KOL157 | “The Social Theory of Hoppe: Lecture 5: Economic Issues and Applications”

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 157. This is the fifth of 6 lectures of my 2011 Mises Academy course “The Social Theory of Hoppe.” I’ll release the final lecture here in the podcast feed shortly. The slides for this lecture are appended below; links for“suggested readings” for the course are included in the podcast post for the first lecture, episode 153. Transcript below. LECTURE 5: ECONOMIC ISSUES AND APPLICATIONS Video Slides TRANSCRIPT The Social Theory of Hoppe, Lecture 5: Economic Issues and Applications Stephan Kinsella Mises Academy, Aug. 8, 2011 00:00:00 STEPHAN KINSELLA: … question about – someone sent me in the class course page.  Well, I mean if you’re just asking me my opinion, I mean I don’t think Hoppe has written very much on abortion.  I actually did include an abortion question in the questions I submitted to him that hopefully he’ll give us some feedback on it for discussion next week.  I believe he is generally pro-choice because I remember he asked me one time about, oh, 12 or 15 years ago to try to come up with an argument to justify it.  So I don’t know.  I’m not assuming there is a flaw in Rothbard’s argument about abandoning the fetus. 00:00:52 My personal view is that certain actions give rise to positive obligations.  So if you harm someone or put them in a position of peril, then – push someone in a lake who can’t swim, you have an obligation to rescue them.  And I think there’s a similar argument that, because of the nature, the dependent nature of the child, that you have positive obligations to your children because you brought them into the world.  So that’s the basic argument.  I mean another could be that the fetus is a human who has a right to life, and there is no reason the parent needs to kill it.  It’s not really a threat.  Now, there are some people written – there’s a book called Solomon’s Knife by Victor Koman, a libertarian science fiction novel, which posits this trans-option procedure. 00:01:47 And the idea is that medical technology permits any woman who’s pregnant to take the baby out and put it into another host mother.  So there’s really no reason anymore to have abortions.  If you want the baby out, you give it to another woman.  That would change the complexity of the debate.  Okay, so let’s get going.  So I have a lot of slides here.  I don’t think we’re going to cover them all.  The ones that we don’t cover we’ll talk about next time.  A lot of these topics blend into politics and economics. 00:02:20 So some of these are somewhat political as well, and so it would make sense to cover these in the next week as well.  So where we left off, we talked about epistemology, and last week, economic methodology and dualism.  Okay, so for the methodology part.  Today, I want to continue the end of that lecture and talk about a few more things, and then we’ll get to some economic issues and applications.  And you see the suggested readings I have here.  For next week’s classes, a lot of smaller topics.  A lot of blog posts cover these.  I don’t know if I will assign the reading ahead of time, but I will have links in the slides for all the things we talk about. 00:03:04 00:03:08 Okay, so let’s go to slide five.  Excuse me a second.  Let me close my door.  Excuse me.  Okay, I mentioned last time in the epistemology discussion, there’s a lot of hostility by Rand and objectivists to Kant.  And as I mentioned, that is directed towards an idealistic, subjectivist-type interpretation or construction of what Kant wrote.  And to the extent they’re characterizing him correctly, I think a lot of their criticisms make sense. 00:03:49