Professor Hoppe was previously interviewed on Australian Broadcasting Corp. Radio, on the topic “Anarcho-capitalist libertarianism: What is it?” (approx. 25 minutes). It was aired on Jan. 23, 2012; audio is available here. As described on the ABC site, “What is anarcho-capitalist libertarianism? Hans Herman Hoppe explains the idea behind it and why it’s a very different and quite radical way to think about government, society and the economy.”
A recent NPR feature, The Secret Document That Transformed China (h/t Vijay Boyapati), tells the fascinating story about one of seminal events at the dawn of the modern Chinese experiment in their version of capitalism.
In 1978, the farmers in a small Chinese village called Xiaogang gathered in a mud hut to sign a secret contract. They thought it might get them executed. Instead, it wound up transforming China’s economy in ways that are still reverberating today.
The contract was so risky — and such a big deal — because it was created at the height of communism in China. Everyone worked on the village’s collective farm; there was no personal property.
“Back then, even one straw belonged to the group,” says Yen Jingchang, who was a farmer in Xiaogang in 1978. “No one owned anything.”
At one meeting with communist party officials, a farmer asked: “What about the teeth in my head? Do I own those?” Answer: No. Your teeth belong to the collective.
Because of communism, “In Xiaogang there was never enough food, and the farmers often had to go to other villages to beg. Their children were going hungry. They were desperate.”
So the farmers agreed to a form of personal property, where each farmer could keep some of his own crop, above a certain threshold. This would give them incentives to work harder and the ability to keep some of the fruits of their labor. However,So, in the winter of 1978, after another terrible harvest, they came up with an idea: Rather than farm as a collective, each family would get to farm its own plot of land. If a family grew a lot of food, that family could keep some of the harvest.
This was done in secret for fear of reprisal by the state. Their agreement “recognized the risks the farmers were taking. If any of the farmers were sent to prison or executed, it said, the others in the group would care for their children until age 18.”
Their new pact was a success: “At the end of the season, they had an enormous harvest: more, Yen Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined.”
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Over at C4SIF, I’ve blogged quite a bit lately about SOPA and PIPA and the recent Internet blackouts and other protests against these bills, which threaten free speech and the open Internet (Mike Masnick et al. at Techdirt have also been great on exposing and analyzing SOPA). As Jeff Tucker noted recently,1 the protests against SOPA started not with conservatives or even “libertarians,” but with civil libertarians of the “left,” as well as Silicon Valley tech types. Of course, some libertarians have been opposed to SOPA (and copyright) from the beginning–the more radical and anti-state libertarians, in particular Austro-libertarians and left-libertarians (such as some of the people associated with C4SS2 ).
Aside from the anti-state libertarians, however, most of the protests against SOPA concede that copyright is good, intellectual property is important, and piracy is bad–but then they bemoan that SOPA “goes too far.” For example, as I noted in Where does IP Rank Among the Worst State Laws?, consider this article in PC Magazine, providing the response of 11 PCMag staffers asked for their take on SOPA. The response to SOPA was universally negative, but most of them first prefaced their opposition to SOPA by genuflecting to copyright and recognizing that IP piracy “is of course a real problem”. …
Last night I appeared for two hours on FreeTalkLive (1-22-12 show), with hosts Mark Edge and Stephanie. We discussed intellectual property and SOPA. (Audio)
Update: The Journal of Peace, Prosperity & Freedom now has its own web page: www.la.org.au/journal.
As the post below, from Liberty Australia, notes, another scholarly libertarian journal is in the works. It joins existing journals such as Libertarian Papers, The Independent Review, and Reason Papers, as another outlet for scholarly articles on the topic of liberty and related fields like Austrian economics, with a focus on Australia.
To mark the historic Mises Seminar in Sydney, Liberty Australia is launching The Journal of Peace, Prosperity and Freedom. It will be dedicated to Austrian economics, revisionist history, legal arguments from an individualist perspective and other topics not adequately addressed by the IPA Review and Policy. The primary focus will be on Australia, although analysis of other countries is welcome too.
Journals are typically peer-reviewed, so I will maintain a list of referees with expertise in the specialist topics covered by the review. If you are interested in acting as a referee please shoot me an email.
Information for Contributors
Frequency: once a year.
Distribution: Published and distributed online. A print copy can be ordered through Amazon.com. I can also set up a regular subscription system, for those who prefer it to be automatically posted to them.
Submissions are sought for:
(1) Research articles up to 5000 words in length;
(2) commentaries up to 3000 words
(3) book reviews of between 800-2000 words.
The citation format used is the Cambridge Style, so please make sure submissions conform to this.
There’s no deadline: submissions are accepted on a rolling basis.
If you’d like to be a volunteer editor, have graphic design skills or want to donate time or money in other ways, do get in touch.
