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 World Economic Forum (WEF) was founded fifty years ago. It has gained more and more prominence over the decades and has become one of the leading platforms of futuristic thinking and planning. As a meeting place of the global elite, the WEF brings together the leaders in business and politics along with a few selected intellectuals. The main thrust of the forum is global control.
Free markets and individual choice do not stand as the top values, but state interventionism and collectivism. Individual liberty and private property are to disappear from this planet by 2030 according to the projections and scenarios coming from the World Economic Forum.
Eight Predictions
Individual liberty is at risk again. What may lie ahead was projected in November 2016 when the WEF published “8 Predictions for the World in 2030.” According to the WEF’s scenario, the world will become quite a different place from now because how people work and live will undergo a profound change. The scenario for the world in 2030 is more than just a forecast. It is a plan whose implementation has accelerated drastically since with the announcement of a pandemic and the consequent lockdowns.
According to the projections of the WEF’s “Global Future Councils,” private property and privacy will be abolished during the next decade. The coming expropriation would go further than even the communist demand to abolish the property of production goods but leave space for private possessions. The WEF projection says that consumer goods, too, would be no longer private property.
If the WEF projection should come true, people would have to rent and borrow their necessities from the state, which would be the sole proprietor of all goods. The supply of goods would be rationed in line with a social credit points system. Shopping in the traditional sense would disappear along with the private purchases of goods. Every personal move would be tracked electronically, and all production would be subject to the requirements of clean energy and a sustainable environment.
In order to attain “sustainable agriculture,” the food supply will be mainly vegetarian. In the new totalitarian service economy, the government will provide basic accommodation, food, and transport, while the rest must be lent from the state. The use of natural resources will be brought down to its minimum. In cooperation with the few key countries, a global agency would set the price of CO2 emissions at an extremely high level to disincentivize its use.
In a promotional video, the World Economic Forum summarizes the eight predictions in the following statements:
The truth is that we are sustained by stories – oral, written, existential – not by things, as a commercial civilization would have us believe. From infancy to old age, we crave stories that will allow us to make sense of our lives, to give them shape and spiritual significance. And the greatest gifts we can give each other are stories that draw on the mystery and sacredness of existence, stories that express, in ravishing language and a musical spirit, clarification for our lives. Stories that help us resist the nihilistic ethos of our times, the violence and deceit that defines them.
“The most incomprehensible talk comes from people who have no other use for language than to make themselves understood.”
– Karl Kraus, Half-Truths & One-and-a-Half Truths
Things, possessions, life on the installment plan or credit card. This is the season to buy, to accumulate more folderols, to give things to one’s children and each other, which, we like to believe, will bring joy. It’s make-believe, of course, an adult lie conjured up out of guilt and fear that our lives, the stories we live, the stories we dream, and those that dream us, are insufficiently meaningful to bring our children and ourselves the joy we say we seek.
Driven by a pure sense of guilt devoid of any sense of redemption in a capitalist materialist culture, we buy and buy, accumulate and accumulate, in the vain hope that such tangible “gifts” will bring a magic that we can possess. Our exchange of gifts is a consumer culture’s parody of the true meaning of a gift: that gifts are given to be given away, to be passed around, like the peace pipe of native American Indian tribes.
As Lewis Hyde writes in his extraordinary book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, “… a gift that cannot be given away ceases to be a gift. The spirit of a gift is its constant donation.” What we are given, in the inner and outer world, must be shared, allowed to circulate.
But we like to own, to stop the flow. As a result, we have become stuck, selfie people who can’t understand that to possess is to be possessed.
Stop, pose, click. Got it!
Describing art as a way of life, or walking life’s way as an art, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it thus:
Not any self-control or self-limitation for the sake of specific ends, but rather a carefree letting go of oneself; not caution, but rather a wise blindness; not working to acquire silent, slowly increasing possessions, but rather a continuous squandering of all perishable values. This way of being has something naïve and instinctive about it, and resembles that period of the unconscious best characterized by a joyous consciousness , namely the period of childhood.
The truth is that we are sustained by stories – oral, written, existential – not by things, as a commercial civilization would have us believe. From infancy to old age, we crave stories that will allow us to make sense of our lives, to give them shape and spiritual significance. And the greatest gifts we can give each other are stories that draw on the mystery and sacredness of existence, stories that express, in ravishing language and a musical spirit, clarification for our lives. Stories that help us resist the nihilistic ethos of our times, the violence and deceit that defines them.
For example, long ago a Jewish boy was born in a stable because his parents couldn’t get a room anywhere. The parents then had to flee with the boy because the government was murdering children and was out to get him. Later in life, this child Jesus, became a radical opponent of church and state, preached peace, love, non-violence, and living by faith, not money; he embraced the outcasts, condemned the hypocrites, and was finally executed as a radical criminal by the state. But his spirit was undefeated; he conquered death; and his name has become synonymous with love and kindness to such a degree that we celebrate his birth as the light of the world as the darkest days of the year turn brighter.
It’s a beautiful story from beginning to end, and if heeded, would bring massive resistance to the way things are throughout the world. No wonder it has touched the hearts of so many for so long.
Sadly, however, Wordsworth put it perfectly when he said that, “getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” And the consumer-gift-stories we indirectly tell our children by participating in the madness of holiday shopping are tales unfit for young ears.
To live to buy is to tell them lies.
Our children (and all of us) wish not things but stories that will help them face life with enthusiasm and courage. When I was a young boy, my father would ease me to sleep with “Jiminy Cricket Stories,” imaginary improvisations on Pinocchio and his conscience. They were in no way trendy like the most recent Pinocchio film adaptation, but fundamentally sound as in the song As Time Goes By – it’s still the same old story.
I can’t remember any of his stories today, but what stays with me is their underlying theme, their spirit: to become a real boy, a genuine person, one must determine to tell the truth. One must be brave, truthful, and unselfish. Yet even more, when I think of them, I feel my father’s unconditional love and the timbre of his lilting voice.
These stories about truth and bravery contained hard but vital lessons for a father to pass on to a son, but he did it in such an entertaining way that I took the lessons to heart. Ever since, in gratitude and wonder, I have been trying to make my story adhere to that spirit of truth. Trying; for as we all know, truth is a hard taskmaster. We never hold it, only seek it, and can only approach it if we are possessed by language and allow its musical spirit to carry us on into the unknown.
When I became a father myself, I tried to pass on to my children a love for stories and the words we use to express our lives. Without words, and the ability to use them meaningfully, we are lost in the world of things, a place where consuming replaces creating. So from infancy onward, my wife and I would read to them, and eventually I began to tell them imaginary stories of my own, “Willy Daly Stories,” inspired by a boyhood pal. They would hang onto each word, and swing into depths of reverie as I strung them together into tall tales.
“At the bottom of each word/I’m a spectator at my birth,” wrote the French poet Alain Bosquet.
Entering into this creative spirit, Susanne and Daniel would ask me. “Is that really true?” And I could not lie and say no. So they would laugh, I would grin, and we would go on.
Like all children, they loved these stories, the ones I told and the ones we read. They entered into them, and they, into them; their inner worlds germinated. When they were very young, each started to read, not haltingly but fluently and with amazing comprehension. “Out of the blue” something clicked (and neither was “taught” to read, but was read and talked to by my wife and me as though they comprehended everything, even the most abstruse words), and from that day on the words that they previously heard became theirs. They received the gift, even when they didn’t understand the meaning, they grasped the music.
Now it has passed to my grandchildren, Sophie and Henry, who are children of the word, lovers of the epiphanies stories can disclose.
“The bright book of life,” as D.H.Lawrence called the novel, opened to them. Novel: New. New life forever arising out of the old. Miraculously (is there any other word for it?), they were in possession of the gift of words that they could pass on; they had the power to hear and tell their own stories, to understand their lives, not as the pursuit of things, but as the pursuit of meaning. They felt proud and I felt blessed.
“Art tells the truth,” wrote Chekhov. Indeed. And the wheel of life turns with the seasons. The gift of stories is passed on. Christmas turns to New Year’s. People pass on, but so do stories. The things are forgotten.
The wordsmith Leonard Cohen sang in his song, “Famous Blue Raincoat,” that “I hope you are keeping some sort of record.” The words stick on the page, but the beautiful melody carries them into our present and into the future and we imagine stories carrying us on as the music and the words don’t stop and we keep humming the tune and imagining as we move along to that which cannot be said and about which it is impossible to be silent, to paraphrase Victor Hugo.
In fact, under a typical government, there is no private property. If you can lose your house for failure to pay property taxes, that’s not your property. The government is renting it to you, like a lord allowing a peasant to work his lands in exchange for tribute.
In contrast, under common law, private property is generally recognized under a two fold test: 1) were you the first person to occupy the land (or acquire it without coercion from the previous legitimate owner) and 2) did you improve the land?
If government services were transacted exclusively in the free market, we would be living under an umbrella system of anarcho-capitalism. Under such a free market for governance, we would see many different types of societies emerge, and one may be anarcho-monarchism. That is an extreme form of private property, where by owning land, you become the exclusive sovereign over that land. You own it, you set the rules. In this video, I explain how that would work.
There are 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Only one would get my vote (if I voted).
Thomas Massie is a Republican who has represented Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District, which stretches across Northern Kentucky and 280 miles of the Ohio River, since 2012. With a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, both from MIT, Massie is a smart guy. But more importantly, he is a friend of the Constitution, liberty, property, and peace; that is, he doesn’t just recite the conservative mantra: his votes in Congress speak for themselves.
The New American magazine publishes four times each term of Congress “The Freedom Index: A Congressional Scorecard Based on the U.S. Constitution.” The Freedom Index “rates congressmen based on their adherence to constitutional principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, national sovereignty, and a traditional foreign policy of avoiding foreign entanglements.”
The new edition of the Freedom Index (in the issue dated July 20) is the second for the 116th Congress, and looks at ten key measures. Scores are derived by dividing a congressman’s constitutional votes by the total number of votes cast and multiplying by 100. So, the higher the score the better.
This edition of the Freedom Index tracks congressional votes in the House on appropriations, impeachment, the United States-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement (USMCA), the Equal Rights Amendment, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Iran War Powers Resolution, and coronavirus aid packages.
For the second time in a row for the 116th Congress, Rep. Massie scored a perfect 100 percent. Most of the Democrats received a failing score. But the other Republicans in the House didn’t do so well either. Seven of them earned a score from 30-39 percent. Sixty-four of them earned a score from 40-49 percent. Forty-five of them earned a score from 50-59 percent. Forty-three of them earned a score from 60-69 percent. Twenty-four of them earned a score from 70-79 percent. Six of them earned a score from 80-89 percent. And only one of them earned a score from 90-99 percent.
This means that over half of the Republicans in the House received a failing grade when it comes to their “conservatism.” With Republicans like these, who needs Democrats? Indeed, outspoken Democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez earned a score of 60 percent. This means that she scored higher than the majority of the Republicans in the House. Let that sink in for a minute:
AOC is more conservative than the majority of Republican House members.
Any yet we are told ad nauseam by conservative talk show hosts and pastors of evangelical churches that we should vote Republican to keep those evil Democrats out of office.
What makes things even worse is that the Republican Party is the opposition party in the House right now. Republicans always score lower when they are the party in power.
How many times must I say it: The only limited government that Republicans seek is a government limited to control by Republicans. Thomas Massie is apparently the only exception in the House. Like former House member Ron Paul, Massie often casts the lone “no” vote on legislation. God bless him.
I don’t know where this is coming from. Maybe here.
You own yourself and private property. Two vastly misunderstood and appreciated “rights”. Government doesn’t like these two concepts. It tells you what you can and can’t do. You rent your property subject to confiscation through taxes or failure to pay same.
Smoking your greens instead of eating the FDA approved variety could mean loss of liberty. Just because you paid off your mortgage doesn’t mean you can keep your house.
To say “I don’t believe in rights,” is like saying, “I don’t believe in language.”
Uttering the phrase contradicts your claim. Humans created language in order to constructively communicate. Language is real because people agree on the meaning of words.
In the same vein, humans created the concept of rights to facilitate peaceful human interaction. Rights are real because people agree (sometimes without realizing it) on what constitutes a right.
Even as someone utters, “rights don’t exist,” they are exercising their most basic human rights. Read the rest of this entry »
MCViewPoint 
