From Joakim Fagerström on Mises Sweden, an interview he conducted at the 7th Annual Meeting of the PFS:
Doug French is Senior Editor at Laissez Faire Club and served as the president at the Mises Institute for many years. Doug received his master degree under the direction of Murray N. Rothbard at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas after many years in the business of banking.
Doug is one of the reasons why the Mises Institute has expanded so much over the years. He has not only achieved a lot in his life but he is also a true inspiration for other people. Doug knows how to build great teams to achieve results. He is always humble and ready to share his knowledge. As an example he spent an evening sharing his knowledge on PFS with younger think thanks. It is truly a privilege to be able to ask and get advice from someone like Doug. The good thing with Doug is that he has experience from “real” think thanks not the kind of public policy think thanks that wants to stay close to the political power in Washington and get corrupted step by step.
Doug was also kind enough to give this interview. In this interview you will hear him talk about PFS and the plans for Laissez Fair Books which I am sure will see a fantastic growth the coming years together with Doug and Jeffrey.
You can read his latest articles at Laissez Faire Books here.
A few months ago we were invited to speak at the European Students For Liberty regional conference in Stockholm. Our institute has previously written articles for ESFL and we have also delivered a webinar for them, on May 1st on the topic The Myth of the Socialist Paradise Sweden. It was a great event with about 200 attendees and it was, to our knowledge, greatly appreciated. Thus, we were truly looking forward to speaking at a one of their conferences that was going to be held in our hometown.
The topic of the speech was “How to achieve freedom”. In the speech we were going to bring up Mises and use him as a role model in the struggle for freedom, and how you had to be uncompromising in your struggle and never water down your message in order to better suit the masses. What mattered was devotion to truth and to your principles. After all, Mises in his memoirs concludes that if there was one thing that he regretted it was that he compromised too much (Memoirs, p. 60).
As a part of our attendance at the event we were planning on selling books from many of the great authors and legends like Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Henry Hazlitt, Stephan Kinsella, Linda and Morris Tannehill and many more. Since these books are hard to get and a bit more expensive in Sweden we always try to sell them at good prices. We were granted the permission to have a table to sell the books from during the day. At this point everything was ok.
However, a few days before the event we announced at the ESFL event page that we were going to sell these books during the day and about ten minutes later we got a message from the organizers asking us to immediately remove the “Hoppe comment”. [continue reading…]
O fortunate age! O happy times! in which shall be made public my incomparable atchievements, worthy to be ingraved in brass, on marble sculptured, and in painting shewn, as great examples to futurity! and O! thou sage inchanter, whosoever thou may’st be, doom’d to record the wondrous story! forget not, I beseech thee, the trusty Property and Freedom Society, the firm companion of my various fate! ~ Don Quixote de la Mancha1
Complying with Rothbard’s strict unanimity criterion, Turkey is the only modern day libertarian country. It is difficult for those who don’t speak a word of Turkish to comprehend the marvel, but I was able to get a good taste after interviewing scores of English-speakers in Turkey, all of whom were anarchocapitalist. This must be due to the diplomatic manoeuvrings and popular scheming of Turkey’s Property and Freedom Society (PFS), especially its annual meetings, with The Honourable Hans-Hermann Hoppe as host alongside his wife Gülçin as “the indispensable framework”. I was very fortunate that the 7th annual PFS meeting coincided with my recent visit to the southwest Turkish city of Bodrum.
Bodrum has so rich a history that it is even where “the father of history” Herodotus resided, and so, although I do not claim to be a professional historian, its history of historical awareness plausibly explains how it became the most libertarian country in the world today. The conference venue was the Hotel Karia Princess, which sounds like a cruise ship, and in the beginning of its history the evidence would indicate that it was a cruise ship that decided to stay put at the best location rather than travel to pick up passengers, or, more likely, to return them. The rooms were large enough for a modest harem. The food! The food was fit for a: libertarian. And the drinks! At 16 months since the last Property and Freedom Society meeting, it was a long time between drinks. And for Duncan of the U.K., Doolittle of the U.S. and De Roeck of Belgium, it looked like it was also a long time between meals. Evidently drinking like a fish has a different meaning to eating like a fish. It is very libertarian to think of progress as weight loss.
What I found most representative of PFS was a conversation I had involving the youthful Kinsella jnr. He is understandably so familiar with censoring his opinions that his father had to remind him that it is okay to speak his mind at PFS, which Hoppe proclaims a “political correctness free zone”. I think everyone struggled a little with this; jetlag was a non-issue compared with turning down our self-censorship settings. Many of us had forgotten where our self-censorship setting was, as we find it easier to just change the channel. I wonder if the popularity of sport can be explained as simply people finding somewhere where they are allowed to speak their mind and genuinely speak out in plain language against the opposition.
What I found fiercest was the very gentlemanly Karl-Peter Schwarz chastising Václav Klaus and Tyler Cowen for their opposition to returning land confiscated by governments to their rightful owners.
What I found funniest was Hoppe reading out the many functions of government that Hayek supported. Next time Hoppe delivers that speech there needs to be an intermission. But even without an intermission, or any time constraints of any sort since Hoppe wrote the schedule, even then! there was still only time for the speech to be just basically a list of where Hayek supported government.
Somewhere in between the two lie neo-reactionaries. I can’t quite get a handle on this term, but I have been seeing it with rising frequency this past few months. Is it really possible to have a category that includes both Jonah Goldbergand the weird but brilliant Mencius Moldbug? (I am a regular reader of MM, insofar as one can be a regular reader of a blogger who sometimes goes two months between posts.)
One percipient observer sees the beginnings of an entirely new kind of conservatism, distinct from all the foregoing: a “Dark Enlightenment,” of which I am (he says) one of the fuglemen, along with the aforementioned Mencius Moldbug.
I have been invited to contribute a chapter to this book of appreciations of Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Now, he is a person of forbidding achievements. He has made important contributions toeconomics, to political theory, to law, and to epistemology, among much else. He is also a person of much organizational ability, and the conferences he runs at Bodrum for his Property and Freedom Society have rapidly established themselves as one of the high points in the libertarian calendar.
My friend asked me this as our van accelerated away on our departure from Bodrum, Turkey.
I was unable to answer him, frankly, because I had stopped noticing. I guess I had been smiling permanently since my arrival at the Property and Freedom Society conference six days earlier.
Last year, my dear friend and blogger-colleague, Andy Duncan, wrote an excellent article entitled “A Few Days Outside the Asylum”. This beautifully summarized how wonderful and special the annual PFS Conference becomes to its attendees. Andy is a far better writer than I am and everyone would be served to read (or re-read) his wonderful article, which you can find here.
Why would anyone want to travel to Turkey and endure such cost and trouble, just to hear a few days of lectures that will be posted for free viewing on the Internet, anyway?
Ah, but that is only one of the pearls of distributed wisdom that one receives in Bodrum.
The Eighth Annual Meeting of the PFS will be held from Thursday, September 19, to Tuesday, September 24, 2013, in Bodrum, Turkey, at the Hotel Karia Princess. Those interested in attending should contact Dr. Hoppe or Mr. Grözinger, Administrative Secretary, regarding conditions, availability, and requirements.
The Seventh Annual Meeting of the PFS was held in Bodrum, Turkey, from Thursday September 27 through Monday October 1, 2012. The list of speakers and topics may be found here. Audio and video of the presentations will be available presently. The list of speakers for the Sixth Annual Meeting (May 26-30, 2011) may be found in the Program; video of the presentations are available here.
Vytautas is one of these young libertarians that give you real hope about the future. Vytautas is young smart, full of energy, well-educated and would make any socialist tremble with fear. He is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Lithuanian Free Market Institute and lives in Vilnius, Lithuania.Lithuanian Free Market Institute is a quite big and active Institute and employs 12 people. Remigijus Šimašius who is a frequent visitor at the PFS was the President of Lithuanian Free Market Institutefrom 2006-2008 but became the Minister of Justice 2008 in Lithuania. I was really happy to meet Vytautas at PFS and we had a very nice interview where he told me about PFS, his work at the Institute and the future. It was great to do this interview and we wish Vytautas all the best in the future and hope that we can cooperate more between Sweden and Lithuania in the future.
From Joakim Fagerström on Mises Sweden, an interview he conducted at the 7th Annual Meeting of the PFS:
Mr Helio Beltrão is the President and one of the founders of Mises Brasil. I met Helio three years ago and he inspired us to start mises.se. Helio continues to be a very close friend and ally in the struggle for freedom. Mises Brasil and Mises Sweden has very close ties and I hope we will continue to have this for many years to come. In this interview Helio tell us about many good things that are happening with Mises Brasil, about PFS and his personal background in the financial industry. So I give you this very nice and relaxed interview with Mr Helio Beltrão recorded somewhere outside Bodrum Turkey on the Aegean Sea on what is known as “Bad Boyz Boat II”.
Sorry for the background noise but it just a bunch of very nice libertarians having the time of their life!
The group photo from the recently-concluded 7th Annual Meeting of the PFS is below. More pictures to be posted soon; pictures from previous years are on the Media page.
I was very pleased to be able to interview the living legend Mr Jeffrey Tucker by the pool at the Property and Freedom Society 2012. Mr Tucker is the former editor of mises.org and the current Executive Editor of Laissez Faire Books. Thanks to him mises.org has grew enormously thanks to the fantastic web site amongst other things. I am sure that Mr Tucker and Mr French will be as successful in expanding Laissez Faire Books in many years to come.
Every time you meet Mr Tucker he is everything you would imagine him to be: a real gentleman, full of inspiration and a passion about everything beautiful in life. In Turkey I personally witnessed that you can actually look good in a bow tie even if you go for a swim. In this interview Mr. Tucker tell us all about PFS, the goals with Laissez-Faire Books, about Turkey and his recent book A Beautiful Anarchy. How can we build and achieve liberty for ourselves in our lifetime?
We also discuss Professor Hoppe’s most recent book The Great Fiction which Mr. Tucker say will make you a ”dangerous man” if you read it. You can buy both these books from exclusive from Laissez-Faire Books or for free by becoming a member here. In the end Professor Hoppe joined us for some comments about his book and the PFS.
I am reading both books right now and you can look forward to a review here at mises.se soon.
I had a chance to interview the very likable and intelligent Roman Skaskiw at PFS2012 this year. I met Roman last year at PFS2011 and had the chance to listen to his great speech about his journey from being an agent of the state to the conclusion that the state is wrong and evil. This was one of my favourite speeches last year. In this interview Roman tell us about what PFS means for him, about his speech last year and about his new adventures in Ukraine. I give you the great Roman Skaskiw.
Another post from Joakim Fagerström about the recently-concluded 7th Annual Meeting of the PFS is repixeled below. Previous reports from this year and other year are listed on our Press page.
I recorded around 15 small movies and interviews at the Property and Freedom Society 2012 and will publish them one by one. I had a lot of fun doing the interviews and they are really really good so I hope you will enjoy them. The first movie is the Inflation Blues performed by Professor Hunt Tooley and Joe Becker. A great song and fantastic performance in the honour of Ludwig von Mises 131st birthday!
As noted here, PFS 20, the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society, will be held from Thursday, September 18, 2025 to Tuesday, September 23, 2025, in Bodrum, Turkey, at the Hotel Karia Princess.
Those interested in attending should contact Dr. Hoppe or Mr. Thomas Jacob (jacob@pfs-zurich.ch) (Administrative Secretary/Membership), regarding conditions, availability, and requirements.
Speakers and topics for previous Annual Meetings may be found here.
To donate with BITCOIN please use the address below. If you would like us to credit your payment (for dues, conference fees, etc.) please email Stephan Kinsella (nskinsella@gmail.com) when you make the bitcoin payment.
17M9V6m5X5Da4vNM5wWLjzcHz9qF36FPk6
“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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