[Presented at the “Panel on the Significance of Hans Hermann-Hoppe” at the 2019 Austrian Economics Research Conference.]
I will recount a single episode which epitomizes Hans Hoppe’s singular approach to economic controversy.
On May 14, 2009, a Mises Daily piece appeared by Hoppe entitled “The Yield from Money Held’ Reconsidered”. It was the text of a lecture which had been presented as The Franz Cuhel Memorial Lecture in Prague the previous month.
Although it was long assumed that the electoral college favored Democrats — and this assumption continued right up to election night 2016 — Democrats in the United States have now decided the electoral college is a bad thing. Thus, we continue to see legislative efforts to do away with the electoral college, accompanied by claims that it’s undemocratic.
In the 1940s, economist Friedrich Hayek said in his book, “The Road to Serfdom,” that the road to serfdom was socialism. Economist Joseph Schumpeter, in “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy,” feared that socialism would displace capitalism even though capitalism was a better system.
On March 21, 2019, the BBC ran a story titled “Chinese imports ‘driving fishermen to despair.’” Although the title might lead one to think the article is another installment on the US-China trade war, it is instead a piece on the relationship between China and Kenya. The situation covered by the BBC is a highlight of the intersection of environmental concerns, economics, population dynamics, and social reactions.
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