Some of My Favorite Hoppe Quotes

Thomas DiLorenzo

Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo was a university economics professor for forty-one years, including twenty-eight years at Loyola University Maryland. He is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

One of the joys of reading the writings of Hans-Hermann Hoppe is his ironclad logic, inspired by his deep knowledge of philosophy, Austrian economics, and libertarian theory. This enables him to constantly state the obvious, a reality that is lost and may even seem shocking to the less logical and educated among us. Such conclusions comprise my favorite Hoppe quotes.

Take for example this one: “[A] president (as distinct from a king) has not interest in not ruining his country”.1 Unlike a king who owns the capital of the country and therefore has a longer-term perspective, a president benefits from using up or consuming as much of that capital while he can.

With democracy “public law” emerges which “exempts government agents from personal liability.” That of course sounds more like lawlessness than lawfulness, all in the name of “the law.”2

With a welfare state “There will be more poor, unemployed, uninsured, uncompetitive, homeless, and so on . . . there will be less productive activity, self-reliance, and future orientation, and more consumption, parasitism, dependency and shortsightedness . . . and a progressive de-civilization—infantilization . . . of civil society.”3 The evidence of this is of course everywhere.

“Democratic wars tend to be total wars . . . distinctions between combatants and noncombatants fall by the wayside . . .”4 As this is written the “only Democracy in the Middle East” was waging total war on Gaza, carpet bombing the entire area, destroying all of the infrastructure, and reportedly killing more than 30,000 civilians.

“[A]fter the . . . defeat . . . of the secessionist Confederacy by Lincoln and the Union, it was clear that the right to secede no longer existed and that democracy meant absolute and unlimited majority rule . . . all modern democracies are compulsory membership organizations.”5 Murray Rothbard mocked Lincoln’s theory of the compulsory, forever “union” as “a perpetual one-way venus flytrap—a one-way ticket to sovereign suicide.”6

“After more than a century of compulsory democracy, the predictable results are before our eyes. The tax load imposed on property owners and producers makes the economic burden even of slaves and serfs seem moderate by comparison.”7 This is because our rulers claim to be “protecting” us from “global warming and cooling and the extinction of animals and plants, from husbands and wives, parents and employers, poverty, disease, disaster, ignorance, prejudice, racism, sexism, homophobia, and countless other enemies and dangers” but not “protecting our life and property,” the one legitimate function of the state.8

Finally, “[I]f the power of government rests on the widespread acceptance of false indeed absurd and foolish ideas, then the only genuine protection is the systematic attack of these ideas and the propagation and proliferation of true ones.”9 Hans-Herman Hoppe has spent a lifetime doing exactly that.

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1 Hans-Herman Hoppe, Democracy: The God that Failed (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), p. 24, emphasis added.

2 Hoppe, Democracy, p. 28.

3 Hoppe, Democracy, p. 32.

4 Hoppe, Democracy, p. 36.

5 Hoppe, Democracy, p. 80.

6 Murray Rothbard, “America’s Two Just Wars: 1776 and 1861, in John Denson, editor, The Costs of War (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009), p.126.

7 Hoppe, Democracy, p. 89.

8 Hoppe, Democracy, p. 89.

9 Hoppe, Democracy, p. 93.