Economy, Society, and History
by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Mises Institute, 2021
191 pp.
In 2004, Hans Hoppe delivered a series of lectures at the Mises Institute about his theory of social evolution, and we are fortunate to have this volume, based on a transcript of those lectures, now available. As one would expect, the book contains much of interest, and in what follows I shall comment on only a few of the topics that this gifted and erudite scholar discusses.
Chaining Down Leviathan: The American Dream of Self-Government, 1776–1865
by Luigi Marco Bassani
Abbeville Institute Press, 2021
356 pp.
Live at the 2021 Virtual Jackson Hole symposium, Federal Chair Jerome Powell addressed the public. Beginning with a nod to COVID and appreciation for front line workers, he quickly moved to an analysis of the economy:
Booming demand for goods and the strength and speed of the reopening have led to shortages and bottlenecks, leaving the COVID-constrained supply side unable to keep up.
When people hear the word “fascism” they naturally think of its ugly racism and anti-Semitism as practiced by the totalitarian regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. But there was also an economic policy component of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and ‘30s as “corporatism,” that was an essential ingredient of economic totalitarianism as practiced by Mussolini and Hitler. So-called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a “model” by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe.
When Oswald Spengler, in one of his minor books, scornfully characterized German classical liberalism as “a bit of the spirit of England on German soil,” he was merely displaying the willful blindness of the school of militaristic-statist German historians, who refused to acknowledge as a true compatriot any thinker who did not form part of the “intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern.”
In the Rothbardian-Hoppean school of libertarianism, all legal disputes come down to property rights and contractual obligations. Therefore, there is much discussion about originary property rights (stemming from homesteading unowned land) and about who has rights to places that people claim to have been displaced from long ago when those areas have been inhabited by many groups, often simultaneously, both pre- and postdispossession.
The most recent protests in Cuba against the current regime have once again brought us to a multi-sided debate on “what should be done” about Cuba. The Left claims that we should actually be emulating Cuba, praising it as a paradise with higher literacy rates and higher, life expectancy than Americans as if either is the end of all measuring prosperity, though will also say any downsides the nation has are due to harmful sanctions and embargoes.
The policy response to the covid panic of 2020 in the United States was one of the most widespread direct attacks on fundamental human rights in decades. Overnight—and without any deliberation, debate, or checks and balances—millions of Americans were denied their basic rights to seek employment, to freely assemble, and to engage in religious practices.
Business and churches were closed, and countless Americans were ordered to stay in their homes and abandon their sources of income.
With the Federal Reserve’s annual Jackson Hole symposium there’s been much talk about when the central bank might allow interest rates to rise, presumably through the process of “tapering.” Tapering would mean easing monthly bond purchases, which would “effectively increase interest rates.“
