Hans-Hermann Hoppe (born September 2, 1949) is an Austrian School economist of the anarcho-capitalist tradition, and a Professor Emeritus of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Born in Peine, West Germany, he attended the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken, and the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, studying philosophy, sociology, history, and economics. His doctoral studies began with Marxist thought, under Jürgen Habermas as his Ph.D advisor.[1] However he quickly became disillusioned in this pursuit. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Goethe-Universität in 1974. He was then a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from 1976 to 1978. He earned his Habilitation in Foundations of Sociology and Economics from the Goethe-Universität in 1981. He taught at several German universities as well as at the Johns Hopkins University Bologna Center for Advanced International Studies, Bologna, Italy.[citation needed] In 1986, he moved from Germany to the United States, to study under Murray Rothbard.[citation needed] He remained a close associate until Rothbard’s death in January 1995. Hoppe was then Professor of Economics at University of Nevada, Las Vegas until retirement in 2008.
According to a blog posting by Hoppe, he gave a series of speeches at conferences that were organized by Lew Rockwell, Burt Blumert, and Murray Rothbard for the purpose of creating what came to be known as paleo-libertarianism.[2]
Hoppe is a Distinguished Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and, until December, 2004, the editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. The author of several widely-discussed books and articles, he has put forth an “argumentation ethics” defense of libertarian rights, based in part on the discourse ethics theories of German philosophers Jürgen Habermas (Hoppe’s PhD advisor) and Karl-Otto Apel. In 2005, he founded the Property and Freedom Society.
Following in the tradition of Murray Rothbard, Hoppe has analyzed the behavior of government using the tools of Austrian economic theory. Defining a government as “a territorial monopolist of jurisdiction and taxation” and assuming no more than self-interest on the part of government officials, he predicts that these government officials will use their monopoly privileges to maximize their own wealth and power. Hoppe argues that there is a high degree of correlation between these theoretical predictions and historical data.[citation needed]
In Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe compares dynastical monarchies with democratic republics. In his view, a dynastical monarch (king) is like the “owner” of a country, because it is passed on from generation to generation, whereas an elected president is like a “temporary caretaker” or “renter”. Both the king and the president have an incentive to exploit the current use of the country for their own benefit. However, the king also has a counterbalancing interest in maintaining the long-term capital value of the nation, just as the owner of a house has an interest in maintaining its capital value (unlike a renter). Being temporary, democratically elected officials have every incentive to plunder the wealth of productive citizens as fast as possible.
According to Rothbard‘s theory [3], which Hoppe makes his own, a monopoly has nothing to do with market share, but is an institutional privilege barring “free entry” into the business of producing a particular good or service. As a consequence, such monopolies cannot arise on the free market.[citation needed] Rather, they must always be the result of government policy. Coercive monopolies are bad from the standpoint of consumers because the price will tend to be higher and the quality will be lower than they would be in markets completely free from coordinated coercion. Like Rothbard, Hoppe has conjectured that, in a free market for governmental services, competing private insurance and defense agencies would provide a better quality of protection and dispute resolution than that which currently exists under monopolistic government control.
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