Hoppe out, Cianti in!

Written in Spanish, above is a post from Lorenzo Cianti on X, celebrating Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s removal as Mises Institute Distinguished Senior Fellow:

SEE YOU SOON, HANS! I’m glad to see that the libertarian movement is distancing itself from toxic figures who praise dictatorial regimes, hate Milei out of prejudice and have tried to silence those who do not share their dogmatism. LONG LIVE FREEDOM, DAMN

I came across this post because the Mises Institute published and promoted yet another piece of propaganda in favor of Milei a few days ago:

The article by the same Cianti was not only published, but also awarded by the Mises Institute during the latest Austrian Economics Research Conference:

(One silver lining: at least his paper only won second place in the Mises Institute’s annual Kenneth Garschina Undergraduate Student Essay Contest; First place went to Ludovico Lumicisi, for a paper that cites and relies heavily on work by Hoppe and Stephan Kinsella.)¹

While people may accuse me of ad hominem, I have simply no interest in refuting what’s evidently another shitty Mileist piece, which has the audacity to call a “Rothbardian assault” on “collectivism” the actions of a genocide-defending Zionist extremist like Milei. Rather, I will focus only on the author, to show the kind of scum that is being promoted by the Mises Institute—even though this trend is anything but new. Regarding the content, I will only point to a passage from Hoppe’s introduction—which Mises Institute Chief Editor Ryan McMaken refused to publish—to the commemorative book for Murray Rothard’s centenary, that the Institute refused to merely announce:

           To be sure, Milei has read some Rothbard, but his knowledge of Rothbard’s work is rather limited and superficial. He has also introduced some economic “free market” reforms in Argentina that have been inspired by “Austrians.” But he has done nothing truly radical, deserving the praise of any anarcho-capitalist. He has not closed the central bank, as originally promised, and there are no signs that this will happen any time soon. He has brought consumer price inflation down from 300% to some 30% (wow!), but the money supply (of all monetary aggregates) has continued to grow rapidly (even more so than under several of his predecessors). He has centralized rather than decentralized government power and is on record as being fundamentally opposed to secession. In addition to assuming (rather than repudiating, as Rothbard would have recommended) the existing government debt owed to the IMF of some 40 billion USD, he burdened the Argentinian people with another 42 billion USD of debt, solicited from the IMF, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, and in order to avoid insolvency right before the Argentinian mid-term election, in October 2025, he further required a rescue package of some 20 billion USD from “his dear friend” Donald Trump.

So let’s see what else Cianti’s social media reveals about the new stance of the Mises Institute. Uppermost, he rejects libertarianism in favor of conservatism:

Cianti is a fanatical Zionist, to the point of being an admirer of some of America’s most despicable public figures, such as Laura Loomer:

He loves the state that Rothbard considered the worst of all states and believes in the right of Jews to steal land from Palestinians:

Cianti also loves Trump—so much that he favors tariffs of 200% being imposed on his own country, harming Italian exporting producers and American importing consumers, simply because Giorgia Meloni is supposedly antisemitic. And he pathetically buys all the bullshit of neocon warmonger talking points:

In his Instagram profile, we can see how much he loves two figures considered despicable by Rothbard, Margaret Thatcher and Ayn Rand:

Recently, James Lindsay made one of the most idiotic posts in internet history, praising Milei as a real libertarian and accusing Hoppe and several Rothbardian libertarians like Dave Smith and Tom Woods of being Marxists for subscribing to Hoppe’s article “Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis“:

Guess who happily shared this complete nonsense?

Cianti has no qualms about showing just how much he despises Hoppe and true libertarians, whom the little Italian genius labels “libertarian maximalists”:

And it gets even worse, since Cianti is one of those Hoppephobes types who call (1, 2) the leading living dean of Austro-libertarianism a Nazi:

The kid is not to blame; he clearly does not know Rothbard’s work and has no idea what he is talking about. If and when he discovers what Rothbard really stood for, he will immediately stop considering himself a Rothbardian or cease to be a neocon Zionist. The real culprits here are the editors and directors of the Mises Institute, who should know better, and on top of this all, yesterday published one more article from Cianti. Here’s something curious: Cianti criticizes Trump in his latest article, even though he actually defends Trump regularly on X and just five days ago he was cheering Trump on:

If Walter Block was expelled for supporting the Zionist genocidal project, they should not have continued to give a platform to other Zionists like Daniel Lacalle and now this Cianti Zioboy, while “distancing itself from toxic figures” like Hoppe and leaving genuine Austro-libertarians like Oscar Grau completely out of the media spotlight. This is incoherence on steroids.

So, here they are: Hoppe out, Cianti in!

1. See Lumicisi, Rothbardian Property Rights in a Dangerous Digital World. [↩]