Michael Duffy: As it happens, we're going to start the year with a guest from the right, but so far to the right you certainly couldn't call him conservative. I'm not sure what you'd call him, he is right out of the ideological ballpark. His name is Hans-Hermann Hoppe and he's a German intellectual who lives in America. He's going to propose ways of thinking about government, society and the economy that are literally radical. Paul Comrie-Thomson: And I think in this case, Michael, the word 'literally' is being used literally. Michael Duffy: Indeed it is. Hans-Hermann Hoppe is probably the world's leading living libertarian philosopher. He's emeritus professor of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a distinguished fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Perhaps his best-known book appeared about a decade ago, and it had the challenging title Democracy: The God That Failed. His critique was from the libertarian right. Libertarians are part of a pretty broad church, so how would Hans-Hermann Hoppe describe his position? Just where is he coming from? Hans-Hermann Hoppe: I am a libertarian but there exists various wings of libertarians. I am a member of the wing that is referred to as the anarcho-capitalist libertarians or, as I prefer to say, I'm a proponent of a private law society, and a private law society is a society where the same laws apply to every individual and every institution, not just separate groups of individuals—government officials on the one hand and private citizens on the other—to whom different laws apply. Michael Duffy: In general terms, is there one particular place that you're coming from? Is there a sort of fixed point where you start whenever you consider a new subject or a problem? Are you interested in freedom, for example? Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Of course I'm interested in freedom. I think freedom is defined precisely by the position that I take, that every individual and every situation is subject to exactly the same law and there is no group of individuals or no particular individual that has certain privileges that other people do not have. Michael Duffy: Okay, let's apply those beliefs to what you've written about the differences or the comparison between democracy and monarchy. I suspect most of our listeners would consider that democracy is a marked improvement and a dramatic difference from monarchy. How do you see the two? Hans-Hermann Hoppe: First you have to define a state because monarchies as well as democracies are states, and then in the second step we have to explain what the difference between these two types of states are. States are defined as institutions that are the ultimate arbiter in cases of conflict on a certain territory, including conflicts involving the state itself. And secondly, states are territorial monopolies of taxation. So this applies both to monarchies and to democracies. In monarchies, the head of the state considers the territory as his private property, and the people inhabiting the state territory as his renters who owe him rent payments. And of course he uses his privilege that he has as the ultimate arbiter in any case of conflict and a person who has the right to tax individuals to his own advantage. He exploits his population. This is also true in a democracy. Taxation exists in a democracy, just as much as it exists under monarchy. Democratic states also assume that they are the ultimate arbiter in any case of conflict, including conflicts involving themselves. And there is distinction in democracy also between public law and private law. Public officials under democracy can do many things that private individuals in their private dealings would not be permitted to do. They can tax individuals on a private level, this would be called stealing. They can tax individuals and redistribute income in the private level, that would be considered stealing and fencing of stolen goods. They can draft people into the army or force them to work for the state, which on a private level would be considered enslaving people or kidnapping people... Michael Duffy: But people choose this, don't they? People will vote for democracy, for democratic governments. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Yes, that brings me to the difference between democracy and the monarch. Under monarchy it is relatively clear who the ruler is and what the rules are, under democracy you can hope that you will end up on the other side, that you will be on the receiving end, and that reduces the resistance against increases of taxes, against unjust verdicts in conflicts of a situation. But the most important difference between monarchy on the one hand and democracy on the other hand is that you replace somebody who considers himself to be the owner of the country with somebody who is a temporary caretaker of the country, and that does not improve matters, it makes matters much worse. To give you an example, if I give you a house, in one situation I make you the owner of the house so you can determine who will be the heir, you can sell the house off and keep the receipts from the sale, while in the other case I make you the temporary user of the house. You can use to your own advantage the income that you can get off the house but you have no right to sell the house, you have no right to determine who will be the heir of the house. Will you treat the house in a different way? And the answer seems to be quite clear; yes, you will treat it in a very different way. In the one case as the owner you will be interested in preserving the value, the capital value embodied in the house. In the other case, as a democratic politician where you can only use the house but don't own it, you will try to increase your income that you can get from the house without any regard to the capital value embodied in the house, and you will engage in capital consumption, you will want to rob the country as fast as possible because, after four years or eight years you have no chance anymore to do it. So it is far more destructive of wealth formation than monarchy. Michael Duffy: But isn't it the case, using your analogy, that because of elections if I want to keep the house, keep my control of the house at the end of a period of four or five years, I have to act within certain limits? In other words, elected rulers, even if they do exploit people a bit, they have to keep that exploitation within boundaries in the hope of being re-elected. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: But this is also true for monarchs. Monarchs have frequently been killed if they overstep their boundaries, and the dynasty of which they are a member is very much interested in keeping the dynasty in power. Democrats are far less frequently killed because people always have the hope that in four years somebody else will come to power. So the resistance against attempts to increase government power to increase the amount of taxes is far lower under democratic conditions than it is under monarchical conditions. And in addition it should be said that competition for entry into government, competition is not always good. Competition is good when it comes to the production of things that are good. We do not want to have a milk monopolist, we do not want to have a car monopolist, we do want to have competition in the milk industry and the car industry, but competition is not good when it comes to producing something that is bad from the point of view of property owners. We would not want to have competition in people­—who runs the best concentration camp, who is the best mugger on the street—and this is precisely the type of competition that we have in democracy. Michael Duffy: It's the case, isn't it, that democracies on the whole have higher standards of living than other forms of government, and also the case that many people who do not live in democracies would like to, to the extent that we can gauge what they want. Why is that so, do you think? Are people deluded to want to live in democracies? Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Democracies have won out in competition against monarchies in the course of history. The monarchical age has ended by and large with the end of World War I, so it would be unfair to say that democracies are in fact richer than monarchies because we compare the 19th and 18th century with the 20th century. Societies can grow richer despite the fact that governments grow richer. So my thesis would be if we would have kept monarchies of the style that we had in the 19th and 18th century we would be far richer than we are currently under democratic conditions. Michael Duffy: Moving on, what might a libertarian society look like? How might it organise itself? Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The basic idea is that if every institution, every person is subject to the same set of laws, then also the production of law and order has to be provided by freely financed institutions. There is no monopoly institution in this place. This would lead to a situation where we would indeed get some sort of contract of what will happen to us in certain situations of conflict, what the provider of security of law and order will do. They will have to describe what it is that they will protect, how will they protect it, what will they do in the case of a conflict between a client of a protecting agency and the agency itself, what will happen in the case that two security providers and their clients have conflicts with each other. They will have to agree, for instance, that there will be independent arbitration in the case of conflicts between various protecting agencies, whereas if you compare that with the current situation, we have a situation where no contract exists between the citizens that are allegedly protected in their life and their property by the government, where it is not clear what will happen if the clients, the so-called clients of the state, are dissatisfied with the provisions that the state gives, where the clients have no possibility of appealing to independent third parties if it comes to a conflict between the state and the individual, where instead we have a situation where if you have a conflict with the state, some state agent, over property rights, it is another state agent who decides who is right and who is wrong in this case of conflict. And there you can predict of course what the outcome will be; they will by and large decide that they are always right. Michael Duffy: Can I ask you for an example? In this sort of world you're describing, say there was a law and everyone else agreed with it but I didn't. So if, for example, I live in a street and I've got a one-hour parking sign out the front and I disagree with that but the other people in the street agree with it, what might happen then? I'm just trying to get a concrete idea of this. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The street would be privately owned. In a private law society there exists no such thing as public property, there exists only private property, and of course the owner of the private property lays down the rules that apply to this piece of private property. So conflicts like this would not even arise. Public property, on the other hand, generates conflicts. Allegedly we all own it. If we do not happen to agree, as if by magic, conflicts are almost unavoidable. If the unions want to demonstrate on the street and the car drivers want to drive on the street, both claim to be owners of this territory, and conflict is unavoidable. If everything is privately owned, it is perfectly clear whose rules apply and whose rules do not apply. Michael Duffy: So if I own a house in a street, would that street belong to all the people in the neighbourhood or to another company? How would that work? Hans-Hermann Hoppe: That can be arranged in various ways. It might be owned by all the residents on the street, it might be owned by a third party and you have the right to access your property. Obviously nobody would buy any property if he did not have the right to access his own property, so you would have a contract with the person who owns the street. Or there are neighbourhood associations that jointly own the street and make joint decisions, as in stock companies or as in gated communities or institutions of that kind. Michael Duffy: And if I didn't agree with them I could leave basically, I could sell my house and... Hans-Hermann Hoppe: And then you could leave. Michael Duffy: In Australia we have a large number of people who are on welfare, poor people who are looked after by what we call the welfare state, possibly more than in America. What would happen to those people under the sorts of arrangements you've been describing? Hans-Hermann Hoppe: First of all I think that a large number of voluntary organisations would spring up, voluntary donations would dramatically increase given the fact that no taxes have to be paid. Currently the situation is such that you pay massive amounts of taxes and then people of course have the feeling why should I also support people who have this condition or that condition given that I am already paying an enormous sum of taxes. Second, I think there would be greater pressure exerted on people not to become dependent on welfare because they are not entitled to it. They would have to behave in such a way that they satisfy their donors in some way, they have to be nice to their donors, whereas currently the situation is you feel entitled to these things and that breeds of course bad behaviour. Whatever you subsidise through taxes you will get more of it. If you support poor people, this does not eliminate poverty, it increases poverty, it increases the incentive to stay poor or to become poor. Whenever you subsidise people because they suffer from drug addiction or alcoholism, you increase of these forms of behaviour instead of discouraging them. Michael Duffy: Do you think the welfare state can survive? Hans-Hermann Hoppe: No, the welfare state will ultimately collapse for the same reason that communism collapsed. All Western welfare states will not be able to repay their debts, will not be able to fulfil their obligations that they have assumed vis-à-vis people who are retiring. The only way that they can fulfil it is by engaging in a massive amount of inflation, that is printing up the money in order to give the impression that they might fulfil the obligation, with the consequence of course that the purchasing power of money drastically falls and an expropriation of productive individuals will take place. Michael Duffy: I'd like to ask you a bit more about economics but unfortunately we don't have a lot of time left. Just very generally, can you tell us a few of your most important thoughts about how you think the international financial system ought to be arranged differently? Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The fundamental problem that we have which began in its most drastic form since 1971 is that all governments are nowadays on a pure paper money standard. All governments or their central banks can create money out of thin air. Increasing the amount of money in existence does not increase wealth in society, it is just additional pieces of paper. There is not one additional consumer good resulting from more money being printed, there is not one additional producer good resulting from more money being printed. If by money printing we could make societies richer, there would not be a single poor society. In fact, there would not be a single poor person on earth. All that this money printing does is redistribute income and wealth from those people who print and get and spend the money first, and it impoverishes and expropriates who do get the newly printed money last, who are on fixed incomes and are confronted with rising prices resulting from the fact that additional money was being printed. So the most important monetary reform that we can hope for would be the abolishment of all central banks and the return to a situation that existed for most of mankind, namely a situation where money is a regular commodity that must be produced in a costly way, such as gold and silver, by the market. Again, no monopoly in the production of money but competition in the production of money, and money being a regular commodity that cannot be generated out of thin air. Michael Duffy: What about the role of intellectuals? We've never had anyone like yourself on our program before and that is disappointing. Why don't more people think like you or it least engage in more diverse thinking about freedom? Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The answer to that one is very easy. Most intellectuals are state employees, and of course they know where their money comes from. While that fact does not determine in the Marxist way how people think, it definitely helps to know where your money comes from. The demand for intellectual services on the market is far lower than the impression that intellectuals themselves tried to spread. Their salaries would probably be significantly less, there would be significantly less so-called intellectuals because they realise that their biggest helper is the state. They tend to be in favour of state institutions, tend to be in favour of having public education, public funding for research. Again, most research that is being done, especially in the social sciences, appears to me as a big waste of money. Societies would be richer if many of these so-called research projects had never been carried out at all. Michael Duffy: Professor Hoppe, thanks very much for your time today. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Thank you very much. Michael Duffy: Hans-Hermann Hoppe is emeritus professor of economics at the University of Nevada, and a distinguished fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. In coming weeks here on Counterpoint we'll be talking to another prominent libertarian, David Hart. He's an Australian historian, now resident in the US, a self-described ultra-sceptic who runs the important website, the Online Library of Liberty, and we'll hear his views on freedom, war and the growth of the state.

 

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Andy Duncan

by Benjamin Marks, Economics.org.au editor-in-chief and Mencken’s Conservatism author In light of the furore arising from my appointment as editor-in-chief of the Australian economics organisation, Economics.org.au, it was decided that I travel as far away from Australia as I could until the media frenzy subsided. I was philosophical about this, figuring that having reached the pinnacle of the Australian economics profession with my appointment, the only challenges left for me were abroad anyway. So, in my new capacity as senior foreign correspondent for Economics.org.au, I attended the 6th Annual Property and Freedom Society (PFS) Conference in Bodrum, Turkey. The significance of the conference being in Turkey cannot be understated. There was a gaudy Turkish election campaign of some sort playing out during the conference, and big clunky polluting vehicles were driven around the poorly-maintained and traffic-clogged streets with loud songs and speeches advertising the candidates. Imagine an ice cream van that went three times as fast, emitted noise almost as irritating as “Greensleeves” and offered something people had to be forced to fund. Pedestrians were treated like taxpayers. Despite not understanding the language that the election profundities were in — I was the only conference participant who was not at least bilingual —, they were still just as comprehensible to me as the confabulations of English-speaking politicians. The PFS was founded by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, with the enthusiastic support of his wife Gülçin. It was set up to do what The Mont Pelerin Society was meant to: to be an international hub for genuine defenders of freedom. In actual fact, reminiscent of G.K. Chesterton’s nightmare The Man Who Was Thursday, the MPS is no “Supreme Anarchist Council,” but, “a lot of silly [undercover] policemen looking at each other.”¹ Far from defending freedom, the MPS is more like Rabelais’s Crazy Council:

The next day, on our starboard side, we met up with nine old tub boats full of monks — Dominicans, Jesuits, Capuchins, Hermits, Augustinians, Bernardines, Celestines, Theatines, Egnatins, Amadeans, Franciscans, Carmelites, Minims, and monks named for all the other holy saints — who were on their way to the Crazy Council, where they were going to polish up the articles of faith so they could deal with new styles of heretics.²

I knew PFS would be unlike MPS, as I was familiar with the work of those associated with it. Before attending the meeting, I presumed it was like the organisation established to continue the work of Albert Jay Nock, The Nockian Society, the policy of which is: no officers, no dues and no meetings. Hoppe intends for PFS to be a place where the attendees amuse each other, refine their taste and increase their knowledge. Only a confused tiny minority of the attendees are political romantics, and when Hoppe ended his speech on the banking system, rather than using a clichéd call-to-action that almost every speech ever made suffers from, he said: “So, what a crazy world this is.” Menckenesque. Nockian. One reason for the society’s internationality is that there are not enough suitable people within individual countries to justify a national event (not that that stops us). None of the attendees really knew how to behave, because we’d never really been around people genuinely deserving of respect for their politics before. How does one genuinely show respect, rather than fake it like usual? Well, conversation did not consist of comments on the weather, the “news” of the day, tv shows, sport, fashion or other persiflage. So that’s a big difference to normal conversations. The day before the conference began — my early arrival was ostensibly to recover from jet-lag —, I went scuba diving with a German dentist, an Italian economics professor, an Estonian investor, a U.S. Army veteran, a prolific Austrian Austrian economics author and several other conference attendees, and what we talked about the least was scuba diving (in case you’re wondering, they all spoke excellent English). What does a conversation between Rothbardians consist of? We finish each other’s sentences, slap each other’s backs and give each other knowing winks. The glare of being in the company of such enlightened people was disorientating. We spoke in our own code language, like we were in Gülçin’s Galt’s Gulch, away from the booboisie of the Bizarro World, where people dismiss the Austrian school because Hitler was an Austrian, hate the Mises Institute because they defend misers, disapprove of DiLorenzo because he advocates slavery, complain about Ron Paul’s anti-Semitism, despise Hoppe’s homophobia and oppose the gold standard because of the damage gold mining does to the environment. The speeches were so honest and intelligent that we will not see any of the speakers elected to public office. Thanks to the multitalented Sean Gabb — who was such a dynamo that he made the rest of us, with the exception of trigger-happy photographer and projectionist Paul Vahur, look like we were on holiday — there is video of each and every speech here. Andy Duncan’s review of the conference includes nice speech summaries. The speeches were well-researched. For example, for Roman Skaskiw’s brilliant speech on the mentality of soldiers fighting for freedom in the Middle East, Skaskiw went on multiple tours of duty with the U.S. Army to Afghanistan and Iraq. John Derbyshire went to similar lengths for his speech on China. Such is the respect that Hoppe is given when he recommends a topic to a speaker. The wedding of successful lawyer, Deanna Forebush, to the author of Walk Away, Doug French, took place on the final night of the conference. It was a wise strategic move for the Mises Institute President, representing the libertarian movement, to align himself with such a senior lawyer. It’s a pity he couldn’t find anyone from the Roosevelt, Kennedy or Clinton dynasties, but I guess Forebush is not totally foreign. The wedding music included Ennio Morricone from Per qualche dollaro in piùs, which prompted some of the more cultured members of the audience to somersault out of the likely line of fire, and also the Star Wars theme song, which seemed to hint, if the previous song had not already, that the bride and groom have their differences; although, as far as I could tell, they got along beautifully, and I sat behind them on the flight from Bodrum to Istanbul. Anyway, the wedding was amazing. Amid snickers of “get a real job” and “tax is theft”, the non-English-speaking Bodrum-mayor-turned-wedding-celebrant did not significantly detract from the ceremony’s decorum. The wedding festivities had everything (except Australian Aboriginals hallowing the ground, and showing they can light a fire and finger-paint). For an example of the wedding celebrations that Gülçin and Hans Hoppe orchestrated, there was the release of doves and the release of fireworks. Those activities were not simultaneous. Michael McKay and other gun-toting hunters in attendance would have felt at home if they were, and Hoppe is tolerant of everyone but vegetarians. It was great that there were many non-Hoppeans attending the conference. Yuri Maltsev, a continuous source of amusement as he shared over four-and-a-half Soviet prison camps’ worth of jokes, brought a delegation of university students from the U.S.S.A. They seemed to enjoy themselves, but as Maltsev points out, happiness is relative: in Soviet Union true happiness is when the hammer misses the balls, or when the KGB ransack your place and it turns out their after someone else. One student said her favourite economist was Keynes. Other than that, they were well-behaved. It is a pity that not all of them defected. There were also several legendary paleoconservatives in attendance and a few presented lectures. Paul Gottfried expressed disagreement with libertarianism bravely. Perhaps Gottfried and Hoppe should have debated each other on their differences, rather than each spoken mostly on their agreements. The otherwise-amazingly-learned John Derbyshire, in his review of the conference, said:

I have never read anything by an economist — though I confess I have read far too little in the field — or heard any lecture by an economist that did not leave me thinking, “If this guy’s fundamental assumptions about human nature were true, human history would have been utterly different.” Still, I suppose someone has to do economics, and the Austrians do it closer to my own political tastes than any others.

Mises, Rothbard and others in that tradition do not hide their assumptions or basic propositions; they typically begin their essays and books with a list of them, so it would be easy to point out which assumptions were wrong if someone wanted to make a sincere attempt at criticism. Hoppe lists some of our main propositions here. Five of them are:

1. “Whenever two people A and B engage in a voluntary exchange, they must both expect to profit from it. And they must have reverse preference orders for the goods and services exchanged so that A values what he receives from B more highly than what he gives to him, and B must evaluate the same things the other way around.”
2. “Whenever an exchange is not voluntary but coerced, one party profits at the expense of the other.”
3. “Of two producers, if A is more productive in the production of two types of goods than is B, they can still engage in a mutually beneficial division of labor. This is because overall physical productivity is higher if A specializes in producing one good which he can produce most efficiently, rather than both A and B producing both goods separately and autonomously.”
4. “Whenever minimum wage laws are enforced that require wages to be higher than existing market wages, involuntary unemployment will result.”
5. “Whenever the quantity of money is increased while the demand for money to be held as cash reserve on hand is unchanged, the purchasing power of money will fall.”

Anything there that conflicts with human nature? Acknowledging those five observations alone makes you a radical Austrian school economist. My reason for dwelling on this is that it would be a good idea to have structured debate with those who disagree with us as one of the main activities of the conference. It could be on stage with two lecterns, or it could just be in small groups, informally, but in the conference schedule. I know Neville Kennard has some grand ideas to engage those who are ignorant of Hoppe with libertarianism and the PFS. But this is neither the place nor the time, and I am not the person, to announce them. (Consider this a leak due to excitement, and speculate wildly as to what Kennard has in mind.) Kennard generously sponsored my attendance at the PFS, same as he did to the MPS General Meeting in our home-town of Sydney last year, except the MPS event did not require airfare, accommodation, intelligence or taste. Kennard offered to fund certain senior Australian think tank staffers to go to PFS, but such is the esteem in which Hoppe is held, that they did not exploit Kennard’s largesse. Maybe when Hoppe comes to Sydney in November they’ll leave the country. I wonder whether Hoppe will get through Australian airport security. I wouldn’t dare presume to be qualified to give Hoppe any advice, but he may be interested to hear what worked for me — since I have recently flown internationally into Sydney — and to use my experiences as a footnote for the approach he decides on. I dressed inconspicuously, so as not to alert the authorities that I was an enemy of the state, wearing patriotic Australian flag boxer shorts in case I was searched and ensuring that the drugs were firmly stashed within the lining of the drawstring of the boxer shorts; I showed no eye contact to security staff, even when they were dancing naked on the baggage carousel; and I followed Ron Manners’ advice to fly economy class, “so I didn’t have to sit next to politicians.”³ The conference showed that the Hoppean tradition is in safe hands. There are a new generation of scholars, spread safely throughout the world (except during PFS), who have mastered Hoppe’s methodological rigour and, in the case of Mateusz Machaj, his accent, word intonation, sentence structure, phraseology, facial expressions and hand gestures. Acknowledging the great work Stephan Kinsella has done, and the fact that Kinsella is unlikely to take the matter to court, Machaj also does a brilliant impersonation of him. Thanks to Machaj I now have signed Hoppe and Kinsella publications. On the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to Bodrum I was served Australian cheese and ice cream. I did not bring swimmers, so I bought them from the local Turkish markets. They were made in Australia. I wonder if this would have made “buy Australian” advocates like Dick Smith happy or sad. What is the position of protectionists on using foreign-sourced food on domestic and international flights? Such are the difficulties in dealing with the evils of capitalism. Since six or seven readers of this article may be outside of Australia, and one of the reasons for the PFS is for people in different countries to report projects that their international colleagues will not have come across and may find useful or entertaining, I will take this opportunity to mention two from Australia:

1. Libertarian YouTube videos often get many hits, but it seems that one third are computer-generated, one third are Ron Paul and one third pay homage to a genre of music called rap, so the international community will be excited to know of something very different: video of Australia’s Rupert Murdoch, Kerry Packer, contemptuously facing a hostile pack of senior politicians. At the end of the video is Australia’s most famous libertarian quote. Economics.org.au dug it up, edited it down and uploaded it, and we now call Packer our staff member, because we employ this footage of his (Packer died in 2005, and is somewhat unlikely to have intentionally supported us).
2. Economics.org.au runs several websites dedicated to targeting senior Australian public intellectuals. We are slowly increasing our list of targets and the frequency we update these sites (which will take us to #1 on google when our target’s name is typed in), but already we have set the platform and gone along way towards hijacking the online presence of Australia’s Paul Krugman, Ross Gittins, at RossGittins.info.

Enjoy. Lastly, of the many notes I took during the speeches, I thought I’d put this one down here so as to encourage readers (including myself) to act on it: Nicola Iannello’s insightful speech mentioned several authors and books — including Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui, Gaetano Mosca’s The Ruling Class and Max Nordau’s The Interpretation of History — that I had not heard of before and which sound very interesting, and, which are available in English. It’s becoming rarer that I come across books I’ve never heard of, so this meant Iannello’s speech was the stand-out for me. (I wonder what the “buy Australian” advocates think of this paragraph.) Footnotes

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fans may remember a splendid character (first appearing in So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish) called Wonko the Sane, who lived upon the Earth outside of the asylum. I now know how Wonko felt. Being a man who claims to be the hardest hard-core Rothbardian in England, (and it's pistols at dawn in the mist for anyone who wishes to argue the point), I feel I was last inside the bubble of civilization two years ago, when I was lucky enough to be invited to Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Property and Freedom Society conference, held in 2009. The two years since, inside the asylum, have passed in a hilarious blur as various pin-headed identikit Labservatives or Conliberals jaw-boned at each other (at my expense) about how different they are from each other, because some like pink dots on their blue ties while others prefer yellow dots on their pink ties. Oh, how Jonathan Swift so beautifully captured the futility of anyone believing in the usefulness of politicians with his immortal book, Gulliver's Travels, and his description of the ropedancers:

I was diverted with none so much as that of the rope-dancers, performed upon a slender white thread, extended about two feet, and twelve inches from the ground. Upon which I shall desire liberty, with the reader's patience, to enlarge a little. This diversion is only practised by those persons who are candidates for great [government] employments, and high favour at court. They are trained in this art from their youth, and are not always of noble birth, or liberal education. When a great office is vacant, either by death or disgrace (which often happens), five or six of those candidates petition the emperor to entertain his majesty and the court with a dance on the rope; and whoever jumps the highest, without falling, succeeds in the office.

All this rope-dancing then, has been performed by politicians and bureaucrats while the global economy, such as it is, has staggered under enormous taxes, wasteful government spending, regulatory burdens upon all levels of entrepreneurship, and the strains of dealing with government-imposed fiat currencies, which are having their values deliberately sucked out of them in a continuous manner, to deflate real government debts. All of these debts, of course, were necessitated in the last few decades to foist upon us really useful government products such as endless Middle East wars and legions of tax eaters (such as our own diversity-outreach officers and childhood-clothing inspectors here in Britain), to help persuade us to keep voting Libservative or Conlabour and to continue to believe in democracy, the God that failed, as we seek to impose this frightful governmental system upon the rest of the world — at the end of a depleted-uranium gun barrel. The welfare/warfare state has sucked us dry, and still they want to eviscerate us even more to prop up their rancid empires. If only they would leave us alone and let us get on with it; within a decade we would achieve unbelievable progress and wealth, and yet they would rather hack into us now to feed their short-term parasitic lifestyles and envious natures with our unwilling and increasingly demotivated slave labor. And so, being unable to stand any more after two years of this insanity, I decided to try to return to Bodrum and the 2011 Property and Freedom Society conference, even if this meant crawling over broken glass to do so. And what a joy it was, even after I picked the flecks of crystalline silicate out of my bloody knees and hands, as I crossed the threshold of the Hotel Karia Princess; it was as if I had never been away. Before I even had possession of my room key, I sat down to a glass of red wine in the lobby with Professor Tom DiLorenzo and Professor Yuri Maltsev and several other assorted Australians, Germans, and Swedes. The two years of previous government-induced insanity had melted away before the end of the first glass. Simply magical. And then it just kept getting better — with many more glasses of wine to wash it all down. The pinot noir and gewürztraminer flavor of the conference is perhaps best summed up in the society's motto:

Uncompromising Intellectual Radicalism

After spending two years locked inside the asylum with people who think that the BBC is "impartial"; that the British government is here "to help"; and that it is a mortal sin — tantamount to urinating into a plant pot midway through a church service — to ask for a new plastic carrier bag at a supermarket, PFS is the one place on earth (with perhaps the exception of Auburn, Alabama), where you can speak your mind without worrying about the reactions of the petty thought police, the underwear stasi, and all of the other bottom-feeding apparatchiks of the state's byzantine cornucopia of short-term greed units, tax-consumption directorates, points-scoring rebuttal departments, malinvested corruption troughs, and generally mendacious imbecile farms. Although I'll stick mainly to the actual conference, please do be assured that this personal report is only the tip of the iceberg. The main thing about this conference is to be physically in Bodrum itself when the conference is taking place, to soak up all of that Hayekian knowledge that is impossible to acquire through words alone, and to secure one of its precious invites from Professor Hoppe. Acquiring one of these is an SAS-style initiative test, and I will provide you with no further clues as to how to get one. However, if you are tempted to try, because you regard yourself as some form of Rothbardian, or even anything close, then good luck in the attempt. And so to the actual conference. The first morning concentrated upon the state of world banking, with an opening address by Professor Hoppe and lectures by rising star Mateuz Machaj, on how not to criticize a central bank, and our very own Philipp Bagus. Bagus's lecture ("The FED and the ECB: Banksterism Compared") will be of particular interest, and I urge you to watch the video — particularly the second half, which contains a remarkably clear exposition as to what drives the government money machines of the world.[1] The afternoon included the indefatigable Doug French on the ethics of mortgage default, the combative Tom DiLorenzo on the fallacies of happiness research, and the entertaining Nikolay Gertchev on why psychology isn't economics (which will be available on Vimeo soon). During the question-and-answer session, at the end of the day, Doug French came under a lot of pressure from several non-Auburn libertarians in the audience who disputed his observation that people can or should walk away from bad debts if it becomes financially nonsensical to keep making the payments. Surely contract law should hold, in a future "libertania," and if you take on a debt, surely you should pay it until your dying day, even if you can walk away unscathed and save a fortune in the process? Although I will let Mr. French defend himself online, as he did so well on the day, one point that never materialized is that banks are lending people money printed out of thin air, based upon central-bank reserves printed out of thin air. If banks were lending gold coins, honestly acquired from lenders putting off consumption, then I would have much more sympathy with the arguments of Mr. French's critics, although in those circumstances there would never be the wild swings in housing prices that we have enjoyed over the last few years, with paper-debt bubbles piled upon paper-debt bubbles piled upon paper-debt bubbles. And so perhaps the point is moot. In any case, catch the video if this topic interests you. The day was followed by an excellent evening at a local fish restaurant on the Mediterranean shoreline, where I learnt several German words for some very interesting things (because you should learn something new every day). With very civilized starting times for the lectures, which enabled late-night discussions beyond 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. most mornings, much that is important to the world was discussed, with increasing relevance to the future of humanity as the evenings progressed deep into the late hours. The conference resumed on the second day with the diamond-hard Stephan Kinsella fending off all contenders in his discussion of libertarian legal misconceptions. Although I only had time to say hello and shake his hand for one second, because he had to leave the conference early, it was a privilege to meet Mr. Kinsella and to watch him in action; I hope to meet him again soon. What was really interesting was to hear someone with the confidence to quote Hoppe, in Hoppe's physical presence, and to state what Hoppe thought about something (with nods from the great man himself, in confirmation), in stream-of-consciousness answers to questions from the floor. Remarkable. And I thought I was doing well just to light the professor's cigarettes! What followed was one of my favorite speeches of the entire conference, by John Derbyshire, about understanding China and the Chinese, with perhaps one of the most memorable ideas of the week, when he described his father-in-law, the Communist Army general and friend of Mao, who he described as a small-c "conservative," though no Rothbardian. (You had to be there.) This was followed by two entertaining former Margaret Thatcher speechwriters, John O'Sullivan and Norman Stone — on understanding Europe's bureaucrats and understanding Turkey, respectively. This second speech on Turkey was then complemented by a real Turk, Mustafa Akyol, who delivered a history of the Ottoman Empire and a workable strategy for how the borders of the Middle East may be redrawn in the near future. And so we entered a kind of nirvana, halfway through the conference, when we felt we had been there forever, and felt we would continue to be there forever, outside the asylum. After another late evening, in which the problems of the world became easier to solve as the night progressed, our third and final day — into which much was improbably packed — materialized. Sean Gabb kicked off the day with a pugilistic case against the American War of Independence, which was interesting to witness, as it was delivered in a packed room of 60 people, with about 20 Americans present. Fortunately, Dr. Gabb is blessed with a teflon outer coat and managed to pull it off, whereas other thinner-skinned people may have quailed under the spotlight. The best lecture of the conference then followed, delivered by Roman Skaskiw, a former captain in the US Airborne forces, who has served four tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq (and who will be played by Matt Damon if they ever make the movie). In a wonderfully understated way he detailed how he had actually been living out several of Hoppe's predictions in "winning the peace" in Afghanistan, for instance in the building of roads to ostensibly aid the economy of Afghanistan (bombed into the stone age by B-52s), which were really being built to help aid imperial troop movements around this vast inhospitable country, to quell local resistance to imperial might, in the manner of the finest Roman roads of Monty Python.

I don't think it takes evil people to do evil things; it only takes evil ideologies.

Delivered with power and emotion, I felt physically stunned by this lecture, and will remember it for a very long time indeed. In a packed day, in which many late nights of tired emotionality and mid-life crisis were beginning to take their toll — obviously, as an iron-hard Rothbardian, with nerves of carbon fiber, I was still in top form — the superbly irascible Paul Gottfried explained how the Left in the United States had conquered the Right in the last few decades, and Theodore Dalrymple (aka Anthony Daniels) delivered the quote of the conference when he described welfare-state recipients as living in a "minestrone of self-pity." Joyous. Obviously, I'm going to have to steal that line about the minestrone and use it again in a couple of years, when everyone else has forgotten where it came from. But then, Stephan Kinsella would say that it's not stealing but simply the reproduction of infinitely reproducible ideas, so I can sleep easy in my bed at night with a clear conscience. Oh, those IP ways of thinking are really tough to abandon! Nicola Iannello followed, with producers and parasites. And then we had the big one, Yuri Maltsev, and his tale of defection from the economic advisory department of Gorbachev, involving two large bags of condoms and lipstick; this is one you really need to watch, especially if you're really missing George Carlin. Suffice it to say, anyone who can mix up Salma Hayek with F.A. Hayek, is a man worth listening to. The next day was the traditional boat day, in which various Englishmen and Swedish men went very pink as we swam about in the Mediterranean. Fortunately, on our boat, we possessed several hardy red-blooded vikings, one of whom raided surrounding ships armed with nothing but an air mattress and a pair of sunglasses, to recover beer from various weak-willed Germans and Americans; God bless him. Indeed, at one point he swam about half a mile just to recover one can of beer (which I duly drank, merely to celebrate his achievement, naturellement). All I can say is that the spirit of the vikings is alive and well, and when the welfare state of Sweden finally dies, the rest of us had better look out. Fortunately, we all managed to repair back to the hotel for the semisurprise wedding of Doug and Deanna French, which was the last major spectacular occasion of the week. And so, the next day, it all ended; and we all had to reenter the asylum for another year before we can escape again, for a few blessed days in late May of 2012. Such is life. Thank goodness God (if she exists) gave us all a sense of humor.

The seminar will consist of a Friday night dinner (venue TBA) followed by a full day of lectures at Sydney's Macquarie University that will be podcasted on http://www.mises.org.au (for the moment the website is forwarding traffic to LibertyAustralia.org).  Here is a list of some of confirmed speakers:

1) Hans-Hermann Hoppe (the Great)

2) Steven Kates

3) Ben O'Neill

4) Chris Leithner

by Hans-Hermann Hoppe Abstract: In this paper, first, I want to clarify the nature and function of private property. Second, I want to clarify the distinction between “common” goods and property and “public” goods and property, and explain the construction error inherent in the institution of public goods and property. Third, I want to explain the rationale and principle of privatization.