PFS member Roman Skaskiw has an interesting article up on Mises Daily today: Is the United States Too Big to Succeed?, full of interesting Hoppean insights comparing the situation in the US to that in Europe.
Roman’s previous Mises Daily article, The Military Mentality, was based on his speech “‘Fighting for Freedom’ in Afghanistan: Unintended Consquences and Military Mentality. A Combat Soldier’s Report,” delivered at the PFS 2011 Annual Meeting (video).
There is a very interesting five part interview (a sixth part is forthcoming), Journey into a Libertarian Future: Part V – Dark Realities (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4). It’s by Andrew Dittmer, who recently finished his PhD in mathematics at Harvard. Dittmer extensively quotes Hoppe’s writing from his Democracy book in this interview.
Update: Journey into a Libertarian Future: Part VI – Certainty.
The video of my Moscow IP speech is now available on YouTube, as I noted at C4SIF.org:
“Why ‘Intellectual Property’ is not Genuine Property,” Adam Smith Forum, Moscow
by Stephan Kinsella on November 15, 2011
As I noted in a previous post, the 3rd Adam Smith Forum was held earlier this month (Nov. 12, 2011) in Moscow. This event was organized by the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, the Libertarian Party of Russia, and others. The Chairman of the ASF Steering Committee was economist Pavel Usanov, head of the Hayek Institute for Economy and Law, and Andrey Shal’nev, head of the federal committee of the Libertarian Party of Russia, was its co-chairman. I was invited to speak but could not attend in person, so my 47-minute speech “Why Intellectual Property is not Genuine Property” was presented remotely, with Russian subtitles. It is below, along with the original version and the English transcript plus the Russian translation, which was prepared by Maxim Tulenin, head of the Moscow branch of the Libertarian Party of Russia.
Professor Hoppe’s article, “Entrepreneurship With Fiat Property and Fiat Money,” was published today on LewRockwell.com, and is based on a speech first delivered at the Edelweiss Holdings Symposion held in Zuerich, Switzerland, on September 17, 2011.
Professor Hoppe’s article, Social Democratic Hayek: An Interview with Hans-Hermann Hoppe by Mateusz Machaj, previously published in Polish as Socjaldemokratyczny Hayek, has been translated into Swedish as Intervju med Hans-Hermann Hoppe om Hayek, Mises Sweden, Oct. 13 2011.
Related articles by Professor Hoppe include: “Why Mises (and not Hayek)?“, Mises Daily (Oct. 10, 2011) and F.A. Hayek on Government and Social Evolution: A Critique, Review of Austrian Economics, Vol. 7 Num. 1 (1994)
Professor Hoppe’s article, Why the State Demands Control of Money, was published in Mises Daily today. It is based on a speech delivered at the Mises Institute Supporters meeting, September 19-23, 2011, Vienna, Austria. The piece revisits issues discussed in his article Banking, Nation States and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order, which also appears as Ch. 3 of his The Economics and Ethics of Private Property.
Professor Hoppe’s article, Why Mises (and not Hayek)?, was published in Mises Daily today. It is based on a speech delivered at the Mises Institute Supporters meeting, September 19-23, 2011, Vienna, Austria.
Professor Hoppe taught five classes at the Mises U 2011 in Auburn, Alabama, this past July, including his great speech The Science of Human Action, which kicked off Mises U (his other Mises U 2011 lectures are here). In this speech, Professor Hoppe discusses his intellectual biography and relationship with Rothbard, as well as the Austrian approach and methodology. While he was in town, Jeff Tucker conducted a fascinating interview with him (see video below). In this wide-ranging interview, Professor Hoppe discusses in more detail the history of his intellectual odyssey from leftist to Misesian-Rothbardian, his various books, various topics such as German reintegration, the centralizing effects of constitutions (including the US Constitution and EU), why states with more liberal economies are more imperialist, the interesting and heretofore undisclosed story of exactly how communist policies in East Germany led him to discover Mises, and more.
As announced on B.K. Marcus’s post at the Mises blog today (see below), the Hoppe festschrift that Guido Hülsmann and I edited, Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Mises Institute, 2009), which was already available in PDF and print, is now available in a free epub format as well. Kindle and other ebook formats should be available soon. The festschrift was presented to Professor Hoppe, just a month or so before his 60th birthday, at a private ceremony on July 29, 2009, in Auburn, AL during Mises University 2009 (see Hoppe Festschrift Published). Pictures from the ceremony are embedded below.
Hoppe’s Festschrift now in ePub
Property, Freedom, and Society: Marzipan in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Also, as I noted in Book Review of Hoppe Festschrift, David Howden wrote an excellent review (2) of the festschrift in New Perspectives on Political Economy. And, as I noted in that post, and in Bodrum Days and Nights: The Fifth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: A Partial Report, as a piece of Festschrift trivia: at the recent Property and Freedom Society conference in Bodrum, Turkey, a guest presented a festschrift-cake he had had made in Estonia, entitled “Property, Freedom, and Society: Marzipan in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe,” which was served as part of the dessert at the closing banquet.
Reposted from Andy Duncan’s blog, The God that Failed:
Principato di Filettino: A step on the road to Hoppe World?
Posted on September 3, 2011 by Andy Duncan
In the magnificent Peter Sellers film, The Mouse That Roared, the strangely English-speaking Duchy of Grand Fenwick, a tiny nation between France and Switzerland, defeats the United States in a rather bizarre nuclear stand-off.
Will another such Duchy, the tiny Italian town of Filettino, similarly defeat the horrible coerced agglomeration known as Italy, inside the even more horrible coerced agglomeration known as the European Union?
We can but hope.
For Filettino has declared its independence from Rome, in a bid to emulate San Marino, Monaco, the Vatican City, and Andorra (and I suppose the Cantons of Switzerland itself, when they shook off the First Reich of the mass murderer Charlemagne, and his rotten Holy Roman Empire).
Obviously, we will see if Filettino’s independence lasts, or if it is just another political stunt, but it is an interesting event to witness nevertheless. For when in the future we look back from ‘Hoppe World’ and work out how we got there, historians will regard such incidents as being symptomatic of a wider terminal malaise of coerced collectivism:
Go Filettino!
Interviu cu Hans-Hermann Hoppe despre taxare, the Romanian translation of Professor Hoppe’s Philosophie Magazine Interview on Taxation, has just been posted on the Mises Romania site. It has also been translated into several other languages.
In this humorous interview parody, Exclusive Oliver Marc Hartwich Interview on Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Benjamin Marks skewers the confused criticism of Professor Hoppe’s ideas by Oliver Marc Hartwich.
A published version of John Derbyshire PFS 2011 speech has been published, “On Understanding China And The Chinese” VDare (Aug. 3, 2011).
***
[Peter Brimelow writes: I was very impressed (as always) with John Derbyshire’s thoughts on China, originally delivered in Turkey this spring and published by Sean Gabb on his Libertarian Alliance Website—VDARE.com trademark links added here. For other reasons, I am cautious about China triumphalism. Some years ago, we posted an interview I did with Gordon Tullock, father of the concept of “rent seeking”, in which he suggested that not merely the imperial territories that Derbyshire mentions here, but also the Han core itself, might break apart. Nevertheless, China remains the quintessential nation-state—the political expression of a “nation”, an organic ethno-cultural community—and no student of the National Question can ignore it.]
John Derbyshire wrote: Here are some remarks I delivered to the sixth annual meeting of Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Property and Freedom Society, held at the Karia Princess Hotel in Bodrum, Turkey, May 26-30, 2011.[Video]
The subject of my address was “Understanding China and the Chinese.” The conference organizers meant it to form part of a set, with Jared Taylor following me on the topic “Understanding Japan and the Japanese,” then John O’Sullivan on “Understanding Europe and its Bureaucrats,” then Prof. Norman Stone on “Understanding Turkey and the Turks.”
As things turned out, the set was unfortunately incomplete, as the Japanese Embassy in Washington D.C., with very un-Japanese inefficiency, lost Jared’s passport a few days before the conference, leaving him no time to sort the problem out and so unable to embark for Turkey.
We missed Jared and commiserate with him on what seems to have been an exceptionally bad year for him so far, marred by misfortunes and indignities at the hands of various state apparatuses, by no means only the Japanese. (He did manage to bring out a book, though.)
The rest of us went ahead with our presentations anyway. Here is mine.
Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen. The title of my talk here is “Understanding China and the Chinese.” I’m going to take that very literally; so please let me make it clear that the topic of my talk is not China and the Chinese, about both of which I know all too little; the topic is understanding China and the Chinese, about which I am somewhat more knowledgeable—about which, indeed, I can claim, I hope not too fancifully, to be something of a world-class expert.
To make a claim to understanding of China and the Chinese, as opposed to merely understanding the business of trying to understand them, would be pretty darn presumptuous. For most of the past 25 years I’ve lived in the United States, a cousin nation to the one I was raised in, yet there are many things about the U.S.A. I still don’t understand, as evidenced by the fact that I still occasionally bang my shins against some aspect of the national psyche I didn’t even know was there. Peanut butter with jam—whose idea was that?
Eight years ago I marveled at the confidence with which American bureaucrats, military staff officers, businessmen, and think-tank whizz-kids breezed into Iraq declaring that they would remake that ancient place into a modern liberal democracy. If I, after all these years in America, still can’t pronounce the word “schedule” properly, what chance did George W. Bush’s proconsuls have of effecting social transformation in a country they’d only just learned to locate on a map?
I think subsequent events have justified my skepticism. We have transformed Iraq all right; but we have transformed it into a client state of Iran, which is not what was intended.
So what chance do I have, does any Westerner have, of encompassing China and the Chinese, let alone of transmitting any understanding to you in 30 minutes?
Modern commentators on China also have before them the dreadful example of the Three Week Sinologist.
This is cross-posted from HansHoppe.com. See also: Why the 2012 double Nobel laureate is coming to Sydney.
***
From an email announcement by Dr Washington Sanchez: Professor Hoppe will speak at the Australian Mises Seminar, to be held from the 25-26th of November this year.
John Derbyshire, attendee of the 2011 PFS Annual Meeting, reflects on this experience there in Taki’s Magazine:
The Shadow Science of Economics
June 02, 2011
I spent the Memorial Day weekend as a guest of Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Property and Freedom Society at their annual conference in Bodrum, Turkey. It was a wonderfully relaxing break, for which I am very much obliged to the good professor, his charming wife, and their co-organizers. I gave a talk about China and got to see some of Turkey (a country that was new to me), and I listened to some interesting and instructive lectures.
The PFS exists to help promote the economic and political libertarianism of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. I was in Bodrum because Prof. Hoppe was kind enough to invite me, not because I am a particularly dogmatic disciple of those gents. I approve of them and their doctrines in a vague, general sort of way, as I approve of anything much to the right of the statist elephantiasis dominant in the modern West and which looks to be sailing into some great crisis in the near future.
On the other hand I have issues with libertarianism—with free trade, for instance, and with the open-borders dogma that too many libertarians (though not all the ones at Bodrum, perhaps not even a majority) cling to with religious zeal.
Very nice reflections on the recent 2011 PFS Annual Meeting by attendee Benjamin Marks:
by Benjamin Marks, Economics.org.au editor-in-chief
and Mencken’s Conservatism author
In light of the furore arising from my appointment as editor-in-chief of the Australian economics organisation, Economics.org.au, it was decided that I travel as far away from Australia as I could until the media frenzy subsided. I was philosophical about this, figuring that having reached the pinnacle of the Australian economics profession with my appointment, the only challenges left for me were abroad anyway. So, in my new capacity as senior foreign correspondent for Economics.org.au, I attended the 6th Annual Property and Freedom Society (PFS) Conference in Bodrum, Turkey.
The significance of the conference being in Turkey cannot be understated. There was a gaudy Turkish election campaign of some sort playing out during the conference, and big clunky polluting vehicles were driven around the poorly-maintained and traffic-clogged streets with loud songs and speeches advertising the candidates. Imagine an ice cream van that went three times as fast, emitted noise almost as irritating as “Greensleeves” and offered something people had to be forced to fund. Pedestrians were treated like taxpayers. Despite not understanding the language that the election profundities were in — I was the only conference participant who was not at least bilingual —, they were still just as comprehensible to me as the confabulations of English-speaking politicians.
The PFS was founded by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, with the enthusiastic support of his wife Gülçin. It was set up to do what The Mont Pelerin Society was meant to: to be an international hub for genuine defenders of freedom. In actual fact, reminiscent of G.K. Chesterton’s nightmare The Man Who Was Thursday, the MPS is no “Supreme Anarchist Council,” but, “a lot of silly [undercover] policemen looking at each other.”1 Far from defending freedom, the MPS is more like Rabelais’s Crazy Council:
As noted here, the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society was held from Thursday, September 18, 2025 to Tuesday, September 23, 2025, in Bodrum, Turkey, at the Hotel Karia Princess.
Those interested in attending future meetings should contact 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.
PFS Members/Attendees may sign up to the PFS-Announce Google Group or email Stephan Kinsella (kinsella@propertyandfreedom.org).
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.” — Frédéric Bastiat
“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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