Hoppe Strikes Back (at the Empire) Again

God only knows the extent to which I hate Star Wars, so I am not even sure why (outside of engaging in eutrapalia) I made that allusion in the title… Shrug.

On Hans-Hermann Hoppe: the great Michael Rectenwald just shared this on FB as he was pouring over Hoppe’s essay, “Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis”:

As an exploitative firm, the state must at all times be interested in a low degree of class consciousness among the ruled. The redistribution of property and income is the state’s means by which it can create divisiveness among the public and destroy the formation of a unifying class consciousness among the exploited. Furthermore, the redistribution of state power itself through democratizing the state constitution and opening up every ruling position to everyone and granting everyone the right to participate in the determination of state personnel and policy is actually a means for reducing the resistance against exploitation as such…

And finally, Marxists are also correct in noticing the close association between the state and business, especially the banking elite-even though their explanation for it is faulty. The reason is not that the bourgeois establishment sees and supports the state as the guarantor of private property rights and contractualism. On the contrary, the establishment correctly perceives the state as the very antithesis to private property that it is and takes a close interest in it for this reason. The more successful a business, the larger the potential danger of governmental exploitation, but the larger also the potential gains that can be achieved if it can come under government’s special protection and is exempt from the full weight of capitalist competition. This is why the business establishment is interested in the state and its infiltration. The ruling elite in turn is interested in close cooperation with the business establishment because of its financial powers. In particular, the banking elite is of interest because as an exploitative firm the state naturally wishes to possess complete autonomy for counterfeiting. By offering to cut the banking elite in on its own counterfeiting machinations and allowing them to counterfeit in addition to its own counterfeited notes under a regime of fractional reserve banking, the state can easily reach this goal and establish a system of state monopolized money and cartelied banking controlled by the central bank. And through this direct counterfeiting connection with the banking system and by extension the banks’ major clients, the ruling class in fact extends far beyond the state apparatus to the very nerve centers of civil society-not that much different, at least in appearance, from the picture that Marxists like to paint of the cooperation between banking, business elites, and the state.“

While walking my dog, the great German Shepherd Linus the other day, I came up with some similar thoughts but ones that further explain the angst of modern laborers against capital and entrepreneurs; that is, political entrepreneurs:

Linus is an inspiration. Maybe because he’s SO German…