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Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Hans-Hermann Hoppe (born September 2, 1949) is an Austrian school economist of the anarcho-capitalist tradition, and a former economics 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, 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.

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.

Academic controversy

Austrian theory includes the concept of time preference, or the degree to which a person prefers current consumption over savings. During a lecture in his Money & Banking course, Hoppe hypothesized that, because they tend to not have children, children, old people and homosexuals tend to focus less on saving for the future. One of Hoppe's students characterized this statement as derogatory and a matter of opinion rather than fact. According to the Chronicle 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.

Hoppe's comments triggered an academic investigation which resulted in a "nondisciplinary" letter 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. Carol Harter, president of UNLV, in an February 18 2005 letter 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. Hoppe's request for a one-year paid leave (sabbatical) and a letter of apology were denied.

Criticisms

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

Monarchy

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.

Immigration

Hans-Hermann Hoppe's views about immigration , which do not cast libertarianism as requiring open borders, have been controversial within the wider libertarian movement.

Hoppe has countered his "left-libertarian" opponents by commenting on their opinions in footnote 23 to Natural Order, the State, and the Immigration Problem :

Critics of Hoppe's position on immigration policy have included GMU Economics chair Donald Boudreaux, 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. Other critics include Walter Block, who has written a more scholarly piece on Hoppe's views in the Journal of Libertarian Studies.