Comments Elsewhere

Larry,

I don’t think it’s true that Hoppe is “as far from a collectivist as can be imagined.” His positions on immigration and ethnicity being exhibit A for that charge.

It’s true that in a free society people will have the right to create intentional communities where they can do stupid things like require new residents to sign on to contracts curtailing immigration on the basis of ethnicity. It’s also true that in a free society people will have the right to close privately-owned roads, town squares, and other thoroughfares to immigrants on the basis of ethnicity if they want to. However, a couple of points need to be made. Although politically people have the right to engage in this kind of nonviolent segregation, it is frankly stupid, and the premises that it operates from are nothing less than pure tribalism. In a free society people will be free to indulge in nonviolent tribalism of whatever sort they like, but there’s no reason why that kind of bigotry deserves anything but the contempt of rational people.

Further, Hoppe’s policy prescriptions don’t even qualify as peaceful in the first place. Even if it were true that, under a “natural order,” residents of San Diego would make a community covenant obligating residents to sharply limit immigration from Tijuana, in the actual world there is no such covenant and no resident of San Diego has ever agreed to, or been asked to agree to, those terms. Invading their property, or public property in which they arguably have a stake in the rightful ownership (e.g. roads near their house, town squares, etc.), on the excuse that you’re enforcing the terms of this counterfactual covenant that they never agreed to, is as obvious an invasion of people’s rights as you can think of.

Finally, economically speaking Hoppe’s proposals are absurd. Continent-spanning government’s can’t approximate the outcome of free control over private property. In a free society people wouldn’t own continent-spanning swaths of land, and socialist calculation of the outcomes for a dispersed network of land-owners is impossible, for the usual Misesian and Hayekian reasons. At this point Hoppeans typically appeal to poll numbers on attitudes towards some form of immigration or another to justify the idea that if land were free of government control, immigration would be more tightly restricted; the sight of Hoppeans, of all people, suddenly rushing to defend a centralized, democratic plebiscite as a way of calculating hypothetical market outcomes is one of the most grimly funny things in the current libertarian movement.

Just as a side note, I don’t reject the concept of public property per se. I think there is rightful public property; I just deny that “public property” means “government property.” Cf. Roderick Long’s essay A Plea for Public Property. This has some bearing on immigration: private owners of roads (for example) can exclude whomever they want for whatever reason they please, but there may be cases where roads, paths, etc. are rightfully public property, and where (because of the sort of public ownership in question) there’s nobody who really has the right to bar immigrants from using the road, as long as they are using it safely and their use is not excluding others from using it. Of course, whether things would actually pan out this way, or whether people would choose to keep road ownership strictly private, in the hands of single proprietors or contractually defined firms, is something that we’ll need an actual free society to discover.