Positive Liberty

[To Positive Liberty readers: Controversy continues about Hans Hermann Hoppe, a professor at UNLV who made some controversial comments about gay people in a lecture. The university might dock his pay, which I oppose on principle. I still believe his comments were wrong and that it is important to speak out against them. Posts and articles on the controversy can be found here, here, here, and here, among many others.]

I have had time to listen to the relevant sections of the lecture, and I must say that it confirmed many of my suspicions. I still do not believe that Hoppe should be punished for his comments, but he certainly deserves the public outcry he’s been getting.

Yes, the student who attacked Hoppe was being foolish when he demanded that his education be “as politically correct as possible.” Education should be uncomfortable, disconcerting, and if need be, politically incorrect. It’s not an education if it doesn’t shake you up a bit. Would that there were any party I could champion in this debate, but there is not.

Via No Treason, here is a statement with which I completely agree:

One thing I’ll note is that Hoppe does not present his remarks on Keynes as a joke, as some have suggested. While Charles Murray prudently warned Bell Curve readers not to view individuals in terms of group traits, Hoppe invites his audience to consider an individual’s sexual preference as a possible source of deficiencies in his economic theories.

Contra several commenters at Liberty & Power, Prof. Hoppe very clearly was associating sexual orientation with bad economic decisions and even with utterly depraved criminal behavior.

Having listened to the lecture, I can say with confidence that Hoppe was not referring merely to some value-neutral preference toward risk. Every single one of the examples he used in the lecture declared that a high time preference is negative, and to the effect that homosexuals have a high time preference because they do not care about the rest of society. A student ignorant of this area of economics could not have walked away from the lecture with any other conclusion.

Here is a partial transcript I’ve just done. It’s incomplete, but it gets the sense of the remarks and most of their content too. Sections in quotes are word-for-word or nearly so with ellipses noted; otherwise I have paraphrased closely:

–Children turn down an interest rate of 100% per day; they need their “big gulp” right now. This behavior is presented as foolish in the extreme, which it certainly is.

“Very old people are sometimes said to go through a second childhood, not necessarily so, because very old people can also provide for future generations. But assuming that they do not care for future generations, they might not have any offspring or friends that they want to hand over their own fortune [to]… They have not much of a future left; they again go through the phase of a second childhood, by and large consuming and stopping more or less entirely to accumulate…”

“The example of criminals, which are also typically speaking, and I mean the normal run of the mill type criminal… the muggers, the murders, the rapists… [are] characterized typically by high time preference…”

[He gives the example of "normal" dating, which requires time and investment before the "reward," which is presumably sex. How charming. I'd thought that the relationship too was a reward, but I digress.] “If you have a childlike mentality in an adult body, then [normal dating] is almost an impossible sacrifice… You become a rapist or something of that nature… But what if a day of waiting is too long? …[You] Look for some old lady and rob her of her purse, and this way satisfy your desires.”

[Democratic politicians are in power for only a short time.] “What they do not loot right now, they will not be able to loot in 5-6 years, so their intention… is to milk the public as much as possible, because then with a lot of tax income I can make myself a lot of friends. And who cares about the future?”

“The last example is one that has gotten me into deep trouble at my university… some fanatic wanted to bring me down, this whole process is still underway, so I warn you not to bring harassment suits against me again… If you compare regular heterosexuals with families to homosexuals, you can also say that homosexuals have a higher time preference, because life ends with them.”

Yes, life ends with us. Homosexuals don’t have families like heterosexuals. Both of these statements are preposterous lies and represent nothing less than pure, naked bigotry.

Hoppe may find these claims “obvious” and “beyond dispute,” but I do not. Hundreds of thousands of gays and lesbians have children in the United States alone. And all of us most certainly have mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and other relatives.

Now, a few studies do suggest that there is some truth behind Hoppe’s claims, but this is in a very narrow sense only, and studies of homosexuals suffer greatly from the statistical difficulties that I have already noted.

It’s crucial to note these studies do not support Hoppe’s claims that homosexuals care less about society merely because they are homosexuals, and that “life ends with them.” This is why his (otherwise quite misguided) student took offense, and–in this sense alone–I have to say I agree with the firebrand student.

Let’s consider the question of cause and effect: Is it really that homosexuals don’t care about long-term plans because they are homosexual? Or is it at all thinkable that perhaps homosexuals have been shunned from mainstream society for as long as anyone can remember–and thus they tend to have less interest in giving back to mainstream society?

Gay people are discouraged from forming families or even permanent unions, both by pervasive social attitudes and by direct government attack. They are told every single day that their families are inconsequential–or even that they don’t have families, and that “life ends with them.” They hear this stuff all the time, and frankly, it can rub off. To the extent that Hoppe’s comments in this lecture are true, they are merely self-fulfilling prophecies of the very worst sort.

Let me give just one recent example from my own life: In response to one of my very first posts at Liberty & Power (on an utterly unrelated topic), I was informed, quite out of the blue, that I was not in a real marriage but merely in a “relationship.” Talk about a warm welcome!

The overwhelming majority of gay people hear subtle messages from day to day telling them that society does not want or need them, that they are expendable, that they do not count for anything. They hear comments just like Hoppe’s, and these things have an effect.

An historical analogy immediately suggests itself: At one time, it was argued that Negroes were inherently intellectually inferior, and that it was therefore a waste of time to bother sending them to schools. Unsurprisingly, they seemed far less intelligent, and they probably were less intelligent–as a direct result of their lack of education. Things have improved considerably in the meantime, to the point where it is a matter of heated debate whether any genetic disparity exists at all. I’m inclined to think it doesn’t, but that’s another question.

No, it’s not brainwashing or anything so crude as that–but given the institutional and informal pressures against us, Hoppe’s comments are frankly akin to blaming the victim. So a gay student made a protest? Good for him. It’s about time someone stood up against this nonsense. Would that he’d done it in a more decent fashion, but I have to say my heart still goes out to him.

And here’s the delicious irony of it all: The student in question is demonstrating exactly the sort of economic behavior that Hoppe said gay people do not usually exhibit: In sacrificing (for the moment) his peace and quiet, his reputation, his ordinary course of studies, this student is acting for the good of gay people everywhere, over the longest term I can imagine. If I’m not mistaken, economists refer to that as a low time preference.

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