Professor Hoppe has posted a very interesting Interview on Taxation — as he notes in prefatory remarks:
A few months ago, a French journalist, Mr. Nicolas Cori, approached me with the request for an interview on the subject of taxation, to be published in the French monthly “Philosophie Magazine,” in the context of current “tax reform” debates in France.
I agreed to the interview, it was conducted by email in English, Mr. Cori produced a French translation, my friend Dr. Nikolay Gertchev checked and corrected his translation, and I then sent the authorized translation to Mr. Cori. Since then, more than a month ago, and despite repeated promptings, I have not heard from Mr. Cori. I can only speculate as for the reasons of his silence. Most likely, he did not get permission from his superiors to publish the interview, and he does not possess the courtesy and courage to tell me.
In any case, here is the original interview. …
Note, in particular, the bolded portion of Hoppe’s answer to the final question:
NC: Should rich people be treated differently than poor people?
Hoppe: Every person, rich or poor, should be treated the same before the law. There are rich people, who are rich without having defrauded or stolen from anyone. They are rich, because they have worked hard, they have saved diligently, they have been productive, and they have shown entrepreneurial ingenuity, often for several family-generations. Such people should not only be left alone, but they should be praised as heroes. And there are rich people, mostly from the class of political leaders in control of the state-apparatus and from the state-connected elites of banking and big business, who are rich, because they have been directly engaged in, or indirectly benefitted from, confiscation, theft, trickery and fraud. Such people should not be left alone, but instead be condemned and despised as gangsters. The same applies to poor people. There are poor people, who are honest people, and therefore should be left alone. They may not be heroes, but they deserve our respect. And there are poor people who are crooks, and who should be treated as crooks, regardless of their “poverty.”
Hoppe’s indictment of big business and banking elites who are in bed with the state is not some outlier libertarian analysis. As I noted here, libertarians such as Rothbard, Rockwell, and others have long pointed out that big business often colludes with the state.1 The common charge by left libertarians that “right” libertarians (what I would call just “libertarians”)2 are “vulgar” libertarians–too willing to portray state cronies and parasites as part of “capitalism” instead of as part of the exploiting class–is not supported–at least in the case of Rothbardians.
Update: Two somewhat related observations.
First: another left-libertarian misfire is their frequent criticism of Rothbardians and other non-left libertarians on the grounds that Lockean homesteading is incompatible with pre-existing rights of groups, indigenous peoples, and so on. Yet as Hoppe’s recent Libertarian Papers article, “Of Private, Common, and Public Property and the Rationale for Total Privatization,” shows, this is not true at all. The Rothbardian-Lockean homesteading view is of course perfectly compatible with such concerns, because there are a variety of types and extents of homesteading. As Hoppe argues:
It is conceivable that this state of affairs with ownerless public streets can go on forever without leading to any conflict. It is not very realistic, however, because this requires the assumption of a stationary economy. Yet with economic change and growth, and in particular with a growing population, conflicts concerning the use of the public street are bound to increase. While “street conflicts” initially might have been so infrequent and so easy to avoid as not to cause anyone to worry, now they are ubiquitous and intolerable. The street is constantly congested and in permanent disrepair. A solution is required. The street must be taken out of the realm of the environment—of external “things” or common property—and brought into the realm of “economic goods.” This, the increasing economization of things previously considered and treated as “free goods,” is the way of civilization and progress.
Two solutions to the problem of managing increasingly intolerable conflicts concerning the use of “common property” have been proposed and tried. The first—and correct—solution is to privatize the street. The second—incorrect—solution is to turn streets into what is nowadays called “public property” (which is very different from the former, unowned “common” goods and property). Why the second solution is incorrect or dysfunctional can best be grasped in contradistinction to the alternative privatization option.
How is it possible that formerly unowned common streets can be privatized without thereby generating conflict with others? The short answer is that this can be done provided only that the appropriation of the street does not infringe on the previously established rights—the easements—of private-property owners to use such streets “for free.” Everyone must remain free to walk the street from house to house, through the woods, and onto the lake, just as before. Everyone retains a right-of-way, and hence no one can claim to be made worse off by the privatization of the street. Positively, in order to objectify—and validate—his claim that the formerly common street is now a private one and that he (and no one else) is its owner, the appropriator (whoever it may be) must perform some visible maintenance and repair work on and along the street. Then, as its owner, he—and no one else—can further develop and improve the streets as he sees fit. He sets the rules and regulations concerning the use of his street so as to avoid all street conflicts. He can build a hot dog or a bratwurst stand on his road, for instance, and exclude others from doing the same; or he can prohibit loitering on his street and collect a fee for the removal of garbage. Vis-à-vis foreigners or strangers, the street owner can determine the rules of entry regarding uninvited strangers. Last but not least, as its private owner he can sell the street to someone else (with all previously established rights-of-way remaining intact).
Second: Some left-libertarians, in their (understandable) desire to criticize unjust property holdings, seem sometimes too willing to argue that existing property titles are illegitimate because of their non-immaculate origins and, presumably, ought to be wrested from current nominal owners, especially the wealthy, and presumably redistributed to the people or the workers or whatever. But Rothbard had, in my view, the appropriate, nuanced approach to this (quoted in my post Justice and Property Rights: Rothbard on Scarcity, Property, Contracts…):
It might be charged that our theory of justice in property titles is deficient because in the real world most landed (and even other) property has a past history so tangled that it becomes impossible to identify who or what has committed coercion and therefore who the current just owner may be. But the point of the “homestead principle” is that if we don’t know what crimes have been committed in acquiring the property in the past, or if we don’t know the victims or their heirs, then the current owner becomes the legitimate and just owner on homestead grounds. In short, if Jones owns a piece of land at the present time, and we don’t know what crimes were committed to arrive at the current title, then Jones, as the current owner, becomes as fully legitimate a property owner of this land as he does over his own person. Overthrow of existing property title only becomes legitimate if the victims or their heirs can present an authenticated, demonstrable, and specific claim to the property. Failing such conditions, existing landowners possess a fully moral right to their property.
- 1See Murray N. Rothbard, Origins of the Welfare State in America, Mises.org (1996) (“Big businesses, who were already voluntarily providing costly old-age pensions to their employees, could use the federal government to force their small-business competitors into paying for similar, costly, programs…. [T]he legislation deliberately penalizes the lower cost, ‘unprogressive,’ employer, and cripples him by artificially raising his costs compared to the larger employer.… It is no wonder, then, that the bigger businesses almost all backed the Social Security scheme to the hilt, while it was attacked by such associations of small business as the National Metal Trades Association, the Illinois Manufacturing Association, and the National Association of Manufacturers. By 1939, only 17 percent of American businesses favored repeal of the Social Security Act, while not one big business firm supported repeal.… Big business, indeed, collaborated enthusiastically with social security.”); Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., “The Economics Of Discrimination,” in Speaking of Liberty (2003), at 99 (“One way the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] is enforced is through the use of government and private ‘testers.’ These actors, who will want to find all the “discrimination” they can, terrify small businesses. The smaller the business, the more ADA hurts. That’s partly why big business supported it. How nice to have the government clobber your up-and-coming competition.”); Rothbard, For A New Liberty (2002), pp. 316 et seq.; Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right, 185-86 (2007) (“This is the general view on the Right; in the remarkable phrase of Ayn Rand, Big Business is ‘America’s most persecuted minority.’ Persecuted minority, indeed! To be sure, there were charges aplenty against Big Business and its intimate connections with Big Government in the old McCormick Chicago Tribune and especially in the writings of Albert Jay Nock; but it took the Williams-Kolko analysis, and particularly the detailed investigation by Kolko, to portray the true anatomy and physiology of the America scene. As Kolko pointed out, all the various measures of federal regulation and welfare statism, beginning in the Progressive period, that Left and Right alike have always believed to be a mass movement against Big Business, are not only backed to the hilt by Big Business at the present time, but were originated by it for the very purpose of shifting from a free market to a cartelized economy. Under the guise of regulations “against monopoly” and “for the public welfare,” Big Business has succeeded in granting itself cartels and privileges through the use of government.”); Albert Jay Nock, quoted in Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right, 22 (2007) (“The simple truth is that our businessmen do not want a government that will let business alone. They want a government they can use. Offer them one made on Spencer’s model, and they would see the country blow up before they would accept it.”)
- 2Note: In the original post I parenthetically said that “right” libertarians were “i.e., libertarians who do not accept the labor theory of value”. This was somewhat tongue in cheek out of exasperation with what we are supposed to be called if we do not agree with the left or right prefix, but Sheldon Richman is correct that this wrongly implies that all left-libertarians support the labor theory of value. I have thus removed it. As noted, I struggle with the correct label to use for non-left libertarians. I do not agree with left libertarians that “we” are “naturally” “of the left”; I do not even agree that the left-right spectrum is coherent or valid; I do not agree that the left is “better” than the right–I view both as socialist and evil. I don’t want to refer to us as “right” libertarians because we are not; nor as non-left-libertarians because that is unwieldy and defines us in reference to a subset of libertarians; I don’t want to call us “normal” libertarians because that’s smug and arrogant. So, half in jest, I said we are the ones who do not believe in the LTV but to clarify, I don’t want to imply that all or even most left-libertarians are LTVers.
