The Hoppean Reactionary Is Anarcho-Capitalist
Anarcho-capitalism is a political and moral philosophy that is founded upon property rights and purely voluntary interactions among people. Anarcho-capitalism believes in the right to own private property and believe violence is only justified when defending self or property.
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Anarcho-capitalism has it's root in classical liberalism, In the 19th century, classical liberal Frédéric Bastiat, author of "The Law" wrote " "The state is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else." Bastiat's criticism of the state and advocacy of free market economics helped lay the foundation of libertarian thought that would later be expounded upon.
Bastiat also developed the "parable of the broken window," or what is sometimes called "The broken window fallacy" when the train of thought it argues against is applied. This lesson is often used to demonstrate basic free market economic concepts.
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Gustave de Molinari was another classical liberal who was influenced by the works of Bastiat, who while on his deathbed in 1850, described him as the continuator of his works. Molinari, in his essay "The Production of Security," argued, "No government should have the right to prevent another government from going into competition with it, or to require consumers of security to come exclusively to it for this commodity." Molinari and this new type of anti-state liberal grounded their reasoning on liberal ideals and classical economics.
This new advancement in classical liberal thought rightly identifies the government as a monopoly on certain services, namely law and security, although in modern times the state has it's fingers in many more affairs than these. Further, it exposes how the state is antithetical to voluntary interactions and free market economics.
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Murray Rothbard called "The Production of Security" the "first presentation anywhere in human history of what is now called anarcho-capitalism," while Hans-Hermann Hoppe says that "the 1849 article 'The Production of Security' is probably the single most important contribution to the modern theory of anarcho-capitalism."
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Ludwig von Mises, wrote "Human Action," an early exposition of the method he called praxeology, which is defined as the deductive study of human action, based on the notion that humans engage in purposeful behavior. This praxeological approach uniquely characterizes the Austrian School of economics, from which nearly all anarcho-capitalist economic thought is derived.
Mises also made strong arguments against socialism, the most famous of which is referred to as the "economic calculation problem." It was first proposed by Mises in his 1920 article "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," and it demonstrates the failures of socialism while highlighting the power of the free market to allocate resources and determine prices. These failures of socialism can been seen in the various socialist regimes in history, all of which exemplify the socialist calculation problem. Mises contribution to anarcho-capitalist economic thought cannot be understated.
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The term "anarcho-capitalism" was first used by Murray Rothbard to describe his political philsophy. In his anarcho-capitalist model, a system of protection agencies compete in a free market and are voluntarily supported by consumers who choose to use their protective and judicial services. Anarcho-capitalism would mean the end of the state monopoly on force.
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In Man, Economy, and State, Rothbard divides the various kinds of state intervention in three categories: "autistic intervention", which is interference with private non-economic activities; "binary intervention", which is forced exchange between individuals and the state; and "triangular intervention", which is state-mandated exchange between individuals. Rothbard ultimately concluded that in order to believe in laissez-faire one must also embrace anarchism.
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Rothbard was anti-egalitarian in his worldview, "Equality is not in the natural order of things, and the crusade to make everyone equal in every respect (except before the law) is certain to have disastrous consequences." Later in his life, Rothbard called himself a paleolibertarian, holding culturally conservative values that were in opposition to the cultural leftism of more mainstream libertarian thought. After Rothbard's death in 1995 Lew Rockwell, President of the von Mises Institute, told The New York Times that Rothbard was "the founder of right-wing anarchism"
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Hans-Hermann Hoppe is the most influential Anarcho-capitalist theorist of our time. One of Hoppe's most notable breakthroughs in libertarian thought was his development of "argumentation ethics." Hoppe states that because honest argumentation aimed at resolving a conflict over scarce resources must presuppose various norms including non-violence to be meaningful, then it follows that propositions propounded during such argumentation cannot contradict these norms, from which, he claims, the non aggression principle can be logically derived. Murray Rothbard wrote that Hoppe's theory was "a dazzling breakthrough for political philosophy in general and for libertarianism in particular" and that Hoppe, "has managed to transcend the famous is/ought, fact/value dichotomy that has plagued philosophy since the days of the Scholastics, and that had brought modern libertarianism into a tiresome deadlock".
Hoppe is also a notable cultural conservative and a proponent of libertarian "covenant communities,' which is a form of an intentional community that is made up of property owners for a common purpose. Hoppe's ideas on covenant communities are of significant importance, for it is precisely modern democratic society which is destroying tradition, beauty, and culture. Private property and free association will allow those of us who wish to rise above and form traditional societies based on private property and traditional values.
"Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They – the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism – will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order" - Hans-Herman Hoppe