A wonderful op ed in today’s National Post (Canada) by Colby Cosh on Hoppe’s ordeal. It’s behind the subscription wall; text appended text below.
Good economics v. touchy feelings Colby Cosh National Post April 18, 2005 We tend to think of economics as a sterile, number-clotted discipline, but most of the great economists have antagonized the received wisdom of their day. There wouldn’t be an economics profession if some of the great truths weren’t contrary to intuition. Adam Smith started the whole story by noting that the pursuit of naked individual self-interest could serve the common good, and John Maynard Keynes taught a post-Victorian world that thrift could be a menace. One doesn’t get remembered as an economist without saying a few things that sound outrageous. But today the lecturer who says outrageous things is taking his academic life in his hands. I speak here of Hans-Hermann Hoppe of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, one of my favourite contemporary intellectuals. Hoppe, an anarcho-capitalist economist of the Austrian School, is best known for defending monarchism on the technical grounds of time-preference. (When you’re a libertarian monarchist, role models are hard to come by.)
The basic argument is that kings have an interest in preserving the economic viability of their states for their benefit of their posterity. The government in a monarchy is, Hoppe says, “privately owned” in a sense -- and is thus usually managed better than republics, where paramount control changes hands quickly. It is not easy to refute this using the raw material of history.
Hoppe was recently implicated in an incident that reveals the tumbledown state of intellectual freedom in today’s universities. In a March, 2004, class he was explaining this pivotal notion of time-preference -- the idea that everybody gives a different relative weight to the present and the future. Some people are willing to lend out $100 today to get back $110 next year; others have a different degree of time preference, and would prefer to keep the C-note now. Not such a controversial idea. But he proceeded, like a good economist, to propose some controversial implications. Some demographic groups, he said, might be expected to prefer present-day consumption more strongly than others; children who still have an undeveloped concept of the future, perhaps, or the elderly, owing to their limited lifespans. Or homosexuals, who generally don’t have children ... This is where the poop hit the proverbial fan. A gay student took umbrage, growing particularly angry at a tangential implication that homosexuals’ different time-preferences might also give them a reasonable predisposition towards more risky behaviour in the present. The student, intimidated by Hoppe’s starchy German style, didn’t challenge the hypothesis in class. (He could have pointed out, for starters, that gays and lesbians have as many nieces and nephews as the rest of us.) Nor did he confront Hoppe after class, or visit his office. He went straight to the university’s affirmative-action officer.
Hoppe’s life and work were put on hold for almost a year as the officer formed a grievance committee and eventually dragged in UNLV’s provost. Hoppe’s lawyer was persistently prevented from introducing evidence or challenging witnesses in trial-like settings, while Hoppe himself, on the grounds that he had created a “hostile or intimidating educational environment,” was threatened with cancellation of an annual pay increase and with the placement of a disciplinary letter in his personnel file.
The UNLV’s bylaws state that no faculty member shall face censorship or discipline for holding “controversial” or “unpopular” views. But until Hoppe dragged in the American Civil Liberties Union earlier this year, his attempts to stand on the bylaws failed. When the ACLU publicized the case, and the American economics profession considered the implications of the bullying Hoppe suffered, dozens of scholars rushed to his defence. Scourged by newspapers and Weblogs, the university backed down on Feb. 18, and Hoppe was unconditionally exonerated by UNLV president Carol Harter. But, as with most of these squabbles, he has been punished through sheer bureaucratic frogmarching as much as if he had been found guilty of thoughtcrime.
Under an academic framework that can criminalize certain scientific hypotheses, and that permits the existence of Stalinist creepy-crawlies like “affirmative action officers,” identity politicians don’t need to win to enforce political correctness. Hoppe moved to the United States in 1986 precisely because he thought it was the sort of place where he couldn’t be persecuted on the testimony of one touchy student. His faith was, perhaps, half-justified by the final outcome. In Canada, he probably would have lost. We have nothing analogous to the ACLU here; our ugly little “civil liberties” groups probably would have competed with each other to denounce Hoppe. We don’t have many controversial economists, which might be why we don’t have many world-famous ones. And how many of our tenured professors would dare have supported Hoppe on principle in the face of a student’s hurt feelings?
