Hoppe Unplugged

Hoppe Unplugged presents Hans-Hermann Hoppe's case for competing private courts and insurers, alongside his arguments about political incentives and decentralization. This 72-page English booklet combines italicized excerpts from his interviews and speeches with Thomas Jacob's editorial commentary and video links. The printed edition is dated March 2023 and is available from Hoppe's publications page.

The opening chapter begins with a group of children who choose one member to settle every quarrel, including quarrels in which that member is involved. Hoppe applies the image to the state, which he describes as the final judge of all conflicts, including its own. His case against limited government rests on the same structure. In his view, constitutional checks and balances split authority among offices that all depend financially on the institution that pays them, so the split restrains those officials less than its design suggests.

Hoppe then compares a hereditary ruler with an elected official. The hereditary ruler expects to pass the country to an heir and so has a reason to preserve its capital value, while the elected official holds power only for a term and gains by using that value up quickly. He illustrates the point with two matching houses, one lived in by its owner and one by a tenant on a five-year lease. He treats both arrangements as forms of the state. In the same passage he expresses sympathy for hereditary monarchy but says he is not a monarchist. His case for decentralization follows the same incentive logic. Small jurisdictions compete for residents, so the threat that people will leave limits how much they can tax, and Switzerland is offered as an example. Later pages separate people who pay taxes from people who live on them, and they argue that newly created money benefits whoever receives it first.

The short section on intellectual property starts from scarcity. Melodies and recipes can be copied without taking anything from their originator. On this argument, enforcing a copy restriction gives the rights holder control over the copier's own physical property. A postscript by Jacob cites longer treatments of the subject.

In Hoppe's proposed stateless order, policing and courts become competing services, and contracts govern them. A provider must state which property it protects, what it will do if it fails, what it charges and which appeal bodies apply, and it cannot change those terms alone while the contract runs. Local disputes go to respected figures who are independent of both parties. Larger disputes go through legal-expense insurance, where insurer and client agree in advance on mediators and appeals. An insurer decides disputes between its own clients, and when two insurers reach different judgments, the case goes to an arbitrator both sides respect.

The insurer pays the victim's compensation, so it has a reason to track down offenders and recover stolen goods, since restitution reduces what it pays out. Insurers will not cover losses that the policyholder provoked, so the contract terms penalize people who start fights. Some object that the wealthy would buy favors. Hoppe replies that a briber would have to corrupt many independent agencies, and that a provider known to take bribes would lose its poorer customers to competitors. People cannot leave a state in the same way. Pollution counts in this system as damage to property someone already owns.

In the final chapters, Hoppe predicts an economic collapse that he hopes will open room for secession. He prefers many small competing states to a centralized Europe, and the booklet presents this as hope and prediction. An autobiographical section traces his path from Habermas's seminars to Mises and Rothbard and summarizes his argumentation ethics. Anyone who argues must already control scarce physical things, such as their own body and a place to stand, and Hoppe claims a property ethic follows from that. The booklet gives only an outline of this derivation.

The complete English booklet is available as a PDF from Towards Liberty, with identical copies at nostr.download and 24242.io.