Self-ownership and Teeth-ownership in Communist China: A Lesson for Confused Libertarians

Libertarian Theory, Statism
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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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Kinsella’s “The Social Theory of Hoppe” Course: Audio and Slides

(Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism, Education, Libertarian Theory, Statism
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Mises Academy: Stephan Kinsella teaches The Social Theory of Hoppe

Update: current audio files can be found on my podcast Kinsella on Liberty, starting at #153.

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Last year I presented four Mises Academy Mises Academy courses:

The audio and slides for the first three courses listed can be found in those links; those for the Hoppe course are appended below. The Hoppe course is discussed in my article “Read Hoppe, Then Nothing Is the Same,” translated into Spanish as “Tras leer a Hoppe, nada es lo mismo“; see also Danny Sanchez’s post Online Hoppe Course Starts Tomorrow. I enjoyed all four courses but my favorite was the Hoppe course. Hoppe has been the biggest intellectual influence of my life, as I detail in “How I Became A Libertarian” (published as “Being a Libertarian” in I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians). I agree with Sanchez that “Hans-Hermann Hoppe is the most profound social theorist writing today.” This is one reason I worked with the brilliant Austro-libertarian theorist, and one of my best friends, Jörg Guido Hülsmann, and one of the greatest guys in the world, to produce the well-received and well-deserved festschrift, Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Mises Institute, 2009).

The experience of teaching the Mises Academy classes was amazing and gratifying, as I noted in my article  “Teaching an Online Mises Academy Course.” This and similar technology and Internet-enabled models are obviously the wave of the educational future. The students received an in-depth, specialized and personalized treatment of topics of interest to them, with tests and teacher and fellow student interaction, for a very reasonable price, and judging by their comments and evaluations, they were very satisfied with the courses and this online model. For example, for the Hoppe course, as noted in A Happy Hoppean Student, student Cam Rea wrote, about the first lecture of the course:

Move over Chuck Norris, Hans-Hermann Hoppe is in town! The introduction to “The Social Theory of Hoppe” was extremely thorough. I, a relative newcomer to the Hoppean idea, was impressed by Stephan Kinsella’s introduction to the theory. Mr. Kinsella hit upon all of those who came before Hoppe, and how each built upon another over the past two centuries. In other words, as Isaac Newton stated, “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Hoppe is the result thus far of those who came before him in the ideals of Austrian Economics and libertarian principles. Nevertheless, Hoppe takes it much further as in the Misesian concept of human action and the science of “praxeology”, from which all actions branch in life.

Overall, the class was extremely enjoyable, the questions concrete, and the answer provided by Mr. Kinsella clear and precise. Like many others in the class, I look forward to more. So tune in next Monday at 7pm EDT. Same Hoppe-time, same Hoppe-channel!

There were also rave reviews given by students of the other courses. For my first Mises Academy course, “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics” (audio and slides), one student wrote me at the completion of the course, …

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  1. Discussed in my article “Obama’s Patent Reform: Improvement or Continuing Calamity?,” Mises Daily, Sep. 23, 2011; I discussed the AIA in further detail in The American Invents Act and Patent Reform: The Good, the Meh, and the Ugly) (audio and slides). ↩

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Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics and Kinsella’s Estoppel Discussed in Hebrew

Libertarian Theory
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Guy Kedem sent me a link to his article Dialogical Libertarianism: Ultimate Foundation of Ethics, which is a Hebrew-language discussion of Hoppe’s argumentation ethics and my estoppel theory of libertarian rights.

For more on argumentation ethics, see my “Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide,” Mises Daily (May 27, 2011) (includes “Discourse Ethics and Liberty: A Skeletal Ebook”). For more on estoppel, see “Punishment and Proportionality: The Estoppel Approach,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 12:1 (Spring 1996): 51. Both approaches, and other, related theories, are discussed in my “New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 12:2 (Fall 1996): 313-26.

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Hoppe’s Phoenix and the Coming One-World Currency

(Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism, Statism
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I noted previously, in The Prophetic Dr. Hoppe on the Rise of the Phoenix, Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s prediction years ago of the inexorable move to a single, worldwide fiat currency. It’s coming. As reported here back in 2009, “The dollar dropped after China’s central bank reiterated a call for a worldwide currency.”

In this connection, see Hoppe’s fascinating discussion of money starting about 1:05:17 of Lecture 3 of his riveting 10-part Economy, Society, and History lectures delivered in 2004, where he talks about the tendency on a free market of multiple “monies” to converge to one–by the nature of money, it’s more valuable the more widespread it is, etc. Hoppe notes that there is a similar tendency now, with fiat currencies, only this time, it’s bad, not good. He points out that the world had alreayd achieved free market unified money (gold); this was destroyed with the outgrowth of dozens of country-based paper monies, leading to a world in a state of quasi-barter; and now when the major currencies like the dollar, yen, euro, talk about monetary unification, they are moving back towards what we already had with gold, except without the relatively fixed supply and other salutary aspects of a commodity-based money.

Part of this process is cementing the position of the Euro as one of the world’s major currencies. And this is happening too. As reported in the NYTimes, Germany and France are now pushing for changes to the European treaties to extend and prop up the euro–with “automatic penalties for countries that exceed European deficit limits as well as the creation of a monetary fund for Europe. … European leaders will begin to change the fundamental structure of the union, creating a form of centralized oversight of national budgets.”

As I noted earlier, in Greece, the Euro, and Secession, in a 2004 LRC post, How Stupid are Europeans?, I observed that unless an explicit right to secede or exit from the then-proposed European Constitution were added, any countries joining would likely be prevented by force from leaving later. Happily, the EU Constitution was never finally ratified, due to the heroic stubbornness of French and Dutch citizens.

But as noted in Greece Considers Exit from Euro Zone,

It remains unclear whether it would even be legally possible for Greece to depart from the euro zone. Legal experts believe it would also be necessary for the country to split from the European Union entirely in order to abandon the common currency. At the same time, it is questionable whether other members of the currency union would actually refuse to accept a unilateral exit from the euro zone by the government in Athens.

Never join a political union. Never centralize. It could be a one-way ratchet, as the CSA was forced to realize. Decentralization—and the Catholic idea of subsidiarity—down to the individual level, is the anarcho-libertarian goal.

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Property Title Records and Insurance in a Free Society

Anti-Statism, IP Law, Libertarian Theory, Taxation
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Land registry
Land Registry: Land Certificate, from A Short History of Land Registration in England and Wales

Opponents of intellectual property often point out that modern patent and copyright are purely legislated, artificial schemes. For anarcho-libertarians and libertarians opposed to legislation as a means of forming law, this is yet another stake in the heart of IP. (See my post The Mountain of IP Legislation, and my article “Legislation and Law in a Free Society.”)

So it’s not surprising that one retort of the IPers is to argue that patent- and copyright-like rights “could” evolve in common law courts. Even though they didn’t; even though the idea of statutorily enacted schemes arising from judicial decisions is more than implausible: it’s ridiculous. Some of them simply posit that there could be private “title” offices in a free society akin to real property title records in use today: you just go down and “register” your “idea”; later, when you sue an “infringer” of “your” idea in court, you can prove you “own” it by introducing evidence from the IP title records office. For example, in a recent Mises blog threat, someone suggested there might be some private invention title office (my reply). And the anarcho-libertarian Tannehills, in their classic The Market for Liberty, argue (pp. 58-59):

Ideas in the form of inventions could also be claimed by registering all details of the invention in a privately owned “data bank.” Of course, the more specific an inventor was about the details of his invention, the thought processes he followed while working on it, and the ideas on which he built, the more firmly established his claim would be and the less would be the likelihood of someone else squeezing him out with a fake claim based on stolen data. The inventor, having registered his invention to establish his ownership of the idea(s), could then buy insurance (from either the data bank firm or an independent insurance company) against the theft and unauthorized commercial use of his invention by any other person. The insurance company would guarantee to stop the unauthorized commercial use of the invention and to fully compensate the inventor for any losses so incurred. Such insurance policies could be bought to cover varying periods of time, with the longer-term policies more expensive than the shorter-term ones. Policies covering an indefinitely long time-period (“from now on”) probably wouldn’t be economically feasible, but there might well be clauses allowing the inventor to re-insure his idea at the end of the life of his policy.

One problem with the Tannehills’ reasoning was the question-begging assumption that it’s “theft” to use an idea if it’s “unauthorized”; this presupposes there is property in information. …

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