Bodrum Days and Nights: The Fifth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: A Partial Report

Anti-Statism, IP Law
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I had the good fortune to attend to the Fifth Annual Meeting of Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe‘s Property and Freedom Society (PFS) earlier this month. It was held in beautiful Bodrum, Turkey at the Hotel Karia Princess, from June 3-7, 2010. For those interested, I provide my own (somewhat personal, no doubt partial) report below.

Group photo2 from the Fifth Annual Meeting, June 2010, Hotel Karia Princess, Bodrum
Group photo from the Fifth Annual Meeting, June 2010, Hotel Karia Princess, Bodrum

As a brief overview: the PFS was founded by Dr. Hoppe in 2006, as a more radical counterpart to the Mont Pelerin Society. As Guido Hülsmann has noted, a goal of the PFS was to play the role that the Mont Pelerin Society was originally designed to play: spreading the uncompromising intellectual radicalism of freedom. The PFS is centered around Austrian-anarchist libertarian ideas, with a diverse, worldwide membership, not as dominated by American libertarian intellectuals as many other libertarian groups. The Property and Freedom Society’s very name emphasizes the importance of property rights to human freedom, so it is no surprise that its motto is Frédéric Bastiat‘s dictum, “Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.” (See also Hoppe’s The Role of the Property and Freedom Society in a Crazy World and the History and Principles of the PFS.)

In Professor Hoppe’s opening address for this year’s meeting, “The Property And Freedom Society—Reflections After Five Years,” he concludes:

After our first meeting, 5 years ago, here at the Karia Princess, my plan became more specific still. Inspired by the charm of the place and its beautiful garden, I decided to adopt the model of a salon for the Property and Freedom Society and its meetings. The dictionary defines a salon as “a gathering of intellectual, social, political, and cultural elites under the roof of an inspiring hostess or host, partly to amuse one another and partly to refine their taste and increase their knowledge through conversation.” Take the “political” out of this definition—and there you have it what I have tried to accomplish for the last few years, together with Gülcin, my wife and fellow Misesian, without whose support none of this would be possible: to be hostess and host to a grand and extended annual salon, and to make it, with your help, the most attractive and illustrious salon there is.

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Mises.org Available as a Torrent Download!

Anti-Statism, Education, Technology
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The Ludwig von Mises Institute has issued the second release of all of the content on their website as torrent files. This means that you can download all of the content available on Mises.org (as of June 15, 2010) by downloading various torrent files and opening them up with your torrent client (e.g., uTorrent, Vuze, or Transmission). This is great both for those who read Mises.org or listen to the media from that website. Thank you David Veksler, Jeffrey Tucker, and everyone else at the Mises Institute who made this possible!

The benefits of this are enormous. All of the information, wisdom, and knowledge on Mises.org is available for $0 to the general public, via Torrent download.1 This directly contradicts what Statists would have us believe is the nature of the free-market — people exploiting each other to succeed. How then do they explain the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a truly philanthropic organization, which helps thousands through education: education through peace and persuasion, not “education” at the barrel of a gun.

This will help the Mises Institute, its patrons, and Mises.org readers in numerous ways. Instead of having to navigate to the page or Media section of Mises.org and use browser plugins or spiders, those with a thirst for knowledge and understanding of economics and the free market can simply download everything they want through one torrent file. It also saves the Mises Institute tons of bandwidth, because people downloading torrents simultaneously share in the upload burden by seeding the file (if you download the file, please try to seed until your upload:download ratio is 1.2, this is normal Torrent etiquette). There is a dynamic carryover effect to torrenting: one person might only seed for a few weeks, but dozens of people who leeched from him might seed for a few weeks as well. Thus, there is a kind of digital compounding or interest-effect. Contrary to what you might think — and contrary to what advocates of intellectual property and particularly copyrights would tell you — this will not hurt Mises.org sales of books, but rather boost them, as explained by Jeffrey Tucker.

We can also think of this as a kind of grassroots, guerrilla intellectual resistance. The entire Mises.org media, book, journal, and PDF library will be distributed to thousands of hard drives around the world, will be shared by thousands of people. It can’t shut it down simply by shutting down the Mises Institute anymore. This has two benefits: (1) People can access Mises.org content even if the Mises.org website is down, provided they have the torrents; (2) If the US government wanted to shut down Mises.org, it would still face the distributed world-wide torrents, which would be almost impossible to shut down by a central authority.

So for those of you who are interested, please download: Help Mises.org and yourself at the same time. Download the books, pdfs, journal articles, videos, and mp3 files; listen to, watch, or read them; enjoy the overwhelming amount of knowledge you can have at your fingertips. This is truly a great example of Austrian economics at work: both parties clearly gain something from the interaction ex ante and almost certainly ex post too!

The Mises.org blog announcement:

Mises Torrents 2.0 Available

It’s been about a year early since the first public release of torrents containing all the document and media content on Mises.org. The Mises Institute staff adds new content frequently, so it is time for version 2.0.  Here are the 2010 torrents: Mises Media (132 GB), Books (8.6GB), Journals (4.1 GB), PDFs (324 MB), and ReasonPapers (1.4 GB).

For more files and details see the original announcement.  If you are new to BitTorrent, install the uTorrent client, open the links above, and you’ll be on your way.

If you downloaded an earlier version of this content, please do not re-download everything.  In both uTorrent and Vuze, you can get just the missing files.  In uTorrent,  start the download and let it create the placeholder directory, then stop it.  Overwrite the placeholder directory with your existing files, then “Force Re-Check.”  You can do the same in Vuze –  just enable the option to “Truncate existing files that are too large” under Options->Files.  Then resume.

By my best calculations, we seeded last year’s torrents to thousands of computers worldwide and served over 4 terabytes from our servers alone.  Please help us spread the word and make this release even bigger.

Join the discussion and post a comment

  1. I would like to thank Manuel Lora, Michael Barnett, and Geoffrey A. Plauche for their helpful insights and comments on this blog post. ↩

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Before We Worshipped Presidents

Anti-Statism, Police Statism, Vulgar Politics
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Last week, Lew Rockwell posted an item about officers “subduing” and arresting two people who had the audacity to stand where President Obama’s motorcade wanted to go.

I recalled this yesterday as I read an October 1900 newspaper article, which reported an indignity that VP candidate Theodore Roosevelt suffered when newsboys threw mud at him “and greeted him with insulting language . . . as he departed from the church at which he had attended.” The story was a small item several pages into the paper and there is no indication that the boys were “subdued” or arrested, or that they got into any trouble at all. Instead, the mud-spattered TR just huffed off on his way.

The story included no quotes from experts on how terrible it is that our youth would show such disrespect for a great political leader and no editorializing.

Today, of course, this would be the top news story for a week, Chris Matthews would rend his garments over the blasphemy against our civic religion, and the kids would likely be tazed or killed, and, if they lived, charged with felonies.

Another newspaper article from the same month mentioned that trick-or-treaters stopped by the White House and were greeted by President and Mrs. McKinley. The kids weren’t participating in a photo op, but were just knocking on the front door as they would at any other house. Because you could do that, because the president was not a god.

For more details of the good old days when people treated presidents like the ordinary jerks they are (and how far we’ve fallen), I highly recommend Gene Healy’s The Cult of the Presidency.

(Cross-posted at The LRC Blog.)

UPDATE: Norman Horn points out that The Cult of the Presidency is now available online for free in PDF, Kindle, and ebook formats.

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Article: The Property And Freedom Society — Reflections After Five Years

(Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism, Articles, Vulgar Politics
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This article is an edited version of Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s opening address to the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society (PFS) held in Bodrum, Turkey at the Hotel Karia Princess, June 3-7, 2010. The address provides an insightful overview of various libertarian alliances and strategies over past decades, including the paleo-libertarian/paleo-conservative alliance, and reasons for its failure. Hoppe illustrates how the state has coopted even most free market think tanks into serving the state’s aims, because they are not radical enough and their principal addressee is the central government. Hoppe argues (a) that libertarians must not put their trust in politicians or get distracted by politics and (b) using the case of Pat Buchanan as an example, that it is impossible to have a lasting intellectual association with people (such as some conservatives) who are either unwilling or incapable of grasping the principles of economics.

In view of these insights and this history, Hoppe surveys the brief history of the PFS and sets out its basic purposes.

Read the Full Article by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Afterwards, discuss the article below.

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Hoppe: The Property And Freedom Society — Reflections After Five Years

(Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism, Democracy, Immigration, Political Correctness, The Left, The Right, Vulgar Politics
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I was privileged to attend to the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society last week. It was held in beautiful Bodrum, Turkey at the Hotel Karia Princess, from June 3-7, 2010. The list of speakers may be found in the Program. This is my second, having also attended the inaugural meeting in 2006. I’ll put up another blog soon with more details about the event, but for now let me say it was without a doubt the best liberty related event I’ve ever attended. And two of my fellow TLS co-bloggers also attended–Gil Guillory and Juan Fernando Carpio.

Group photo2 from the Fifth Annual Meeting, June 2010, Hotel Karia Princess, Bodrum
Group photo from the Fifth Annual Meeting, June 2010, Hotel Karia Princess, Bodrum

Professor Hoppe’s opening address, “The Property And Freedom Society — Reflections After Five Years,” is published here on The Libertarian Standard today. It’s a fascinating, informative, and perceptive overview of various libertarian paleo- and related alliances over the years.

Hoppe surveys the mistakes of former alliances, and lessons learned; and also devastatingly illustrates how the state has coopted even most free market think tanks into serving the state’s aims:

The strategy of Hayek and of the Mont Pelerin Society, then, had to fail. Instead of helping to reform—liberalize—the (Western) State, as they intended (or pretended?) to do, the Mont Pelerin Society and the international “limited-government” think-tank industry would become an integral part of a continuously expanding welfare-warfare state system.

Indicators for this verdict abound: The typical location of the think tanks is in or near the capital city, most prominently Washington, DC., because their principal addressee is the central government. They react to measures and announcements of government, and they suggest and make proposals to government. Most contacts of think-tankers outside their own institution are with politicians, government bureaucrats, lobbyists, and assorted staffers and assistants. Along with connected journalists, these are also the regular attendees of their conferences, briefings, receptions and cocktail parties. There is a steady exchange of personnel between think tanks and governments. And the leaders of the limited government industry are frequently themselves prominent members of the power elite and the ruling class.

Most indicative of all: For decades, the limited government movement has been a growth industry. Its annual expenditures currently run in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and billions of dollars likely have been spent in total. All the while, government expenditures never and nowhere fell, not even once, but instead always and uninterruptedly increased to ever more dizzying heights.

And yet, this glaring failure of the industry to deliver the promised good of limited government is not punished but, perversely, rewarded with still more ample funds. The more the think tanks fail, the more money they get.

The State and the free market think tank industry thus live in perfect harmony with each other. They grow together, in tandem.

As for lessons learned:

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