Hoppean-Libertarianism must be the most inhumane ideology ever conceived
This is…I don’t…
I am just reading through this interview by a radical libertarian called “Code Name Cain” who expands upon his ideology. I do believe this must be the most absurd libertarian I’ve ever read. Calling him Fractally Wrong is almost an understatement.
Take a look at the six parts interview, read through the thing. It gets much more absurd (and much more hilarious) in the latter parts.
Choice Quote:
ANDREW: Obviously it would be better to have defaulting borrowers be effectively enslaved in a way that fully respects their natural rights.
CNC: Obviously. Now that we’ve cleared that up, can you turn off the tape recorder? I want to get started on my steak.
Choice Quote:
CNC: With the secession strategy, you don’t need a majority. That’s good, because [t]he mass of people … always and everywhere consists of “brutes,” “dullards,” and “fools,” easily deluded and sunk into habitual submission [92]. Still, there can be no revolution without some form of mass participation. … the elite cannot reach its own goal of restoring private property rights and law and order unless it succeeds in communicating its ideas to the public, openly if possible and secretly if necessary… [93].
ANDREW: Even if you do it secretly, convincing the masses that they are inferior sounds tricky.
CNC: That’s true, but you don’t have to convince Joe the Plumber that he is a brute. You can convince him instead that he is a hardworking, productive individual, and that other people are brutes who are making it so Joe has no control over his life.
(Note red parts are direct quotes from the AnCap ideologue, Hoppe)
Choice Quote:
ANDREW: I know that you think this is very unlikely, but suppose people living in the free society of the future decide that they don’t like it very much, and would like to go back to living in a democracy. Could they do it?
CNC: That will not be possible.
ANDREW: You mean, you are sure that no one will want to go back to democracy?
CNC: No, I mean they won’t be allowed to discuss that possibility.
In a covenant… among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society. [218]
THAT WILL NOT BE POSSIBLE CITIZEN. Is it me, or does this vision of libertopia sound increasingly like a weird version of Paranoia? The next paragraph expands on how the rich would be controlling armies of death bots!
Choice Quote:
ANDREW: Noblemen and masters were obeyed because their serfs and slaves recognized that some people were naturally superior to others – but then some GLOs came in and started messing everything up by appealing to racism and jealousy. These “rogue GLOs” are where governments come from.
CNC: That’s right.
That it. We’ve reached peak absurdity people!
Choice Quote:
ANDREW: You are sometimes forced to engage in lobbying.
CNC: Yes. For example, the current meme in the investment community is that the combination of climate change and population growth will make it almost impossible to have enough food for the world by the year 2050. Farmland is soaring in price.
My hedge fund discovered uncultivated land in the African country of ***. The land did not belong to anyone, and so we tried to buy it from the relevant government. Outrageously, certain officials from *** insisted on…
ANDREW: Bribes?
CNC: … arrangements before they would agree to sell the land at a fair price.
ANDREW: Was this farmland unoccupied?
CNC: No one owned the land before we bought it.
ANDREW: But was someone living there?
CNC: There were some local tribesmen who claimed that they had a vague traditional “right” to the land. Decisive action was necessary before they stopped squatting on our land.
ANDREW: Involving trucks of men carrying machine guns…
Oh gawds, wat?!
Choice Quote:
ANDREW: But you changed the story! That isn’t how it ends – the father doesn’t agree with the older son. He says it is right for them to celebrate, for “thy brother was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” And most readers assume that at that point, the older brother realizes that he has been acting like a two-year-old.
CNC: Look, I’m not like Ayn Rand or Ludwig von Mises. I don’t think that being a libertarian is incompatible with being a Christian. But since, as Mises put it, “all efforts to find support for the institution of private property… in the teachings of Christ are quite vain,” it is true that the New Testament needs to be edited a
little.
…so fucking funny….must not lol at work…
Fortunately for this world, the CNC character was fictional. Unfortunately, Hoppe and his red quotes are not. And the red quotes were the primary content of this “interview” 😉
In fact, I found Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s ideas fascinating, but it would have been quite difficult to construct a dialogue entirely from snippets of his book. Even if I had done that, there would still have been a risk of misrepresenting his thought. Code Name Cain was created so that I could try to fill in missing or uncertain details of a Hoppe-like philosophy in the most logical manner I could think of, without attributing these additions to Hoppe himself. Some fine points that a couple readers thought I personally invented were actually adapted (rather faithfully) from Hoppe’s book: in particular, the graphs in part VI showing time-preference curves for different types of individuals (compare p. 8 of Hoppe’s book).
(h/t to the Barefoot Bum)
This is satire, no? It seems like it from the "I mean effectively X in a rights-respecting manner" stuff, but still.. hard to tell… sounds like a lot of right-libs I know.
It's a Poe. It's basically taking the arguments of Hoppe to their logical conclusions that are usually left unsaid by their proponents because of how inhumane they sound. The last part explains all that jazz 🙂
Hans Hermann-Hoppe is your friend. All hail our glorious friend Hans Hermann-Hoppe! Kill all Communists, Homosexuals and Hedonists!!!
Even if it is a Poe, it's a damn convincing one, as those Hoppe quotes seem even more outrageous. Christ, Hoppe really is that stereotypical jackbooted German engineer ("Zat vill be done, mein Führer!") that comedians love to parrot.
It's curious how there are branches of libertarianism that are completely divorced from the humanistic tradition libertarianism springs from. Property rights, law and order and other ideas that Locke, Madison, Jefferson and Smith drew eyes upon were supposed to help humanity and not be ends in themselves.
I … cannot imagine… DAREN'T imagine … that this is not satire.