The Economics and Ethics of Private Property

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The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy by Hans-Hermann Hoppe was first published in 1993 followed by a second edition in 2006.

1 Brief summary
2 Contents
3 Dedication
4 Publishing history
5 Excerpts
6 External links

[edit] Brief summary

From the back cover of the second edition:

The topics covered by Hans-Hermann Hoppe are wide-ranging—employment, interest, money, banking, trade cycles, taxes, public goods, war, imperialism, and the rise and fall of civilizations—but the core theoretical insight uniting the entire discussion is as consistently applied here as it is neglected by the economic mainstream: the absolute inviolability of private property as a human right as the basis of continuous economic progress.

The right to private property is an indisputably valid, absolute principle of ethics, argues Hoppe, and the basis for civilizational advance. Indeed, it is the very basis of social order itself. To rise from the ruins of socialism and overcome the stagnation of the Western welfare states, nothing will suffice but the uncompromising privatization of all socialized—that is, government—property and the establishment of a contractual society based on the recognition of private property rights.

[edit] Contents

Preface to the Second Edition
Preface to the First Edition

[edit] Part One – Economics

1 Fallacies of the Public Goods Theory and the Production of Security
2 The Economics and Sociology of Taxation
3 Banking, Nation States, and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order
4 Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis
5 Theory of Employment, Money, Interest, and the Capitalist Process: The Misesian Case Against Keynes
6 How is Fiat Money Possible?—or, The Devolution of Money and Credit
7 Against Fiduciary Media
8 Socialism: A Property or Knowledge Problem?

[edit] Part Two – Philosophy

9 On Praxeology and the Praxeological Foundation of Epistemology
10 Is Research Based on Causal Scientific Principles Possible in the Social Sciences?
11 From the Economics of Laissez Faire to the Ethics of Libertarianism
12 The Justice of Economic Efficiency
13 On the Ultimate Justification of the Ethics of Private Property
14 Austrian Rationalism in the Age of the Decline of Positivism
15 Rothbardian Ethics

[edit] Appendix: Four Critical Replies

Demonstrated Preference and Private Property
Utilitarians and Randians versus Reason
Intimidation by Argument
On the Indefensibility of Welfare Rights

[edit] Dedication

Hoppe dedicated the original book to Murray N. Rothbard, who was Hoppe's mentor and colleague in the economics department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.