Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe Is a Scoundrel and a Fraud
I already noted the “Open Letter” published against Walter Block for defending the Jews in Israel. And as I hinted there, this attack was not actually written by its supposed author. Either it was plagiarised by Dr. Hoppe from Jonathan Goodwin (the “Bionic Mosquito” blogger), or it was ghostwritten by Goodwin and signed by Hoppe. Well, the picture is clearer now.
To be clear, I am not arguing crimes were committed. I don’t know enough about laws or mores to determine plagiarism. Not my legal system. I’m sticking to what I know for certain:
- Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a scoundrel and a fraud.
- His Open Letter should never have been paid any attention.
- His vicious character assassinations return upon his own head.
To prove this, I need to set the whole table, but if you’re reading this and wondering “actionable plagiarism or not?”, wrong question.
First, let’s save the evidence to avoid tampering.
Here is the “Open Letter” of January 2024, first published on LRC (using the identical Mises.org version for cleaner formatting):
View or Download the PDF / פתח או הורד את הקובץ
Here is Goodwin’s 2018 post “Israel: 7 Percent Legitimate”:
View or Download the PDF / פתח או הורד את הקובץ
Here is Goodwin’s November 2023 post “Not Surprised”:
View or Download the PDF / פתח או הורד את הקובץ
Comparing side-by-side:
| Goodwin | “Hoppe” (Jan 2024) |
|---|---|
| (Nov 2023) “This may be one of the more unhinged pieces of writing I have read on this topic.” | “it is this screed of his, then, that reveals Block as an unhinged, bloodthirsty monster” |
| (Nov 2023) “Hamas needs to be destroyed, just as the Nazis were – the Walter Block libertarian campaign for carpet bombing Dresden.” | “Hamas needs to be destroyed for the same reason and by the same method that the Nazis were. (Does ‘Nazis’ refer to all Germans living in Germany at the time…and does the method of their destruction include also the carpet bombing of entire cities such as Dresden?)” |
| (Nov 2023) “And it isn’t enough just for Israel to win. They must win so conclusively that they will never have to face another war – a war to end all wars. Where have we heard that one before? How did that work out?” | “Haven’t we heard this before: the war to end all wars?!” |
| (2018) “7% of pre-1948 Palestine was purchased legitimately by Jews.” | “At best, only a meager 7 percent of the present Israeli territory was regularly acquired or purchased by Jews before 1948.” |
| (2018) “Do they all have claim to this land? This is nonsense; correction, this is nonsense on stilts.” | “Yet this theory is not only obviously incompatible with libertarianism. It is also plain absurd.” / “Any genetic linking of present-day Jews to ancient Jews, then, becomes an impossible task.” |
| (2018) “Every single person on earth…has a history of both victim and perpetrator… The authors have made a libertarian case for a war of all against all.” | “There are countless cases of expropriations and expulsions…of victims and of perpetrators… The result would be legal chaos, interminable strife, conflict and war.” |
| (Nov 2023) “Murray Rothbard, Walter’s supposed mentor, must be spinning in his grave.” | “The Murray Rothbard I knew would have immediately called them out as unhinged, monstrous, unconscionable and sickening and publicly ridiculed, denounced, ‘unfriended’ and excommunicated Block as a Rothbardian.” |
| (Nov 2023) “He calls for total, unrestrictive support for Israel, that Israel is entitled to do whatever it takes – a libertarian calling for state to state support for unrestricted war.” | “Block et.al. are demanding… an all-out attack by Israel on the Hamas hiding out in Gaza” quoting Block: “Israel is entitled to do whatever it takes” |
| (Nov 2023) “a pox on all political leaders on both sides of this conflict” | “he would want to wish the pox on the leadership of both gangs” |
In short: Same claims, in the same sequence, often verbatim, and not mere “borrowing”; go read the originals.
“Exhibit one” is from Goodwin 2018. “Exhibit two” is from Goodwin 2023. “Exhibit three”, shortest of the trio, seems fresh (and sounds Goodwin-infused).
At minimum, Hoppe stole the prose, the phrasing, the order, and the arguments from Goodwin and published it under his own name. Or which is worse, Goodwin wrote the whole thing, and Hoppe added his byline. Their close relationship is well established on their respective personal sites. Or perhaps there is yet another man in the middle. Mr. X was paid by Hoppe to ghostwrite in Hoppe’s voice, but he went and stole the whole from Goodwin (as occurred with Rand Paul’s staffers, allegedly). No mention or credit to anybody else was made.
Goodwin is, in his own words, a “random bug”. He concedes: he’s not “meaningful”. Nobody cares what he thinks. Goodwin could never engineer such a schism and ouster of the mainstay, veteran, genius, prolific, etc., Dr. Block, and get it cross-posted prominently on LRC and Mises.org, get a bunch of echoes from others, and the rest of the timed gang campaign, but in the current atmosphere of Jew-hatred (which started before Shmini Atzeres, by the way), Hoppe’s hounds could manage it.
His wildest dream was that Hoppe would steal his words. Quoting his “jokes” in another Goodwin article, “I Love Hans Hoppe!”, 2017:
You will note, sprinkled throughout my commentary are my “accusations” that Hoppe has stolen some of my material. I hope you understand my meager attempt at humor; everything I have come to on this broad subject (I truly mean “everything”) began because Hoppe set me on that path, long ago…Hoppe includes (and I will say stole) one of my well-used examples… (Now, I know, it isn’t exactly my example…but I’m not letting go of this!)
…
is Hoppe stealing my stuff again?
End quote.
So they likely conspired together two months after Goodwin’s November 2023 piece: Goodwin supplied the words and Hoppe the lying byline.
What Goodwin writes about the “Open Letter” in 2024 is suggestive:
Finally, after almost four months of genocidal behavior by the state of Israel and genocidal cheerleading by Walter Block, there is a response from someone meaningful in Block’s intellectual orbit and not just from a random libertarian affiliate of Block’s or a random bug like me:
…
Hoppe makes a rational, point-by-point, critique of Block’s claim that the Jews – as a group – had the right consistent with the non-aggression principle and Lockean property notions to displace Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948. It is a topic that I covered six years ago, here.
…
Returning to Hoppe, he then moves on to the editorial co-written by Block about four months ago, which I had written on when I became aware of it.
Here is the saved page:
View or Download the PDF / פתח או הורד את הקובץ
[Quick lesson: Next time you collude on a shady endeavor (with a known hoaxer), make sure your partner-in-crime doesn’t publicly go and drop hints.]Is this copyright violation? Citing Goodwin’s perennial footer: “Permission to copy fully granted as long as a link is provided back to this site.” No hyperlinks. Does Hoppe have written consent in an email? Someone should ask the pair. (I don’t know what’s worse, having or not having written consent.) Was Goodwin paid for the ghostwriting? Where’s the receipt?
It reads like it was rephrased and reworked to become a turgid, Germanic chapter (“for the same reason and by the same method“?) reeking of Herr Professor Doktor H.H.H’s Judenhass (Jew-hatred). Hoppe adds the Latin “et al.” But Goodwin’s traces of liveliness survived, as in the parenthetical “surprise, surprise!” “making hey” (sic), quoting strictly irrelevant articles on LRC, “Exhibit one” language, using Blockist coinages, like “nonsense on stilts”. He even uses the word “unhinged” again when characterizing the Open Letter itself. And as with Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef, one can suspect it’s not really yours when “you” contradict “yourself”.
Spotlight on a very awkward masking of better prose:
Goodwin, Nov 2023: “a pox on all political leaders on both sides of this conflict”
“Hoppe”, Jan 2024: “he would want to wish the pox on the leadership of both gangs”
“The pox”? Ugh.
“Hoppe” doesn’t note where “he” got the empirical 7-percent figure (hint: far earlier, quoting Block himself in his book’s summary and wrenching it out of context).
The Mises Institute’s own Graduate School warns students that plagiarism entails “copying another person’s writing and submitting it for an assignment”. But this doesn’t count as an assignment; it’s an epochal moment. Wait, any chance the Mises Institute would rescind their Block banishment, seeing as how…? Nu, come on. (For lots of similar pettiness – even before Lew Rockwell lost his marbles, read this juicy account of previous schisms.)
“Hoppe” writes (in the preamble) of the personal dimension, this distasteful duty to blah blah. All this was inauthentic. You can outsource almost anything. Marx’s labor theory of value is wrong. But love and hate can’t be subcontracted. The bathos about a 30-year relationship, “it’s not me, it’s you”— all a lie. No “hard” wrestling of conscience, no grieving. This was “done lightly”, in fact, lighter than air. The gravity of all this is true, but not to him.
The Block-Futerman rejoinder well hammers the point, among others, that “Hoppe” never even read the book he purports to attack. (Goodwin actually admits this minor detail, while cheerfully ignoring its import, and I quote: “The authors do not demonstrate this 2000 year descent in this article, but I believe I am citing only from a summary; I cannot find another, more detailed examination by these authors online.” Right, and defamation is a universal human right, so no need to buy the book first.)
If he/they had stopped to think, they might have realized that Hoppe was actually the wrong choice to do this. As Block-Futerman point out in their rejoinder, Hoppe is acting as a judge in his own case. He should have recused himself.
To quote the rejoinder:
Hoppe allows that he has with Block “a common standing as a public intellectual and both our names are mentioned frequently in one breath as prominent students of the same teacher, Murray N. Rothbard, and as leading intellectual lights of the modern libertarian movement founded by Rothbard.”
In a sense, Hoppe is tied with Block for the title of successor to the mentor of both, Rothbard. This essay of his we are now responding to might then serve as an attempted tie breaker. If the former can gain “street cred” at the expense of the latter, there might be only one successor to the libertarian throne occupied for so long and so well by Rothbard.
I think it’s not just reputational gain, but also avoiding being associated with a Jew-loving, Israel-loving Jew, while simultaneously trying to dog-whistle to the “White Right and Libertarian” horde Hoppe (and Goodwin, too) hang out with (this is well-established)…
Q: Why does this all matter? A: It’s a question of judgement.
Block-Futerman, blissfully unaware of where this “Open Letter” really came from, wrote long pages carefully teaching:
- “The fundamental problem with the sectarian view of Hoppe is that…
- “Does Hoppe think that…?
- “Hoppe should look at what…
- “Let us offer one more analogy; it is so important to make this point. If even a scholar as brilliant as Hoppe can so completely and blatantly misunderstand Rothbard (1967) on this point, then anyone is vulnerable to this error…”
But No! An otherwise “brilliant” Hoppe is not completely “misunderstanding” anything. The lack of substance and merit is a side effect.
He is simply not here!
Hoppe could not give credit even if he cared to. Admitting Goodwin wrote this is not about that. This would amount to admitting he never actually “adjudicated” the case. In Cojocaru [Cojocaru v. British Columbia Women’s Hospital], Canada’s Supreme Court ruled on whether a judge who copies his decision from a party’s brief has physically adjudicated, which is precisely the matter here. Hoppe the fraud provided the fraudulent standing for a fraud of a verdict, that is all.
Now, Block argues for a kind of “Judgment notwithstanding verdict”, since “no reasonable jury could have reached the given verdict as a matter of law”. But I’m showing no judgment was ever made. If this is a medieval anathema or “excommunication” (to quote “Hoppe” himself), it has the potestas, at least according to him, but lacks the auctoritas (the “chair” yes, the deliberation no; the office, but not the officeholder).
The readers read it, the activists acted, the algorithms spread the word, the acolytes acolyted, while the defendants took offense and tried to defend themselves on the merits. But the groom, Hoppe, used a stand-in. Virtually the only original contribution was a signature.
Let’s not ignore the irony.
Unlike the natural-rightists, Hoppe bases all of libertarianism (or his version, at least) on something called “argumentation ethics”. A sub-category or derivation of “discourse ethics” by previous philosophers, Hoppe’s transcendental framework says you cannot coherently violate the inescapable presuppositions of discourse in the very act of discoursing itself. Brute force is not a logical argument, so you can’t “argue” for “Might Makes Right”. A precondition of this is sincerity [*], reasoning, personal identity, and standing in a particular geographical spot while arguing, which somehow leads to the universal human right of not being harmed in their persons or property.
Point being, there was technically no argument here. Hoppe performed the reasoning, violated the sincerity condition, and lacked the “personal identity” requirement. He removed “deliberation” from “liberty”. His own IP theory may remove legal culpability, but his discourse ethics maximizes moral culpability.
By his own standard, Hoppe’s signature is trying to kick someone out of a movement for violation of its ideas and to redefine it, all by means of his own violations.
Further, Hoppe’s signature accuses Block of negating land title laws. Well, Hoppe may not hold government copyright to the “Open Letter” (I’m not a lawyer), let alone title to the actual words under his byline (just like he never acquired title to the book)! Hoppe accuses Block of forgetting Locke, but without having first “mixed his labor” with Goodwin’s words. Neither emotional labor nor intellectual labor.
Bottom line: Goodwin is a documented hoaxer; old news. But this one is new: Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a scoundrel and a fraud.
[*] Frank Van Dun: “There would not be a genuine dialogue if the participants were merely actors reading their lines from a script written by someone else. The very idea of a dialogue presupposes an irreducible plurality of natural persons.P.S.
From Block-Futerman’s rejoinder:
Hoppe wishes to exclude Block and Futerman from the libertarian movement. We will not reciprocate by calling for his removal… We think Hoppe’s views are incompatible with libertarianism on several other issues, besides this one on Israel-Hamas. We still regard him as a preeminent libertarian theoretician on the subjects that qualify him as such.
Dear Dr. Block, a friendly suggestion in light of the above: Maybe consider revoking those “libertarian” credentials after all? As they say, if a man will cheat on his colleague, his friend, his co-author, Mises.org, LRC, his ideology, his intellectual school and home, his patrons, his principles, his reputation, his bibliography, the object of his plagiarism, his trusting readers, his duped followers, the bots, and The Truth… well, he will cheat on anyone!