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Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Born	September 2, 1949 (1949-09-02) (age 58) Peine, Germany
Residence	US
Nationality	German
Field	Austrian Economics
Institutions	UNLV
Academic advisor	Jürgen Habermas
Notable prizes	The Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize (2006), The Frank T. and Harriet Kurzweg Award (2004)
website: http://www.HansHoppe.com/

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Hans-Hermann Hoppe (born September 2, 1949) is an Austrian school economist of the anarcho-capitalist tradition, and a economics professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Contents 1 Academic career 2 Theory 3 Controversy 4 Criticisms 4.1 Monarchy 4.2 Immigration 5 Hoppes' response to criticisms 6 Books 6.1 Interviews 6.2 Publications 7 References 8 External links

Born in Peine, West Germany, he attended the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken, and the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, studying philosophy, sociology, history, and economics. He earned his Ph.D. (Philosophy, 1974) and his Habilitation (Foundations of Sociology and Economics, 1981), both from the Goethe-Universität. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from 1976 to 1978.

He taught at several German universities as well as at the Johns Hopkins University Bologna Center for Advanced International Studies, Bologna, Italy.^{[citation needed]} In 1986, he moved from Germany to the United States, to study under Murray Rothbard.^{[citation needed]} He remained a close associate until Rothbard's death in January 1995.

Hoppe is currently Professor of Economics at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, a Distinguished Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and, until December, 2004, the editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. The author of several widely-discussed books and articles, he has put forth an "argumentation ethics" defense of libertarian rights, based in part on the discourse ethics theories of German philosophers Jürgen Habermas (Hoppe's PhD advisor) and Karl-Otto Apel. In 2005, he founded the Property and Freedom Society.

Following in the tradition of Murray Rothbard, Hoppe has analyzed the behavior of government using the tools of Austrian-economic theory. Defining a government as "a territorial monopolist of jurisdiction and taxation" and assuming no more than self-interest on the part of government officials, he predicts that these government officials will use their monopoly privileges to maximize their own wealth and power. Hoppe argues that there is a high degree of correlation between these theoretical predictions and historical data.^{[citation needed]}

In Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe contrasts and compares dynastical monarchies with democratic republics. In his view, a dynastical monarch (king) is like the "owner" of a country, because it is passed on from generation to generation, whereas an elected president is like a "temporary caretaker" or "renter". Both the king and the president have an incentive to exploit the current use of the country for their own benefit. However, the king also has a counterbalancing interest in maintaining the long-term capital value of the nation, just as the owner of a house has an interest in maintaining its capital value (unlike a renter). Being temporary, democratically elected officials have every incentive to plunder the wealth of productive citizens as fast as possible.

Under Hoppean theory, a monopoly does not necessarily have to do with market share, but rather the lack of "free entry" into the business of producing a particular good or service. In this view, monopolies cannot arise on the free market. Rather, they must always be the result of government policy. Coercive monopolies are bad from the standpoint of consumers because the price will tend to be higher and the quality will be lower than they would be in markets completely free from coordinated coercion. Like Rothbard, Hoppe has conjectured that, in a free market for governmental services, competing private insurance and defense agencies would provide a better quality of protection and dispute resolution than that which currently exists under monopolistic government control.^{[citation needed]}

Austrian theory includes the concept of time preference, or the degree to which a person prefers current consumption over savings. Hoppe made a comment about gay and lesbian Americans during a lecture at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas that was characterized by a student as derogatory and a matter of opinion rather than fact. According to the Chronical of Higher Education:

In his lectures, Mr. Hoppe said that certain groups of people -- including small children, very old people, and homosexuals -- tend to prefer present-day consumption to long-term investment. Because homosexuals generally do not have children, Mr. Hoppe said, they feel less need to look toward the future. (In a recent talk at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, which Mr. Hoppe says was similar to his classroom lecture, he declared, "Homosexuals have higher time preferences, because life ends with them.") [The student], Mr. Knight found that argument unwarranted and obnoxious, and he promptly filed a complaint with the university. In a telephone interview on Saturday, Mr. Knight said: "I was just shocked and appalled. I said to myself, Where the hell is he getting this information from? I was completely surprised, and that's why I went to the university about this."^[1]

Hoppe's comments triggered an academic investigation which resulted in a "nondisciplinary" letter ^[2] being issued February 9, 2005 instructing him to "cease mischaracterizing opinion as objective fact." The ACLU agreed to represent Hoppe, and he was defended in an editorial in the The Rebel Yell, the UNLV student newspaper."^[3] Carol Harter, president of UNLV, in an February 18, 2005 letter ^[4] said that "UNLV, in accordance with policy adopted by the Board of Regents, understands that the freedom afforded to Professor Hoppe and to all members of the academic community carries a significant corresponding academic responsibility. In the balance between freedoms and responsibilities, and where there may be ambiguity between the two, academic freedom must, in the end, be foremost." The "nondisciplinary" letter was removed from his personnel file.^[5]

Professor Hoppe has argued for a number of viewpoints that have proved controversial, both with libertarians in specific and with the world at large.

In June 2005, Hoppe gave an interview in the German newspaper Junge Freiheit, in which he characterized monarchy as a lesser evil than democracy, calling the latter mob rule and saying, "Liberty instead of democracy!" In the interview Hoppe also condemned the French revolution as belonging in "the same category of vile revolutions as well as the Bolshevik revolution and the Nazi revolution," because the French revolution led to "Regicide, Egalitarianism, democracy, socialism, hatred of all religion, terror measures, mass plundering, rape and murder, military draft and the total, ideologically motivated War."^[6]

Hans-Hermann Hoppe's "paleolibertarian" views about immigration have been controversial within the wider libertarian movement.

The Cato Institute's Tom G. Palmer has been critical of professor Hoppe's ideas. Palmer writes, "It’s remarkable to find someone so lacking in awareness of self, or in the ability to perceive himself as others might perceive him, that he would announce an immigration policy that, if taken even half seriously, would have barred him from entering the country [in which he currently works]. For a recent example, check out the latest pronouncement from the inimitably kooky Hans Herman Hoppe, Nevada’s very own mad professor." and "An equally interesting part of a Hoppe rant is how he quickly resorts to arguments ad hominem, even descending into psychoanalysis to explain why people might be so depraved as to — horrors!! — disagree with him. As he opines, “They [people who favor freedom of movement] were initially drawn to libertarianism as juveniles because of its ‘antiauthoritarianism’ (trust no authority) and seeming ‘tolerance,’ in particular toward ‘alternative’ — non-bourgeois lifestyles. As adults, they have been arrested in this phase of mental development." ^{[7] [8]}.

Other critics have included GMU Economics chair Donald Boudreaux, who is both very familiar with and quite sympathetic to the Austrian tradition in economics, and who entitled one of his pieces "Hoppe-ing mad". Boudreaux writes, "Among the strangest and most convoluted arguments I’ve ever encountered is Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s allegedly free-market case for restricting immigration."^[9]

Johan Norberg, a prominent Swedish libertarian, also joined in the renunciation, writing with reference to Hoppe that "...for some strange reason, a bigoted anti-gay professor who prefers monarchy to democracy and opposes open borders (and thinks that the pro-immigration position I have 'can be understood only psychologically') has become the favourite of some American libertarians."^[10]

Hoppe has countered his "left-libertarian" opponents by trying to explain their opinions by way of psychoanalysis in the notorious footnote 23^[11] to Natural Order, the State, and the Immigration Problem ^[12]:

A second motive for the open border enthusiasm among contemporary left-libertarians is their egalitarianism. They were initially drawn to libertarianism as juveniles because of its "antiauthoritarianism" (trust no authority) and seeming "tolerance," in particular toward "alternative" — non-bourgeois — lifestyles. As adults, they have been arrested in this phase of mental development. They express special "sensitivity" in every manner of discrimination and are not inhibited in using the power of the central state to impose non-discrimination or "civil rights" statutes on society. Consequently, by prohibiting other property owners from discrimination as they see fit, they are allowed to live at others' expense. They can indulge in their "alternative" lifestyle without having to pay the "normal" price for such conduct, i.e., discrimination and exclusion. To legitimize this course of action, they insist that one lifestyle is as good and acceptable as another. This leads first to multiculturalism, then to cultural relativism, and finally to "open borders."

• Handeln und Erkennen (Bern 1976)
• Kritik der kausalwissenschaftlichen Sozialforschung (Westdeutscher Verlag 1983) ISBN 3-531-11624-X.
• Eigentum, Anarchie und Staat (Westdeutscher Verlag 1987)
• Praxeology and Economic Science (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1988) (no ISBN)
• A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (Kluwer Academic Publishers 1989) ISBN 0-89838-279-3. Full Text in PDF format
• Economic Science and the Austrian Method (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1995) ISBN 0-945466-20-X.
• Democracy: The God That Failed (Transaction Publishers, 2001) Paperback (in English) ISBN 0-7658-0868-4.
• The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (2nd edition, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006) ISBN 0-945466-40-4
• Editor: The Myth of National Defense. Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production. Ludwig von Mises Institute. October 2003. ISBN 0-945466-37-4. With writings by L.M. Bassani, C. Lottieri, M.N. Rothbard, E. von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, B. Lemennicier, G. Radnitsky, J.R. Stromberg, L.J. Sechrest, J.R. Hummel, W. Block, and J.G. Hulsmann.

• A 2004 interview with Hoppe
• A 1998 interview with Hoppe

• Full text of Hoppe's 1998 introduction to The Ethics of Liberty by Murray Rothbard. (also in PDF format).
• "My Battle With the Thought Police" Hoppe's own account on what happened
• "The Errors of Hans-Hermann Hoppe – Strategies of Liberation?" Dr Oliver Marc Hartwich, October 2005, Open Republic Institute
• In Defense of Extreme Rationalism: Thoughts on D. McCloskey's The Rhetoric of Economics by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
• Some Brief Comments on Hoppe's Justification of the Private Property Ethic by David Friedman.
• LewRockwell.com: Hoppe's archives at LewRockwell.com

1. ^ "Professor Who Was Accused of Making Derogatory Remarks in Class Wants UNLV to Clear His Record" The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 14, 2005
2. ^ http://www.mises.org/pdf/hoppeletter.pdf (.pdf)
3. ^ Rebel Yell
4. ^ (.pdf) Hans-Herman Hoppes' Website
5. ^ The Las Vegas Review Journal
6. ^ http://www.jf-archiv.de/archiv05/200526062409.htm
7. ^ Tom G. Palmer
8. ^ Tom G. Palmer
9. ^ CafeHayek Blog
10. ^ Johan Norberg
11. ^ LewRockwell.com
12. ^ Mises.org

• Hans-Hermann Hoppe homepage
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Mises Institute
• The Property and Freedom Society
• More on Hoppe's argumentation ethics.

v • d • e Austrian economists
Carl Menger · Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk · Friedrich von Wieser · Ludwig von Mises · Friedrich Hayek · Murray Rothbard · Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Persondata
NAME	Hoppe, Hans-Hermann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Economist
DATE OF BIRTH	September 2, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH	Peine, Germany
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH