Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “On the American Ideology and its Proponents and Beneficiaries,” Property and Freedom Journal (Aug. 23, 2026). Edited transcript of a speech delivered in German at the Austrian National Library in Vienna on 3 December 2016, during the tenth-anniversary conference of scholarium, which had the theme “The Future of Europe.” The translation (by Ohad Osterreicher) and original German text are provided.
A Texas court on Friday slashed a $50 million judgment to about $6 million against Infowars founder Alex Jones after he falsely claimed the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooting was a hoax.
Of course:
The ruling does not affect a $1.25 billion judgment against Jones in Connecticut, but is a legal victory for him after he and his company, Free Speech Systems, were found liable for damages for claiming the mass shooting didn’t happen.
Of course, all types of intellectual property, including trademark and reputation rights/defamation law, should be abolished:
Nearly three decades after the long-defunct Spy magazine mocked Donald Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian,” one of the publication’s co-founders says the Republican front-runner is likely still not over the epithet.
In a joint interview with NPR published Monday, co-founders Graydon Carter, now the editor of Vanity Fair, and Kurt Andersen, now a novelist and radio show host, remarked upon the phrase’s origins as well as Trump’s long-running dispute over his anatomy. The phrase’s staying power was evidenced in last week’s debate after Trump guaranteed that there was “no problem” with the size of his fingers, or more pointedly, with the correlation of that size to another body part.
“[Trump] blames me for this more than Kurt. He’ll send me pictures, tear sheets from magazines, and he did it as recently as [last] April. With a gold Sharpie, he’ll circle his fingers and in his handwriting say, ‘See, not so short,'” Carter recalled. “And this April when he sent me one, I just — I should have held on to the thing, but I sent it right back by messenger with a note, a card — stapled to the top, saying, ‘Actually, quite short.’ And I know it just gives him absolute fits. And now that it’s become sort of part of the whole campaign rhetoric, I’m sure he wants to just kill me — with those little hands.” [continue reading…]
In 2009, the Mises Institute published Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a project Guido Hülsmann and and Stephan Kinsella spearheaded to honor Hans Hoppe on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Only a few of the pieces were published independently; we are posting some of them here in this Bookstream.
The Routledge Handbook of Classical Liberalism is now available – for free! – on Amazon Kindle. I don’t know how long this generous offer will last, so interested readers should act fast. The volume is edited by big-name libertarian/classical liberal scholars Richard Epstein, Mario Rizzo, and Liya Palagashvili. Epstein, of course, is probably the most prominent living libertarian legal scholar in the world. There are chapters on a wide range of issues in law, economics, and political theory, including one by me on “Land-Use Regulation.” A version of my chapter is also available on SSRN here. Other contributors include such luminaries as Peter Boettke, Tom Merrill, Richard Wagner, Alex Nowrasteh, and many, many more. [continue reading…]
In 2009, the Mises Institute published Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a project Guido Hülsmann and and Stephan Kinsella spearheaded to honor Hans Hoppe on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Only a few of the pieces were published independently; we are posting some of them here in this Bookstream.
Rahim Taghizadegan, “Zug: A Trading House for the World: How a poor little canton learned to connect capital and strangers productively,” scholarium (19 August 2026)
In July 2024 I closed my Vienna base and moved to Zug with my family. Choosing Switzerland still felt like a vote for Austria and the Alpine region: close enough not to sever the old links. A short thread on what Zug gets right—and what it risks losing. 1/5 pic.twitter.com/fGz4RBxE2P
— Rahim Taghizadegan (scholarium.at) (@scholarium_at) August 20, 2026
Zug: A Trading House for the World
How a poor little canton learned to connect capital and strangers productively
Rahim Taghizadegan ·
When I moved with my family from Vienna to the canton of Zug in 2024, I arrived in a place whose everyday achievement becomes fully apparent only through living there: safety and reliability, short distances, an astonishing proximity of global business and nature, authorities who answer, and a landscape that is not merely admired but inhabited. A newcomer has, at first, nothing to explain about this. He has to notice what generations before him built and to be grateful for it. [continue reading…]
Are the media responsible for the demise of a famous black professor at the University of Cambridge? Jason Arday was found dead last week after resigning from the university following widespread serious plagiarism allegations. But his defenders say Arday was unfairly targeted by racist reactionaries. Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, assailed the media for engaging in a campaign of “pernicious public shaming,” and the activist group Stand Up to Racism said he’d been subjected to a racist witch hunt.
Most notably, the anti-racist activist Ibram X. Kendi stated unequivocally that “the media lynched Jason Arday.”
As outlined earlier, an individual must be a fully qualified member of their local militia in order to be eligible to hold any form of public office and, while required to maintain proficiency, is suspended from enforcement operations for the duration of their time on the tax dole. Legislation may be set by public officials but is executed by the people themselves, as militia or their subordinates. [continue reading…]
In my journey from political blank slate, to rejecting both Democrats and Republicans, to embracing Randian minarchist libertarianism, and then (six months later, as the joke goes) full anarchism, my biggest stumbling block wasn’t the roads (ha ha) or even the police, courts, or military.
Nope, it was so-called “intellectual property (IP).”
Indoctrinated as I was, I couldn’t see how creativity and productivity could exist without patent and copyright protections. Worse, I thought IP was good and true, just and moral, as Rand (and my college professors) insisted. [continue reading…]
In 2009, the Mises Institute published Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a project Guido Hülsmann and and Stephan Kinsella spearheaded to honor Hans Hoppe on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Only a few of the pieces were published independently; we are posting some of them here in this Bookstream.
Complementing other online resources gathering work of the Austrian school and Austro-libertarianism, such as the Austrian Economics Wiki and The Liberty Archive, see the quite impressive collection of resources at Mises Austria (Mises.at), The Original Austrians, a digital library of thinkers and works from the Austrian School of economics, published by scholarium.at, founded by longtime PFS member Rahim Taghizadegan.
The repository has an impressive and growing host of useful information organized into various subsections, including:
Thinkers: Organized into five generations, from Origins and the Classical Austrian School (Generations I and II) all the way to Generation V, “Postwar Revival and the New Austrian Economics.”
Lineages: Graphically illustrating five generations of the Austrian School and their lineages: teachers and students, circles and collegial ties.
Places: Sixty-one places where the Austrian School thought, taught and emigrated: Vienna as epicentre, Lemberg and Brünn as origin, Geneva, London, New York and Auburn as nodes of a tradition kept in motion.
Works: 2,717 titles of the Austrian School: 879 books and 1,838 essays, reviews and lectures.
Author’s note: This year marks the 100th anniversary of Murray Rothbard’s birth, and much has deservedly been written to mark the occasion. But any understanding of Rothbard at UNLV in the early 1990s would be incomplete without a corresponding discussion of the impact of Hans-Hermann Hoppe. It was a magical, if abbreviated, time for Austrian Economics.
Hoppe walked into the seminar room, set his notes on the table without sitting down, and started talking before most of us had our pens out. No preamble, no small talk about the reading—just straight into the labor theory of value, mid-thought, as if we’d been in the middle of a conversation he was simply resuming. That was how every one of his lectures began, and by the third week I’d stopped being surprised by it and started scrambling to keep up instead.
He was tall and gaunt, with glasses in that unmistakably ‘eighties style—sleek, contemporary, of-the-moment, not the thick, heavy frames people tend to picture on a European academic—and a Germanic inflection so thick it seemed less like an accent and more like a warning. He looked like a man built specifically to deliver bad news to bad ideas, and that, it turned out, was exactly his function in the seminar room. [continue reading…]
From @conza and conza.au: libertarian and other works distilled into slide decks, from Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe, Peter Janich, Kinsella, and others. See snapshot below, and conza.au-a-curated-library-of-liberty (pdf).
In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged there is a famous scene when a series of irrational mistakes lead to the Taggart Comet disaster. It is caused when railroad officials, under political pressure from a powerful passenger and unwilling to take responsibility, ordered the Comet into an eight-mile mountain tunnel with an unsafe coal-burning locomotive instead of a diesel. The train stalled from the fumes, passengers and crew asphyxiated, and an oncoming Army munitions train crashed into it, triggering an explosion that permanently sealed the tunnel. The catastrophe resulted from the broader collapse of competence and judgment under collectivist policies that had driven capable people out of the system.
Rand’s description in effect blames the victim-passengers for sharing the irrational views that led to it. She starts out:
It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Time Preference, Government, and the Process of De-Civilization—From Monarchy to Democracy,” in Democracy: The God That Failed (Transaction, 2001)
Vespasianus, Titus and Domitian in a work by painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema
An Australian study dismantles the idea that imperial succession was improvised and shows deliberate strategies to ensure family power for generations
Were Roman emperors simply improvisers who waited to see what would happen after their death? Or did they carefully plan for the future of their dynasties, thinking not only about their immediate successor but also about several generations to come? A new study published in the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies answers: most emperors did think strategically about the long term.
Caillan Davenport, a researcher at the Australian National University, has analyzed succession plans from Augustus to Commodus (from 27 B.C. to A.D. 192) and concludes that, despite the absence of fixed inheritance laws, emperors deployed multiple strategies to keep the throne in their family.
The work introduces the concept of “dynastic scenario thinking”—taken from studies of early modern Europe—to explain how emperors anticipated threats and complications in the transmission of power.
As I noted in “My Years with the Mises Institute,” Property and Freedom Journal (May 2, 2026), in the section “Mises Academy and the High-Water Mark,” in its digital heyday under the ambitious leadership of Jeffrey Tucker and President Doug French, Tucker and French spearheaded the formation of the Mises Academy, taking advantage of (live) remote courses delivered over the Internet. As I noted in that article, since the ouster of Tucker and French, Mises.org has declined in many ways. The website indicates Mises Academy is still alive, but it’s hard to tell if this is so—though they are still begging for financing for it (Help Us Expand the Mises Academy!) despite sitting on an $80M warchest. Whatever. All I can say is, good thing I insisted on downloading copies my stuff at the time.
In any case, PFS readers may find of interest some of the following Mises Academy courses I conducted, back in 2010–2011. These included multi-course lectures, “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics” (taught in both 2010 and 2011); “Libertarian Legal Theory: Property, Conflict, and Society,” “Libertarian Controversies,” and “The Social Theory of Hoppe,” and one webinar, “Obama’s Patent Reform: Improvement or Continuing Calamity?” All are available at the Kinsella on Liberty Podcast as well as Youtube. [continue reading…]
Murray Rothbard was a prolific author, an Austrian economist, and a promoter of free market anarchism, which he called “anarcho-capitalism.”
In this video, Rothbard gives a tribute to his mentor in Austrian economics, Ludwig von Mises, at a Libertarian Party convention in Pennsylvania in 1984. Rothbard discusses Mises’s work and life, and the growing popularization of his ideas in the United States.
A prolific author and Austrian economist, Murray Rothbard promoted a form of free market anarchism he called “anarcho-capitalism.”
Economist Murray N. Rothbard mounted the most comprehensive intellectual challenge ever attempted against the legitimacy of government. During a career that spanned more than 40 years, he explained why private individuals, private companies and other voluntary associations can do whatever needs to be done. [continue reading…]
Murray Rothbard shares how he became a libertarian and his subsequent intellectual journey.
A prolific author and Austrian economist, Murray Rothbard promoted a form of free market anarchism he called “anarcho-capitalism.”
In this talk, given at the 1981 National Libertarian Party Convention, Rothbard tells the story of how he came to learn about economics and libertarianism as he grew up in the Bronx and attended Columbia University in the 1930s and 40s. He reminisces about meeting Frank Chodorov, Baldy Harper, George Stigler, and Ludwig von Mises, and takes a number of audience questions.
In 2009, the Mises Institute published Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a project Guido Hülsmann and and Stephan Kinsella spearheaded to honor Hans Hoppe on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Only a few of the pieces were published independently; we are posting some of them here in this Bookstream.
A property-centered legal order encompasses a broad variety of enforceable crimes.As expected, all of them are oriented toward the integrity of private property.The basic principles of natural law, do all you have agreed to do and do not encroach upon other persons or their property, provide the basis for contract and criminal law.Both are rooted in the integrity of property and its conflict-free exchange. [continue reading…]
On Sept. 17–18, 2005, Professors Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Guido Hülsmann presented a two-day 11-lecture series, “Weekend Seminar in Austrian Economics,” in Klampenborg (just north of Copenhagen, Denmark), under the auspices of the Copenhagen Institute and Liberator. Program (local, and at right). See also Copenhagen Institute hosts Hoppe and Hülsmann, Mises Economics Blog (Sept. 1, 2005).
As noted here, the 2026 Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society will be held from Thursday, September 17, 2026 to Tuesday, September 22, 2026.
Rothbard at 100 is in production! As you can see, the books are printed in premium hardcover with gold foil stamping, and then they will be covered with a dust jacket. Also available as an audiobook and eBook. Preorder your copy now: https://t.co/iaEh0bk5G0pic.twitter.com/bapPGmhFHb
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“Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.” — FrédéricBastiat
“Because the concept of property, for instance, is so basic that everyone seems to have some immediate understanding of it, most people never think about it carefully and can, as a consequence, produce at best a very vague definition. But starting from imprecisely stated or assumed definitions and building a complex network of thought upon them can lead only to intellectual disaster. For the original imprecisions and loopholes will then pervade and distort everything derived from them. To avoid this, the concept of property must first be clarified.” —Hans-Hermann Hoppe, TSC, ch. 2
The Property and Freedom Society (PFS; Facebook) stands for an uncompromising intellectual radicalism: for justly acquired private property, freedom of contract, freedom of association—which logically implies the right to not associate with, or to discriminate against—anyone in one's personal and business relations—and unconditional free trade. It condemns imperialism and militarism and their fomenters, and champions peace. It rejects positivism, relativism, and egalitarianism in any form, whether of "outcome" or "opportunity," and it has an outspoken distaste for politics and politicians. As such it seeks to avoid any association with the policies and proponents of interventionism, which Ludwig von Mises identified in 1946 as the fatal flaw in the plan of the many earlier and contemporary attempts by intellectuals alarmed by the rising tide of socialism and totalitarianism to found an anti-socialist ideological movement. Mises wrote: "What these frightened intellectuals did not comprehend was that all those measures of government interference with business which they advocated are abortive. ... There is no middle way. Either the consumers are supreme or the government."
(A more complete statement of our Principles can be found here.)
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