 Welcome to our final event. And I'm very happy to say that this event will honor my old friend Hans Hoppe on the impending occasion of his 70th birthday. I don't want to rush it. And fittingly enough, the panel is called the Significance of Hans Hoppe. And this is how we will proceed. We'll have each of several old friends that have known Hans for at least a quarter of a century, each of us, will give five to 10-minute remarks in order, and then Hans will respond. Let me just introduce everyone in the beginning, and then they will tell you what they're talking on. David Gordon will begin. Mark Thornton will come next, followed by Stefan Konsella, Tom Di Lorenzo, Gita Hulsman, and then myself. And then Hans will take the stage and give any comment he wishes to make. OK. Thank you. I remember it was, I believe, in 1986 when I first met Hans Hoppe. I'd been hearing great things about him from Murray Rothbard. Someone come up with a wonderful new argument defending libertarianism. And I was very glad to hear the argument. Hans has been an inspiration to me ever since. He's a thinker and scholar of outstanding merit, and for whom I have the highest respect. What I wanted to talk about briefly today was a way Hans has applied a certain trend in recent German philosophy, especially philosophy of science and philosophy of mathematics to economics. And in doing so, I think he's brought out a way of understanding Ludwig von Mises' praxeology that other writers haven't achieved. And what I have in mind is this. We know in praxeology we have the concept of action, and we're reasoning about this in an a priori way. We're developing the concept of action. And people raise the objection to this. I've encountered this in the many years I've been lecturing on this. People always say, well, how do we know these concepts apply to the world? The logical posbists say they're just tautologies. They're just arbitrary definitions. We want them to apply to the world. We want them, in Hans' phrase, to be synthetic a priori true of the world. And the way Hans has developed this is by applying, thinking of the implications of action for theory of knowledge, in particular, following certain German philosophies of mathematics, in particular Paul Lawrence and Hugo Dingler. He asks, how do we construct the world? How do we construct the world itself? How do we get the notions of space and time? We see things in space and time. But as Hans has developed from these philosophies, we do that through action. We measure things. We say, in geometry, we develop the notion of space from measuring certain dimensions. And we, thus, we can develop, say, a Euclidean geometry, which is basic to our perception. Other non-Euclidean geometries sometimes raise an objection to synthetic a priori truth, really rely on this Euclidean geometry as primary. So what Hans has done, I think, very effectively, is to show how the notion of action shows us how we can construct the world and know that the truths of praxeology apply to the world we live in, and thus, that praxeology does give us a synthetic a priori truth. And I think that's a very interesting and productive idea. And I hope he'll develop that even further in his future work. Thank you. Good afternoon. The title of my talk is Hans Hoppe as a textbook writer. And I want to make very clear that nobody thinks of Hans Hoppe as a textbook writer. It's just a personal experience I had after meeting Hans a long time ago. I wrote about Hans's book, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, in a book of essays in his honor, Property, Freedom, and Society, essays in honor of Hans Hermann Hoppe in 2009. 20 years prior, I was pressed at the last minute into teaching a course in comparative economic systems without any prior training. I chose Hans's book because it was a brand new book and would obviously take a free market perspective. However, I was a little reluctant to choose Hans's book because he had recently given a lecture to my economics faculty at Auburn University where he denied the existence of public goods. It was literally a jaw-dropping experience. I looked around the room and everybody's mouth was wide open, but they didn't say a thing. Hans's book was obviously not a traditional textbook in any way, but was rather a treatise on how to analyze any economic systems. It begins with a pure capitalist-based system based on property rights and contracts as well as with socialism based on the idea of aggression against property. He then deduces the economic and non-economic effects when aggression is introduced into a previously existing pure capitalist system. The results, of course, are negative and Hans is very effective in communicating this in a way that makes it seem very obvious. Okay, he then applies this to four types of socialism, socialism Russian style, social democratic style, socialism of conservatism, and socialism of social engineering, a chapter which he also bothers to destroy positivism and empiricism as a basis of economic knowledge. He then turns to his notorious chapter on the ethical justification of capitalism and why socialism is morally indefensible, something that David was talking about. This chapter and the one that follows the socio-psychological foundations of socialism or the theory of the state are probably the toughest to teach Auburn undergraduate students because basically Hans is undermining everything the students have been led to believe their entire life. Then the final two chapters attack the notion that capitalist production suffers from the problems of monopoly and public goods. Ideal also in class with many of the 47 pages of footnotes in the book. I consider the use of this treatise as a textbook to be a success. I've used it several times along with case studies of countries such as Ireland, Sweden, and Korea. The book is very well written, has a punchy prose, and generally gives examples and references that are generally accepted in mainstream economics, such as the impact of price controls. Most importantly, I've come to realize that much of the book's success is based on the solid description Hans gives for his terminology. Much of modern political discourse is largely unproductive because we all have different understandings of what terms like capitalism, liberalism, and socialism actually mean. And likewise, when we turn to examples of actual economies, people only have a vague understanding of what a particular economy is all about, what is causing its problems, or who is to be blamed. The United States, for example, is a mostly capitalist economy with some elements of all four forms of socialism. As a result, Americans have a relatively high standard of living and wealth. However, it has Russian style socialism, for example, in the form of the post office with all its problems and inefficiencies. It has social democratic style socialism in the form, for example, of the various welfare programs and all its problems. And it has conservative style socialism in the form of the war on drugs with all its problems. And the socialism of social engineering or technocracy in the form of the Food and Drug Administration and all its problems. In other words, you get a clear understanding of what an economy is all about if you use this methodology. At this point, my students and readers have ready made toolkit for analyzing economic systems on their own. At this point, I believe that more students are more open and curious, and that makes them more acceptable to the more radical ideas coming at the end of the book concerning the deductive foundations of economics, the moral superiority of capitalism, that the state is just an elaborate ruse to trick us and that public goods theory is not a theory at all, but a contrivance. Thank you, Hans. Hello, Stefan Kinsella here. Happy to be here. I hate to rehearse talks, so I'm always impressed with myself when I do it in the right time, allotted. So sometimes I speak quickly, even though I'm from Louisiana, maybe I should slow down. I came across Hans's writing in 1988 when I was in law school and it was his paper in Liberty Magazine on the ultimate justification of the private property ethic. It was a very provocative title and it just blew me away. I totally loved it and I'm still fascinated with it even today. Finally, I met Hans and Lou and even Murray Rothbard in 1994 at the John Randolph Society meeting in D.C. and have been learning from her ever since. And coincidentally, I brought exactly the same two books that Mark did, the exact same faded printed version of his book, his 89 book, and I finally got Hans to sign it. It's, that's the signature there in between all the notes, so who cares? And yeah, 10 years ago, for Hans's 60th birthday, we released the Festschrift and the same copy here at a ceremony at Judge Jensen's house. So 10 years ago we were doing this and everyone on the panel here contributed and some other people in the audience as well. And as everyone knows, and you'll hear more here today, and by the way, I believe this book is in the bookstore downstairs, so it's well worth getting. Hans has contributed to a large number of fields, almost all of which have influenced me and my thinking and many other people. Democracy and argumentation ethics, his rights theory, various applications of praxeological or Misesian style economics, method and epistemology, his amazing critique of logical positivism in chapter six of this book, immigration and cultural analyses. And, but I would like to focus today on property rights, Hans on property rights, which is basically summarized in chapters one and two of this book and it's only 18 pages. It's very condensed and concise, it bears rereading, but Hans's clear and essentialist definitions of that and other concepts is used by him in the rest of the book and in his other analyses and helped influence me in my writing too. I'm just gonna have one quote here. He says, next to the concept of action, property is the most basic category in the social sciences. As a matter of fact, all of the concepts to be introduced in this chapter, which were aggression, contract, capitalism and socialism are definable in terms of property. So he, like Mark summarized, aggression is aggression against property. Contract is a non-aggressive relationship between property owners. Socialism is an institutionalized policy of aggression against property and capitalism is an institutionalized policy recognizing property rights. He has been criticized by some for defining socialism so generally because he doesn't focus only on the ownership of the means of production, but his general essentialist definition helps him then to apply this to the different types of socialism that Mark outlined. And what's key here is that Hans's thought is so steeped in Mises' praxeology, right? The structure of human action, the way Mises viewed it, that he gives a lot of emphasis even more than Rothbard, I believe, on the essential role of scarcity to the concept of property. So Hans, this is sprinkled throughout Hans's writing. It's in this book, it's in many of his other articles. Basically, his idea is, and by the way, I'm never going to finish all this. I did give a long talk on just this topic last month in New Hampshire. It's on my podcast feed. It's on how to think about property rights and it's heavily influenced by the way Hans has taught. In chapters one and two, Hans basically identifies the natural position of property, which is a descriptive and not a normative idea. And then he goes on to deduce the right to property using his argumentation ethics. But first he describes it descriptively anchored in Mises' type of analysis of human action because basically in human action, in praxeology, Mises views humans as actors who employ scarce means but guided by knowledge. And those scarce means or resources are things we have to use in the world. And that's sort of the natural position of property is that people have to employ their body, which is a scarce resource, and they have to employ scarce resources in the world that no one else had been using before. So that's the natural position it would apply even to Crusoe on a desert island. But when society is introduced, there's the possibility of conflict because there's scarcity. And that gives rise to the need for people to have normative property rights rules that allow them to act cooperatively and to use these resources without conflict with each other. And because Hans had such a clear understanding of this and had rooted it in his praxeology and his study of Mises, he was able to instantly figure out what for me was a vexing issue for at least 10 or 15 years, the intellectual property issue. And it took me at least five years of dedicated research and study and thinking to finally figure it out the way I think of it now. But I came across something a few years ago. There was a panel in 1988. I don't know if it was here in Auburn, but it was a Mises Institute panel. And on the panel were Hans and Rothbard and David Gordon and I believe Leland Jaeger. And someone asked the question, I have this question for Professor Hoppe. Does the idea of personal sovereignty extend to knowledge and my sovereign over my thoughts, ideas and theories? And Hans instantly just answered, in order to have a thought, you must have property rights over your body that doesn't imply that you own your thoughts. The thoughts can be used by anybody who is capable of understanding them. So just in a second, he basically instantly figured out the right way to look at the vexing issue of intellectual property without applying it or extending it very much. But it's so amazing that having a clear understanding of property rights, the role of scarcity in human action can help you figure these issues out. I'll stop here. Thank you very much. I've also known Hans for at least 25 years. I forget when we first met, but it's been a long time. And I also have used that book as a textbook in a class that I created called Capitalism and its Critics. And I've used Hans's book several times in there. And the guys in the room who've known me for a long time know that I started my career as a public choice economist, James Buchanan and Gordon Tellak were professors of mine. And they were colleagues of mine for a few years at George Mason later on after that. So I published quite a bit early on. And in both areas, I was always interested in Austrian economics, even in graduate school. I used human action was the textbook in my micro-economics class in the first semester, along with Milton Friedman's Price Theory book. So my brief comments are gonna be on comparing some of what Hans has said about Austrian political economy and compare it to public choice. And as some of you know, Walter Block and I have co-authored a book of readings critical of some aspects of public choice. Not every bit of it, but some aspects of it. And particularly, we're critical of Buchanan, my old professor, the late Jim Buchanan. In his much of his career, he wrote article after article, book after book, trying to create a theory of what he called the voluntary state. And it's really the root of what he called constitutional economics. And I heard Jim Buchanan repeat over and over again, beginning in my graduate school class to 20 years or more, quoting Thomas Hobbes about how without the state life is nasty, brutish, and short. And I must have heard him say that a hundred times, at least, nasty, brutish, and short. But Hans reminds us that it's primarily the state that can make life nasty, brutish, and short. Not the absence of the state, but the state itself. The state can steal from you, can kidnap you, and send you to die in a foxhole somewhere, can flay away your savings, take your property. That's pretty nasty. I think that's a mild word to be nasty for that. And then Hans points out that all of society becomes more present oriented because of the expected return to productive behavior being reduced by statism. And that's very different from the public choice, especially Buchanan's writings. And here's one quote, one of my favorite short one sentence quotes about this from Hans. He says, as a result of this creation of a higher rate of time preference by the state, former provident providers will be turned into drunks or daydreamers, adults into children, civilized men into barbarians, and producers into criminals. I lived in Baltimore for a long time, and it sounds about right to what the state has done, or Washington DC, the closer you get to the state, the more you will see adults into children, civilized men into barbarians, et cetera. So government says, Hans creates a constant threat to the process of civilization. And that's just diametrically opposed to Jim Buchanan's basically life work of the voluntary theory of the state to avoid Thomas Hobbes' threat of nasty brutish in short. Another thing that I note that I wrote down here about some of Hans's writings, is that there are some public choice economists, not all of them, but some of them were sort of fond of something called the Ricardian Equivalence Theorem in public finance. And this is a theory by Ricardo, and not Ricky Ricardo, but the other one, the economist, David Ricardo. He theorized that if people anticipate higher taxes in the future, they will save more because they know they're gonna have a tax bill coming in the future. And of course, Hans's take on this is that increased expected taxes causes an even higher rate of time preference because you know the return to productive behavior is gonna be even lower in the future. And so why invest in more productive behavior in the future? So it sort of turns the Ricardian Equivalence Theorem on its head and having been around public choice circles for quite some time, I know that quite a few of the public choice scholars are sort of fans of the Ricardian Equivalence Theorem, but not all. You know, Tyler Cowan, I just read something of his criticizing it, for example. Another part of the public choice that I got involved in years ago was a lot of public choice scholars like to think of competition among governments, like local governments mostly, as sort of similar to competition between firms. There's even a book in public choice literature entitled The State as a Firm, okay? And of course, Hans's take on this is that, yes, governments do compete, but what they compete for is not like a business. A business competes for your money by pleasing you. States, though, they compete for the right to plunder you. That's what the type of competition it is. It's a very different type of competition, okay? And so a few more things, like the Calculus of Consent, the most famous book by Buchanan and Tullock. In the beginning, in the introduction, they state very clearly that this is not a, like any kind of classy and Marxian class struggle analysis, because they apparently thought people would be confused because they're analyzing politics. And so, but they don't quote John C. Calhoun at all, contrary to what that lying fraud Nancy McClain has said in her book Democracy in Chains. She wrote a book that is basically critical of Buchanan and public choice, a lot of you know about this, claiming that the Calculus of Consent is based on Calhoun's ideas. Calhoun was a slavery defender, therefore James Buchanan and all the public choice economists are slavery defenders. That's the kind of chain of logic that'll get you an endowed chair at Duke University, apparently. You might wanna read my review of her book in the quarterly journal of Austrian economics. But Hans does talk about some of ideas that Calhoun is known for, namely the Libertarian class analysis. Calhoun was one of the sort of the, philosophically a member of the founding generation, the founding fathers. And in his famous book Disquisition on Government, he articulated the old, that was not original with him, Libertarian class analysis, and where the, between the oppressor class and the oppress class, and the oppressor class is not white heterosexual males as it is on college campus today. And the oppressor class is basically the net tax receiving class, the people who get more from government than they pay in taxes, and they oppress or exploit the net tax payers, the rest of us. And so, and that's a big difference between the calculus of consent, which totally ignores this, and it does much of most of public choice theory, but not Hans. And of course, another final thing I'll say about Hans's Austrian political economy versus public choice, is if you can't, it always had sort of a love affair with the prisoner's dilemma. I must have seen him 500 times do the prisoner's dilemma on a blackboard somewhere, giving a talk, making the article about the public goods argument. And as, who was it? Mark that you said, or Hans, one of his famous talks here at Auburn was disproving the existence of public goods. And so a lot of the public choices grossly exaggerate the public goods problem. And one final swipe in my old Professor Buchanan, he came up with a theory of what he called conceptual unanimity. Of course, nothing government does is ever unanimous. We wouldn't need government. If we had unanimous consent, why would we need government to carry it out? We would do it ourselves, so we had unanimous consent. And so, as much of his life's work was spinning theories of conceptual unanimity. He had even had a theory of how antitrust laws, even though they have winners and losers, conceptually you can think of a way where people would all get together and decide we all want conceptually antitrust laws. Anyway, the late Leland Yeager killed that idea, and I'm sure Hans would agree with this, but he buys it with one line. He said, whenever you read the words conceptual unanimity, just replace the word no with conceptual and you'll know what they're talking about. So there's no such thing as a voluntary theory of the state and no one has done more to crush that idea than Hans Hoppe. My subject is Hans-Simon Hoppe as a mentor. The definition of a mentor, I actually looked it up, like the original word comes from the Odyssey, or Mayor's Odyssey, from mentor is entrusted by Odysseus with the education of Odysseus son telemacros in this Odysseus absence. And the mentor in the Odyssey is actually somewhat ineffective, as an old man he doesn't really get it done and the boy just makes all kinds of silly things and so on. Unfortunately, the goddess Athena sometimes takes on the appearance of a mentor in order to guide the young telemacros in the right direction without difficulty. In the case of Hans, I guess Athena sometimes asked the god Mars to give her a hand. So a mentor means a person who is a trusted counselor or guide, he's a tutor or coach. He's sometimes referred to as godfather or rabbi. Schultasten to point out that in German, this translates as pate, not as führer. Among the mentoring techniques, the Amphitheater III there, usually pointed out in the literature which is sewing, catalyzing and showing. Let me say a few things about each of them, but before I just have to mention how I met Hans the first time, because we had yesterday a talk about Henry Haslith, this famous incidence when he had Mises on the phone, he said, Mises on the phone, Mises speaking. I said, oh, it sounds like Hans Simon Hopper speaking, right? John Stuart Mills speaking. I had the same experience with Hans, so as it was in January 1995, I had just a few weeks before I got into contact with the Mises Institute and I met Murray Rothbard in New York City shortly before his death. I promised there was no causal connection and I brought a copy of my German language doctoral dissertation for him to read because unfortunately for him, he had sometimes quoted a German text in his footnotes and said, yes, right here you have some Germans, you read German, so have 250 pages or so of the doctoral dissertation. Let's say, send this to my colleague, Hans Hopper. So that's what I did. And then on the very day when I received the letter stating that Rothbard had died on January 6th or 7th of that year in New York, Hans Hopper gave me a call in the evening. So I was desperate the entire day, all my efforts had been in vain and so on, then hop on the phone. Yeah, so the tutoring started right there, the mentoring started right there. He asked me to write a paper on fractional research because he had read the dissertation, and he liked it, and he wanted me to be associated with the Mises Institute, but he wanted me to come to Auburn and lecture at the Summer University and he asked me to write a paper on fractional reserve banking which I criticized in my dissertation. So the consequence, the result was a paper with the title Free Banking and the Free Bankers. It was a 1996 journal article and a paper criticizing Israel Kirchner's approach to entrepreneurship. And the result of this was a 1997 article with the title Knowledge, Judgment and the Use of Property. Yeah, now, sewing. The most important ideas that Hans showed from which I profited a lot was the critique of empiricism as a very rigorous critique of empiricism. Not only he refuted the claims of empiricism, but he demonstrated also the political implications that of course if you are in the empiricist limbo and you just need to check everything by observation, data checking and so on, then you never get to a conclusion anyway. So then this is then up for grabs. Any practical action and concrete action is then up for grabs for the political powers of the day. Hans also stressed the moral dimension of capitalism, socialism and interventionism. Hans converted me to become a rigorous anti-statist. I don't like the word anarchy, I want to Catholic for this, I guess. Yeah, anti-statist, I like that. Wonderful critique of anti-Marxism, secession, his critique of elites and the necessity of anti-elite elites. And more generally, Hans's great pleasure is he really enjoys this a lot of bashing political incorrectness. And he celebrates this in Bodrum with the Popaterian Freedom Society, right? So in the leftist circles often talk about the epaté le bourgeois. So we are ruling, no not ruling, we are making fun, we're poking fun at the bourgeois and Hans suggests the same thing, epaté le Gauchot. So we're poking fun at all the leftist. Now, catalyzing for my life, Hans brought me in touch with the Mises Institute, so I got a job here at the Mises Institute of Rotomises Biography, was very formative and influential for me. He brought me in touch with important persons for my further development. Barry Smith is one of them and he's a philosopher at the University of Buffalo. And the other one is Ralph Raco, has become a very good friend and I translated Booker Fiss, the Party of Freedom on the German classical liberal movement of the 19th century. And then catalyzing was also the Property and Freedom Society along with his charming wife. He's here present with us, Gucci. Yeah, and then finally showing Hans, yeah, Hans, well he led like all great leaders lead with the right example, right? This is the only technique of leading that really works. Hans showed by being a great pedagogue, he's an extremely gifted pedagogue, extremely wonderful teacher, very clear, very systematic, always comprehensive. He brings great passion to his subjects. So that's obvious to anybody who has had to hurt him, lecture on anything. He stresses the emphasis on humility now. I think sometimes with impression personally, he has a little difficulties with this. So therefore he stresses it so much. It's important, yes. That's also one of the reasons why we all get married, right? Yeah, he made me understand that we are ambassadors of a great tradition and that we should never bow down to just idiots who happen to be hired by sensibly prestigious institutions, Harvard and Princeton and whatever else, right? So we should be proud hairs of a great tradition that comes from Menga, Bumbawerk, Mises, Hayek and before them even greater thinkers or thinkers of a similar status. Hans focuses always on relevant questions. He has no time to spend on games, a little modeling, playing and so on. He likes to focus on fundamental questions like a priori theory, the importance of a priori theory, the importance of natural law, secession, the critique of democracy and so on. And he has the courage to defend his stance there in the face of overwhelming adversity. That concerns most notably his critique of democracy, which not only brought him great admiration, we should not forget, but also a host of enemies and people who really have come to hate him. And finally, great quality, which I had difficulties to emulate because it's just not my personality, Hans is enormously fierce, right? So what are the synonyms of fierce? And I just quote those that is enemies, we'll probably cite here, wild, barbarous, brutal, extreme, ferocious, fervent, furious, tense, savage, severe, vehement, vicious, violent. Oh, so that's very difficult for me to emulate, as I said, but I'm just a charming Catholic boy from next door. But let's not forget, it's very comfortable for all others of us who don't have quite these qualities because we can free ride in the shadow of Hans, right? There's all the attack, all the last spotlight is always on him and we can work quite freely, quite unobstructedly on our research and Hans takes all the fire. And we must say, okay, we shouldn't be too sorry for him because he likes it also. Thanks, Hans. My topic is Hans Hoppe and the Art of Economic Controversy. And what I wanna do is we count a single episode which exemplifies Hans's approach to economic controversy. On May 14th in 2009, a Mises Daly piece appeared by Hans entitled The Yield from Money Held Reconsidered. Pretty innocuous. It was the text of a lecture which had been presented at the Frans Choule Memorial Lecture in Prague the previous month. The title of Hans's lecture is a nod to William Hutt's article, The Yield from Money Held, published in 1956. In his article, Hutt argued that holding money was productive and generated a positive yield to the individual cash older. Hutt proceeded mainly by criticizing the contrary position widely held by economists from John Locke and Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes. The Smith Keynes position maintained that money is, quote, barren, sterile, unproductive, offering a yield of nil. That it differs from other assets and that it is dead stock, unquote. All of those come from Hutt's article. Although Hutt demolished the view that money is not a productive asset, he never explained exactly why holding a cash balance is productive. The aim of Hutt's lecture was to positively demonstrate that money held in cash balances is productive and to describe the unique nature of its productivity. And so doing Hutt fulfill the gap in Hutt's argument and made an important contribution to monetary theory. I'll skip over some of the argument just to give you a flavor of Hutt's argument. He writes in the article, in holding money, its owner gains in the satisfaction of being able to meet instantly as they unpredictably arise, the widest range of future contingencies. The investment in cash balances is an investment contra the subjectively felt aversion to uncertainty. A larger cash balance brings more relief from uncertainty aversion, unquote. At this point, Hoppe distinguishes between risk and uncertainty in the Knight-Mieses sense and goes on, the sum of money that a man spends on insurance is an indication of the height of his aversion to risk. Insurance premiums are money spent, not held and are as such invested in the physical production structure of producer and consumer goods. The payment of insurance reflects a man subjectively felt uncertainty concerning the predictable future contingencies, which are risks. In distinct contrast, insofar as a man faces uncertainty, he is quite literally not certain concerning future contingencies as to what he might want or need and when. Only money on account of its instant and unspecific wide-ranging saleability can protect him against uncertainty. Hoppe concludes the article, to invest in cash balances means I am uncertain about my present and future needs and believe that a balance of the most easily and widely saleable goods on hand will best prepare me to meet my as of yet unknown needs at as of yet unknown, at as of yet unknown times. All right, in addressing this important issue in monetary theory, I believe Hoppe advanced beyond Hutt, Mises, and Rothbard and what they had written on this. That's only a part of the story, okay? The best part, I'm gonna recount now. Hoppe's article, which was focused on a very arcane point of monetary theory, almost immediately ignited a firestorm of controversy that started on other economics blogs and spilled over to the Mises economics blog. Remarkably, the controversy had absolutely nothing to do with Hoppe's main thesis. Rather, the uproar concern preliminary remarks that Hoppe had made consisting of two brief paragraphs consisting of five sentences. But these incidental remarks touched the third rail of Austrian economics. They challenge a tenet of modern free banking orthodoxy. In introducing his topic, Hoppe had used the free bankers as one of a number of examples of monetary theorists who failed to grasp unique productivity of money held. Hoppe wrote that according to the free banking school, quote, an unanticipated increase in the demand for money pushes the economy below its potential and requires a compensating money-spending injection from the banking system. He commented on this view. Here it is again, an excess demand for money has no positive yield or is even detrimental. Hence, help is needed. Now, Hoppe was very careful and he specified that according to free banking, this help should not come from central banks, but from a competitive free banks. But he then concluded that for free banking, the holding of some excess money is unproductive and requires a remedy. All right. So the day after the publication of Hoppe's piece, Larry White criticized it on the economics blog, The Division of Labor. The sole focus of White's post was not Hoppe's sort of pathbreaking thesis about why people hold money. Not a word was spent on that. It was on Hoppe's peripheral comment on the free banking school. White accepted Hoppe's characterization of the free banking school's position regarding the negative impact on employment and real output of an increase in demand for money that is uncompensated by an increase in supply. So he accepted that part. He agreed that, yeah, Hoppe was right about that in characterizing us that way. But White argued that Hoppe's second paragraph contradicted the first and was nonsensical. The gist of his argument was that Hoppe's critique of the free bankers confused the concept of an excess demand for money, which was conventionally understood by monetary fears as a shortage of money. It conflated that and the concept of an excess cash balance is held. Okay. So the whole thing was turning on a terminological point. Later that day, Steve Horowitz posted a response to Hoppe on the Austrian Economist blog, another blog that was run by Steve and Pete Becky. Steve quoted long excerpts from Larry's post before concluding on a nasty note by asserting, quote, Hoppe does not understand the concept that is central to monetary theory and even more central to the debate between free bankers and 100% gold advocates, unquote. With that, the floodgates opened and 87 comments on the topic were posted on the Austrian Economist blog from May 15th to May 21st. Many of the comments came from Hoppe supporters and Horowitz and Seljan intervened with their own comments a number of times to stamp out the dumpster fires of dissent that repeatedly flared up. In the meantime, after enjoying the polemical fireworks for a few days, I posted a defensive Hoppe and a critique of White and Horowitz on the Mises economics blog on May 18th. My response to White was that Hoppe's unconventional terminology did not vitiate a substantive argument, even if Hoppe used the term excess demand for money irregularly to mean excess cash balances held, his points still held, absent an exactly offsetting increase in the money supply free bankers believed and White admitted that the increased cash balances initially accumulated by those demanding to hold more money would precipitate a time consuming process of a rising purchasing power of money. However, because all prices do not instantly adjust downward according to the free bankers, this process would engender a reduction in real output and employment. That is a recession. It is in this sense that Hoppe meant that free bankers viewed the extra cash balances accumulated by those who first cut their spending as having quote no positive yield and as quote even detrimental. So in other words, the current demand for money held from Hoppe's perspective was in excess of the demand which was consistent with potential output that is full employment and full employment in the labor market at the current price level. All right, okay, so my response to Horowitz, that was my response to White, my response to Horowitz was directed at two rhetorical questions he posed at the end of his post quoting Horowitz. He said, my questions now are, do the Rothbardian critics of free banking really understand the concept of the excess demand for money? And why should anyone now take seriously any criticisms Hoppe makes of free banking? This all turns on the terminological irregularity. Okay, nothing substantive was said at all. I regret now that I lost my temper and responded quite uncharitably to Steve and his queries. Here's what I wrote, Steve, my answers are one, the Rothbardian critics you address went to real graduate schools like Columbia, Rutgers, VPI, Berkeley, et cetera and do not need a Hain-level lecture from you on the meaning of excess demand for money or for anything else. Two, Ludwig von Mises made an elementary error in arguing that the competitive price can be distinguished from a monopoly price on the free market. Therefore, we should not take seriously anything else Mises ever wrote about monopoly. And is this proposition true or false? I will give you a hint, Steve. I'll give you extra credit if you can identify the logical error entailed in the proposition, unquote. Okay, so I wasn't charitable and to his credit, Steve apologized for his important questions in a later post. Anyway, after my post on May 18th, the Mises blog blew up with 94 comments posted within two days. As the only academic economist defending Hapa, I subsequently posted only three additional comments responding specifically to additional posts by Seljan, Horwitz and White. However, they posted, now they began posting comments on the Mises blog. George posted eight, Steve five and Larry one. Most of the comments by George and Steve were in response to vociferous Hapa fans who were fired up by my initial post. In the meantime, my post instigated even more dissenting comments by Hopkins over on the Austrian economics blog, it's Betge's blog, whose polemical tone were no doubt irritating to George, Steve and Larry and elicited even more posts from them. I'll read just two of the more humorous provocative pro-Hapa posts. One, well, Steve, both Larry and you have been shown to be in error by Joe Salerno over at Mises. You are beating on a strawman character of Hoppe's position, not the real thing. Does that really have to irritate them? Two, does anyone have a link to that Salerno piece? I have no memory of Salerno often being wrong on monetary matters, unquote. Now, I was cited as the eminence grease in several of the pro-Hapa posts and many of them. As I had mentioned, I was the only academic economist who defended Hoppe. That was the reason why they were citing me. But this raises the question, where was Hoppe in this controversy? What and where were his comments? Hoppe, in fact, remained completely silent during the brouhaha that his article created and has not, as far as I know, said a word about it since. And therein lies his unique approach to economic controversy. It is the intellectual equivalent of the great Muhammad Ali's rope-a-dope technique in boxing. State your position once, then lay back and let your opponents punch themselves out, attacking it. In the end, your position is still standing. Thank you. Okay, Hans, you wanna give some responses? I first want to thank Lou and Pat and Jeff and Joe for this wonderful celebration. And I have to say that I am in the meantime about the oldest person that has seen the Mises Institute become what it has become. I joined the Mises Institute in 1985, three years after the foundation of the Institute. I was also, I think, the first foreigner ever having anything to do with the Mises Institute. At that time, to be a white heterosexual male was not yet a problem. Nowadays, the problems have, of course, even aggravated because apart from being white heterosexual male, I am a member of the even more hated group that is a German who does all of this. I saw the Mises Institute grow from the first place that they had in Washington, DC that was in a townhouse, one flat. Then they moved to Auburn in a big barrack next to, in the shadow of the stadium. The next step was having some premises in the business college across the street. And then they started building this facility, first smaller version and then the expanded version. I think there are not very many people here who have seen all of this. I also got in contact very quickly with many of the people here in this room and made lifelong friends. Let me just mention the first hardcore group that met at Mises Institute conferences. David Gordon was always there, Jeff Herbner was there, Tom DiLorenzo, Joe Salerno, Walter, Yuri Maltsev came a few years later after he defected from Russia and of course also Ralph Ryko. We were all Murray's children. He always referred to us as his kids. We had sometimes disagreements among ourselves, but being Murray's children, we always pulled together when things got difficult. At that time, Mark Sorenten was our kid. So was Guido was one of our kids, Stefan Kinsella was one of the kids and Peter Klein was one of the kids. And then there were also toddlers. Bob Murphy, for instance, was a toddler and so was Tom Woods. In the meantime, as you'll see, the Austro-Libertarian movement has become such a big thing that you don't even know all the names anymore and we exist in the world around. There's practically no country where we do not have some Austro-Libertarians. My work has been translated into 35 languages. I never imagined anything like this being possible. Now, let me make a few remarks, lighthearted remarks about the various comments. Obviously, I cannot do justice to this, what they've said. As far as David is concerned, yes, I'm a German and I have been influenced by German philosophers quite a bit. I think it is also an injustice that the German language has become a minor language in the meantime. At some point in history, there was a chance that we might play the role as Germans that you guys now enjoy speaking English. But there exist very important German philosophers that had hardly ever been translated. I encountered or re-encountered recently, if German philosopher recently died, Peter Janig, who was a student of Paul Lorenzen, who was mentioned before by David Gordon, who made tremendous contributions to the theory of action. The man was completely unaware of Mises. But there are contributions, additions to Mises' insights about action that I hope I will introduce to the English-speaking world in the near future, if God wills. Mark Sorenten was his textbook example and Tom mentioned that also. I should mention how that book originated. I taught for a year at Johns Hopkins University in Bologna. And that was the first time that I ever had to lecture in English. So I wrote that book in long hand. And every lecture was carefully prepared because I was afraid that I might run out of stuff to say. So I had to make sure that you have enough paper and enough written up so that you can finish an hour and a half in a foreign language. That's why it turned out to be a little bit like a textbook. Even though textbook writing, yes, that is not my forte, I must say. Stefan has already mentioned my contributions to the theory of property. I'm still trying to refine this. I hope one more work I hope I still have in myself to get that finally finished. What Tom said about the public choice school. When I decided to go to the United States, I had a magnificent grant that allowed me to go wherever I wanted to go, Heisenberg Scholarship, the highest grant that you could win in the German university system. And I was thinking about where will you go? And I wrote letters to two people. One to Murray Ross Bart, I would like to work with you and to be, to ensure myself, myself, I also wrote a letter to James Buchanan who was at that time at Virginia Polytechnic in Blacksburg, Virginia. Both wrote back immediately. Jim Buchanan offered me far more private room, secretary and all the rest of it. Murray could not offer quite as much, but as soon as I got Murray's letter, I decided of course I go Murray. Because I had encountered the same difficulties that Tom mentioned about the public choice school, about this conceptual agreements which are no agreements. And yet this unanimity rule, but the unanimity rule was only quasi-unanimity rule. So I figured that's not exactly promising if I go there. I never met Buchanan, but I did meet Gordon Tullock a few times. Gordon Tullock was a more caustic person. I met him incidentally at some conferences of the Mooneys in Korea. I should mention it, that the first big prize that Hayek received long before he received the Nobel Prize was also from the Mooneys. The Mooneys had some sort of libertarian subgroup. After the person who was in charge of that subgroup retired from his position, the Mooneys appointed me for one year to be the head of this committee. The result of that conference was the miss of national defense. After that conference, the Mooneys stopped with this type of panel. At that occasion I asked Gordon Tullock, what do you think about this conceptual agreement and the quasi-unanimity? And Gordon Tullock then said, no, this is all what Buchanan wrote. I wrote the rest of the book. I'll see what I can do. Yeah, I think that is all I want to say. No, I should make a remark about Gido's stuff, being so fierce. That used to be the case, but now my wife whips me into shape and now I'm turning into the most lovable person. It is not exactly my nature to be the most lovable person, but I'm trying very hard. And yes, I do like to fight. I hate this intellectual disease of political correctness more and more. And I have to convince myself once in a while that I should not fight too much, but get back to more important theoretical work which I promise I will do. I will work hard to produce at least one more important work. I thank you all very much. Every one who made remarks here in particular, as I said, I am honored to have friends like you. Thank you very much. Thank you.