 The Tom Woods Show, Episode 998 Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion. Your daily dose of liberty education starts here. The Tom Woods Show Folks, unless you want to live in fear forever of your social justice warrior boss, you better have some kind of side hustle going on in case it should ever come to that. I've built up online income streams that allow me to work from anywhere I want and say whatever I want. Check out my free ebook on how I do it at PathsToIncome.com Hey everybody, Tom Woods here. Today we're talking about a very, very important name in the libertarian world, a name you need to know. And that's Hans Hermann Hoppe, who is probably, if not the most significant libertarian thinker in the world today. He's certainly in the top five and no question about that. Extremely important and influential and certainly played a role in helping me understand libertarianism better. He's got just a razor sharp mind. If you've got a bad argument, it is going to be shredded and in tatters by the time Hans has done with it. He's a brilliant guy, Murray Rothbard could not say enough good things about him. And joining me to talk about Hans Hoppe, who is controversial. There are a lot of people who strongly dislike him and yet have never read a single one of his books. Gee, I wonder what that would be like. I can't imagine going through that experience. Somebody smearing you without reading your books. Well, anyway, Hans has had that experience quite a bit. So we're actually going to talk about his books. There's a novel approach. And joining me to do that is Stefan Kinsella, longtime student of Hans Hoppe. Stefan is founder and executive director of Libertarian Papers, founder and director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom, and the author of numerous articles and books on international property law, international law, and the application of libertarian principles to legal topics. You can find out more about Stefan and his work at StefanKinsella.com. Stefan, welcome back to the show. Thanks much, Tom. All right. So here you are on your way to Turkey today as we're talking. And yet at the last minute you were able to fit in an episode with me and I sure appreciate it. Maybe we'll talk later about why you're headed to Turkey because it's not a million miles removed from the topic of our discussion today. But I would say it's hard at least for me to think of somebody, maybe other than Karl Marx, where both his supporters and his critics have not read him. Then the case of Hans Hermann Hoppe. I mean, his supporters love him for what they think he's all about and his detractors hate him for what they think he's all about. But you ask, well, what is his position on empiricism and positivism? I don't even know what the question means. So I'm not so sure these people are reading him. So I thought, I know Kinsella has read Hoppe even more thoroughly than I have. So let's talk about him. How did you first get to hear about this guy? I mean, with me, it was just I wanted to read every single thing the Mises Institute had. And back in those days, in the old days, that used to be possible. It was. And you probably were like me when I was in college and law school. I read like every issue of Liberty magazine, the free market newsletter from Mises, Reason magazine. So, you know, I was reading the Iran newsletter. There was there was only so much. And yeah, I read it all. But I think Hans came to my attention. He started appearing early in the pages of the I think the Austrian economics newsletter put out by Mises in the early 80s. And also Liberty magazine had a big symposium in 1988 on his argumentation ethics. And I was in law school and it blew me away. Absolutely blew me away. We did an episode on argumentation ethics. So I'll link to that. And then I also did an episode where I just I walked through one chapter from Hoppe's book, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, which is an amazing book. I just walked through the chapter on banking and society and where he starts from. Banking nation states, I think. Yeah, I can't remember the sociological reconstruction of the present economic order, I think is the is the subtitle. It's one of its best articles. It's so packed with insights. It's so explosive. And wow, you understand the world better. So much better after you read it. So I made that. And I think my title for that episode was a little click baity because I said Hans Hoppe on blah, blah, blah. So people must think, oh, Hans is on the show. No, it's just me talking about his idea. So who knows if that'll ever happen. I know he's not big into audio interviews these days. But anyway, I will see him tomorrow and I'm going to put a bug in his ear and try to. Yeah, you got to. You got to. I mean, he's already done me a favor. I can't give away precisely what, but it'll become clear at my 1000th episode event on September 30th. But anyway, let's let's talk about some of his significant work. And there's a there's I mean, the first two things I got at the same time, I got a theory of socialism and capitalism, one of his books. And then the economics and ethics of private property. So the argumentation ethics thing, which is his his defense of libertarianism. It's a defense that's I had never heard before. Certainly, I haven't heard the let's just say I hadn't heard the libertarian spin that he put on it before. Correct. I think I think this is his his creation, but we have devoted an episode of that. Let's talk about other things that that he does. First of all, what's your favorite book length work of his then? Well, for me, it's clearly the theory of social theory of socialism and capitalism. Maybe just because I read it first or maybe because it's actually a systematic work. It's not a collection of essays, which most of his other works are. And that book, it does lay out an extensive defense of his argumentation ethics in the middle of the book in Chapter 7, if I recall. But the first two chapters, chapters one and two do a really good job of laying out the kind of foundational ideas for property theory, which he uses in his economic reasoning and his libertarian reasoning elsewhere. So just chapters one and two, which are very short or just packed full of really concise definitions, like the way he defines aggression, contract, property, socialism, capitalism is extremely helpful and much more clear than the way a lot of other writers use it, which is more of a Lucy Goosey kind of way. So the one I reviewed was so I encountered that book in 88 or so 89 when it came out when I was in law school, when I read about the other stuff and then he released the economics and ethics property, which you just mentioned, which is the one after that, which is also fantastic. It's a collection of essays which are related in two different parts, philosophy and economics. And I did a lengthy book review essay of that book for a law review and I sent it to Hans in 94. And I didn't know him at the time and he sent me a warm letter back. And so I met him for the first time along with Lou Rockwell and David Gordon and Rothbard actually in 1994 and November at the John Randolph Club meeting in DC. Yeah, then you and I must have been there. I was there too. Yeah, that's the first thing I had ever done with any of these and the Rothbard of course died in January, like two, three months later. So I was lucky to meet him there. And so then Hans became the editor of the JLS and a co-editor of the QJAE, the Journal of Libertarian Studies and the quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics after Rothbard's death. And because I had just come into their presence, he asked me to be the book review editor for the JLS and that's how that started. So I've had a long friendship with him and followed his work throughout the years. There's an article that Rothbard wrote about Hans where he's going after some of Hans' opponents and he's saying, you know, maybe the problem people have with Hans, although they'd never say it, is that he's so relentlessly logical and he is so careful and devastating and his demolition of bad ideas that it's hard to take. And Rothbard sums it up by saying, well, shape up guys in argument as in politics. Those who can't stand deductivist heat should get out of the philosophic or economic kitchen. He loved, he absolutely loved Hans, Rothbard did. So Hapa has great treatment of the subject of public goods, for example, which is used to justify the state. There are certain goods that the market just won't produce in quantities that neoclassical economists consider to be optimal for various reasons. So therefore we have to have the state and Hans will have none of that. But more than just public goods, his point is an extension of Rothbard's that he comes to reject the state altogether, because he says the same arguments you make about why we need certain state programs are the arguments that socialists make for why we need further state programs. So if one group of arguments is bad, the other group of arguments must likewise be bad. There's no analytical reason that these particular goods are any different from those. So in other words, that's where the public goods argument ultimately winds you up, our side of the public goods thing. These things, this is an analytical mess, this whole public goods thing. You can't analytically distinguish these different sorts of goods, so therefore there's no class of goods that must be supplied by the state. So we don't need the state. Over and above the moral problems with the state, we just don't need it. And that's pretty tough medicine for a lot of people. Yeah, that's a chapter, if I recall, in his 94 economics and ethics of private property. He demolishes the public goods approach. And he has another good one on antitrust theory. But if you notice what he does there, he relies really heavily on praxeology, on the Mises' method of economics. So he always does this. As I think I noted in one of my afterwards or forwards, more than anyone else I know, Hoppe really, like he doesn't just give lip service to praxeology, like some so-called Austrian thinkers do. They never use it in their reasoning. Hans uses it consistently all the time. He really relies upon it and extends it. So I think just for example, he noticed that the Austrian notion that all goods are subjective, right? There's a subjective quality to them means that no good is ever perfectly public or private. And I think he's got a similar point about other types of goods. It depends upon how the user perceives these goods, right? Just like something is not purely a capital good or a consumer good. It depends upon how a human actor perceives it subjectively. So there's no binary external objective classification of these goods, which is partly his point, right? You can't objectively say something is objectively a public good and then build some political theory on it. Now, getting back to that earlier book, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, with a book title like that with no subtitle, which is very rare in academic publishing, right? Usually three paragraphs subtitle. It's just a theory of socialism and capitalism. What is the Hoppean theory of socialism and capitalism? Yes. I don't think there actually might be a subtitle, Tom. I think it's economics, politics, and ethics. Oh, you're right. Darn it. Okay. But it's hardly ever used. Okay. Well, fair enough. But I think does economics and ethics of private property have a subtitle? I think at least one with no subtitle. It may. It doesn't matter. His merits stand on their own, regardless of this question. Well, his monograph on the nature of Austrian methodology, I'm getting the title wrong. I think has no subtitle. But say the Great Fiction, which is his third series of essays. Now, and by the way, I'll get into a TSC, but he did have a couple of other works published in German earlier, which have still never been translated into English, which is a frustration for me because I can't read German. So I'm hoping someday some Hoppean German-English-Hoppean speaker will translate some of those earlier works. Hand-to-hand to all you listeners out there. Hand-to-hand. All right. So go ahead. But so his theory of socialism and capitalism, first he gets to like what I call essentialist definitions. And I've heard some people criticize Hans for his definition of socialism because what he says is the essence of socialism is really just the institutionalized aggression with private property rights. It's not simply the centralized control. But again, because again, there's no hard and fast definition or objective difference between capital and other goods. This is an economic classification. So his point is yes, we can define socialism as a centralized control of the means of production, but the essence of it is any institutionalized interference with private property claims. And then he defines private property claims as those that arise from the kind of the classical libertarian bases like original appropriation or homesteading, a la lock, and then contractual transfer basically. So his theory is that any time you have a state, you have a degree of socialism. And anytime you have socialism, you have injustice and inefficiency. What is really illuminating is after his first two chapters in the theory of socialism and capitalism, where he sets out the basic categories and concepts he's going to use chapters, I think three, four, five, and maybe six, they they analyze different types of socialism. So he'll he'll he criticizes socialism Russian style, which we would call communism. He's he criticizes the socialism of conservatism, right? So he's anti conservative or fascism, you could say, he criticizes the socialism of social engineering, OK, and things like that. So he breaks different types of socialism down into different classifications, but it finds common things to criticize about all of them. And that's what's so interesting about this. And of course, he also has a chapter in democracy, the God that failed where he talks about libertarianism and conservatism. And he does not have much patience with conservatives who make the argument that, well, we do, after all, need a welfare state. He says that the welfare state undermines all the things you conservatives claim to support. So he is so rigorous in his opposition to all these different approaches that it's it's really exciting and interesting to read. And I'd like to just share an episode that I bet most people listening don't know people in my private group know it because I shared it there. But almost nobody knows it. Were you at the John Randolph Club meeting in 1995? No, no, I just went to the first one. OK, so but do you know what happened in that year? Not sure. OK, well, this is the year that the John Randolph Club was a meeting of libertarians like Lou Rockwell and Murray Rothbard and David Gordon and you know, other people have been on the show. And then on the other hand, it was the paleocons. These were anti interventionists. Now that the Cold War is over, they want to shut down NATO. They want to bring the troops home. So, you know, why wouldn't you want to talk to them? And these days, this whole thing is being people say, oh, they were allying with with Nazis or White National. Well, that's because today everybody's considered a Nazi. If you look at these people, Tom Fleming may be an erasable character, but he was no Nazi. He's just a regular, you know, he's just a he's a non neocon conservative or Bill Kaufman, a wonderful guy. What a thrill to get to meet Bill Kaufman. There's nothing wrong with it with him. Why would you not want to talk to conservatives who want to abolish, you know, to slash the warfare state? Well, anyway, after Rothbard died, Rothbard and Tom Fleming, I think, were the two personalities, one from each camp that were really holding that thing together. And I don't think it could really hold without that glue. So when after Rothbard died, some of the divisions between the two groups began to get greater and greater because the libertarians kind of felt like we're willing to learn from the conservatives about a lot of cultural issues, but they got to learn some economics and it seems like a lot of them aren't and they're still talking about protectionism and this and that. So Hans got up at the 1995 conference and didn't name any names, but he basically said that some of what he's hearing about, you know, nationalistic economic policy, he says, runs the risk of bleeding over into national socialism. I mean, not that these people are outright Nazis, but that you're more or less advocating an economic approach that approximates that and I don't want to have any part of that. And so that wound up splitting the whole group that the conservatives were so upset that Hans had criticized them like that, that that pretty much blew the whole thing apart. Now, nobody knows that. And of course, no one would believe that because of course these days will hop as a Nazi by people who have never read him. They've heard three out of context sentences. They would have no idea that it was Hans before they were even born who was saying there are trends here that I don't want to be part of and I have to reject wholeheartedly. That was Hans Hoppe who did that. And I thought on this episode it might be relevant to throw that in. Yes. And in the meeting I'm going to today is the annual meeting of the Property and Freedom Society, which Hans founded in 2006. So this is our 12th or something meeting. And on the fifth annual meeting, which is about 2010 or so, Hans gave a speech which is on Videre and also on Vimeo. I can give you the link. It was called Reflections on the PFS after five years and he talked in detail about that split with the Paleo conservatives and he's also got another paper on like the Middle American allusions of San Francis or something like that, a draft paper, which is good, which is online too. And he explicitly says basically, listen, it was going to be an alliance and we were going to learn some cultural things from them, which we did, but they refused to learn their economic lessons from us. So he is explicitly critical of these guys. Yeah. And his talk, by the way, on Sunday, I believe, is going to be on the alt-right. So I'm interested to see what he has to say about them. Yeah, I will be too. And I mean his criticisms from 1995 are, you know, the same sorts of things I would say much more. I would be much tougher with these people. And let me also mention that it's just part of this whole history. You know, Hans turned 60 years old in 2009. And so Guido Holzmann, who, Guido, I became friends going to our first Mises conference together and we were both going there to study under Hans, basically, me for legal and political theory and Guido for economics and we stayed good friends over the years. And we decided to do a festrift for Hans, which is like, you know, a collection of articles in memory of a notable thinker. And we published it right before his birthday in, I think you were at the ceremony, Tom. I was. I've got a great picture where I'm standing, like, right behind Hans while he's grinning from ear to ear because you guys had successfully managed to keep this project a secret from him. We did. He thought it was a birthday thing or something. But if you look at the volume, the array of scholars in there is just incredible. It's all over the world. Guido and I, we split the project up and we sort of humorously said, well, Kinsella, you take America and Guido, the German will take the rest of the world. It was about half and half that way, you know, because most of the scholars are concentrated here. So it was funny that we split it up with the globe up between us that way. But it's a beautiful book and beautiful sentiments from there. There's Bob Higgs and Lou and scholars from Pascal Salon and scholars from all over the world. And it just shows the depth of his influence. And you did mention earlier that some people haven't read Hans. They criticize him. I think part of the reason for that is because he became more popular with the publication of his Democracy Book, which followed his first two or three more scholarly, more philosophical works. And he became popular by a lot of people because of that, because of his theories about monarchy and democracy and immigration and things like that. And I don't know if a lot of those people have gone back and read the earlier, more foundational work. Right. Now, even the Democracy Book, though, is for a popular style book. It's about as scholarly a popular book as you're ever going to see. But you're right. It is on that level. And it's published by a press, I think it was Transaction, that more or less catered to the public. But yeah, you're right. The theory of socialism and capitalism and the economics and ethics of private property. Beautiful thing about these books today is that they could be read for free. So I'll actually link to the free versions that you can read online over at tomwoods.com slash 998. The Democracy Booking, and I have to buy. I'll link to that. I think there is a link to a version online, but it's not exactly legit. Yeah, I don't know how I want to do that. I'm just mentioning he has a short like a, it's an essay in booklet form called Economic Science and the Austrian Method. This thing is beautiful from 1995. Absolutely beautiful. So I'll link to that. I'll link to the there's a lot of material people can read. So let's get to the key question. Where do they jump in? What's the first one? Is it theory of socialism and capitalism? Honestly, I would start with the theory of socialism and capitalism. And then what I had noticed over the years was there were several of his best articles that had never been put into a book. And most of those are included now in The Great Fiction, which was published by Lesley Fair a few years later. So that's like a counterpart to the economics and ethics of private property. But I would say read the theory of socialism and capitalism and then read that short monograph of his on praxeology and the economic science and the Austrian Method, I think, is the title. And those are all online and free. And they are just, if you're interested at all like an Ein-Ran sort of theory of concepts and her criticism of Kant's idealism and you're interested in realism and you're also interested in Rothbard and his Aristotelian sort of spin on Mises and Mises himself, which is a sort of a realistic Kantian take on things. This book is just heaven for you because it's a blend of all those approaches. It's not randian, but it would be of interest to randians. Let's take a few minutes if we could to talk about controversy surrounding Hans. I mean, we might as well say something about it. I mean, even though I really do just want to talk about the basics of his books so that people will know where to start, because really you should read the books and not listen to a podcast episode. You should read the books. They're fantastic. But he's attracted a lot of controversy. The thing is, a couple things here, he doesn't really respond to critics. He responded to critics of argumentation ethics, but these days, if some guy calls him a racist or whatever, that is about the last thing in the world he cares about, which makes them crazy because, of course, he's supposed to come begging for forgiveness on his knees and, oh my goodness, I hope you're not upset at me. He could not possibly care any less and that, I think, more than anything else drives people crazy because they feel like, wait a minute, we've set the moral standards for this society and we're the ones who are going to decide who's forgiven and who's, you know, who's in good standing and who isn't. And you don't even care? What does the matter with you? So where are people getting this anger toward Hans? I mean, I assume it's not because they disagree with his public goods theory. Well, you know, it's weird to me because I, he's one of the sweetest, gentlest, most sincere, honest and intelligent I've ever met. Without a doubt. And he has obviously been a hardworking advocate for liberty in Austrian economics for I don't know, 40 years now. How many foreign language translations are there of his books used to keep track of this? Oh, it's like, it's in the, it's almost approaching 30 now, I think. So it's, there've been translations all the time and I have them on his website, HansHappa.com, which I help him, I help maintain for him. There were a couple of statements he made that were taken out of context. You know, it's to the point now where if you say you're against the anti-discrimination law, then everyone says you're a racist. So it's part of it is that kind of reaction. But I think he had said one time in his he was talking about imagining a private society of the future and he expects there to be a higher role for private morality, private communities, and even maybe something like covenants where people that have certain, they agree on certain values to live together. And he had some comment that people that advocate principles that are contrary to the basic unit of society, which is the kind of conservative family unit, right? And kind of conservative values, you know, hard work, honesty, things like that. People that advocate for things like communism would be he said, be physically removed, but what he meant was people wouldn't want to live near to them, right? They would use private means to do that. And he also said something like advocates of homosexuality. And I think what he meant there was someone coming in and just vocally criticizing heterosexuality like saying that everyone should be this way or whatever. So he was talking about advocates and people took that to me that he was he thought homosexuals themselves should be banned, which he's clarified in comments and explained many times he of course doesn't believe that at all. In fact, he endorsed Rothbard's kind of comment that you could also imagine this gorgeous mosaic I think is some expression where you have different types of covenant communities or neighborhoods around the world which some are more counter cultural in their practices and their beliefs and some are more traditional and Christian or whatever. So that was part of it. Also, he had there was a flap with UNLV when he was a professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas where he used homosexuality as an example of a time preference situation where he said that people that don't have children are not as oriented toward the future because having a child makes you think about the future more. So that would give you lower time preference and he just observed that so group that tends not to have children as much like homosexuals might have lower time preference in that respect. And some student complained and he got censured and his career was threatened there and he got the ACLU to defend him and he won so he heroically stood up to these guys so he's definitely not I advised him at the time too I would say just take the deal because I'm a lawyer and I'm always looking at probabilities but he was brave enough to fight it he wasn't going to go down without a fight so I admire that about him. I'm going to say something about this whole covenant community thing because I think there are some libertarian anarchist types who I think their vision for what society would look like is not very well fleshed out. They just imagine that we really would be atomized individuals just walking around doing our own thing and that every place on earth would be exactly like every other place. Yes. And that's their diverse world where every place looks exactly like every other place. Yes exactly. But some people do want to live among themselves whether it's a Christian community or whatever it is they just want to live among themselves. Leave them alone. Yes they know that that's the biggest sin in the world is wanting to live with people who are like you. We all get that. We all know we're going to be demonized for saying it but sometimes that's what you want. Like during the day I go to work and I see crazy people all day and I love them but when I go home to relax I just want my neighbors to be quiet, conservative. I just want quiet. I just want peace. So a covenant community I was just seeing a Facebook thread where people were just saying oh it's just like more little states. These are just like little states except they're not because you enter into them voluntarily but they can't get over the idea that people could voluntarily agree to rules but in an anarcho-capitalist society there's no reason to think that I would want to live in a neighborhood where my next door neighbor could paint his house hot pink and put all kinds of crazy stuff all over it whatever. We would come up with rules that we all agree on and so I think sometimes these anarchists, it's like they're trying to live down to the caricature of anarchists where you don't believe in any rules and the central ones amongst are trying to say we do believe in rules just like state enforced rules. They're supporting our critics who say that well you guys can't tell me what society is going to look like in the future and you don't believe in any rules you want chaos not anarchy and when some of us try to say well here's one possible suggestion about how society might look like private institutions would take up a lot of the roles that the state is crowded out now and would do a better job of them it would be more humane, it would be more responsive to what consumers really want it would be more diverse then you have these kind of simple minded newer anarchists who say well if you believe in law you believe in the state so they're seeding the ground to the status they think without the state there cannot be law and order and these anarchists that object to the notion of law because they equate it with the state are seeding the ground to our opponents and moreover one of the ways you can cope with the public goods problem is precisely by offering some goods on a community basis so that you don't have to somehow figure out well how would an individual pay for sewer services or whatever well the sewer service is one of the benefits you get when you join community A that solves the problem street lights are one of the benefits that you get in this residential area when you belong to this community and you pay some dues and that covers it or either there are other ways that you could just provide these things for free there are a lot of ways you could provide public goods but one of them is like the analogy that Fred Foldery gave on the show a long time ago was when you go to a hotel you don't pay separately for the elevator you don't pay separately for the lobby and what you pay for and we don't say oh the hotel is like a little state because I pay and I get well no the free market is where you pay and you get goods so communities might be arranged the same way there's nothing wrong with that let me say one other thing too before we run out of time but people sometimes say well what's the difference between Hoppe and say Rothbard now I would say that what's his main contribution or what's the distinction right because in my mind Rothbard is the libertarian he's the guy that really is the founding thinker of our modern libertarian movement and Ein Brand was probably the one that got it started but you know with Rothbard's Austrian economics and his radicalism and its anti-status he is the founding libertarian thinker Hoppe I would say he studied under Rothbard for 10 years and he was a deep mzeezy and so Rothbard and Mises are his two main influences and there's one thing I discovered years ago which I might have pointed out to you you know Hans was in Germany he was initially a socialist he was in the German educational system he was brilliant and he started to reject socialism on his own and he discovered the works of Bomberwerk first and Bomberwerk's criticism of Marxism so that got him thinking and then he started looking for free market ideas and he came across Friedman and these guys and initially immediately rejected Milton Friedman in that school because of their logical positivism so he was starting to conclude on his own that economics is a priori like Mises did so I believe Hans was on the path to basically being a second independent Mises and then he discovered Mises and realized oh this guy's got it figured out already I'm a mzeezy I sometimes wonder what would have happened if he had never stumbled across Mises we might have a brand new independent Austrian by Hans from the scratch so I would say he's heavily mzeezy and Rothbard influences politics greatly but I would say that some of the differences are that Hans goes way deeper into the issue of scarcity which David Hume analyzed too so the acknowledgement of the role of scarcity informs his libertarian property theory more so I think that it did for Rothbard he's also a bigger skeptic of democracy in the American constitution than say Rothbard and Mises would have been so he's more radical in that sense where he moved a little bit beyond them in his critique of democracy and he views the constitution as just like a centralizing force that was a step backwards and that democracy was a step backwards in many ways from the earlier monarchic period whereas Rothbard kind of buys into this libertarian worship of the founding father's generation and the American original system as being quasi-libertarian so those are some of the differences between Rothbard and Hoppe let me just say a quick thing about my own personal situation regarding Hans I met him a long time ago and I was kind of becoming a libertarian but then I went through a like a paleocon phase in the 90s and so I remember there was a time I was going to speak at the Mises Institute and Lou very gently said well Tom I would appreciate if you would wear your Mises hat rather than your Buchanan hat while you're here and I said of course I'm not going to cause you problems but I really was kind of a Buchanan and I still like Pap Buchanan and all that but it's funny that when people are trying to criticize me today the best they can do is dig up something from like 1995 well yeah when I wasn't really a libertarian I wasn't really a libertarian duh right but I was interested in it and I was closer to libertarianism than most people were but I went through that kind of a phase and the thing that got me out of that phase permanently was Hans Hoppe I talked to him in 2001 it was a year democracy the God that failed was about to come out and I told him about my misgivings and he said these will all be answered in my book yeah I'd like to see that so then I read democracy the God that failed and I basically decided okay I've been on the fence about this for a while but now I officially I'm officially in the was it 2001 that book came out that sounds right somewhere around 2000 or 2001 I said okay I am definitely in the libertarian camp and then I started calling myself a libertarian but even for a few years after that if you read my articles you don't even see myself referring to myself as a libertarian for a long while if I had just if Hans had written this book earlier maybe it would have saved me a lot of trouble and of course with the internet today you can go through 10 ideologies in 5 months but in the old days you had to read books and it took a long time I think you've had some interviews with Buchanan on your show and he's brilliant he's so likeable and he's so smart in some areas I understand the appeal there and Hoppe likes him too I think he's actually criticized Buchanan on Francis he did criticize Buchanan for his his trade his sort of trade views his economic nationalism type views but no I had a similar experience with Hans I sent him an article one time to review it was on federalism and he said something like it's alright because I was talking about the constitution and all this and he said but he goes you Americans libertarians focus so much on the US Constitution like it's special and it struck me I started thinking yeah he's got a point actually it's not some proto-libertarian mechanism for controlling or getting a good state it's really not it was really a centralizing coup almost yeah it's true I've argued you know the arguments of both sides of that we can say well the nationalists tried to ram through what they wanted but the constitution was still sold decentralizing things but the point is there were time bombs in it that over time could be and were in fact exploited by people who were who just wanted power yeah I used to I've come a little bit in the like the Sheldon Richmond direction over the years really okay he persuaded me that like I used to argue the interstate commerce clause was never meant to grant all this great power to the feds and all this you know and I don't want it to so the arguments a little bit convenient but you know he persuaded me that a lot of this language is very amorphous and some of the people that wrote it did have some of these things in mind John Hasnass has a really great article the myth of the rule of law where he talks about about how so much of legislative and statutory and constitutional language it does not actually have an objective clear answer it is subject to the whims of the people that have left to interpret it yeah and so no matter how good your intentions are when you're drafting a constitution let's say although this isn't his main argument but you're going to run afoul of this problem that you can't well anyway in fact I did a whole episode with him on this this myth of the rule of law was one of these articles that I read yes it's a classic I told him on the show that I indignantly rejected it when I first read it yeah and that eventually I basically you know I found myself shaking my fist at the sky and saying Hasnass you were right you know eventually and those are the best articles of all the ones that eat away at you until you finally just have to surrender so I'm going to link to that one you know another really good one like that is Cousin's article in the JLS he's not a libertarian it was called do we ever get out of anarchy is it do we ever get out of anarchy yes and he wrote a revisited later which wasn't as good and I think he submitted another article to my paper that my journal the journal I mean the libertarian papers journal and so but you know Hans actually in his democracy book this is kind of what he talks about the logic of democracy is that it has to lead to more centralized state power it doesn't matter what a paper constitution says they're going to because of the nature of the state they're going to use whatever means they can and that long article you mentioned earlier banking in nation states he traces the kind of actual steps the state takes to seize control you know it takes control of education it takes control of the roads transportation takes control of communication and finally takes control of banking and money so it has its tendrils in all these areas of society so it can basically buy support and make everyone dependent upon it and control them it's it's really insidious and the thing is this is the nature of the state even if you have a paper constitution even if you have democracy or maybe even especially if you have democracy in a way it's kind of like you should ask yourself suppose you were because some people might say oh that's an unnecessarily cynical view of the state well suppose you were about to think of a way to dominate people and keep them dependent on you and and and be able to lord it over them what sectors of society would you want to control and it'd be exactly the same ones that the state does now either that's an amazing coincidence or this they're doing this on purpose yeah transportation security law communication education of the kids I mean yeah so do you see why you read Hans Hoppe and your brain explodes and you think okay let me put all this goo back in my head because I got to read some more Hans and learn learn about how the world works it's thrilling and exciting stuff which is why it's such a shame that even some of his own supporters haven't really read him but secondly that people of frankly bad will are driving people unnecessarily away from maybe the greatest living libertarian theorist we've got and that that ain't right and hence Tom Wood show episode number 998 so what are your final thoughts on this step well you just reminded me of I think it's Lou Rockwell's chapter in the festeriff to Hans that he had some anecdote about how Hans gave a speech and he was just criticizing the expansion of the state and the US constitution in front of an audience of people that are somewhat friendly towards a constitution he said the audience was so silent you could hear a pin drop I mean so the power of its ideas makes people think he it doesn't matter what his unfair critics say because his work is all online you can read it and you can see what he says yourself and when you listen to his speeches and I will mention one other thing I did a six lecture course on Hans in 2011 called the social theory of Hapa it was on Mises Academy and it's all online on my site so anyone who wants to go study more about Hans can read his works which are all online and free or they can listen to my 2011 video presentation about his theories it's as I say it really is it almost sounds fanboyish but to say but his work really is exciting intellectually exciting there's nothing dull it's like reading Rothbard nothing dull about reading Rothbard nothing dull about reading Hans Hapa so a lot of great resources yeah he electrified me when I came across him and I still think his first book is my favorite book I've ever read so and I you know I have my own thing as I've written but I'm not too proud to say that I'm kind of like Hans's fanboy or Emanuance you know someone who spreads the ideas of someone else but you know because of his ideas and I think they're well worth reading for any libertarian so I'm going to have a bunch of them linked at tomwoods.com slash 998 so I urge people to check those out and Stefan safe travels as you head over to visit with Hans and just let him know that there is a huge community of listeners out here that would pretty much crawl over broken glass if that would somehow help to get Hans onto my show so just casually mention that and safe travels and thanks a lot good luck with 1000 thank you all right that's going to do it for today definitely want to check out tomwoods.com slash 998 and don't forget to join me for the 1000th episode event which we've postponed to September 30th 1000th episode of the show I know it's episode 998 but I'm going to skip over episode a thousand go right to 1001 and then when we do our live event then I'll re-insert I'll insert episode 1000 in the missing spot but anyway it's going to be great I've got a couple special guests that you don't know about but also the ones who are on the bill are Michael Malis, Tom DiLorenzo and our MC Eric July cost you nothing to attend so definitely make sure and be there and help me spread the word tomwoods.com slash Orlando and I'll see you tomorrow become a smarter libertarian in just 30 minutes a day visit tomwoods.com to subscribe to the show for free and we'll see you next time