A recent speech by Hans-Hermann Hoppe includes the following insights:
Apodictic or
quasi-apodictic statements regarding elementary insights of the social sciences.
· It is impossible to increase social prosperity
by increasing the money supply. How else should one explain that despite the
existing possibility of any amount of increase in paper money, poverty
continues to exist in some places, unchanged. An increase in the amount of
money can only ever lead to a redistribution of a given stock of welfare goods.
It favors the first and early recipients of the new, additional money at the
expense of the last and late users.
·
Human action is the conscious pursuit with
scarce resources of goals regarded as valuable.
·
No one can deliberately not act.
·
Every action strives to increase the subjective
well-being of the actor.
·
A larger quantity of a good is always preferred
to a smaller quantity of the same good.
·
The earlier attainment of a given goal by given
means is preferred to its later attainment.
·
Production must always precede consumption.
·
Only those who save – spend less than they earn
– can increase their prosperity permanently (unless they steal).
·
What is consumed today cannot be consumed again
tomorrow.
·
Price fixings above the market price, such as
minimum wages, lead to unsalable surpluses, i.e. to forced unemployment.
·
Price-fixing below the market price, such as rent
ceilings leads to shortages and a persistent shortage of rented housing.
·
Without private ownership of production factors (as
in classical socialism) there can be no factor prices and without factor prices
an economic calculation is impossible.
·
Taxes – compulsory charges – are a burden on
income producers and/or property owners and reduce production and capital
formation.
·
No form of taxation is compatible with the
principle of equality before the law because any taxation involves the creation
of two unequal classes of persons with conflicting interests: those of the
(net) taxpayer on the one hand, for whom taxes are a burden one seeks to
reduce, and on the other hand the class of recipients or rather (net) consumers
of tax, for whom taxes are a source of income and a delight that one seeks
instead to increase as much as possible.
·
Democracy – majority rule – is incompatible with
private property – individual property and self-determination – and leads to
creeping socialism, i.e. to ongoing redistribution and the progressive erosion
of all private property rights.
·
Whatever is subsidized by taxes, such as
lounging about or doing things for which there is no profitable customer
demand is further encouraged and strengthened by the subsidy.
·
Whoever is not personally liable for the
repayment and redemption of so-called public debts incurred by him or with his
participation, as is the case today with all politicians and parliamentarians,
will frivolously and without hesitation take up debts for his own present
advantage and to the detriment of an impersonal future public.
·
Whoever controls a territorial money printing
monopoly enforced by state power, like all so-called central banks, will also
make use of this privilege and, even if an increase in the amount of money can
never increase social prosperity as a whole, but can only redistribute it, will
still print more and more new money for his own benefit and that of his direct
affiliates and closest business partners.
·
And finally, there is this: Whoever or whichever
institution has a territorial monopoly on the use of force and jurisdiction, as
actually claimed by all states, will also make use of it. I.e., he will not
only exert violence himself, but he will also declare his exertion of violence
to be lawful by virtue of his ultimate legal representative. In all conflicts
and disputes of a private person with representatives of this institution (the
state) no independent, neutral third party decides on good and evil, or about
the guilt and innocence of the opponents, but always and invariably an
employee, i.e., a dependent representative, one of the two conflict parties
(the state) itself, with a corresponding, reliably predictable partisan,
"state-supporting" result.
Obviously,
these insights are in blatant conflict with social reality. In this reality
there are monopolies of violence, monopolies of money printing, taxes,
taxpayers and tax consumers, tax-subsidized idleness and uselessness, majority
rule (democracy), public debt, politicians and parliamentarians exempt from
liability, capital consumption (consumption without saving), redistribution of
property, minimum wages, and maximum rents. And what's more, all these acts and
institutions are not subject to constant criticism. On the contrary, they are,
almost monotonously and from all quarters, presented and praised as
self-evident, correct, good, and wise.
The entire speech has been published by the Mises Institute is available at this link: My Path to the Austrian School of Economics
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