In other words, the world of Hoppe, can easily devolve into a kind of neo-fuedalism or even outright fascism, without ever having to mechanically violate the non-agression principle. In a world where the right to exclude other’s from one’s property is seen as absolute and inviolable, and where no countervailing forces or institutions can check the power of the economically dominant, you essentially just have a might-makes-right society who can largely impose their will with impunity. The libertarians believe lethal force is justified in defense of property, and that in such a society, security is best provided by private contract, and someone with the most security is going to be exceptionally difficult to control or hold accountable. Through this backdoor, the libertarian idea when completely uncontained against some claim on the common good, slides effortlessly into the fascist tendency. It is therefore an unstable idea.

It’s worth mentioning that classical liberals such as John Locke, John Stuart Mill and Thomas Jefferson, absolutely believed in a concept of the common good. In fact, Jefferson’s conception of it, shows up in the US Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution itself — it specifically calls upon government to “promote the general welfare” and to “secure the blessings of liberty” for all citizens; classical liberals absolutely believed in a conception of the common good, and even believed in government, and believed that government should have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence — in service of maintaining rule-of-law so disputes could be settled without violence. Locke’s liberal social contract theory, from which Jefferson was heavily influenced, is very much the intellectual basis for the American constitutional order.

What’s been a particularly bizarre twist for me, is coming face to face with this ideological disposition popping up in Bitcoin. In fact, there’s a popular strain of thought that shows up in among people who promote Bitcoin as a technology, that Bitcoin actually proves that Austrian economics is true. And by extension, methodological individualism, and that this has intractable implications for the future of how society will be organized. That, bitcoin has achieved the dream of Rothbard’s propertarian vision, by manifesting inviolable property rights, which can be the basis for a complete reformation of culture and society around a purely market-driven system, that lessons or eliminates the need for government, taxation, the welfare state, and will finally unleash the market’s invisible hand upon the world to fix all that ails it — and all that ails it, is the malinvestment, cultural degeneracy, and lack of discernment that easy money and credit unleash upon the world, at the end of the barrel of the government’s gun. That, market failures, externalities, liquidity traps, thrift paradoxes, and all the things that literally every practicing macroeconomist thinks about — are all just propaganda for “fiat”, communism or some shadowy totalizing ideology being pursued by a bunch of unaccountable elites.