Hoppe's third and final speech at the Australian Mises Seminar 26/11/2011.

Second video from the Mises Seminar 25/11/2011.

Start of the Mises Seminar 25/11/2011. Hoppe introduced by Neville Kennard. Opening remarks by Dr Washington Y Sanchez.

Compared with life in Western countries, where the socialist sector is sizable, life under total socialism is miserable.

The standard of living is so deplorable that, in 1961, the socialist East German government built a system of walls, barbed wire, electrified fences, minefields, automatic shooting devices, watchtowers, watchdogs, and watchmen, almost 900 miles long, to keep people from running away from socialism.

The empirical evidence shows that socialism is an obvious failure. And the cause of socialism's failure is crystal clear: there is almost no private ownership of the means of production, and almost all factors of production are owned in common in precisely the same way that Americans own the Postal Service. Read more

It's true that the U.S. health care system is a mess, but this demonstrates not market but government failure. To cure the problem requires not different or more government regulations and bureaucracies, as self-serving politicians want us to believe, but the elimination of all existing government controls.

It's time to get serious about health care reform. Tax credits, vouchers, and privatization will go a long way toward decentralizing the system and removmg unnecessary burdens from business. But four additional steps must also be taken: Read more

Imagine a world government, democratically elected according to the principle of one-man-one-vote on a worldwide scale. What would the probable outcome of an election be? Most likely, we would get a Chinese-Indian coalition government. And what would this government most likely decide to do in order to satisfy its supporters and be reelected? The government would probably find that the so-called Western world had far too much wealth and the rest of the world, in particular China and India, had far too little, and hence, that a systematic wealth and income redistribution would be called for. Or imagine, for your own country, that the right to vote were expanded to seven-year-olds. While the government would not likely be made up of children, its policies would most definitely reflect the 'legitimate concerns' of children to have 'adequate' and 'equal' access to 'free' hamburgers, lemonade, and videos. Read more

One of the most widely accepted propositions among political economists is the following: Every monopoly is bad from the viewpoint of consumers. Monopoly is understood in its classical sense to be an exclusive privilege granted to a single producer of a commodity or service, i.e., as the absence of free entry into a particular line of production. In other words, only one agency, A, may produce a given good, x. Any such monopolist is bad for consumers because, shielded from potential new entrants into his area of production, the price of the monopolist’s product  x will be higher and the quality of x lower than otherwise. Read more

Akkurt: How did you come to be a libertarian and which thinkers were most important in shaping your ideas?

Hoppe: As a young man, a 'Gymnasiast' in Germany, I was a Marxist. Then, as a student at the University of Frankfurt, I encountered Boehm-Bawerk's Marx critique, and that finished Marxist economics for me.

Consequently, for a while I became somewhat of a skeptic, attracted to the positivist and especially the falsificationist Popperian methodology and to Popper's program of piecemeal social engineering. Like Popper himself, at this time I was a right-wing Social democrat. Read more

The personal, political, and scholarly papers of Ludwig von Mises have been discovered in a formerly secret archive in Moscow. So have the papers of many of Mises's colleagues and associates during his years in Vienna, including friends and foes in academia, politics, and business.

What does this startling news --which has Misesians the world over cheering--mean? It opens enormous possibilities for deepening our understanding of the life and times of Mises, and therefore much about the intellectual history of our century. Mises's career in the U.S., which began when he was sixty years old, is documented, but without his Vienna papers, there would always have been a void in our understanding of this extraordinary man. Read more

The intellectual achievements of Murray Newton Rothbard (1926-1995)--eminent scholar and friend--are monumental. He is the author of 25 books and thousands of article in scholarly and popular journals. His work covers the entire spectrum of the social sciences: pure economic theory, history, sociology, philosophy, religion, languages, and politics.

His main work in economics, Man, Economy, and State, appeared in 1962, when Murray was only 36. It elucidated the entire body of economic theory, in a step-by-step fashion, beginning with incontestable axioms and proceeding to the most intricate problems of business cycle theory and monopoly theory. It ranks alongside Ludwig von Mises's Human Action as a towering achievement within the Austrian School tradition.  Read more

Alone on his island, Robinson Crusoe can do whatever he pleases. For him, the question concerning rules of orderly human conduct — social cooperation — simply does not arise. This question can only arise once a second person, Friday, arrives on the island. Yet even then, the question remains largely irrelevant so long as no scarcity exists.

Suppose the island is the Garden of Eden; all external goods are available in superabundance. They are "free goods," just as the air that we breathe is normally a "free" good. Whatever Crusoe does with these goods, his actions have no repercussions — neither with respect to his own future supply of such goods nor regarding the present or future supply of the same goods for Friday (and vice versa). Hence, it is impossible for there ever to be a conflict between Crusoe and Friday concerning the use of such goods. A conflict is only possible if goods are scarce. Only then will the need arise to formulate rules that make orderly, conflict-free social cooperation possible. Read more