Kinsella:

For the record, the following quote is mine:

I will gladly go to the mat defending Hoppe’s freedom to be a bigot without retribution from University administrators.

John Lopez quoted it in passing to comment upon it. I don’t know whether you know that or not, but since you attribute his quote and don’t attribute mine, someone reading your comment might not realize you’re actually responding to two different people.

That said, I turn to your reply:

He’s not a bigot, you human scum pipsqueak.

As well as your reply to Ghertner’s similar sentiments above:

Look here you cocky son of a bitch. Disagreeing with Hoppe is one thing. But you are accusing him of being a bigot. This is a horrible, evil, thing. Hoppe is not a bigot, you stupid, brainwashed, punk of a student.

Here’s a common definition of “bigot”:

bigot, n.: One who is strongly partial to one’s own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.

I don’t think that’s quite right, actually; “bigot” is a vice term, but not all groupings are such that partiality towards one’s own group or intolerance towards those who differ is a bad thing. (It’s not “bigotry” for someone who doesn’t molest children to be intolerant of those who do.) So let’s add the qualifier: a bigot is one whose partiality towards members of one’s own group and intolerance of those who differ is irrational.

Here’s Hoppe (with emphasis added):

… Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They — the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centred lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism — will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.

Hoppe is, I take it, a heterosexual and not a homosexual. He is, therefore, demanding that—in order to maintain “a libertarian order” there be no tolerance towards those who have a different sexuality than his own, that they must be shunned, and—if they live in Hoppeville—they should be exiled and their property confiscated.

That Hoppe is vocally intolerant of homosexuals is an open-and-shut case. The only question that remains is whether his avowed intolerance amounts to bigotry. Whether or not it does depends on whether or not it’s reasonable to be intolerant towards someone solely because she or he desires to sleep with people of the same sex.

If you have some other meaning for the word in mind when you deny that Hoppe is a “bigot,” now’s the time to mention it. If so, then you ought to let us know what it is, because I take it that those of us calling Hoppe a bigot mean by it something like what I just spelled out.

If, on the other hand, you take “bigot” to mean roughly what I just said it means, the only question that remains is:

Stephan, do you think that it’s reasonable to be intolerant towards someone solely because of she or he desires to sleep with people of the same sex?

Heinrich, again:

Yes, we could expel all of the human trash — bums, welfare-recipients, criminals, communists, and fascists (e.g., KKK-nutjobs) — and that would be good.

No, you can’t. Even if someone bought into your argument that roads, parks, etc. are collectively owned by tax-payers, your conclusion does not follow. Whether or not you can rightfully restrict their use of “public” property according to some weighted voting scheme, they don’t live on “public property.” They live on their own land or land that they have contracted to rent. You have no grounds on which to expel them; you can at most return them to their own homes if they step onto your alleged “public” property.

You haven’t said, incidentally, whether or not I can create my private helicopter shuttle service in Hoppe’s United States.

The people expelled would be net tax-consumers (in no case would it be appropriate to deport a net tax-payer), and this would increase.

(1) You’re bluffing here. Do you have any empirical evidence whatsoever that bums, welfare-recipients, communists, fascists, and KKK-nutjobs are as classes net tax-consumers in the Rothbardian sense?

(You might think that welfare-recipients are the easy case. Not so: most welfare recipients do receive more money from the government than they pay in formal taxes, but so what? Welfare recipients are disproportionately more likely to face systematic rights-violations at the hands of drug cops, hanging judges, wardens, petty bureaucrats, and the rest of the State apparatus of control. It’s not at all clear that if you consider all the illegitimate harms that the very poor typically suffer at the hands of the state, the pittance they receive from the government overcomes the losses inflicted.)

(2) Let’s say for the moment that you had succeeded in listing off classes of net tax-recipients here. Would that make any moral case for physically expelling them from the community? If so, why

It’s important to remember that receiving tax funds is not a crime under natural law; it’s taking the tax monies from their owners that is. Of course, people who are benefitting from expropriation and have some control over whether the money is taken and transferred have a moral obligation to exercise that control in such a way as to cut against the taking of tax funds. But it’s not clear that all or even most net tax-recipients do have any meaningful control over whether or not the money is taken. So it’s unclear that any particular blame falls on their shoulders.

As for those who are in positions such that blame falls on their shoulders: do you earnestly think that physical expulsion is a proportional response to the crime? Do you normally advocate exile and confiscation of property for thieves?

Hoppe suggests that the best thing to do is try to approximate how net tax-payers would act if they actually controlled “public property”.

Too bad for Hoppe, since socialist calculation is impossible.

I suggest a way to perhaps better do this, by a weighted vote.

Socialist calculation is still impossible. Changing the scheme from central planning to One Big Corporate Cartel doesn’t help.

Lopez:

If advocating immigration restriction makes you a “collectivist”, then how on earth is it not “self-evidently un-libertarian”?

… because it’s only self-evident if the collectivist premises behind the anti-immigration policy are in clear sight; and there are matters of degree as to how transparent the collectivist move in a given argument for an immigration control policy is.

I take it that Roderick regards Hoppe’s position to require a violation of individualist principles; that’s why he strongly disagrees with it. But the question is whether the violation is an obvious one or a subtle one. Mike Tuggle, who Roderick is jousting with in the article you cite, wears his collectivist premises on his sleeve and makes it fairly easy; Hans Hermann Hoppe, who claims to be a rights-absolutist and has spilled a lot of ink trying to defend enforcing immigration restrictions on rights-absolutist libertarian grounds, makes it somewhat harder. I think Hoppe’s arguments on the matter are a bunch of nonsense, but they are there; so showing how Hoppe’s position violates libertarian principles does require engaging with an argument of Hoppe’s and showing where it is fallacious. (I think that’s a task that y’all have done well enough here on several occasions and that Roderick and Walter Block have done well enough elsewhere.)

The difference here corresponds to the difference between arguing over whether or not libertarian principles are correct (as Roderick is in his argument with Mike Tuggle) and whether those principles, once agreed on, are being correctly applied (as Roderick is in his debates with Hans Hermann Hoppe).

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.

Well, since I tossed the bomb in the first place, I guess I ought to explain it a bit.

The sites for promoting in the GoogleBombing were chosen on the basis of (1) their already-high placement in Google, and (2) containing authoritative information. The Touro Law Center page on Roe is just like any other law school’s page on Roe (or Oyez, or FindLaw); it has the text of the decision and the dissenting and concurring opinions, and it’s part of a law school’s collection of online decisions. It also happens to have the advantage of already sitting at #2, making it the best candidate for pushing over the top. (The important thing is that a site with objective information on the matter gets set above an advocacy site whose primary purpose is to repeat lies about both abortion and about the content of the decision.)

As for the abortion query bombing, GynPages is a bit further down on the search results for “abortion” (about #7 or so when this started, I think), and there are some fairly even-handed or outright pro-choice links above it. The reason I’ve been encouraging people to boost GynPages, though, is that it offers very important information that someone searching for the term “abortion” might need—i.e., objective and straightforward help in finding abortion servies in your area if you need them. Political harangues about abortion—even pro-choice political harangues that I agree with 100%—shouldn’t crowd out that kind of information; it’s too important that people who need it be able to find it. So I think that boosting GynPages up to #1 or at least nearer to the top will also be doing web searchers a substantial service.

Hope this helps explain things. Thanks for y’all’s support—it’s been awesome to watch this grow!

Stephan,

I agree that getting a precise and theoretically useful concept is more important than the specific word you use to tag it; I’m perfectly willing to talk with people who use “socialism” in a Hoppean sense and I agree that questions of lexicography shouldn’t be allowed to get in the way of analysis and discussion.

But, granted all that, I also think that it can be worthwhile to look at how the choice of a particular word for your stipulate definition eases or obscures communication with others about the content of the theory. I mean, I take it that Hoppe didn’t think of himself as offering a pure neologism—if he did, then he would have made up a word or phrase that doesn’t have a fixed meaning—but rather catching ahold of, and clearly setting out, what is essential to a historical common usage.

I think that’s a mistake, but you’re right that the mistake isn’t a serious mistake as far as the development of the theory is concerned. But there are questions as to what sort of problems in the gaps between the historical usage of “socialism” and Hoppe’s (and other 20th century libertarians’) stipulative definition of “socialism” might cause for the communication and application of the theory. (In particular, I’d argue that the use of the term in such a way that libertarians become by definition anti-“socialist” has encouraged libertarians to overestimate their proper distance from the Left and even more substantially underestimate their proper distance from the Right. If this can partly be traced to the Left and libertarians simply talking past each other when they use terms like “capitalism” and “socialism” (in ways that libertarians did NOT use them in, say, the 19th century), then that may be a reason to reconsider the words. Not necessarily a decisive reason, but at least a prima facie one.

As for what word to use… well, again, what’s wrong with “statism?” Doesn’t that already mean institutionalized aggression against private property, especially for a specifically anarcho-capitalist libertarian like Hoppe? Or if you think that runs the risk of making the account seem tautologous at first glance (“states are bad because they’re statist”), why not just use the term “institutionalized coercion” instead? Or “a racket,” if you want something a bit punchier. These are all terms that get the point across clearly and wouldn’t raise any objections from even the most ardent Tuckerite.

“There are nations that are states such as Japan, Han China, Korea etc and then there are states comprised of nations such as the UK, Spain, Iraq, Pakistan and historically France.”

I don’t get the principle behind the proposed distinction here.

Is it supposed to be that the first group of states are relatively homogenous in terms of national composition whereas the second are multinational political amalgamations? If that’s the case, then I don’t understand how Han China—which has for millennia been one of the foremost multinational imperial entities in the world—goes in the group of “nations that are states.”

Is it supposed to be that the first group of states are states in which, if there is a multinational population, nevertheless one national group has historically had exclusive or overwhelmingly prevalent access to the instruments of state power? (I.E. that the state was ruled imperially rather than federally?) If so, Han China clearly belongs in the first group rather than the second, but so does Spain (at least, up until 1975), the “UK” for the overwhelming majority, and Iraq.

Or is the distinction supposed to mean some third thing which I am not grasping? If so, I look forward to being corrected.

Thanks, Flute. This is a fascinating piece you’ve forwarded and worthy of a lot of discussion.

One thing, though: it’s important to remember that every mother is a working mother. Childcare and housework are work, too, and important work, even though they’re not counted as a formal “job.” The study tells us something about how mothers doing different kinds of work structure their work lives; it doesn’t tell us anything about working vs. non-working mothers.

“If we had a fair conscription and the sons and daughters of congressmen and their contributors were being sent to Iraq do think they would be applauding Bush’s foreign policy so loudly?”

Who cares? The sons and daughters of the wealthy and powerful are not pawns for your political purposes. Enslaving other people in order to shift policy is treating other people as if they were your property. They’re not.

(Of course, it’s also worth noting that even if moral side constraints were satisfied here—which they aren’t—the practical case would still be extraordinarily weak. There is no example in American history of any war that was prevented or shortened by a draft. Every single draft has prepared for or prolonged a war which could not be pursued by voluntary enlistment. And of course even if the draft were somehow passed (by whom?!) in such a way that the sons and daughters of the wealthy and powerful weren’t given easy outs, they would still—as they always have—exercise their influence to achieve safer officer and clerical positions. That’s exactly what happened in Vietnam once the lottery was instituted and student exemptions were undermined, just to pick a recent example. Conscription always and everywhere means more war for longer.

Kinsella: “I have always liked Hoppe’s definition of socialism as a system of institutionalized aggression against private property.”

Stephan, one of the problems with this definition is that there are many clear cases of people who called themselves socialists, and were recognized as such by other folks at the time, but did not accept any kind of aggression against private property, institutionalized or otherwise, especially Benjamin Tucker and the Liberty circle in the late 19th and early 20th century. Of course, they recognized at the time, and defined themselves in opposition to, statist socialists such as Marx. But they viewed this as an internecine struggle within “Modern Socialism” over a question of means (both constitute and instrumental, for what that’s worth), and identified the State-capital nexus, not statist socialists, as the primary target of their struggle. (Of course, the seizure of the state by the most monstrous forms of state socialism in the 20th century couldn’t help but change the rhetorical stance that libertarians would take. But while the change may have been understandable, there may be good reasons to think that it’s had plenty of unfortunate consequences.)

Of course, you might say, “Well, look, they may have called themselves socialists, but if they didn’t endorse institutionalized aggression against private property then they weren’t really socialists at all; they were libertarians.” I agree that they were libertarians, but I think that conceding the term “socialists” to the Marxists and the welfare statists gives the doctrinaire pronouncements of statist butchers entirely too much credence. Just because specifically Marxist socialism was clearly ascendent from ca. 1921 onwards doesn’t mean that the Marxists have any firmer claim to determining the content of the word “socialist” than the many other competing conceptions of socialism that were common in the 19th century. If Tucker used the word “socialist” in such a way that socialism was conceptually compatible with a thoroughgoing free market (as, in fact, he did), I don’t see any reason to take Marx’s word over his as to what “socialism” means.

Or, while we’re at it, to take Hoppe’s stipulative definition over either historical conception. It’s good to point out that welfare liberalism, fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, theocracy, “progressivism,” etc. all have something importantly in common with one another. But isn’t the best word for what they have in common just “statism,” or, if you prefer, “coercion?” Why not save socialism for what its practitioners actually took it to pick out—a tradition of thought and action with the aim of placing the means of production under workers’ control—rather than expanding it (so as to encompass all other forms of statism) and contracting it (so as to eliminate many forms of anarchist socialism) so as to make it fit a concept that we already have a perfectly good word for?