Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

RE: –“An Open Letter to Walter E. Block” by Hans-Hermann Hoppe–

Thoughts:
It’s not a subject to destroy a thirty year friendship over. Hoppe should have started with the opposite position in that he was morally and professionally compelled to counter Block despite their otherwise shared vision, long experience and friendship.

That said, as I’ve stated in the video “Ancestral Lands”, I don’t choose such an ideal or arbitrary criteria for decidability, but do a full accounting.

As such:
(a) territory cannot be captured and settled or conquered independent of a political order to hold, build commons, and maintain it. So there is always a demonstrated collective interest in territory – not just individual.
(b) If a people improved a land, in particular with infrastructure (israel) they have greater interest in it vs those that didn’t improve the land (amerindians).
(c) Peoples are unequal in that a superior people have a greater claim (israelis) than an inferior people (islam).
(d) We might make the opposite argument that displacement of a people by immigration and buying property and then attempting political takeover is a theft as well.

In this case I would say that this isn’t at all a matter of rights but of pragmatism:
(a) people in the past though they were doing right by both giving jews territory and getting rid of jews among them given the long history of their troublemaking.
(b) israel is an advanced society that is superior to its neighbors, and over time will have a positive impact on her neighbors, and her neighbors need that influence and impact because they are so comparatively primitive.
(c) no one wants jews to return from israel to europe or the USA. In fact the consensus or not would prefer they all returned to israel and ensured its persistence as an advanced country in a region that is more accepting of their cultural proclivities, and more needing of their example.
(d) And the unpleasantness: We might as well face the reality that islam is the center of the world’s troubles, and all civilizations despise them for the reason that are deserved, and that threat they consist of. I am not sure the entire world would not be better off if all muslims disappeared. At that point we have just the remaining empires of Russia and China both in their last gasps, and the rest of the world can get along just fine without the catastrophic failure of islamic civ in our midst.

So I don’t think Hans’ argument is POSSIBLE. But like scripture (and this is important) libertarianism is treated as scripture not science and therefore Hoppe somewhat like Block tests competing ideas against libertarian scripture, and unfortunately it’s unsurvivable scripture.

Cheers
CurtD

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