Hans-Hermann Hoppe

The following address was given to the 2010 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society. It was originally published at VDARE.com. 

When I first envisioned the idea of this Society, more than 10 years ago and then still a society without a name, I had direct experience with only two other Societies from which to learn.

My first experience was with the Mont Pelerin Society which Friedrich Hayek had founded in 1947.

During the 1990s, I was three times invited as a speaker to Mont Pelerin Society meetings in Cannes, Cape Town, and Barcelona. Each time, with papers attacking democracy and egalitarianism, defending monarchies vs. democracies, eviscerating the classical-liberal idea of a minimal-state as self-contradictory, and propagating a stateless, anarcho-capitalist natural order, my appearance was considered somewhat scandalous: too irreverent, too confrontational, and too sensational.

Whatever the function of the Mont Pelerin Society may have been in the immediate aftermath of WW II, at the time of my encounter with it, I did not find it particularly to my liking.

To be sure, I met many bright and interesting people. But essentially, Mont Pelerin Society meetings were junkets for "free-market" and "limited-government" think-tank and foundation staffers, their various professorial affiliates and protégées, and the principal donor-financiers of it all, mostly from the U.S., and more specifically from Washington D.C. Characteristically, Ed Feulner, long-time President of the Heritage Foundation, the major GOP think-tank and intellectual shill to the welfare-warfare state politics of every Republican government administration, from Reagan to Bush, Junior, is a former Mont Pelerin Society president and, more significantly, has been its long-time treasurer.