Progressive lawyer, online pundit, and internet troll Matt Bruenig has a question for libertarians: “My first question for Cato and libertarians more generally is this: What is up with Hans-Hermann Hoppe?”[1]

I wish I could respond, “Who?” Alas, I am well aware of Hoppe. Many libertarians and other readers, though, may have just that response. Fortunately, Bruenig has provide an introduction:

“For the unacquainted, Hoppe is a very prominent libertarian academic, certainly well known within intellectual libertarian circles. He ironically works at the University of Nevada as an economics professor, making him a public employee. He publishes frequently in libertarian academic journals, is a Distinguished Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, founded the Property & Freedom Society, is frequently referenced by other libertarians as one of them, and [authored a] 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed. It is a tad on the long side, but it’s really good, the [following] quotes especially.”[1]

We will look at Bruenig’s quotes later. For now it is enough to say that, while Hoppe and his followers self-identify as libertarians, many if not most other libertarians who know of him want nothing to do with him.

Here is an assessment of Hoppe that I suspect many libertarians who have read him or his admirers would accept:

The errors of Hans-Hermann Hoppe are regrettable for two reasons: Firstly, Hoppe is a highly intelligent and well-educated economist who – for whatever reasons – fails to notice when he does damage to the values of freedom and property, which he claims to support. This is the tragic personal side of Hans-Hermann Hoppe. But it is also tragic for academic discussions: At a time when we are surrounded by ever growing welfare states we badly need thinkers like Hoppe to show us how to tackle today’s problems. But instead of doing that, Hoppe prefers to take refuge in his pipe dreams of a so-called ‘natural order’, which rather resembles the abyss of a variation of right-wing totalitarianism. For all these reasons, for all his errors and mistakes and for his wrong-headed methodology we may expect Hoppe’s ideas to remain a footnote in the history of political thought. And it may well be better this way. An effective strategy of liberation would look very different. If Hoppe continues to use the terms ‘liberalism’ and ‘freedom’ for his authoritarian and pseudo-liberal agenda, it is time for the true liberals to claim back these terms from him.[2]

It is only necessary to add that (1) the very idea of libertarianism that Bruenig claims libertarians should be following (2) is not only compatible with, but looks like it would result in, Hoppe’s theorized libertarian society of the future; furthermore, while (3) Hoppe’s account of that society suffers from serious flaws and errors, (4) Bruenig’s account of that future society, being almost identical to Hoppe’s, has the same flaws and errors. Making those four points is easy enough, but demonstrating them requires a bit more work.

(1) Bruenig’s libertarian vision

Bruenig believes that libertarians should advocate for an ideal state of affairs that he calls “Grab-what-you-can world” or “Grab World”. He claims that this is the only possible world compatible with the libertarian core belief (or set of beliefs) referred to by the label of the “Non-Aggression Principle” or NAP:

“The world which follows the non-aggression principle is the one Roderick Long calls the ‘grab-what-you-can world'” – “this quote [from Long] clearly describes the only world that follows the non-aggression principle” – “the grab-what-you-can world satisfies the non-aggression principle and no other world does” – “almost everyone opposes following the non-aggression principle – as it requires the grab-what-you-can world” – “the grab-what-you-can world is the world that follows the non-aggression principle”.[3]

This claim follows from Bruenig’s definition of ‘force,’ which is not the standard libertarian one. By his definition, trespassing, embezzlement, fraud, burglary, robbery, looting, vandalism, arson, and other property offenses should not be considered uses of force: a property offense “involves no force (strictly defined) because no body has been attacked.”[4] By this definition – that ‘force’ is just attacking other people’s bodies – Bruenig reasons his way to Grab World:

“It’s simple: 1) grabbing pieces of the world does not, by itself, involve initiating force against other people (if it did, then all resource use would be considered aggression), and 2) attacking someone for grabbing up a piece of the world does involve initiating force against other people.”[3]

In Grab World, there is only one law, the Basic Rule: “You may not act upon the bodies of others without their consent.”[4] Everything else, including the property crimes listed above, would be legal. From this Rule follows the idea of Grab World, as envisioned by its creator, Roderick Long (the libertarian philosopher from whom Bruenig grabbed the idea):

Imagine a world in which people freely expropriate other people’s possessions; nobody initiates force directly against another person’s body, but subject to that constraint, people regularly grab any external resource they can get their hands on, regardless of who has made or been using the resource. Any conception of aggression according to which the world so described is free of aggression is not a plausible one.”[5]

Plausibly or not, Grab World is free from aggression (the actual initiation of force) as Bruenig defines it: “in the libertarian set, there seems to be severe difficulties with distinguishing between what we might call Actual Initiation (defined as ‘who touched who first’) and Ideological Initiation”[6]…. “What [libertarians] actually mean by ‘initiation of force’ is not some neutral notion of hauling off and physically attacking someone.”[7]

David S. Amato points out that Bruenig’s criterion of ‘Actual Initiation’ as touching would not include pointing a gun at someone else: “even the mugger doesn’t, under Bruenig’s Actual Initiation standard, initiate force against his victim, at least not necessarily. Pointing a gun at someone, with the desired goal of taking his money or possessions, doesn’t require the mugger to touch the victim, to make any actual, physical contact.”[5] Nor, for that matter, would pulling the trigger. But to be charitable, that conclusion should probably be chalked up to Bruenig’s sloppy writing rather than his actual beliefs; it is reasonable to think that he includes shooting and threatening people with guns, bows and arrows, and bombs as examples of the use of force as well as mere touching.

What seems less reasonable is to imagine the Grab World state of affairs obtaining in reality. Grab World would require a society of pacifists (as, by stipulation, “nobody initiates force directly against another person’s body”). But while difficult to conceive, it is not logically impossible. As a youth I read a speculative fiction novel by Damon Knight, Rule Golden, in which the galactic overlords unleashed a gas upon earth which caused everyone who physically hurt or injured another person to experience the victim’s pain or injury; those who killed others would die.[8] Anyone with enough imagination could probably think of other ways for Grab World to be instantiated.

(2) From Bruenig to Hoppe

So far, so good. But Bruenig makes assumptions about Grab World that do not look so reasonable. Among them:

(1) “It is more or less communism, yes.”[9] No, it is not. It may resemble the ultimate communist society that Karl Marx envisioned; but it rules out any chance to establish the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ that Marx saw as being necessary to get there. In the ‘dictatorship’ stage, which is all that every self-proclaimed Communist regime has ever reached, there is plenty of property; it just all belongs to the state. Property rules against trespass, theft, and the like have always been enforced by “the state’s violence and bloodshed” (as Bruenig likes to call it) under those regimes just as strongly as in states with private property; even more violently and bloodily, in many cases.

(2) “there is a state that is preventing people from assaulting and battering and the like.”[9] Wrong again. States require a division of labor society which in turn requires an exchange economy: since those enforcing the Basic Rule are losing the opportunity to grab or produce goods and resources for themselves, they must be supported by those who are grabbing or producing. But Bruenig forecasts that, on Grab World, exchange would initially break down completely:

there is no such thing as a non-coercive trade. All trades rely upon violent coercion. I only trade with someone because they have a violence voucher that they will redeem [from the state] if I decide to act upon the piece of the world without doing so. They only trade with me for the same reason. If you got rid of the coercion, which is to say you got rid of violence vouchers, no trading would occur.[6]

Without the possibility of exchange, production of consumer goods would grind to a halt; who would buy them, when one could just loot for them? But with nothing being produced, at a certain point people would start running out of stores to loot; then where would a state get its tools of violence, its guns, handcuffs, police cars, prisons, tanks, fighter planes, and all the rest? Given Grab World’s universal pacifism, those are not things they could go around and grab from just anyone.

Even if the state did manage to get supplied with its tools of violence, it could not use them, as that would mean acting on the bodies of others without their consent, just as it is today. No one could be physically detained, arrested, or held at gunpoint (much less shot) by the police in Grab World. No one could be jailed or placed under house arrest awaiting trial, physically compelled to attend a trial (including witnesses or jurors as well as defendants), or punished physically, including by imprisonment, if convicted.

Since Bruenig’s Basic Rule forbids anyone to act on the bodies of others, it forbids its own enforcement. All a state could do to anyone violating Bruenig’s Rule, without itself violating the Rule , would be to grab things from him; in other words, the Basic Rule would forbid a government sworn to uphold it from treating those who violate it any differently from non-violators. That would mean the end of the state as we know it, and as we have known it for all of recorded history.

(3) “It is a propertyless society.”[9] There is no reason to think so. As Bruenig himself stipulates, “Conventions would develop”[9a] by mutual consent, between groups of people or communities in Grab World; which could include rules against taking each other’s property, invading each others’ homes, killing each others’ pets, and the like. Those rules could of course mirror standard libertarian rules respecting property rights, as they would be consensual, and therefore could include allowing others to use force in response to cases of theft and so on (even on Grab World).[10]

Since in communities with such rules, and those communities only, people would be able to produce and trade goods, it is reasonable to imagine them as coming into immediate being in actual communities, in villages and small towns where people know and trust each other. Only such communities could give people the property security, and the division of labor, necessary to maintain a more-than starvation existence after the cities were looted. However, they could do so only by instantiating property rights through voluntary community covenants.

It is easy to imagine these proprietary communities expanding to the size of whole counties, walled or fenced off and guarded against outsiders. It would be easy enough (and not necessarily involve any touching) to restrict admission only to those who consented to the community rules on force. One can even imagine a flood of refugees to them from the cities, all of whom were admitted would have consented to the standard libertarian view of defensive force.

Outsiders like Bruenig would still have the negative liberty to invade and loot communities, and some might do just that; but there is no reason communities would have to merely let them do it. Non-consenters could climb fences, or cut holes in them, to get in to do their looting; but to get out again they would have to let go of their loot; at which point a community police or posse could simply grab it all back. Would-be looters could also tunnel under fences; but community defenders could simply destroy the tunnels. (Question for any Bruenig Bros reading: would destroying a tunnel with looters in it count as “attacking” them?)

I have written elsewhere on this evolution.[10] To sum up: rather than a propertyless society, Grab World looks like it would evolve into the stateless world of proprietary communities envisioned by Hoppe, where political power is “stripped from the hands of the central government and reassigned to the states, provinces, cities, towns, villages, residential districts, and ultimately to private property owners and their voluntary associations.”[1]

However, the vision of those libertarian communities imagined by Hoppe looks completely flawed, riddled with conceptual errors. Those errors in turn inspire Bruenig to adopt a similarly flawed account filled with the same errors. Documenting that assessment, though, must wait for now.

Notes

[1] Matt Bruenig, “Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Libertarian Extraordinaire,” Demos, September 11, 2013. http://www.demos.org/blog/9/11/13/hans-hermann-hoppe-libertarian-extraordinaire

[2] Oliver Hartwich, “The Errors of Hans-Hermann Hoppe,” Open Republic Magazine (Dublin) 1:2 (October 2005). Web, June 9, 2017. https://oliverhartwich.com/2005/10/10/the-errors-of-hans-hermann-hoppe/

[3] Matt Bruenig, “What a World Following the Non-Aggression Principle Looks Like,” Demos, January 29, 2014. http://www.demos.org/blog/1/29/14/what-world-following-non-aggression-principle-looks

[4] Matt Bruenig, “The Lesson of Grab What You Can”, Demos, June 3, 2014.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140606193500/http://www.demos.org/blog/6/3/14/lesson-grab-what-you-can

[5] David S. Amato, “Against Grab World,” Libertarianism.org, October 15, 2015.

https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/against-grab-world

[6] Matt Bruenig, “Violence Vouchers: A descriptive account of property,” Matt Bruenig Politics, March 28, 2014. http://mattbruenig.com/2014/03/28/violence-vouchers-a-descriptive-account-of-property/

[7] Matt Bruenig, “Can you sustain an economic philosophy solely by begging the question?”. Matt Bruenig Politics, October 7,2015. http://mattbruenig.com/2015/10/02/can-you-sustain-an-economic-philosophy-solely-by-begging-the-question/

[8] Damon Knight, “Rule Golden,” Three Novels. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Print.

[9] Matt Bruenig, Comment, June 23, 2014, to [9a] Bruenig, “Pick-up basketball and grab what you can.” Matt Bruenig Politics, June 22, 2014. http://mattbruenig.com/2014/06/22/pick-up-basketball-and-grab-what-you-can/

[10] George J. Dance, “Grab World,” Nolan Chart, May 26, 2017. https://www.nolanchart.com/grab-world

Also read: The Party of Choice