The moment the truckers began rolling toward Ottawa in January 2022, I felt a surge of joy that was like throwing open a window after having suffocated in a dank cell for two years. That euphoric feeling continued to swell during the ensuing weeks as I immersed myself in firsthand footage and witnessed what I called the Winter of Love in my Profile in Courage on the Canadian truckers.
This was the concretization of the secret to toppling tyranny I had revealed in a May 2021 essay as articulated by Étienne de La Boétie in The Politics of Obedience:
“You can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”
The Canadian truckers were the allegorical green grocer of Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless who one day decided not to hang the government’s propaganda sign in his window, and, in so doing, “disrupted the game … [and] enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain.”
This single act of peaceful noncompliance triggers a cascade effect that dissolves the mental enslavement keeping the populace under the thrall of tyranny, and that is precisely what occurred as freedom convoys began erupting all over the world.
Bouncy castles; pancake parties; marshmallow-roasting; fireworks; Sikhs dancing; spontaneous outbursts of songs like “Lean on Me” and “O Canada”; hot tubs in the middle of a snowy landscape—these were the markers of humanity shattering its shackles. Most impressively, it was accomplished through love rather than violence.
The free market is what the name implies, a voluntary social and economic arrangement. 1984 was not about life in a free society. Turning problems of any nature over to an organization founded on theft, violence, and lies — government as it exists — should give anyone reason to reject the idea out of hand.
To paraphrase Thomas Paine, in the name of saving the planet freedom is being hunted “round the world.”
Let’s get sober. Two plus two really does equal four, and empirical science — which deals with testable hypotheses and outcomes — is never settled. An example of an empirical science that is never settled is climatology, the dictionary definition of which is the scientific study of climate.
Yet not all science is empirical. Scientific conclusions and everyday observations obey certain axioms, or laws, that have proved favorable to understanding reality. These laws had to be discovered, and in this respect could be considered the science of correct reasoning. For more on this topic see Hazlitt’s Thinking as a Science, W. Stanley Jevons Elementary Lessons in Logic, or go to the original source in Aristotle. You might also find deliverance in my article “Too Many Economic ‘Truths’ Are Built on Fallacies.”
Let’s go to court
In dealing with any issue it often helps to think like a defense attorney. The following is from my book, Write like they’re your last words. The scene is a courtroom where a man is being tried for murdering his girlfriend, taken from an old movie.
The prosecution put a male witness on the stand who testified he had sometimes heard the accused and his girlfriend exchanging heated words.
“So, are you saying the accused had woman troubles?” the prosecutor summarized.
“I think that’s fair to say.”
“Thank you.”
He turned to the defense attorney. “Your witness.”
The defense lawyer approached the witness and hit him square on the nose:
“Have you ever murdered a woman?”
“No! Of course not!”
“Have you ever had woman troubles?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever known a man who didn’t have woman troubles?”
“No.”
“Thank you. That’s all.”
Like the prosecution in the scene above, anyone with a weak argument might slip a fallacy into the debate to make their point.
What about the priests of climate change? The argument they want us to accept runs something like this:
Certain human activities are making our climate life-threatening.
Since we need a favorable climate to sustain life these activities should be eliminated.
Therefore, governments, which have the power to control human behavior, should mitigate and ultimately eliminate the aforementioned activities.
How would you go about “trying” this syllogism in court?
Vouchers constitute a direct violation of what is called the libertarian non-aggression principle, which is the core principle of the libertarian philosophy. That’s because vouchers are based on the initiation of force — i.e., taxation — to get the money to fund the vouchers.
Needless to say, vouchers are based on the continuation of the public-school system. They are simply a reform vehicle to enable some parents to use the coercive apparatus of the state to enable them to take their children out of the public-school system and place them in a private school, using the voucher to assist them with the private-school tuition.
Thus, vouchers are not freedom. They are actually antithetical to freedom.
One of the questions about libertarianism that has long fascinated me is: Why have so many libertarians given up on freedom? Everyone is given just one life to live. It seems to me that if there is anyone who would want to experience that one life as a free person, it is libertarians.
And yet, so many older libertarians gave up on freedom decades ago, and many younger libertarians have already given up on freedom.
Why?
Let’s look at one big example of this phenomenon. Let’s consider, for example, the massive governmental apparatus of public schooling, which is the crown jewel of American socialism at the state and local level. The state governments and local governmental school boards provide education for children. Students are there by state mandate. The state sets the curriculum and selects the textbooks. The teachers and administrators are employees of the government. Funding is through the coercive apparatus of taxation. Indoctrination, regimentation, and deference to authority are the name of the game, just like in the military.
In other words, there is nothing voluntary about public (i.e., government) schooling. As a socialist institution, it is the very antithesis of educational liberty.
What would educational freedom mean? It would mean the end of all governmental involvement in education, just as we have no governmental involvement in religion. No more compulsory-attendance laws. No more school taxes. No more government schoolteachers or administrators. No more government-approved curricula and textbooks. A total separation of school and state. A total free market in education.
How would the poor receive an education? How do the poor go to church? It’s the rich and the middle class who build and maintain the churches with their donations. No one excludes the poor. That’s the way freedom works in religion. It gives us an idea of how freedom would work in education.
Yet, freedom is not the position that many libertarians take. Many of them have settled on supporting the concept of school vouchers.
What are school vouchers? They are nothing more than a socialist reform measure, one that is based on the same principle of coercion on which public schooling is based. With vouchers, the state taxes one group of people and gives the loot to another group of people.
Doug Casey: Milei’s election is a big deal—potentially a very, very big deal. He’s the first declared anarcho-capitalist in history to head any country. And not by stealth. He, all the while, said that the State is the enemy and should be abolished. Anarcho-capitalists believe that society can run itself without a State, which is a formalized instrument of coercion.
International Man: Javier Milei made history by becoming the world’s first anarcho-capitalist president.
What is the historical significance of his victory? Are you optimistic?
Doug Casey: Milei’s election is a big deal—potentially a very, very big deal. He’s the first declared anarcho-capitalist in history to head any country. And not by stealth. He, all the while, said that the State is the enemy and should be abolished. Anarcho-capitalists believe that society can run itself without a State, which is a formalized instrument of coercion.
It’s unprecedented for somebody to be elected to run a State that he wants to abolish. And propose that if it continues to exist, it should only have the police, military, and the courts. And even those should be privatized.
Am I optimistic?
Looking at it from a long-term point of view, for the last hundred years, individual freedom has been diminishing, and State power has grown hugely all over the world. What’s worse is that the trend is accelerating. Many countries are on the ragged edge of turning into socialist or fascist dictatorships.
That includes the US. Since Reagan left office, all of our presidents have been disasters of various types, with the current regime being the worst yet. In Argentina, the Peronists have run the country completely into the ground over the last 75 years.
Of course, maybe Milei’s election is just an uptick in a continuing downtrend because you can’t change a country’s national philosophy overnight. But destroying a State apparatus infested by Peronists, socialists, fascists, and other horrible parasites is a good start. If he can pull the apparatus of the State out by its roots, not just trim it back, the result might last for quite a while.
I’m encouraged by the fact that young people and poor people are among his biggest supporters. They recognize that they’re the ones who the State damages the most. Could Argentina be the start of a worldwide trend towards free minds and free markets?
Since I prefer to believe humans are basically decent, I can’t help being optimistic—even if cautiously. He’s going to get lots of resistance from the Deep State, unions, the media, welfare queens, and other “usual suspects.”
International Man: Perhaps there is no issue more important in Argentina than money.
Milei has promised to “burn down the central bank” and replace the peso with the US dollar. He has made statements favorable to eliminating all legal tender laws and allowing whatever commodity the free market would choose as money—though he hasn’t articulated his exact plans.
What do you think Milei should do regarding the money issue? What are the risks of adopting the US dollar and not having any monetary alternatives?
Doug Casey: First of all, he totally understands the government shouldn’t be in the money business. I know that shocks most people to hear, but trusting the government with money is like trusting a teenager with a Corvette and a bottle of Jack Daniels.
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