Mr. Milei fancies himself to be a great monetary theorist in the Austrian tradition. To illustrate his unrivalled brilliance here are two revealing exhibits.

Dr. Hoppe‘s recent email correspondence with a New Yorker writer.

What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

Block’s call for total war and the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians in Gaza is the complete and uninhibited rejection and renunciation of the nonaggression principle that constitutes one of the very cornerstones of the Rothbardian system.
Original Article: An Open Letter to Walter E. Block

Breaking up with a person you have known for more than thirty years, with whom you have participated in countless conferences and co-authored a couple of articles, even if only in the somewhat distant past, is nothing done lightly. It is even harder, if one shares with this person a common standing as a public intellectual and both our names are mentioned frequently in one breath as prominent students of the same teacher, Murray N. Rothbard, and as leading intellectual lights of the modern libertarian movement founded by Rothbard.
But then: in this position, it becomes near-imperative to always stay on guard and take notice if a person closely associated with your own name goes astray and falls into serious error, and you may be compelled to publicly distance and dis-associate yourself

[This article is the foreword to Stephan Kinsella’s, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023)]
The question as to what is justice and what constitutes a just society is as old as philosophy itself. Indeed, it arises in everyday life even long before any systematic philosophizing is to begin.
All throughout intellectual history, one prominent answer to this question has been to say that it is “might” that makes “right.” Or more specifically: that what is right or wrong, just or unjust, is unilaterally decreed by a State qua territorial monopolist of violence. The self-contradictory nature of this “decisionist” position, i.e. of “legal positivism,” comes to light once we ask its proponents for a reason or evidence as to why we should believe the proposition

[See this lecture as a video.]
States, regardless of their constitution, are not economic enterprises. In contrast to the latter, states do not finance themselves by selling products and services to customers who voluntarily pay, but by compulsory levies: taxes collected through the threat and use of violence (and through the paper money they literally create out of thin air). Significantly, economists have therefore referred to governments—i.e., the holders of state power—as stationary bandits. Governments and everyone on their payroll live off the loot stolen from other people. They lead a parasitic existence at the expense of a subdued “host population.”
A number of further insights emerge from this.
Naturally, stationary bandits prefer larger loot to smaller loot. This means that

Includes an introduction by Joe Salerno. Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on 23 July 2023.

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Interviewer: I would like to welcome our second guest in the studio. It is the philosopher and economist with an international range Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Nice to meet you, Mr. Hoppe.
The dream of a united Europe, the eternal longing of the empire. Do you also dream this dream?

Imagine you are in command of the state, defined as an institution that possesses a territorial monopoly of ultimate decision making in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving the state and its agents itself, and, by implication, the right to tax, i.e., to unilaterally determine the price that your subjects must pay you to perform the task of ultimate decision making.

In June 2004, Professor Hoppe visited the Mises Institute in Auburn to deliver an ambitious series of lectures titled Economy, Society, and History. Over ten lectures, one each morning and afternoon for a week, Dr. Hoppe presented nothing short of a sweeping historical narrative and vision for a society rooted in markets and property.

Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito

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