Getting Libertarianism Right (2018), by Hans H. Hoppe

Relatively short book by Hoppe (~100 pg.), published in 2018 by Mises Institute. Actually, the book contains four essays:

• A Realistic Libertarianism [Rothbardian libertarianism 101, strengthened with the Hoppe’s argumentative ethics]
• On Democracy, De-Civilization, and the Quest for a New Counterculture [I skipped this essay — if you are not new to libertarianism this should be all well known to you]
• Libertarianism and the Alt-Right: In Search of a Libertarian Strategy for Social Change [what libertarian can learn (or share?) with Alt-Right]
• Coming of Age with Murray [incredible personal essay about Murray Rothbard, one of the greatest social theorist of modern time and “father” of the modern libertarianism. It was incredibly tragic to read how much Rothbard was stigmatized all his life by the universities, businesses and even other libertarian & free-market organizations. But his brilliance and hard-work was impossible to pass unrecognized and today he is still one of the most-read libertarian. So, fuck you all?]

If I can summarize his main points in 2–3–paragraphs:

1. You can’t have free & peaceful society without common shared beliefs within the community. NAP is not enough. The society/community (at least most of its members) must share similar cultural (libertarian, “Western”) beliefs in order the system to be sustainable, i.e. not to slide towards majoritarian non-libertarian social-klepto-democracy (at best). It’s not enough just to have people respecting NAP — you need community of “good neighbors” that have commonality of culture: of language, religion, customs and conventions that is supportive of libertarian values. This is recognized by the Right as well.
2. In the whole history, the only culture supportive of these ideals was (and mostly still is) the so-called Western culture.
3. Libertarianism, in bare essence, is closer to the Right because both share the same belief about the “structure” that underpins the reality — both “recognizes, as a matter of fact, the existence of individual human differences“ and the inequalities, hierarchy and differences in achievement, rank and status that arise of it. The Left denies that the inequalities are “natural” and wants to brush them away as “pure luck and the outcome of individual success or failure as underserved”. The inequalities “should be rectified”, which requires “permanent imposition of a power elite armed with devastating coercive power”. Thus, it is inevitably on other side of the spectrum of the Libertarianism.

Few selected excerpts below.

A Realistic Libertarianism

If there were no scarcity in the world, human conflicts
would be impossible. Interpersonal conflicts are always
and everywhere conflicts concerning scarce things. I want
to do X with a given thing and you want to do Y with the
same thing.
Because of such conflicts — and because we are able
to communicate and argue with each other — we seek out
norms of behavior with the purpose of avoiding these
conflicts.

The purpose of norms is conflict-avoidance.

Absent a perfect harmony of all interests, conflicts
regarding scarce resources can only be avoided if all
scarce resources are assigned as private, exclusive property
to some specified individual [or group of individuals].

But who owns what scarce resource as his private property
and who does not? First: Each person owns his physical
body that only he and no one else controls directly (I
can control your body only indirectly, by first directly controlling
my body, and vice versa) and that only he directly
controls also in particular when discussing and arguing
the question at hand. And second, as for scarce resources that can be
controlled only indirectly (that must be appropriated
with our own nature-given, i.e., unappropriated, body):
Exclusive control (property) is acquired by and assigned
to that person, who appropriated the resource in question
first or who acquired it through voluntary (conflict free)
exchange from its previous owner. For only the first
appropriator of a resource (and all later owners connected
to him through a chain of voluntary exchanges) can possibly
acquire and gain control over it without conflict,
i.e., peacefully.

Let me emphasize that I consider this theory as essentially
irrefutable, as a priori true. In my estimation this
theory represents one of the greatest — if not the greatest
— achievement of social thought. It formulates and
codifies the immutable ground rules for all people, everywhere,
who wish to live together in peace.

The difference between the Right and the Left , as Paul
Gottfried has often noted, is a fundamental disagreement
concerning an empirical question. The Right recognizes,
as a matter of fact, the existence of individual human
differences and diversities and accepts them as natural,
whereas the Left denies the existence of such differences
and diversities or tries to explain them away and in any
case regards them as something unnatural that must be
rectified to establish a natural state of human equality.

The Right further recognizes that people are tied
together (or separated) both physically in geographical
space and emotionally by blood (biological commonalities
and relationships), by language and religion, as well
as by customs and traditions. Moreover, the Right not
merely recognizes the existence of these differences and
diversities. It realizes also that the outcome of input-differences
will again be different and result in people with
much or little property, in rich and poor, and in people
of high or low social status, rank, influence or authority.
And it accepts these different outcomes of different inputs
as normal and natural.

The Left considers these differences as pure luck and the resulting
outcome of individual success or failure as undeserved. In
any case, whether caused by advantageous or disadvantageous
environmental circumstances or biological attributes,
all observable individual human differences are to
be equalized. And where this cannot be done literally, as
we cannot move mountains and seas or make a tall man
short or a black man white, the Left insists that the undeservedly
“lucky” must compensate the “unlucky” so that
every person will be accorded an “equal station in life,” in
correspondence with the natural equality of all men.

Every libertarian only vaguely familiar with social reality
will have no difficulty acknowledging the fundamental
truth of the Rightist worldview. He can, and in light of
the empirical evidence indeed must agree with the Right’s
empirical claim regarding the fundamental not only
physical but also mental inequality of man; and he can in
particular also agree with the Right’s normative claim of
“laissez faire,” i.e., that this natural human inequality will
inevitably result also in unequal outcomes and that nothing
can or should be done about this.

While the Right may accept all human inequalities, whether of
starting-points or of outcomes, as natural, the libertarian
would insist that only those inequalities are natural and
should not be interfered with that have come into existence
by following the ground rules of peaceful human
interaction mentioned at the beginning.

The corrective action required in such cases, however, is not motivated by
egalitarianism but by a desire for restitution: he (and only
he), who can show that he has been robbed, defrauded,
or legally disadvantaged should be made whole again by
those (and only those) who have committed these crimes
against him and his property, including also cases where
restitution would result in an even greater inequality

The leftist goal of equalizing everyone or equalizing everyone’s “station
in life” is incompatible with private property, whether in
one’s body or in external things. Instead of peaceful cooperation,
it brings about unending conflict and leads to the
decidedly un-egalitarian establishment of a permanent
ruling-class lording it over the rest of the people as their
“material” to be equalized. “Since,” as Murray Rothbard
has formulated it, “no two people are uniform or ‘equal’
in any sense in nature, or in the outcomes of a voluntary
society, to bring about and maintain such equality necessarily
requires the permanent imposition of a power elite
armed with devastating coercive power.”2

At least for a libertarian, the answer should be obvious:
the egalitarian doctrine achieved this status not
because it is true, but because it provides the perfect
intellectual cover for the drive toward totalitarian social
control by a ruling elite.

From the fact that government property is
illegitimate because it is based on prior expropriations, it
does not follow that it is un-owned and free-for-all. It has
been funded through local, regional, national, or federal
tax payments, and it is the payers of these taxes, then, and
no one else, who are the legitimate owners of all public
property. They cannot exercise their right — that right
has been arrogated by the State — but they are the legitimate
owners.

Realistically, then, a right-libertarian does not only
recognize that physical and mental abilities are unequally
distributed among the various individuals within each
society and that accordingly each society will be characterized
by countless inequalities, by social stratification and
a multitude of rank orders of achievement and authority.
He also recognizes that such abilities are unequally
distributed among the many different societies coexisting
on the globe and that consequently also the world-as-a-whole
will be characterized by regional and local inequalities,
disparities, stratification, and rank orders. As for
individuals, so are also not all societies equal and on a
par with each other. He notices further that among these
unequally distributed abilities, both within any given
society and between different societies, is also the mental
ability of recognizing the requirements and the benefits
of peaceful cooperation. And he notices that the conduct
of the various regional or local States and their respective
power elites that have emerged from different societies
can serve as a good indicator for the various degrees of
deviation from the recognition of libertarian principles in
such societies.

More specifically, he realistically notices that libertarianism,
as an intellectual system, was first developed and
furthest elaborated in the Western world, by white males,
in white male dominated societies.

Hence, even if you do not want to have any part
in that, recognize that you are nonetheless a beneficiary of
this standard “Western” model of social organization and
hence, for your own sake, do nothing to undermine it but
instead be supportive of it as something to be respected
and protected.

Libertarianism and the Alt-Right: In Search of a Libertarian Strategy for Social Change

However, the history of modern libertarianism is still
quite young. It began in Murray Rothbard’s living room
and found its first quasi-canonical expression in his For A
New Liberty: A Libertarian Manifesto, published in 1973.

But the libertarian doctrine does not imply much if anything
concerning these questions: First, how to maintain
a libertarian order once achieved. And second, how to
attain a libertarian order from a non-libertarian starting
point, which requires (a) that one must correctly
describe this starting point and (b) correctly identify the
obstacles posed in the way of one’s libertarian ends by this
very starting point.

“Millennial Woes” (Colin Robertson) has thus aptly summarized the
Alt-Right: “Equality is bullshit. Hierarchy is essential. Th e
races are different. Th e sexes are different. Morality matters
and degeneracy is real. All cultures are not equal and we are
not obligated to think they are. Man is a fallen creature and
there is more to life than hollow materialism. Finally, the
white race matters, and civilization is precious. This is the
Alt-Right.”

The lesson? The peaceful cohabitation of neighbours
and of people in regular direct contact with each other
on some territory — a tranquil, convivial social order
— requires also a commonality of culture: of language,
religion, custom, and convention. There can be peaceful
co-existence of different cultures on distant, physically
separated territories, but multi-culturalism, cultural heterogeneity,
cannot exist in one and the same place and
territory without leading to diminishing social trust,
increased tension, and ultimately the call for a “strong
man” and the destruction of anything resembling a libertarian
social order.

Outside egalitarian fantasy lands, however, in the
real world, libertarians must above all be realistic and
recognize from the outset, as the Alt-Right does, the
inequality not just of individuals but also of different
cultures as an ineradicable datum of the human existence.
We must further recognize that there exist plenty of
enemies of liberty as defined by libertarianism and that
they, not we, are in charge of worldly affairs; that in
many parts of the contemporary world their control of
the populace is so complete that the ideas of liberty and
of a libertarian social order are practically unheard of or
considered unthinkable (except as some idle intellectual
play or mental gymnastics by a few “exotic” individuals);
and that it is essentially only in the West, in the countries
of Western and Central Europe and the lands settled by its
people, that the idea of liberty is so deeply rooted that these enemies still can be openly challenged.

In order to expand and increase its power, the ruling
elites have been conducting for many decades what
Pat Buchanan has identified as a systematic “culture war,”
aimed at a trans-valuation of all values and the destruction
of all natural, or if you will “organic” social bonds
and institutions such as families, communities, ethnic
groups, and genealogically related nations, so as to create
an increasingly atomized populace, whose only shared
characteristic and unifying bond is its common existential
dependency on the State.

Cultural homogeneity has been destroyed, and the freedom of
association, and the voluntary physical segregation and
separation of different people, communities, cultures, and
traditions has been replaced by an all-pervasive system
of forced social integration.

The institution of a family household with father, mother, and their children
that has formed the basis of Western civilization, as
the freest, most industrious, ingenious, and all-around
accomplished civilization known to mankind, i.e., the
very institution and people that has done most good in
human history, has been officially stigmatized and vilified
as the source of all social ills and made the most heavily
disadvantaged, even persecuted group by the enemy
elites’ relentless policy of divide et impera.

For one, given that the class of intellectuals from the tops of academia to
the opinion-moulding journalists in the MSM are funded
by and firmly tied into the ruling system, i.e., that they are
a part of the problem, they also should not be expected to
play a major if any role in the problem’s solution. …any realistic libertarian strategy for change must be a populist strategy. That is, libertarians
must short-circuit the dominant intellectual elites and
address the masses directly to arouse their indignation
and contempt for the ruling elites.

In a fully privatized libertarian order there exists no
such thing as a right to free immigration. Private property
implies borders and the owner’s right to exclude
at will. And “public property” has borders as well. It is
not unowned. It is the property of domestic taxpayers
and most definitely not the property of foreigners.

Stop attacking, killing, and bombing people in
foreign countries. A main cause, even if by no means the
only one, for the current invasion of Western countries
by hordes of alien immigrants, are the wars initiated and
conducted in the Middle East and elsewhere by the US’s
ruling elites and their subordinate Western puppet-elites.

Let it be America First!, England First!, Germany First!, Italy First!, and so on, i.e., each country trading with one another and no one interfering
in anyone else’s domestic aff airs.

Murray moved still further to the right —
in accordance with Erik von Kuehneldt-Leddihn’s dictum
that “the right is right” — in pointing out that in order to
establish, maintain, and defend a libertarian social order
more is needed than the mere adherence to the nonaggression
principle. The ideal of the left — or “modal”-
libertarians, as Murray referred to them, of “live and let
live as long as you don’t aggress against anyone else,” that
sounds so appealing to adolescents in rebellion against
parental authority and any social convention and control,
may be sufficient for people living far apart and dealing
and trading with each other only indirectly and from afar.
But it is decidedly insufficient when it comes to people
living in close proximity to each other, as neighbours
and cohabitants of the same community.

The peaceful cohabitation of neighbours and of people in
regular direct contact with each other on some territory requires
also a commonality of culture: of language, religion, custom, and
convention. There can be peaceful co-existence of different cultures
on distant, physically separated territories, but multi-culturalism,
cultural heterogeneity, cannot exist in one and the same place and
territory without leading to diminishing social trust, increased
conflict, and ultimately the destruction of anything resembling a
libertarian social order.