 Hans Hermann Hoppe, it's a pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much for coming. Your opening lecture at the Mises University was intriguing because you went through some personal biography that I don't think is well-known. It seems as if you began on the left, really not just as a graduate student, but even into your full-time professional career. Is that right? Into the first semesters of my studies. I was a leftist during the last few years in high school. That can be explained partly due to the fact that that was also the time of the student rebellion. It was also a way to free yourself of the discipline of your parents, I guess. I was an ardent reader of Marx and then took the selection of my university teachers head. Obviously, also something to do with the fact that I was a lefty. I went to the University of Frankfurt, which was the center of left-wing thought at the time and selected Jürgen Habermas as my principal teacher and was extremely proud that he accepted me. I think I was in my fourth semester to become his doctoral student. But then I gradually moved to more free market positions. I did realize that there was something fundamentally wrong with Marxism. I encountered Böhm-Bawerk's criticism and that by and large convinced me that that was the wrong thing. But I discovered Mises only much later actually by some funny accident because my parents had both been refugees from East Germany. My mother's family had been expropriated by the Russians in 1946. Initially, she lived in an area in East Germany that had been occupied by the Americans. Then the Americans exchanged that province for what became West Berlin and moved out of that territory. Then the Russians moved in and the Russians expropriated all major landowners and my mother's family were major landowners. But most of my relatives lived in East Germany and we regularly visited them. You always had to pay an entrance fee to enter the paradise of workers and farmers. Since we stayed at relatives' houses, in order to, you had to somehow spend the money that you were forced to exchange. There were only two ways to do that. One was to buy Russian records of Russian composers and the other possibility was to buy collected works of Lenin, collected works of Stalin, collected works of Walter Ullbrich, who was the Prime Minister of East Germany and Erich Hornigar was his successor. One of my book purchases was a text that they used to train students in political economy. In this book, they mentioned all the major enemies and they mentioned, for instance, not only Birm Barber, with whom I had been familiar before, but also as the most evil of all, Ludwig von Mises. At that time I did not immediately start treating Ludwig von Mises, but at least I encountered his name and I knew that he was the guy that might be eventually worthwhile taking a look at. At the same time in West Germany you did not have these names of Hayek and Mises mentioned in any of the economic textbooks. I think the first economic textbooks I read in West Germany was the German translation of Paul Samuelsen's book and there was no mention of them, at least not in the editions that were available at that time, but there was mention of the fact that the East Block would eventually take over the West. It was just a matter of time and because I could see what was going in East Germany at that time it was enormous scarcity of things. Sometimes you could not get milk and the other day you could not get sausages and on the third day you could not get beer. I saw these types of descriptions the East would take over. The West were entirely ridiculous. Now how does it happen that there could have been a socialist in West Germany at all at the time? Given the clear contrast, we had a one system of socialism right on the other side of the wall and one that's predominantly capitalistic on the other side of the wall, how could anybody, somebody as brilliant as Habermas, have a favorite socialist system under those conditions? Because the socialist and social democratic parties in West Germany quickly reformed themselves due to the fact that they were placed in a country right next to the communist type. So the German social democrats were the first ones who became moderate social democrats as compared with those that wanted to have mass scale nationalization of industries and in countries that were further removed from the iron curtain, this transformation of the socialist and social democratic parties took much longer. So it did affect what the social democrats were all about that millions of people in the West of course had seen with their own eyes what was going on in the East. I remember after integration occurred you wrote an essay that still strikes me as absolutely brilliant in retrospect. There were aspects of integration of Germany that you regretted at the time. Do you want to explain what those were and maybe address the question whether you were right? Of course I think I was right. The alternatives at that time were either East Germany becomes part of West Germany so to speak and then you could immediately predict what would happen that the welfare state would be expanded to the East at massive costs involved and at the same time West Germany would become more socialistic because of the integration of these people who had lived under communism and had to a certain extent acquired the communist type of mentality and the other alternative would have been of course that East Germany becomes an independent state trying to stand on their own feet which would have forced them to introduce far more radical free market reforms than it became necessary due to the fact that they became subsidized up to this day by West Germany. So we call it a step towards freedom but it was also a lost opportunity. It was a great lost opportunity in actually some other countries that could not rely on some sponsor like West Germany bailing them out and subsidizing them did more drastic reforms. For instance the Czech Republic did better in this regard than they did in East Germany because there were simply no people in the West in these massive numbers who could be forced to subsidize. You once wrote an essay I remember quoting the words of Goethe praising the old German city-states and their liberality and the way that led to a world of free trade and free migration. Goethe's position in the early 19th century was so to speak a minority position. Most Germans crave to have a unified states because they looked at France and other centralized countries and wanted to have that and Goethe's position was in order to have a unification or you need the same currency, the same measures, the same language but it would be good to have competition between small entities and he compared Germany favorably to France which had been a centralized state and said look if you look at France everything is concentrated in Paris and if you go outside of Paris it is deep and dark province and in contrast you had 37 or 39 principalities in Germany each competing against each other each wanting to have the best university, each wanting to have the best painting galleries, the best theaters, the best orchestras and so forth and that was a phase that made Germany great and in the way the decline of Germany began with the unification of Germany after the Franco-Prussian war in 1870-71 and the unification was also achieved through means of war. Not all that different to what you see in the United States happening almost at the same time just a little bit before so Bismarck played a similar role to Lincoln in the United States by uniting Germany by means of war. Germany's outstanding position in terms of sciences and culture continued of course for a while afterwards because the old tradition stayed on for a while all these various universities still continue to exist but the University of Berlin became indeed and the leading university in Germany whereas before it was just one of the universities next to many others. One of the most counter-intuitive arguments you make I believe it's in democracy and it's the one I keep returning to because it's so alarming and so shocking is how you have related the prosperity of a nation to its propensity towards imperial conquests so that the more capitalistic a nation is the more wealthy it is but then also the wealthier and more expansionary its government tends to be very simple explanation. If you are a state at all then you can externalize the cost of aggression onto others who all states in a way tend to be aggressive but since aggression always involves costs as well you have to finance the tanks you have to finance the soldiers and so forth it tends to be the case that those states that are more liberal internally have a more prosperous population at their disposal so to speak and other things being roughly the same the size of the country's size of the population being roughly the same this allows you then to be more aggressive because you know you will tend to win out in wars except in wars that are blitzkriege or you immediately succeed in taking over another place but if a war is drawn out for a little bit then of course the prosperity of a country matters whether you will win or not and I have also used as to explain the paradox that why is it that the United States tends to conduct a more aggressive foreign policy for instance in the Soviet Union which internally was an utmost evil an empire but of course an empire not run by complete morons who did not know anything about economics whatsoever they did know of course that in a long drawn-out war they would tend to lose out against a comparatively large country such as the United States and because of that cared more about internal affairs keeping those things that they already controlled under control worse a country like the United States knows we will of course win all wars accordingly we can afford to be more aggressive in our foreign policy how much is this is this influenced by culture and the nature of a society I mean for example in the United States you have a kind of expansionary impulse at the root of our history whereas a country like Switzerland which is a very wealthy you see no kind of as far as I know no kind of expansionary impulse within that population I think very early in the Swiss history Switzerland also pursued aggressive policies and they were beaten back in this by countries that were significantly larger than they themselves were and then decided so to speak now we stay within the borders that currently exist and follow a policy of neutrality but but in the Swiss history that does exist in the early phases some imperialist impulse as well you know another thing that you've said I of course I mean I could speak all day about all the counterintuitive and conclusions that you've demonstrated in the course of your writings but one of them concerns your demonstration I remember one time about that the U.S. Constitution really represented an expansion of the state not really an attempt to to reign it in or or curb it would you say it's a general principle that anytime you you find a new constitution being asserted by a state that it's most likely there's an ulterior motive to to expand it beyond its it is always an attempt to to centralize because the confederation that existed before was obviously less centralized and the constitution was precisely the attempt to overcome the limitations of of a federation and create a central state initially a very weak central state but one that predicted predictably became ever more centralized you do you do find the same thing also in in Switzerland I mean even though they abstained of course from aggressive foreign policies largely due to the fact that they were surrounded by far larger countries and they themselves are initially almost all powers was arrested with the with the cantons which are so to speak the equivalents of the American states but this has also been in the course of time been gradually eroded and the central government in Switzerland has also acquired more and more power so the process is the same it has proceeded in a in a somewhat somewhat smaller pace than it did in in the United States even nowadays the cantons are far more powerful than the American American states are and in the Swiss case the the cantons are also still very homogeneous in a country like Switzerland where you have German speaking people we have French speaking people we have Italian speaking people and then a small group of they speak little or manic language a very small place the cantons are almost completely homogeneous otherwise it would have been difficult for Switzerland to stay as stable and as harmonious as it is because one nationality would have tried to dominate the others there is still quite a distinct difference between the German speaking parts of Switzerland and the French speaking parts of Switzerland the German speaking parts are more free market oriented less socialistic in their general outlook the French cantons are more so and even if they have plebiscites country-wide plebiscites you can you can see that the French speaking parts are more favorable disposed to becoming part of the European Union whereas the German speaking parts are vigorously opposed opposed to it so even though people mention Switzerland frequently as a multicultural society Switzerland is not in the sense a multicultural society because the cantons which are still quite influential the cantons are homogeneous you mentioned the European Union you could cite that as a great example of how a constitution leads to an expansion of the state and yet the history of wanting to unite Europe was a liberal dream it was a desire to increase liberty the initial idea was of course to erect a free trade a free trade zone but a free trade zone only requires two sentences whatever you want to ship out you ship out whatever you want to import you can import but that has almost from the very beginning of the European Union been forgotten and instead the attempt has been to harmonize the tax and regulation structure in all of Europe that has not been accomplished completely there still exist no free trade in in Europe if you watch German TV for instance they have constantly reports that the German border control has again arrested a few people who were smuggling cigarettes that are tax less in Poland to to Germany despite the ultimate goal we want to have free trade there is a skiing region in Austria that borders onto Italy and you can ski down one side of the hill you are Italy and you ski down the other side of the hill then you are in Austria and even in that ski resort they had also the Austrian TV reported was great pride about great accomplishments of the Austrian border controls having arrested again a few people who hadn't bought a few leaders alcohol too much in Italy and smuggled it over to Austria and vice vice versa so the whole thing has very little to do with was free trade and as far as a euro was concerned it had always been my my conviction I have also written on this that the purpose of that was to weaken in particular the German mark because a euro would be of course more inflationary than the German German mark had been the German mark had always been some sort of obstacle for other countries to inflate as much as they really desire to inflate that had nothing to do with specific German virtues but it has something to do with the fact that Germany had experienced the hyperinflations twice and the German public was a little bit more sensitive towards inflation so the German Bundesbank was a little bit more reluctant to follow the general inflationary trend that all central banks naturally how fragile do you think the EU is today do you think it could blow up and revert back to its old nationalist schemes I hope I hope it would happen but and I'm always amazed with how much the Germans are putting up because the Germans are the main financiers of of the southern European countries the cycle is so to speak that the crisis broke out in the periphery and the Germans have to pay the bills for it when we had the conference two years ago in Salamanca and we were driving from Madrid to Salamanca on beautiful new expressways with very little traffic I remember then Hazels who are to this photo told me look you guys have financed all of this for us if you drive on German expressway they are somewhat in far less good shape than the Spanish expressways expressways are in the German so far don't seem to rebel against it but the debt the sovereign debt crisis could make the difference could make the difference so yes Greece is in worse shape Spain is in worse shape Italy is in worse shape than Germany but Germany is also in pretty bad shape and will get increasingly in worse shape given the fact that they have to bail out these other places eventually there might be a rebellion of the German public against this but the Germans of course suffer from this problem that they have a special history and feel eternally guilty and are not allowed to rebel we mentioned some of your books maybe in the order in which they've appeared in English you have a book on methodology methodology the method of the Austrian school of economics and then you had a theory of socialism and capitalism which is still being used as probably the leading compared of economic systems text within the Austrian world and then after that democracy the god that failed was probably your most popular book and then economics and ethics of private private property which is your most theoretical um treatise um am i leaving anything out in English i don't know i've edited the miss of national national defense and they've had a fresh riff in your honor which is a wonderful book put together by Stefan Kinsella yeah and very yeah that's a fun a really fun book now how many languages has your writings has your writings been translated into i think that 25 plus languages what did you what would you say is your most widely distributed book most widely read book i think the democracy democracies are god that failed is the most widely distributed book but in recent years the theory of socialism and capitalism has been has been several translations um as a Romanian translation came out um mises brazil has published uh that book also in portuguese translation they also published the economic science and the austrian that's a message of okay um which was actually in fact a transcription of a series of speeches right yeah i think one article was added to it but initially it was uh it was my first lecture that i gave in the united states the first uh mises university that we held it uh at stanford yeah yeah um and um your your book um democracy was published by transaction but we've published your economics and ethics book um but i very good and i i regret in a way that the book was published by a transit by a commercial publisher you have no control over it they have even prevented some translations of the book to come out because it should it charged uh two high prices uh i mean the book has been translated into six or seven languages also but um i get constantly compliance i cannot download it and yeah it's not available free online it is but at the time the possibilities that exist nowadays simply did not exist i mean many of these things have just changed in in recent in recent years yeah it's easy to look back and say oh well that was a mistake we should have done ourselves but yeah i know it wasn't i mean looking back i would say that was a big mistake that i had done it at the time i was happy that uh a reputable publisher like transit meant a lot at the time you know i should say about your theory of socialism and capitalism it's not just a comparative economics text you have in there the essence of your property rights theory which um which i don't think we need to say anything more about this but i would just encourage everybody to go and read that and understand very uh with great precision what you're saying because whatever you say you say very carefully and uh to my mind you uh really might be the first uh thinker uh which is a remarkable thing to say who laid out such a coherent view of what constitutes property that it makes it to makes it possible to so clearly delineate what what is and what isn't and no property rights theory before yours really was as thorough and it has a special application to the area of intellectual property so i mean uh the worldview of Hans-Hern Hermann Hoppe has a profound um explanatory power in the world of digital media for example you know that the book has also a german predecessor um the part part of the previous german book was called eigentum anahi und staat i incorporated into that but i have also certain things in that german book that i think are even better than uh than in that uh theory of socialism and and capitalism uh sometimes you look back at your own things you are just amazed that you did good things also when you were young yeah well i've read the book probably three or four times and and uh the first time you read it you think well he's being points out that socialism is impoverishing whereas capitalism is good you do a lot more than that there's a lot of theory in that book and you have to really read it several times to in order to fully appreciate just what a substantive contribution that book really is um Hans Hoppe thank you for sitting down with me for a few minutes there's so much we could talk about and i hope there's a time in the future before we close here though maybe you should say something about your own society yeah i i found that that society is some sort of counterpart to uh the monpelerin uh society uh which refused to have me as a member for reasons that i do not want to dwell upon um and uh the society is um by invitation by invitation only i want to have it small i want to have it intimate i run it like a salon um and want to assemble hardcore libertarians or spardians um it is controlled by those people it's controlled completely by myself with some good advisors that i have in the in the background um but it also wants to have yeah synthesizing conservatives uh politically incorrect uh conservatives um who are also personally nice uh individuals so that it is like a gathering of friends many of them come regularly every year and there's always a small number of additional people rotating rotating people um and um our purpose is to yeah to have intellectual entertainment uh stimulating entertainment uh to not be afraid to talk about any type of subjects even about subjects that sometimes would not be talked about at mesis institute functions or at any other functions um you know people come back from your conference and they always tell me they say you know hantapa is just the most fun guy ever he's just a blast to be with which is a funny thing to say i think i think it i think it is not just me i don't think i'm such a blast a fun person but i given that i'm more of a dry northern german um i love to have people surround me that draws the best out of me and and contribute to the whole event being a big blast well i think you're a blast and i've enjoyed visiting with you today thank you so much thank you so much