Here’s a rant by Oliver Hartwich, where the author calls Hoppe homophobic and a totalitarian. The sad thing is, this pseudo-scholar is now employed by the Centre for Independent Studies, Australia’s “free-market” think-tank.
http://www.openrepublic.org/open_republic/20051001_vol1_no2/content/20051001_ehh1.htm
I guess that’s so much worse than the beltway libertarians who are pro-war and anti-anarchism, you know, the actual totalitarians. I’ll begin to care when Hoppe seizes power and tries to impose his vision of the world onto the rest of us. Unfortunately for Oliver, that is fiction and is not going to happen, so the care factor in response to this article is approximately… um, zero.
Wow, honestly his arguments were pretty weak. I didn’t even get through the whole thing because his views were so obviously uneducated that it became clear I was wasting my time reading it. He dismisses anarcho-capitalism simply because “it has never existed before”. I wonder if anyone told that to Cleisthenes before he instituted ostracism into Athenian political economy? What a pathetic argument.
There are more pathetic arguments but I’m not going to warrant them with a response. Just be warned that if you read this you will be reading some silly claims such as:
Apriori-based science is useless and totalitarian.
A voluntary society (ie anarcho-capitalism) requires a “new man”, like socialism and communism, and is thus totalitarian.
Hoppe’s claim that a free society would financially pressure people into being more culturally conservative is also totalitarian in nature.
Did an academic really write this?
Being called a totalitarian by a minarchist is always giggle inducing.
That’s pretty irresponsible titling of a thread about an LvMI member. Better judgment next time please, these thread titles are displayed site wide.
Also, in Hoppe’s defense, he is not a homophobe. He had Justin Raidmondo out to his Society meeting a couple years ago in Turkey.
These charges are ridiculous.
Yeah, I agree, please be more cautious.
What’s the problem? The author I linked to states that Hoppe is both homophobic and totalitarian, therefore I made those two key claims the title of my thread. In retrospect, I should have added a question mark (i.e. “Hoppe is homophobic and a totalitarian?”).
However there’s no need to be oversensitive about these things. I understand there’s a tendency to glorify Austro-libertarian leaders. Still, it’s not like my title contained obscene words.
It’s a new type of homophobia. Hans isn’t afraid of assless chaps and gay bars. Nor some superstitious belief in abominations unto teh Lord.
He’s afraid of those slightly-higher-than-average time preference parades! aaaaaaaagh!
No, it’s more that we don’t want to use the forum as a means of promoting this garbage. Adding a “?” would’ve been sufficient indeed.
Slandering Hoppe isn’t even difficult given some of the ridiculous things he says, and yet, the author failed. If you’re going to do it, do it right.
I can haz examples of some of the ridiculous things Hoppe says?
Slander means it isn’t really true.
I explained the problem. Your title made a claim that gets displayed site wide, and was sloppy because it was untrue.
In retrospect you could have done some research, since it is from 2005, and not exactly worth yelling fire in a theatre over.
It’s not glorifying him. It’s keeping people from posting misrepresentations without any backup. When you post that on Mises.org, it is instantly picked up in Google.
All you need to do is exercise a little more discretion next time. If such a claim is warranted, it will be known. But to post it like that makes it sound like it was warranted, and it clearly was not.
You could have just said, 'Sorry, my mistake" but since you wanted to protest it, you get the long admonition.
a rule of thumb might be to consider whether you would object to someone on the forum posting new thread headers of this kind with your name switched in place of Hoppe’s. If it was true you would have grounds for posting it without concern to peoples aesthetics, but if you want to remain on good terms with people on this forum its good not to be provocative merely for its own sake…
He engages in hyperbole for shock effect. If some people wish to focus on that, as opposed to the actual garbage trotted out by some so-called libertarians, that’s their prerogative but it reflects about as much about them as it does on the individual they wish to erm… “expose”. What’s really going on is an attempt to silence the author based on un-PC things he’s said, so that potentially interested individuals do not bother due to a conditioned reflex to ignore anything associated with such things. It’s partially Hoppe’s fault for not being more cautious, but intellectually speaking it’s little more than mud-slinging.
- Gary Becker is an “intellectual criminal”
- There is some scientific grounds for believing in the existence of “natural elites”
- Hayek’s contribution to the socialist calculation debate was “confused”
- Praxeology alone can show the desirability of the free market
- A “value free” ethical system exists
- There is a distinct group of people who are parasites and a distinct group of people who are producers
- Rothbard was somebody of superhuman intelligence
shit. i’m as crazy as Hoppe.
So, aside from hero worship of Rothbard (a man he worked with in close proximity) and an attack on the often bizarre Gary Becker, how is the rest meant to form the basis of an attack on Hoppe’s intellectual acumen…? Because it’s either part and parcel of Austrian theory or claims one can legitimately make and argue in philosophical circles. If someone took those claims alone as a sign of being ridiculous, it’s not Hoppe I’d regard as such. You could pick on his hyperbolic statements on race or “advocates” of “deviant” lifestyles, but then he never argued anything should be forced upon anyone, so the commentary at best reflects his own personal idiosyncracies.
I don’t really see how Gary Becker is bizarre, nor how he can be regarded as an intellectual criminal (unless, free market economists who win nobel prizes is a bad thing now). Of course, this is ignoring Hoppe’s strange claims about the work of Buchanan & Tullock and his screed against Keynes.
As for the rest, I don’t see anything therer that is “part and parcel” of Austrian theory (except perhaps the notion that one can show the free market to be superior to the state with praxeology, but that’s just not true, because Rothbardian value theory precludes the possibility of Rothbardian welfare theory from making any sense at all, as White has shown). How Hayek’s contribution can be regarded as “confused” eludes me, Hayek was perhaps the most gracious of all Austrian scholars, a true intellectual. Perhaps it’s wrong, but I highly doubt that Hayek was confused (nor do Huerta de Soto, Boettke, Horwitz et al). Hoppe’s ideas of natural elites are, well, unsupported and hopelessly vague.
Although, that’s not to say I wouldn’t agree with the rest of what you just said about his hyperbole.