Tom Woods, “Interview with Hans Hoppe,” Tom Woods Elite Letter, Issue #18 (Summer 2025), idem, “The Hans Hoppe Interview Concluded,” Tom Woods Elite Letter, Issue #19 (August 2025). Reprinted with permission. See other biographical pieces in Hoppe Biography.
Tom Woods, “Interview with Hans Hoppe,” Tom Woods Elite Letter, Issue #18 (Summer 2025)
The Tom Woods Elite Letter, Issue #18 (Summer 2025)
INTERVIEW WITH HANS-HERMANN HOPPE
Issue #18, Summer 2025 Double Issue
Dear Supporter:
Our good friend Hans-Hermann Hoppe was feeling under the weather for part of July, and that delayed the exclusive interview with him that I wanted to conduct for you. But here it is at last.
***
Interview with Hans Hoppe
Virtually everyone reading this is familiar with Hans-Hermann Hoppe, one of the most significant intellectuals in our movement. He is best known for Democracy: The God that Failed, a book I highly recommend, but his books A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism and The Economics and Ethics of Private Property are equally important.
Hans does not give many interviews, so I hope you enjoy this one, specifically for Supporting Listeners of the Torn Woods Show.
Tom Woods: Hans Hoppe, thanks so much for talking with us. I’d like to start by asking you to describe your educational and ideological background; I know you began your career as a left-winger.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe: I finished high school in 1968, which was the height of the student rebellion in the United States and also in Germany, in France, actually all over Europe. And I was some sort of left winger – not so much because of egalitarian motivations, but more because I was convinced that a planned economy would be more efficient than some anarchistic market market economy.
Because of that, I went to the University of Frankfurt, which at that time, next to the Free University of Berlin, was one of the most left-wing places. And I decided to study philosophy. I was close to Jurgen Habermas, who at that time was the rising star of the Frankfurt School. He offered me very quickly the opportunity to write a dissertation with him. So I became one of his students in the meantime, and probably one of his most famous students, even though I eventually turned away from the thinking of my early days.
The reason for that was, on the one hand, my experience with East Germany. My parents were both refugees. My mother’s parents were expropriated by the Russians in 1946. They were major landowners. Most of my relatives lived in East Germany and we visited them every year. And I saw what sort of mess that whole thing was. So I turned away from the idea that the planned economy was great, because I saw the results of it.
I then looked around for alternatives. And the most prominent non-socialist people at that time in Germany were Milton Friedman, by far, and then second, maybe Hayek. My dissertation that I wrote under Habermas had nothing to do whatsoever with leftist politics anymore. It was concerned with a critique of empiricism from the point of view of the rationalist school, represented by people like Kant, for instance.
In the German system, after your dissertation, if you want to pursue an academic career the next step is to write an habilitation thesis, like an advanced doctoral degree. Once you finish that, you get the title of a Privatdozent. That was also the title that Mises had for a long time in Vienna. It gives you the status of a professor. You can take on doctoral students, you can teach courses at the university, but you are unsalaried.
In any case, my habilitation thesis was on the method of the social sciences, including economics. That was the first time that I became acquainted with economics. I discovered that most economists adopted the view that I knew as a philosophy student, of the so-called Vienna School or of of the Popperite version of the Vienna School—namely, that all statements in economics are empirical, testable or falsifiable statements.
I thought that was clearly wrong. I thought statements like, if you increase the supply of money, then the purchasing power of money will decline, were things that seemed to be logically true, that didn’t need to seek any falsification. I also discovered other statements that clearly did not qualify as empirical statements, such as: a person cannot be in two places at the same time. This was not a statement that wasjust a linguistic convention, but it was a statement that was true about some real thing. Every detective uses this principle; in every detective story, you find it. The first thing they do is to look: does the accused have an alibi? Was he at that place where the murder occurred at the time when it occurred? Or was he someplace else (in which case, of course, he would have to be innocent)? So there are plenty of statements that are not empirical statements in the way that the logical positivists in Vienna, the Popperites, held that all statements have to be.
Then I discovered Ludwig von Mises. I found out that Mises held precisely this view. There are economic statements – he called them a priori statements. And that wassomething that also existed, of course, in Kant. And I had studied Kant in my critique of empiricism, especially of David Hume. So I thought there was nothing strange about a priori statements. So, yes, economics has a priori statements that cannot be refuted by experience, but they are logically true. So I became a Misesian.
Then I discovered Murray Rothbard.
I had a huge stipend from the National Science Foundation called the Heisenberg stipend that allowed me for five years to do whatever I wanted to do and go wherever I wanted to go. I decided to go to the United States because I realized that despite my achievements in my academic career, I would likely not get a chair in Germany.
I contacted various people in the United States, among others James Buchanan and Rothbard. Buchanan offered far more amenities than Rothbard could offer. I felt closer to Rothbard, though, and went to New York. I spent a year there, and then from there I went to Las Vegas with him and spent the last ten years of Rothbard’s life in close proximity with him. I was, in a way, his lieutenant. So that’s a big background of my academic career.
Woods: How were you able to get that position at UNLV? Did Rothbard push for it?
Hoppe: There was another opening besides Rothbard’s. He had been a visiting professor there before, and they invited him to take that over as a permanent position. And there was another opening, and he pushed for me. They invited me. And at that time, the composition of the department was such that for miraculous reasons they gave me the job. In the same year some of those people retired, and I think I after that I would never have had another chance to get that position.
Woods: I don’t know the exact year, but I think it’s about 30 years ago that you published Economic Science and the Austrian Method, which I’ve read and I will give people a link to. That expands on what you said about economic method just a moment ago. [Get this book at tomwoods.com/method.]
Hoppe: That little book came out of the first time I was invited to a Mises Institute conference, I would say in 1986 or 1987. We had a conference at Stanford University, and I gave a number of lectures that in turn grew into this little booklet. But that booklet was based on work that I had done before in my habilitation thesis in Germany.
Woods: Well, also 30 years ago, of course, we lost Murray Rothbard. There are many things we could say about him, but I’m curious to know why you think among libertarians, given his enormous contributions and output, there was so much hostility toward him. Why couldn’t they say:”He’s written tremendous books of great importance, but we find him personally irascible”? What do you think the source of the hostility was?
Hoppe: I’m still wondering about that myself. I would consider myself a somewhat more difficult person, but Rothbard was not a difficult person. He was a very nice, humorous, entertaining guy. Also, in conversation he was not in any way aggressive, whereas I would say that at least when I was younger, I was quite aggressive sometimes in conversation.
So I have no explanation for that whatsoever, except that he had, of course, views that were completely out of the norm. He was an anarchist. You could be an anarchist if you were some sort of leftist anarchist. Noam Chomsky, for instance. That was perfectly reputable. But to be an anarchist in favor of capitalism, that was unheard of in the United States at that time. Yes, of course afterwards I found out there had existed strange people like that before, but they were obscure figures.
And there was a certain amount of, I would say, jealousy, because, I mean, Rothbard was enormously bright. I’ve met bright people in my life, but the only person I’ve met whom I would consider to be a genius was Rothbard. He could tell you the the content of every book in his library. And that wasan enormous library. Whenever you would ask him about any strange subject, he could give you some suggestions on what to read. You felt like a little, urn, uneducated person if you talked to him. So jealousy played a big role in explaining why it was that he was not treated like a genius, as he should have been treated.
Woods: How did you find out that he had died?
Hoppe: It was just before the spring semester in 1995 was supposed to begin. Lew Rockwell called me and said, Hans, I have to tell you, Murray went to the eye doctor with Joey (his wife), and while she was visiting the eye doctor and Murray was sitting in the waiting room, he fell over and was dead. And that was that. And then I was charged in a way to take care of his house in Vegas. He lived just a few blocks away from me in Vegas. I helped clean out his house.
It came as a complete surprise. He was 69 at the time. He was, of course, a person who did not live anything like a healthy life. He never walked anywhere. When I was at Brooklyn Polytechnic, which I understand is now part of NYU, in Brooklyn and then also in Vegas, we always went to lunch together, and while there were several options where you could go for lunch, his choice was always the place where you had to walk the least.
Just across the street in Brooklyn, there was some sort of Italian Jewish deli, and in Vegas it was also some sort of deli, just across from the university. And if you suggested, you know, there is a better place 100 yards down the road, he wouldn’t want to walk that far.
He did like Vegas quite a bit because he could go out late at night and and still eat. Whereas even in New York, sometimes at 11:00 or 1130, some of the waiters would come and say, don’t you think it’s about time to leave here? The kitchen is closed and why don’t you pay your bill? Um, Vegas was special in that regard because anytime you wanted to go out and eat someplace, you could do so.
That was also a reason that Murray always liked Denny’s, because at that time Denny’s was the only restaurant that was open 24 hours. I don’t know if that is still the case. I don’t even know if Denny’s still exists. But at that time, that was a special place for all the conferences that we attended together. After the official program was over, he then went with his in-group to Denny’s. Does it still exist, Denny’s?
Woods: Oh, it does.
Hoppe: And it’s still 24 hours?
Woods: Yes. We all use it for the same purpose: it’s adequate food that’s available at any time of day.
Hoppe: Okay, yeah.
Woods: I wonder if you had the same concern I did. I was a 23-year-old graduate student when Rothbard died, and I was worried that because of the sheer output of this man and the strength of his personality and how precarious the Austrian movement had been in the past – it took the Hayek Nobel Prize to really revive it—maybe the movement might fall into abeyance again because of the absence of Rothbard. And yet I think that was the year we started with the Austrian Scholars Conferences, and I was pleasantly surprised that the movement just kept on chugging along.
Hoppe: I mean, I was new to the country. I had heard about the Cato split, and the Mises Institute had just started in what was it—1982, I think. I was surprised at how many people came to our first conference. About one hundred people. I think at Stanford, we had it the first two years. Then we moved to some other place, also in California. I don’t remember exactly what the place was called. All of that took place before the Mises Institute had built its facility in Auburn.
One of the most interesting observations I’ve made was the difference between his lecturing and his writing. In his writing, he was completely organized. Always straightforward. Completely clear. In his lecturing. he was somewhat disorganized, going from one tangent to the other, talking about Plato and then jumping to the last Nixon campaign. So students were confused by him. I had students approaching me – Rothbard also had a strong New York accent, and students came and asked me, as a foreigner (I had a heavy German accent), this guy is a foreigner, right? And I told them, no, he’s from New York. Oh, he’s from New York!
What I noticed about Rothbard was that he never promoted himself. His graduate students, like Doug French and those people who did their master’s theses under him, reported the same thing I myself noticed after attending all of his lectures for a number of years: when he discussed subjects he had written a book about, he would never say, I also wrote a book about this and that. Only curious students would find out. He’s the guy who talks about the Great Depression, but he doesn’t even mention that he has himself written a book on the Great Depression.
Woods: Let me add something to this. One of the times I interacted with Rothbard in the 199Os, I asked him, do you know of a good history of of money in the U.S. from a pro-gold standard perspective? And he said, well, there’s some pretty good historical material in the minority report of the U.S. Gold Commission, which I found. And only later did I find out that he had written it!
Hoppe: [laughter] He had written it. The official authors were Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman. I found out about this also only in conversation: I wrote the whole book, he told me. There’s not a word from Ron Paul and Lew Lehrman in this. I wrote this book.
But that was a typical for him. He would have told his students even yesterday, this is a book by Ron Paul and Lew Lehrman about that subject, and read that. He wouldn’t say: I wrote that. Only in bar conversations would that come out.
Woods: I want to shift gears and ask you, what is your impression of the Trump phenomenon?
Trump: I’m profoundly disappointed about it, even though I must admit that I had never been a Trump fan. If I now listen to Trump for one or two minutes, I’m almost losing my mind. What a big mouth this guy has. I think the guy has probably never read a serious book in all of his life. He knows literally nothing about anything. He doesn’t know anything about foreign countries. He doesn’t know anything about foreign personalities. He doesn’t know anything about economics. He is just a person who is full of himself.
The only thing that I always thought would speak in favor of him was that he might be less of a belligerent and warlike person, and that turned out to be a complete illusion, too. In some ways, he’s probably worse than Kamala would have been. They would have continued that Ukraine war thing, but would they have been as belligerent as Trump is in the Israel-Iran affair? I very much doubt it. So my opinion of Trump is, is very, very low. He deals with the world as if it is like people assembling at some sort of construction site that he oversees as a builder of some buildings where he can tell people do this and do that.
Yesterday: I like that guy. But today he said this, and I don’t like that guy anymore. Uh, no, I like this guy better. Yesterday, I like this guy better. Then pretending to be a peacemaker in situations where he is actually involved as a party to the war. Of course, the United States is a party to the Ukraine war, and Trump tries to present himself as a peacemaker, at the same time sending weapons to Ukraine. He presents himself as a peacemaker in in the Israel-Gaza affair, at the same time continuing to send weapons to Israel. Then starting these tariff wars, not understanding what the reason is for the trade deficits and trade surpluses that you have. They have nothing to do with tariffs whatsoever.
So I think Trump is a disaster, and that libertarians ever feeling close to Trump was a big mistake. He is not a libertarian. He is just a loudmouth who knows nothing about any subject whatsoever. So my view is very negative.
Woods: There are people in his general orbit like Tucker Carlson, who may be on the outs with him now, and other right-wingers who are getting pretty good on things like foreign policy. So I think some of the people who, in one way or another, have been associated with him in the past are much better than he himself is.
Hoppe: Oh, yes. Yes, I agree. Absolutely.
The entire Trump movement has been good at shutting down to a certain extent this woke movement. Who knows what a woman is and who knows what a man is? And we have to promote this, the gays and lesbians and whatever it is. He has normal instincts. This girl is pretty; you cannot say things like “this girl is pretty” anymore. But Trump can say it.
But that is not much. I think this woke movement and political correctness movement would have broken down eventually anyhow, because it goes completely against what every normal person sees with his own eyes.
You probably know I met Peter Thiel at some point. Peter Thiel invited me to San Francisco with my wife. He paid for everything big, big time and wanted to get to know me. He had read my Democracy book. (At that time, I also met Curtis Yarvin, who is now a big star and influencer in the background of of the Trump administration.) Peter Thiel had assembled his entourage of lawyers and advisors around him and so forth. I had a pretty good conversation with him.
What he does now, I do not understand anymore. I assume that people like Vance, for instance, have also read my Democracy book. Curtis Yarvin certainly has. He always mentions me as one of his big influences, even though I’m not quite sure that I understand what Curtis Yarvin is up to these days. I consider him to be a big rambler. The guy loves to talk endlessly.
To what extent the Trump circle are all Trumpist or to what extent they understand that Trump might be the person who helps promote them to the next level of power? I do not understand.
Woods: We’ll have to wait and see about that. I have to ask you: you’ve written about immigration and libertarianism, and that’s generated a lot of controversy. But my question for you is: I’ve spoken to Dave Smith about this, and he’s debated immigration and he’s tried to do so also from a libertarian perspective. And I told him, although I appreciate what you’re doing, even if there weren’t a good libertarian argument against mass migration, I would still oppose it because I would say civilization is at stake, and that’s more important than whether I’m the world’s greatest libertarian. What do you think about that posture?
Hoppe: I think civilization is at stake. And I think it makes me a great libertarian that I opposed this mass immigration from the very beginning. In the meantime, I think my position, even among libertarians, has become quite prominent. At the beginning, most people hated me for the position I took. But you can see it far more closely in Europe than you can in the United States. In the United States, it is mostly people who come from South America. In Europe, it is mostly people coming from African countries who come, and you have a more blown-up welfare state in Europe than then you have in the United States. So these people overwhelmingly go immediately on welfare and don’t do anything.
And you have mostly young males. On TV, they sometimes show a woman with a child on her arm in order to persuade the people: as humanitarians, we have to allow them to come. But 90 percent of the people are young males. So imagine you have young males in the numbers of millions come coming to a country and not working. What do they do? They do nonsense and criminal activities from morning to night. So in Europe you find almost nobody, even including most libertarians, who are in favor of free immigration. Whereas in the United States, there is still a significant number of people who do.
Woods: I want to push this a little harder, though. What I’m saying is, would you be willing to say, even if you could not think of a libertarian argument against it, what is at stake is so important that I will even depart from libertarianism in order to fight it? Or are you saying I don’t have to make that choice?
Hoppe: I don’t have to depart from libertarianism. Libertarianism is about private property and the protection of private property. Nobody has a right to come to a place if it is occupied by private property owners. But even if I were not a libertarian, I would be opposed to it. You want to live, by and large, with people who are similar to you, who behave like you do, and people who fall completely out of the norm, they should just disappear. They should stay someplace else. But I don’t think I have to make any compromises with my libertarian principles at all. Private property means also the right to exclude. And all we do is we exclude. We don’t want people like you. I want people who contribute to my well-being and add something to the wealth that I have accumulated in my life, not people who will diminish what I have accomplished in life.
This is exactly what you can see is happening in Europe. And they also outbreed the domestic population. That is, of course, also taking place in the United States. But in Europe it is far more dramatic. Growing up in the post-World War II era, I had never seen black people in my life until I went to study in Frankfurt, because the Frankfurt was also one of the headquarters of the American Army. And there for the first time I saw a few black people.
I had no idea how black people were. It didn’t disturb me. I knew some people quite well. But in the meantime, you have European cities and and you have school classes where there are more foreigners, including black people, than domestic people. You have more people speaking a foreign language than speaking German. I consider that to be an abnormal and unhealthy development.
Again, I think that can be perfectly reconciled with libertarian principles. But most people in Europe, for instance, are not libertarian. And yet they feel exactly the same way. This is a big split in European politics. The elites want this thing to go on and the rank-and-file people in Europe hate it. And the reason for the elites wanting this? You cannot say that in Germany. It’s almost illegal to say that this replacement of your own population by a different people, they do this in order to promote centralization. Because the resistance against centralization—there’s always more power to Brussels, more power to whatever, the United Nations and UNESCO, and the World Health Organization—the resistance against all these international organizations is by local people, and [they carry out this policy] to overcome the resistance of Germans, French people of the Danes or the Norwegians or the Swedes, whatever it is, to overcome the natural resistance that these people have against this tendency of being taken over, of being replaced, of being outbred.
Woods: I consider this the most important issue of all right now, because ifit isn’t addressed in some way, everything else we might argue about becomes moot or pointless.
The conclusion of our interview with Hans-Hermann Hoppe will appear in the next issue of the Tom Woods Elite Letter.
Tom Woods “The Hans Hoppe Interview Concluded,” Tom Woods Elite Letter, Issue #19 (August 2025)
THE HANS HOPPE INTERVIEW CONCLUDED
Issue #19, August 2025
Dear Supporter:
In this issue we conclude our interview with the great Hans-Hermann Hoppe, an interview available only to readers of this newsletter.
Enjoy:
Hoppe: European countries are lost. You can predict the time when when there will be more non-Germans than Germans in Germany, when there will be more non-Swedes than Swedes in Sweden. I remember in Peter Brimelow’s first book on immigration that came out in the rnid-1990s. he predicted that that would happen in the United States also around 2050 or something like that. But it will be a replacement, so to speak, of genuine Americans by Latinos. In Europe it will not be a replacement of Europeans by Latinos. It will be the replacement of Europeans by Third Worlders. So the situation is far more dramatic in Europe than it is in the United States, I would say.
Woods: Apart from the big change you made when you began to follow Mises, are there any changes of heart you’ve had, or have you changed your mind c;:in anything important over the course of your career?
Hoppe: I would say I was a little bit more of a left-libertarian at the beginning than I am now. I think in order to maintain a libertarian society, you also have to value specific cultural traits. You have to be able to exclude certain types of unpleasant behavior. So I have become more culturally conservative than I was when I was a young man.
Another thing that has something to do with this: I have become more exclusionary in my views than I was ever before. I think I don’t want to have anything to do with people like that.
Interestingly, I must say, because I always have this annual intellectual salon in Bodrum in Turkey, the demand for people to come there has increased as I myself have become more and more intolerant towards these relativistic cultural views that I sympathized with to a certain extent when I was younger. So even though the number of people that I exclude has increased, the number of people who are interested in this type of exclusionary program that I offer has increased.
Woods: What would you say you are the proudest of in your career?
Hoppe: My first book, The Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, is where I present for the first time my argumentation ethics. My most successful book has obviously been this Democracy book, where I have some good things to say about monarchy as compared with democracy. That has had a major impact on people. That is also my by far best-selling book, up to this day.
I believe I’m the the person who most closely continues along the lines that the late Murray Rothbard laid out. Murray was also a more left-leaning person when he was younger, and became more conservative and also more radical as he grew older. I think the the young Rothbard was less radical than the older Rothbard. I talked with Murray about this. The general view is, of course, that people, when they get older, get milder in their views and find excuses more easily for certain deviations. In my case, and I think in Rothbard’s case, it was just the opposite. We did become more radical as we as we grew older.
There are certain purely theoretical points, like the foundation of private property rights and so forth, where I think I did make some breakthroughs, which Murray endorsed. I’m very proud of that. But since I’m now 75, if I had to assess my general impact that I hadon the world, I think it would make me most proud if people would say Hoppe is, in a way, the most important successor of Rothbard in the present age. It would make me enormously proud if that became the general view, even though I admit I’m not in the same league as Mises and Rothbard. Those two were geniuses. I’m a pretty bright guy. I contributed quite a bit to libertarian thought. But I would never, ever put myself in the same league as them. But since there is nobody in sight who is in the same league as they are for the time being, I’m a pretty good substitute for these two giants.
Woods: Are there any reasons to be hopeful or optimistic about the future that you see?
Hoppe: You know that Murray was always an optimist. But looking over the last 30 or 40 years, I don’t see any progress that we have made. I think that the people who rule us want to dumb down the people as much as possible. It is easier to rule dumb people than to rule smart, smart people. So I see my obligation more in keeping up the things of—of helping people not to forget what has already been achieved intellectually. To be a remnant until some time or whatever in which a great breakthrough will happen and a new dawn will appear. But, I mean, do you see any any signs for optimism? Let me ask you that question.
Woods: Well, I would say that the Overton window in the U.S. has shifted to the right. And I think there are more people with large audiences who hold the opinions that we wish Trump held. Unlike him, they really do hold them. So I think there are more and more people who agree with—I mean, they might not agree with the radical libertarianism, but they agree with the general worldview that we have.
I don’t know what comes of this, because the establishment is so powerful and somehow still has such purchase over the minds of the public. That’s a phenomenon I can never understand. But the fact that a lot of right-wingers voted for somebody they thought was going to end wars means that there has been some shift. We just need to find somebody who will deliver on that.
Hoppe: Deliver on it, yeah. The war situation has certainly not improved since Trump arrived on the scene. Do you think the danger of some major conflagration has declined since Trump? My impression is that it has almost increased.
Trump is definitely not a peace candidate. I mean, the idea of giving him the peace prize, it strikes me as absurd.
Woods: Well, not to mention, I think he ordered a couple of nuclear submarines to move closer to Russia. What I think he likes is that he says things and people bend to his will. But he’s discovering that that doesn’t always happen.
Hoppe: [He seems to think] you can talk to to people all over the worldjust like you can talk to your construction crew or on a place where you build a high-rise. I mean, he thinks he can talk to Putin like, “Putin, you listen to me. I’m telling you something.” “Zelensky, didn’t you listen to what I told you before? Oh, today you behave all right. But, you know, we have another talk.” “And Putin, yes, this was good, but I know you. I cannot rely on you. And now you said something that was really nasty, and I’m mad at you.”
I mean, who talks? Who talks to powerful people like that? You can talk to your flunkies that way. He has no style.
Woods: An interesting question is: what happens when he’s gone? What happens to the right wing when he’s gone? Because his personality holds that movement together (even though he’s done an awful lot to undermine the unity of his movement). Does does J.D. Vance automatically inherit the support and enthusiasm?
Hoppe: At the beginning of the Trump administration, I thought yes, J.D. Vance will definitely win the next election. But in the meantime, I’m no longer sure about that. He alienates his own people. I mean, his tariff policy. He ruined a lot of people’s fortunes. IfI look at my own accounts, some people think, he harms me, that Trump guy. Lots of people will find that out. Look at your bank accounts and your investments that you made. Was he helpful or wasn’t he helpful in this?
Then there’s the Epstein thing. Of course, that doesn’t help him. So I think the next midterm election might be a disaster for the Republicans. I’m not sure. I mean, you are closer to to events in the United States than I am, but at first, I thought, of course there would be no question that that Vance would be the next president. Um, but I’m not so certain anymore that is a sure thing.
Woods: Yeah, I’m not so sure, either. And all they had to do was what they said they would do. That’s all. All they had to do was just carry forth with what they said they would do. With Vance, he has the added problem that he’s on camera saying, we need to release the Epstein list. And now his boss says there is no list. It’s all a scam and a hoax. How do you get out of that one?
Hoppe: Yeah. How do you get out of that? The same thing with Musk, first giving giving a huge “how great was was my cooperation with this most wonderful person” and stuff like that. And then all of a sudden that he is scum.
Trump is not a reliable person. What can I say? I. He could have ended the war in Ukraine easily by saying, okay, I will not send any money and any weapons whatsoever anymore to the Ukraine. And the war would have been over in one week. But he didn’t do that. And the terrible thing is that the Europeans, in the meantime, are more warlike than even Trump is as far as the Ukraine is concerned. They were lured into this whole thing by the United States. And then because they are closer to the Ukraine. They went there and hugged the guy and kissed the guy, and he came here and here, huckstering around. So for most of the European leaders, it will be enormously difficult to say that Zelensky is just a big asshole, and we drop him, because they have declared their unconditional love for him too frequently. They would lose anything that they have in terms of reputation and public opinion if all of a sudden they make a big turnaround.
The war thing for Europeans is, of course, a far bigger issue than it is for America. I mean, Ukraine is right next to Turkey. It’s not that far from Germany. We are close. You Americans don’t even know how good you have it. You have two oceans that protect you from these weirdos. We have to deal with a crazy Zelensky who is incapable of seeing that it would have been a realistic solution to the war to say: we give these two eastern provinces, or three or four eastern provinces to the Russians, or give them some autonomous status. The war would be over. The war could have been concluded very easily. The Russian demands were, in my view, perfectly reasonable. Those are provinces where everybody speaks Russian.
Putin has almost been a humanitarian as compared with the way that Americans conduct their wars. Kiev is still standing. Putin would have been able to level Kiev in one week. Kiev would have looked like that, like the Gaza Strip. Um, that he didn’t. That he didn’t do that, nobody credits him for this.
And the suggestion that that he is out trying to reestablish the old Soviet Union is the most ridiculous idea. My parents came from East Germany. The Russians withdrew after German reunification in 1990. The Russians withdrew their troops from East Germany and took them back to Russia. The Americans did not withdraw their troops from West Germany and all of western Europe. No. They expanded their NATO further and further to the east.
Now all of these people in my view, of course, are gangsters, but one has to recognize what is obviously the truth: the Russians took their troops out. There’s not a single Russian who was left in East Germany. And before, they had bases all over the place. They just went. They left. And they are the evil people. The Americans, who expanded first to East Germany, then to Poland, then to Czechoslovakia, then to Estonia, Lithuania, bringing NATO to all of these countries and encircling Russia, they are hailed.
The European perspective on this is different than the American because it’s close at home. For Americans, who cares about Ukraine? They don’t even know where it is. But we do know.
Woods: But a lot of European libertarians, even European-American libertarians, are very much in favor of pushing the Ukraine side.
Hoppe: I know. I have seen that also. People who used to come to my conference are no longer coming anymore. I think they’re all wrong. They should see that secession is a legitimate concern, and they should see that. Who is the biggest war maker in the world right now? Is it Russia or is it the United States and Israel? I think it is the United States and Israel. If you look at after the entire development after World War II, what country started more wars than the United States? I think there is not a single country that you will find. I mean, Iran, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Vietnam, whatever. At least 20 million people are dead as a result of Americans trying to expand their empire.
I have nothing against United States. My children have American passports. I owe my career to the United States. I love America. But these neocon policies that they have pursued and that Trump is continuing to pursue, these are just a disaster.
Woods: Before we wrap up, do you want to say a quick word about the Property and Freedom Society?
Hoppe: I have done that for for 20 years now. We have a hotel that is owned by my wife and her brothers. It’s a small part of the overall business that they have in Turkey. In the beginning we had difficulties persuading people to come to Turkey because Turkey is a strange country. But now, one week after we announce the conference times, we are booked solid. It’s a hotel that has between 50 and 60 rooms, and we always fill it for the conference. The hotel is always reserved only for the attendees of the conference.
My principle is that I invite as speakers only people who are sympathetic to libertarianism. They don’t have to be hardcore libertarians. But they should not be people who ardently promote, for instance, “limited government.” Because the main view is we are anarchists there. It creates an atmosphere like no other one that I’ve ever experienced at any other conference.
Everything takes place at the hotel, so you don’t have to go out at night and find some other place to eat. You can change your table at every meal, eat breakfast together, eat lunch together, dinner together, party until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning.
Many different kinds of people have attended, between the first conference and the last one. We have poor students and we have billionaires coming to the conference. It’s a very interesting mixture of people. I want interdisciplinary talks: economics, history, philosophy, and cultural stuff. It is the mixture of topics and also the mixture of people.
When I started it, most of the people attending were Americans. Since then, it has become predominantly European. But we also have people coming from South America and Australia. It is a very unusual conference, and I don’t think anybody who has ever attended it went away without saying: that was something special.
Woods: Hans Hoppe, thank you for your time and for your answers, which I know people will find very interesting.
Hoppe: Thank you, Tom. I thought we had a good conversation.
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