Regarding: Matt Breunig’s HHH, Libertarian Theoretical Historian?
Matt.
Better criticism than is usually thrown at him. I think most of his justification can be seen as nonsense.
I also think that at this point his primary contributions are:
(a) the difference in incentives between the private german micro states and the corporate bureaucratic states. Fukuyama would probably argue that this is weak, but only because Chinese were low trust peoples and the germanic peoples were already high trust peoples by the time of the Hanseatic league. Napoleon adopted the same strategy as the Chinese bureaucracy as well as total war and fiat credit and proved that small states cannot resist bureaucratic-war-states.
(b) he also contributed the means of arguing across heterogeneous moral codes by reducing all rights to property rights.
The latter is a profound innovation that no one other than he has mastered to that degree. And his particular insight, if written as Elinor Ostrom wrote her nobel prize winning study of institutions, would have placed him as the natural consequence of that line of reasoning.
Unfortunately he was trained by German, Rationalist, marxists (Habermas) and then Jewish Cosmopolitan Rationalists (Rothbard and Mises) and his frame of reference was rationalist, (justifiactionary), and authoritarian, rather than scientific (demonstrative) and skeptical.
Which is horribly depressing from my position, as someone who is attempting to reform (correct) his work by dragging it kicking and screaming into the ratio-scientific fold.
Nice piece really.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
L’viv, Ukraine