WE DON”T NEED THEORISTS TO BE RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING, JUST BEING RIGHT ABOUT ONE

WE DON”T NEED THEORISTS TO BE RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING, JUST BEING RIGHT ABOUT ONE THING IS ENOUGH

(worth repeating)

Rothbard’s work on banking is some of the best that’s ever been done. His history of economics is some of the best that’s ever been done. He blows it on ethics (which if you follow me is a pretty simple argument) he blows it on praxeology (which a first year philosophy student probably can demonstrate). Hoppe’s the same. If you ignore Argumentation and Praxeology and focus on his theory of socialism and capitalism, his Ethics of Property, his criticism of the incentives of private vs corporate governance, and his solutions to privatizing regulation via competing insurance companies, it’s some of the best and most revolutionary work that’s been done in the past century.

Philosophers don’t need to be right about everything, they just need to contribute a single novel idea. Hoppe did more than one. And I think his greatest contribution is probably the means of constructing his arguments – which is why I was drawn to him. He has successfully employed economic reasoning to ethics on a scale never done before, in rigorous form.

If you want to refute Rothbardian ethics, Argumentation Ethics, and Praxeology, then it’s not all that hard (although it took me a long time myself). The thing is, that if you refute those things, it doesn’t change ANYTHING regarding Rothbard’s history or Hoppe’s institutional solutions. In fact, all it does is eliminate a lot of nonsensical justification that isn’t necessary. It’s just a holdover from before the soviet union fell and chia abandoned central planning for state capitalism, and the world understood that socialism was empirically dead, as well as logically. We have evidence now that previous generations didn’t.

If you pick something you want refuted it’s pretty easy. Search for criticisms of those three topics. I’m probably the best critic of Rothbard’s ethics, but you’ll find Hoppe’s arguments criticized all over the place. But what you won’t find is his solution to the problem of institutions criticized, or Rothbard’s history criticized. Or of you do, I’ll bet its pretty stupid criticism.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy Of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev