Q&A: CURT: HOW DO HOPPE’S COVENANT COMMUNITIES FIT WITH PROPERTARIANISM?
(good piece) (for newbies especially)
—“Hoppe’s advocating for so-called covenant communities seems a decent idea on paper, people establish communities based on contractual relations and setting rules based on the will of the community.
Now I have seen videos of you talking about the “absolute nuclear
family” and societies where everyone treated everyone the same and there was no difference between in-group and out-group trust, this seems like a rather vital part of propertarianism.
Now my question is, does the idea of covenant communities fit within the propertarian framework? Because while it seems a decent idea, it does certainly look like it would create a major difference between in-group treatment and out-group treatment, seeing as these communities could, and probably would, have vastly different rules than the one next to them, so to say.
Do you see covenant communities as an extension of Rothbardian
ghetto/gypsy/Jewish ethics, or have I totally misunderstood either you or Hoppe?”—
GREAT QUESTION.
This is such a great question. Thank you for it.
– Preamble –
I consider myself a Hoppeian (although Hans would likely differ) in that all ethics and politics can be expressed as property rights.
Part of what I tried to do in propertarianism was illustrate how the three empirical-rational cultures: English Empirical, German Rational, and Jewish Pseudoscientific, (and I suppose we could include the frech-pseudo-moral), tried to restate their group evolutionary strategy as universal ethics and politics – and all failed.
So what you see is rothbard attempting to universalize jewish law, and cosmopolitan pseudoscience (of separatist disasporic people), hoppe attempting to universalize german rationalism (of homogeneous agrarian landed people), and me trying to use anglo-saxon empirical contractualism (of a trading naval people) as a universal – within which we can construct a variety of orders.
So when my work differs from Hoppe’s it differs largely in the fact that he relies on’ justificationary rationalism’ (tests of internal consistency and subjective non-contradiction) using intersubjectively verifiable property as the basis for common law, and I rely on ‘testimonialism’ which is an advancement over scientific empiricism, for reasons that are complicated – but which are reducible to adding the tests of existential possibility when describing human actions, and the requirement for full accounting, assuming that man is NOT naturally moral, but naturally rational, and will choose immoral-unethical or moral-ethical actions based purely on intuitionistic estimation of costs and benefits.
That paragraph is extremely loaded, (dense) with meaning. I would point you to my introductory writings to understand it if you need to.
But in simple terms, that means that I consider my work a SCIENTIFIC restatement of hoppe’s reduction of all ethical, moral, political decidability to expressions of property rights, and the first cause of property rights non imposition of costs upon the property in toto of others that would cause them to retaliate in ANY way – this is in fact (as Butler Schaeffer has tried to show us) the meaning of ‘natural law’.
Hoppe constructs his anarchism (german rule of law) on the lower standard of intersubjectively verifiable property, and fully voluntary production of commons.
I construct my rule of law (anglo anarchism) on the higher standard of property-in-toto, and creating a market for the voluntary exchange of commons – much more like the stock market which is competitive, rather than the current houses of government which are monopolies.
The reason I do this is because the west beat the rest with commons production – truth-telling, private-property, sovereignty, rule of law, and militia chief among them.
The other reason is that communities that do not produce commons across the spectrum: normative, ethical, moral, legal, institutional, martial, and territorial, NEVER survive competition from competitors. because they cannot. They cannot positively because it is always preferable to give up liberties in order to obtain predictabilities needed for complex commercial production. They cannot Negatively because the only individuals suitabe for a lower trust polity based upon several property and lacking commons are thieves, pirates, and other predators. And so external groups always exterminate them. So anarchic polities without commons cannot survive. And this is evidenced by jews themselves, gypsies, and the hundreds of other societies that have been out-gunned, out-steeled, out-germed, out-bred, out-farmed, out-traded, and generally ‘out-civilized’.
What we see with Rothbard and Hoppe’s higher standard, and my higher standard, is that Rothbard brings Jewish ethics of diasporic people, who want to privatize (parasitically consume) the commons that preserves parasitism via deception but prevents retaliation against it; Hoppe’s separatist ethics of the protestant evangelists who want to construct private commons only (civic society) but prevent all free riding (the opposite of Rothbard’s strategy) and my (Doolittle’s) imperial ethics (rule of law) that prohibits parasitism entirely.
I might state it less charitably, as Rothbard and the cosmopolitans, Hoppe and the germans, and the enlightenment anglo-Americans all failed to solve the problem of creating a market for commons instead of a monopoly bureaucracy for the production of commons (anglo/german/french) and the civic production of commons (Hoppe). Whereas what I have tried to do is create a market for commons as the old English houses created, but failed to expand both on the enfranchisement of non-land owners (non-business owners, and those with diasporic or naval interests) and the enfranchisement of women (who have polar opposite ethics from the males entirely and want to marry the ‘state’ or ‘tribe’ again – obviating them from exchanging sex and care with males for survival.)
So propertarianism includes covenant communities, but the standard by which these contracts are judged in matters of conflict is by property in toto: complete, not partial, non-parasitism.
The anarchic model of Rothbard and Hoppe does not survive competition. That’s why it won’t work.
Property rights are not something we ‘have’ but something we obtain ONLY in trade.
The same is true for the survival of an anarchic community: you cannot choose a community by will, but by incentives. You do not choose the incentives, they are chosen for you by the nature of man.
Civilization – complex cooperation outwitting the dark forces of time and ignorance – is the result of the incremental suppression of parasitism in all its forms by genetic, normative, ethical, moral, traditional, legal, political, and economic means: eugenics.
When we remove all parasitism, what we are left with is truth, property, liberty, knowledge, and cooperation.
And those are the torches that give us the time to light the darkness and eventually transcend into the gods we seek.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine