KOL302 | Human Action Podcast with Jeff Deist: Hoppe’s Democracy

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 302. [Update: see various biographical pieces on my publications page, including Alan D. Bergman, Adopting Liberty: The Stephan Kinsella Story (2025).] From The Human Action Podcast, Oct. 23, 2020, with Jeff Deist, discussing Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Democracy: The God That Failed, chapters 5-8. Transcript below. From the Mises.org shownotes: Lawyer and libertarian theorist Stephan Kinsella joins the show to discuss the middle chapters of Hoppe's Democracy, The God That Failed—in particular dealing with "desocialization" of collective property, immigration, and free trade. These are the most controversial and widely-discussed parts of the book, and Kinsella provides a fascinating analysis of property vs. wealth, the problems with public ownership and forced integration, and the concept of rule-setting for state property. And don't miss the final part of the show for his explanation of "Hoppephobia." [“Hoppephobia” (Liberty, March 1990)] Kinsella's article on LewRockwell.com: www.lewrockwell.com/2005/09/stephan-kinsella/a-simple-libertarian-argument/ Read Stephan Kinsella's Against Intellectual Property at Mises.org/KinsellaBook Use the code HAPOD for a discount on Democracy: The God That Failed from our bookstore: Mises.org/BuyHoppe Mises Institute original video: Jeff Deist and Stephan Kinsella on Hoppe’s Democracy Transcript 00:00:03 JEFF DEIST: This is Jeff Deist, and you’re listening to the Human Action podcast.  Hey, ladies and gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us, and welcome back once again to the Human Action podcast, a show we do every week where we are not afraid of books, even the 900-page books.  And that’s really what the show is all about is working our way through what we consider important or seminal works in the broad, let’s say, Austro-libertarian landscape, and then by doing so, hopefully encouraging you to read these books, to tackle these books and also helping you through them as you go. 00:00:38 So that’s the goal, and as you know, we have recently started with Hans-Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed, and we chose this purposely because we had three weeks left until the election, so we’re breaking it up into three sections.  And last week we were lucky to be joined by my friend, Jayant Bhandari, and we had a great talk about things like time preference and civilization and capital at the beginning of that book.  And in the mid part of this book where Hoppe gets into the discussion of centralization and trade and immigration, I thought there would be nobody better to invite on the show than Stephan Kinsella with whom most of you are already familiar no doubt. 00:01:19 He is a patent attorney.  He has written extensively on not just libertarian theory but I would say more narrowly libertarian legal theory, which is a bit of a different animal.  And also, of course, he’s perhaps best known for his work on IP, and we will link to at least one article of his, which we shall discuss during the show.  We will link to his book, Against Intellectual Property, at the mises.org site.  If you haven’t read it, and you – or maybe you don’t have developed thoughts about IP in the digital age, you should read it.  You can read it easily over a weekend, and I very much encourage you to do so regardless of where you fall on that debate.  I – my personal feelings are in line with Kinsella on that topic, by the way.  So all that said, Stephan, thanks for joining. 00:02:08 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Glad to be here, Jeff. 00:02:09 JEFF DEIST: Well, I want to ask you before we get into the book, it came out in 2001.  Unfortunately, the Mises Institute doesn’t own this book, wish we did.  So where were you?  What were you doing in 2001?  Where were you living?  How did you become aware of Hoppe or this book? 00:02:25 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Oh 2001.  That’s a good question.  I remember that because that was the year of 9/11.  I was back in Houston.  I’m from Louisiana.  I had moved to Houston as a lawyer in 1992 and moved to Philadelphia in ’94 and been there for a few years and moved back to Houston.  And I remember in 2001, I was in my bedroom when the Twin Towers attack happened. 00:02:52 I was already a Hoppeian, Rothbardian, Austrian, anarcho-capitalist libertarian, and my first Hoppian introduction was his argumentation ethics in a Liberty Magazine symposium, which I read in 1988 in law school and – when I was in Louisiana.  And so I became enamored of Hans when I read that, and then I read his Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, which is a sort of a systematic treatise laying out his propertarian, Austrian theory, and then of course his subsequent books, his subsequent books which are more or less previously published articles but related by a common theme, so economics and ethics in private property in 1994 if I recall, and then Democracy, the one we’re talking about how, and then The Great Fiction, and who knows what else is to come. [Note: see related biographical pieces are here.] 00:03:58 JEFF DEIST: And so did you get to meet Rothbard? 00:04:01 STEPHAN KINSELLA: I did.  I was in Philadelphia in 1994, and I had written – I was a young lawyer.  I had written a review essay, a complementary review essay in the Law Review for Hoppe’s second book.  And I sent it to them, and I was a big fan of Rothbard and Hoppe and the others associated with them like Block and David Gordon and Lew and these guys.  And they were having a – it was a time of the fusion – the second fusionism movement with the – I forgot the name of the group now.  It was at Crystal City, Virginia, the… 00:04:45 JEFF DEIST: It was the Randolph Society. 00:04:46 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, the John Randolph Society.  (( See Meeting Rothbard and Hoppe: John Randolph Club, 1994. ))  That’s what it was.  And I was actually – I’m from Louisiana, so I saw the cigar smoking, puffing I would say neo-confederate kind of guys.  There was a little bit of this kind of southern, neo-confederate, flag, puffing stuff going on that – not too much, but it turned me.  That wasn’t my attraction.  My attraction was to meet Lew and Block and Hoppe and Rothbard.  And so I met Hans, and it was a pleasure and Lew, and I sat alone in an auditorium for about 30 minutes with Rothbard, and he – we talked, and he signed my book.  And then he died two months later in January, so I did get my little tiny overlap with Rothbard, which I’m glad to have done. 00:05:42 JEFF DEIST: Well, that was serendipitous, no question about it.  The book in question today, The God That Failed, I did an interview with Hoppe a few months back when I mentioned that this is undoubtedly his most famous work.  It doesn’t necessarily mean his most important, but his most famous.  So I guess give us your overarching take on the book and where it fits. 00:06:06 STEPHAN KINSELLA: It’s interesting because my take on Hans is not the same as that of others, partly because my take is more academic and more in the praxeological point of view.  And my favorite book of Hans is – and his is – we have a nice relationship, and he kind of rolls his eyes.  Oh, you love my Theory of Socialism and Capitalism.  I know that’s my favorite work of mine for you because it’s systematic.  And that was his first one that I read.  It bowled me over. 00:06:38 The other works were more compilations of essays, but they’re not just like a typical book of compilations of essays.  They’re just like, okay, it’s not like a columnist at the New York Times.  They’re just – these are deep essays, and they usually relate to each other, and they do hang together.  But I had read most of them already by the time they came out, so when the books came out, I already knew most of them. 00:07:05 And I was the one going like, why isn’t extreme apriorism or extreme rationalism included in one of these books?  So then it finally came out in The Great Fiction or whatever.  The Democracy book has a little bit more of the social – the conservative cultural kind of views.  I’m a lawyer and engineer who has dabbled in and lucky to have received knowledge in history and economics from the Mises Institute.  And these scholars I have been lucky to rub elbows with, but I don’t view myself in the same class as these guys. 00:07:44 So I don’t view myself as a cultural expert, so I find it interesting.  I have learned and borrowed from a lot of the stuff he wrote about that is in Democracy in some of my legal writing.  For example, the stuff about time preference and how it affects the formation of cities and just democracy itself, like this American assumption that democracy was an improvement over the earlier ancient regime. 00:08:22 I mean the introduction – to be honest, I know we’re talking about chapters.  This is something funny, by the way, about intellectuals like you and I, people that get into these books.  You said, hey Stephan, let’s talk about chapters five through nine, and I know we narrowed it down to five through eight.  You said it’s only 58 pages or whatever.  And by the way, on EPUB, it’s like 128, but for most people that’s a monograph of densely worded, terse, intellectual stuff with footnotes. 00:08:50 And that’s fine.  I’ve read it before, but it’s like that’s not a minor assignment, but this is the way we think.  But – and I love it.  It’s juicy.  It’s like a nice, meaty t-bone, rib eye steak for me.  But I just think that as Americans we take for granted that the move from democracy to – or from monarchy to democracy was a good thing.  And in this book, Democracy, one of the best things about it is the introduction. 00:09:23 And by the way, another great thing that Hoppe has written is the introduction to the revised edition to Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty, the re-released version in 1997 or 1998 I believe.  The introductions are tour de forces.