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

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 302. 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." 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.