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Hans-Hermann Hoppe

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Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Born (1949-09-02) September 2, 1949 (age 75)
Peine, Germany
NationalityGerman
AwardsThe Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize (2006), The Frank T. and Harriet Kurzweg Award (2004)
Scientific career
FieldsAustrian Economics
InstitutionsUNLV
Doctoral advisorJürgen Habermas

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

Academic career

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. In 1986, he moved from Germany to the United States, to study under Murray Rothbard. 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.

Theory

Following in the tradition of Murray Rothbard, one of Hoppe's most important contributions has been analyzing the behavior of government using the tools of 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.

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.

While "mainstream" economists would agree with that analysis for things like shoes or haircuts, Hoppe believes it also applies to services like protection and justice. He has written and lectured extensively about how, in a free market, 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.

Views

In June 2005, Hoppe granted 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."[1]

Controversy

There has also been critasism for his book Democracy the God that failed for it calling for a return to Absolutitist monarchy and saying that democracy has done nothing good.

Austrian theory includes the concept of time preference, or the degree to which a person prefers current consumption over savings. Hoppe commented during a lecture at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas that, in his view, homosexuals would tend to have higher time preference than average, because they tend not to have children.

Complaints from a homosexual student triggered an academic investigation which resulted in a "nondisciplinary" letter (.pdf) being issued February 9 2005 instructing him to "cease mischaracterizing opinion as objective fact". Others have defended him regarding this controversy—over 1700 academics and others signed a petition of his behalf[2], and the ACLU agreed to represent him. He was also defended by the editorial board of The Rebel Yell, UNLV's school newspaper, who stated in a February 10 2005 that the school was "a virtual black hole of thought—a barren desert of oppression where the most fragile bloom of originality is stomped out under the mud caked boots of clodhopping ignorance."[3]

Carol Harter, president of UNLV, in an February 18 2005 letter (.pdf) declaring a close to the case, said that "Teaching is of its nature and origin provocative. Faculty are called upon to challenge students, to push them to a greater understanding, and to encourage them to question the current base of knowledge and, in so doing, to create new knowledge... In the balance between freedoms and responsibilities, and where there may be ambiguity between the two, academic freedom must, in the end, be foremost... UNLV considers this matter closed." In a vindication of Hoppe, the "nondisciplinary" letter was removed from his personnel file; and the dispute eventually prompted UNLV to discuss and reexamine its policy on academic freedom in a public conference.[4]

Books

Wikiquote has quotations related to Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

See also


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