Comments Elsewhere

Roderick Long’s comment is what shocked me. I’d always thought that he was a pretty [independent] thinker before this.

John, what in Roderick’s comment(s) do you object to? He wrote a letter about Hoppe, which is reasonable, since as a Professor he has reasons to protest on behalf of academic freedom even for those with whom he strongly disagrees (a class which includes Hans Hermann-Hoppe). All of his other comments seem to me to be fairly diplomatic attempts to acknowledge that there are deep problems with the passages that Kennedy’s citing while calling attention to the fact that other readings are possible; indeed, plausible. (Others have reverentially invoked “Professor Long” in the course of throwing brickbats at Kennedy, but that isn’t Roderick’s fault.)

I think Kennedy and others are right that Hoppe’s work is fundamentally inconsistent on the questions of immigration and emigration, and so it shouldn’t be surprising that there are several ways that certain passages could be read. The ones that Kennedy quotes clearly show Hoppe to be a foolish bigot but it’s not clear whether they advocate any kind of violations of rights. (As Roderick points out, there are contextual reasons to suppose that he doesn’t mean that; as Lynette and JTK point out, there are reasons of empirical plausibility to think that separatist “covenant” communities on Hoppe’s model would be difficult to establish without either colonization on a foreign planet or someone violating someone else’s rights.)

Note that it’s “difficult,” not “impossible;” I can think of some examples, both concrete and hypothetical, that might emerge if the Magic No-State Button were pushed in the near-future (e.g. white supremacist imbeciles have owned flat-out large tracts of land, such as the National Alliance’s compound in West Virginia and until recently the Aryan Nation’s compound in Idaho, which might be converted into covenant Klan-towns without any trouble; Hoppeans might decide to start a Mexican-Free State Project by buying up land in Vermont or Maine and putting it into a covenant bloc). Roderick’s correct to point out that people in any covenant communities like this who breached the terms of the covenant could be physically removed without any violations of their rights, as trespassers (whether they’d be forcibly removed in any meaningful sense whatever depends on whether or not they forcibly resisted; but if they were being removed as trespassers, then proportional force would be defensive, not aggressive).

How would anyone end up in that position if they couldn’t buy the land without already signing onto the contract? Well, people can sign on to a covenant and then turn out to breach it; or they can have guests who end up breaching it. For example, in Hoppeville, you might have a closeted gay man who comes out after he’s already bought in to the community on the covenant terms; you might have a child of a proud Hoppeville citizen who ends up becoming a Marxist. If you have a covenant like the one Hoppe is discussing then the first case would be a breach of covenant, and in the second case Hoppeville parents would have to either evict their Marxist children or else be in breach of the covenant themselves. Of course, neither someone who breached the covenant nor someone who didn’t sign the covenant but is living in the home of someone who did has the right to unconditionally demand to stay on the property in Hoppeville. If you’ve actually created Hoppeville according to the specifications that HHH sets ou in his book, then you could indeed physically remove these people from the community as trespassers, without violating any of their rights. (I don’t think the use of the word “society” or “civilization” by Hoppe defeats this interpretation, either: people often talk about “civilization” or about being part of or outcast from “society” within a single town, neighborhood, or institution. I think it’s true that the unqualified general use of these terms seems to indicate that Hoppe suspects covenant communities like the ones he discusses may be a lot more widespread in a stateless society than any sensible person would suspect, but that’s a separate issue from whether he thinks that they can be forced on unwilling people who already reside in the area.)

On the other hand, it’s also true that spelling out in any detail what sort of life all of this means for inhabitants of the sort of community that Hoppe is talking about should make it very clear what an absolutely horrifying idea it would be—the covenant will either be unenforceable or else involve people contractually submitting to a private neighborhood Stasi or Holy Inquisition. That’s better than the real Stasi or Holy Inquisition, but what sort of nutcase (other than unhinged fanatics who are already buying in to separatist intentional communities) would actually want to live somewhere like that?

I don’t take anything I’ve said here, incidentally, to be inconsistent with what Roderick has said about Hoppe over in the comments at Mises Economics Blog. He’s been pretty diplomatically trying to clarify the issues quickly while also trying to sidestep a protracted debate over Hoppe’s views on migration; I don’t think that’s because of any defect in independent thought (he’s published his own views extensively elsewhere and the folks at VMI are well aware of it) but rather because the thread isn’t really about Hoppe’s views on migration at all, but rather about his circumstances at UNLV. I think Kennedy’s right to call attention to Hoppe’s (many) defects, and I think Jeffrey Tucker’s decision to ban Kennedy on the basis of the comments he put up is silly, but I also think it’s perfectly reasonable to try to defer any kind of extended debate over Hoppe on migration and covenant communities to a better forum for the discussion than the comments on a very tangentially connected article.