Author: Curt Doolittle

A LIST OF HANS HOPPE’S ERRORS

(from elsewhere)

I consider my work as a restatement of Hoppe’s in ratio-scientific terms rather than his use of aprioristic justificationary rationalism.

Hoppe’s problems (errors) are natural for a german philosopher who was trained by Marxists. But they are considerable errors. It is not that his conclusions are incorrect, it is that his justifications are in correct.

– We justify moral actions within a normative system of evolved rules. We criticize truth propositions to test whether the theories survive. We do not find truth in justification – we find permission. We find truth in survival against all known criticism. Justification translates to “I can get away with saying this so you cannot say I violated the rules of cooperation: morality or law” while truth propositions under ratio-scientific criticism translates to “I have done due diligence to determine if this argument survives all know attempts at failure, regardless of preference, morality or law.”

– Property demonstrably (empirically) exists prior to cooperation, and so does scarcity. But scarcity is imperceptible. Cost is perceptible. The origin of demonstrable property is in the cost to acquire. Scarcity explains why things are costly, but not the origination of property. Scarcity is an abstract explanation not a cause.

– Property rights exist due to the disproportionate returns on cooperation, and the necessity of preserving those returns by prohibiting parasitism. Property rights do not originate in scarcity of goods, they originate in the scarcity and disproportionate return on cooperation.

– Argumentation and contradiction originate in legal justification post-cooperation, not necessary constraints prior to cooperation. The first question of cooperation is ‘why don’t I kill you and take your stuff’, and

– The minimum scope of property reciprocally necessary to defend for the rational formation of a voluntary polity is demonstrated property (defense of that which we have paid costs to acquire), not intersubjectively verifiable property (that is epistemologically easy to test if we transfer). Hoppe and Rothbard misapply separatist ethics between polities (between states) as sufficient for the formation of a polity. (Ghetto Ethics.)

– The formation of a voluntary (anarchic) polity requires that local transaction costs are low enough to limit demand for authority to either prevent retaliatiion for violations of property en toto, and to provide sufficient incentives to join such a polity rather than say, a democratic humanist polity. The reason is we must choose between high local transaction costs with low political costs that prohibit economic velocity, and low local transaction costs that encourage economic velocity with high political costs. Humans rationally choose government over anarchy unless anarchy provides the lower transaction costs. This means that anarchy is only possible under high trust. High trust is only possible under property en toto with it’s total prohibition on deception (cheating) rather than intersubjectively verifiable property with its tolerance for deceptoin and cheating.

– Those voluntary anarchic polities that have existed, on the few occasions that they have existed, have been the target of extermination by neighbors. Because the only reason to seek a low trust polity is some variation of parasitism: gypsies on the low end, pirates in the center, and financial predators (moral hazards) on the high end.

– The formation of a voluntary polity (anarchic) will only be possible under western aristocratic martial egalitarianism and the independent common law, prohibiting all parasitism against demonstrated property (what we bore costs for and defend), whether that parasitism is by violence, theft, extortion (blackmail, racketeering), fraud, (fraud by obscurantism, fraud by moralizing, fraud by omission), externality, (free riding, privatization of commons, socialization of losses), or conspiracy (statism, conversion, immigration, conquest, war and genocide).

– Mises was, like many of his contemporaries, trying to solve the problem of his era, and incorrectly cast operational testing by subjective analysis of rational incentives (praxeology) a positive means of exploration sufficient for the investigation of cooperation, instead of a test of existential possibility of claims. Economics is empirical as any other of the science and only differs in that we know the first principles of cooperation (rational incentives on the positive side and non-imposition of costs – parasitism- on the negative side.) Whereas the first principles of the physical universe are as yet unknown to us. And where the first principles of declarative systems (logics) are matters of our discretion. (This is a rather difficult subject for all but those of us who specialize in epistemology.)

I could go on a bit, but Hoppe’s insights are in the perverse incentives of bureaucracies – even under democracy, and the exposition of all moral and legal argument as reducible to property rights.

All his justificationary argument is pure Kantian,Cosmopolitan and Marxist nonsense. We do not justify truth propositions. Truth propositions survive attempts to refute them.

I love the man, honestly. But he was a product of his time and place just as I am a product of mine. Science wins. Rationalism loses. Not only because science is necessary for the provision of truth, but because PHILOSOPHY HAS LARGELY BEEN USED TO LIE.

I hope this is of some value to you.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine (Tallinn, Estonia)