KOL157 | “The Social Theory of Hoppe: Lecture 5: Economic Issues and Applications”

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 157. This is the fifth of 6 lectures of my 2011 Mises Academy course “The Social Theory of Hoppe.” I’ll release the final lecture here in the podcast feed shortly. The slides for this lecture are appended below; links for“suggested readings” for the course are included in the podcast post for the first lecture, episode 153. Transcript below. LECTURE 5: ECONOMIC ISSUES AND APPLICATIONS Video [fvplayer id="11"] Slides TRANSCRIPT The Social Theory of Hoppe, Lecture 5: Economic Issues and Applications Stephan Kinsella Mises Academy, Aug. 8, 2011 00:00:00 STEPHAN KINSELLA: … question about – someone sent me in the class course page.  Well, I mean if you’re just asking me my opinion, I mean I don’t think Hoppe has written very much on abortion.  I actually did include an abortion question in the questions I submitted to him that hopefully he’ll give us some feedback on it for discussion next week.  I believe he is generally pro-choice because I remember he asked me one time about, oh, 12 or 15 years ago to try to come up with an argument to justify it.  So I don’t know.  I’m not assuming there is a flaw in Rothbard’s argument about abandoning the fetus. 00:00:52 My personal view is that certain actions give rise to positive obligations.  So if you harm someone or put them in a position of peril, then – push someone in a lake who can’t swim, you have an obligation to rescue them.  And I think there’s a similar argument that, because of the nature, the dependent nature of the child, that you have positive obligations to your children because you brought them into the world.  So that’s the basic argument.  I mean another could be that the fetus is a human who has a right to life, and there is no reason the parent needs to kill it.  It’s not really a threat.  Now, there are some people written – there’s a book called Solomon’s Knife by Victor Koman, a libertarian science fiction novel, which posits this trans-option procedure. 00:01:47 And the idea is that medical technology permits any woman who’s pregnant to take the baby out and put it into another host mother.  So there’s really no reason anymore to have abortions.  If you want the baby out, you give it to another woman.  That would change the complexity of the debate.  Okay, so let’s get going.  So I have a lot of slides here.  I don’t think we’re going to cover them all.  The ones that we don’t cover we’ll talk about next time.  A lot of these topics blend into politics and economics. 00:02:20 So some of these are somewhat political as well, and so it would make sense to cover these in the next week as well.  So where we left off, we talked about epistemology, and last week, economic methodology and dualism.  Okay, so for the methodology part.  Today, I want to continue the end of that lecture and talk about a few more things, and then we’ll get to some economic issues and applications.  And you see the suggested readings I have here.  For next week’s classes, a lot of smaller topics.  A lot of blog posts cover these.  I don’t know if I will assign the reading ahead of time, but I will have links in the slides for all the things we talk about. 00:03:04 00:03:08 Okay, so let’s go to slide five.  Excuse me a second.  Let me close my door.  Excuse me.  Okay, I mentioned last time in the epistemology discussion, there’s a lot of hostility by Rand and objectivists to Kant.  And as I mentioned, that is directed towards an idealistic, subjectivist-type interpretation or construction of what Kant wrote.  And to the extent they’re characterizing him correctly, I think a lot of their criticisms make sense. 00:03:49 But there – as I mentioned, there’s a realist tradition of Kant that Hoppe and Mises share, and so actually, there’s a lot more similarity between Hoppe and Mises-style Kantianism and Rand’s own view of epistemology.  So for example, Ayn Rand talked about an axiom, if you remember, that is sort of analogous to what Kantians would call a priori statements.  And she says it’s a statement.  It’s like – it’s a fundamental statement and base of knowledge. 00:04:19 And if you look at the end of this quote in the bold, she says: It’s a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it.  So this is very similar to some of the basic a priori propositions, which you commit a contradiction if you deny them, including Hoppe’s argumentation ethics.  She talks about existing and how, if you grasp that, that implies to corollary axioms or propositions, that something has to exist that you’re perceiving and that you exist as a conscious perceiver. 00:04:58 So basically, just right recognizing that there is something gives you the distinction between an observer, a conscious person who exists, and reality.  So that’s another way of proving certain things about the world.  And again, she notes here that it’s a contradiction in terms to be a consciousness but you’re conscious of nothing outside of yourself.  So you can see how she has a similar argument structure to some of the basic operative propositions of Mises and Hoppe, anyway, the way they interpret Kant. 00:05:33 I prepared this chart some time ago trying to sort this out, trying to show the parallels between the thought of Rand on the one hand and the sort of Misesian or even Rothbardian or maybe a more normal type of terminology.  So what Ayn Rand called her philosophy of objectivism, in that philosophy, she does recognize sometimes—she’s not always consistent—that the value of things is relational.  It’s a relation between a person who values something.  Now, she might go astray on the intellectual property stuff, and they talk about creating values. 00:06:13 But, for the most part, when she talks about objectivism in terms of value, she’s talking a relation.  And this is similar to what Mises would refer to as subjectivism, that basically value is from the subject’s point of view.  Now, when Rand talks about subjectivism, she means what we would call relativism.  Okay, so when she criticizes Kant for being subjective, but she’s saying he’s a relativist or an idealist.  In other words, we can’t know anything true or certain about the real nature of the world. 00:06:49 Now, Rand has a formulation that value is something you act to gain or keep, and/or keep, and this is very similar to the Misesian notion of demonstrated preference, that you demonstrate that you value something when you act to achieve it.  Now, what Rand calls action in general, that is, just anything humans do, that is what you can think of in Misesian terms as rational action.  In other words, they think of all action as rational in that sense.  Now, what Rand would call rational action is what Misesians would call efficient or moral action, that is, action that achieves what your goal is.  So if you think about how – I have a blog post, by the way.  I think there’s a hyperlink in the title. 00:07:39 00:07:45 I think if you click on that Axioms there on the previous page, there’s a blog post I did, which explores this in more detail.  Now, as I mentioned before, Rand – her ethics is consequentialist or hypothetical because she’s like, if you choose to live as a man, or you could say, it’s what Roderick Long and others call an assertoric.  Let me type it in here, assertoric.  An assertoric hypothetical, that is, since you choose to live, then the following results.  So her ethics is consequential as is Mises’ utilitarianism.  If you want peace and prosperity and harmony and cooperation productivity, then you favor the free market, etc. (( See Geoffrey Allan Plauche, "Aristotelian liberalism: an inquiry into the foundations of a free and flourishing society" (unpublished PhD diss., Louisiana State University,  2007), p.125; Douglas B. Rasmussen & Douglas J. Den Uyl, “Why Individual Rights? Rights as Metanormative Principles,” in Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), p.125 ("the fundamental nature of an ethical imperative for a natural end ethics of the sort that we are presenting is best explained by reference to the following classifications: ‘‘Categorical imperative—regardless of what ends you seek, you must take the following steps. Problematic hypothetical imperative—if you seek this end, then you must take the following steps. Assertoric hypothetical imperative—since you seek this end, then you must take the following steps’’ (emphasis added)." (quoting Roderick Long, Reason and Value: Aristotle Versus Rand (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: The Objectivist Center, 2000), 61 n. 65.). )) 00:08:29 Now, as far as terminology Rand and even Rothbard’s terminology is more Aristotelian, whereas Kant’s is – Mises and Hoppe are more Kantian.  And finally, when Rand talks about something being intrinsic, Mises would call that objective, but not too important here but interesting nonetheless.  Oh, here’s the post here.  The top link there has more detail about this for anyone who is interested.  There’s a couple of articles that talk about this too, about the compatibility between Austrian economics and objectivism despite the protests to the contrary of the objectivists. 00:09:05 Now, there’s something we – I think I talked about logical positivism in last class.  I want to bring up one other related thing here.  Some of you may have heard of legal positivism, and for years, I struggled in my mind.  I’d think, why are they using the same word?  Is there a link between them?  Is there a relation?  And it’s hard to find anything good on this.  I’ve blogged about it a little bit.  Here’s how I think about it.  So legal positivism is a school of thought in legal theory, which says that – well, it has a couple of parts.  First,