The Private Property Order

[Chris]

Hoppe interviewed on private property.

The Private Property Order

AEN: If society were based entirely private property and exchange, most people would say there would be no thing as community and order.

HOPPE: The market's speciality is producing things that people want, and that is certainly true of conditions like community and order. A main means of achieving them is the right of exclusion, which, in a market economy, property owners can always exercise. This allows owners to keep up the value of their property and to encourage civilized behavior.

Part of the terrible trend in modern government has been to trample on the right of exclusion. That is essentially what civil rights law does. Employers cannot hire and fire as they see fit. Teachers cannot kick students out of school. Businesses must accommodate customers who are detrimental to the long-term interest of the firm. In light of this, cultural decay and rotten behavior are to be expected. Even the right of parents to be the ultimate judge in their own household is under attack.

The covenant is a crucial market institution that affirms the right to exclude. Groups of people, usually with one founder, lay down all sorts of rules to which all people who are part of the group are required to adhere. The ultimate owner determines the rules based on consent. And there are competitive markets for covenantal property arrangements themselves, offering varying degrees of strictness.

[Mister D]

Hoppe appears to be an interesting thinker and I give him a hearing because, unlike most latter day libertarians and anarchists, he realizes that the ideas he defends are not a set of abstract and universally applicable principles but principles largely peculiar to the European world.