Welcome to this week's Moving Hawaii Forward. I'm your host, Tim Appichella. In the next week or so, Waikiki and downtown residents will soon see a thousand new beaky bikes stationed on our sidewalks and streets. Bike Share Hawaii is a nonprofit company that has brought this new program to Honolulu. A couple months ago, we had Laurie McCarney, CEO of Bike Share Hawaii, on to this show to describe the program in detail and those benefits the Bike Share program will bring to Waikiki. However, since that visit, there have been a couple of issues raised in the news that prompted me to revisit the Bike Share program. One issue is the rental rate for bikes that local residents and tourists will pay if they wish to ride and take advantage of this new program, which is partially funded by the city of Honolulu. Our today's guest, Wyatt Gordon, German Chancellor, fellow and urban planner, recently wrote an opinion editorial in the Honolulu Civil Beat News which focused attention on why should the bike rental rate be higher here in Honolulu than elsewhere in the Bike Share where Bike Share Hawaii has other operations in the USA. I suppose, given yesterday's Newsweek article that rated Hawaii the most expensive state to live in for the seventh year in a row and the looming, ugly debate about the rail project and the taxes needed to pay for it and other pending taxes, proposals that really highlight the issue of the cost of living here in Hawaii, these articles seem to be in the news almost every day. So perhaps it is a good time to look at the pricing of this new Bike Share program and we're going to do that. We're going to get to the bottom of this. Wyatt, thank you for coming on our show this morning and I look forward to a healthy discussion about BIKI and Bike Share Hawaii and the pricing structure. Thank you for having me. The article was titled, Honolulu residents get a raw deal with Bike Share. That's a pretty bold title. So let's talk about your editorial and kind of some of the main points that you raised in that op-ed opinion. So I chose a really bold title because the pricing system that's been put forward I find to be extremely bold to say the least. This is a completely unprecedented type of model. They've never done pay as you go where you buy blocks of minutes. So they're trying out something new which I totally respect but what I don't find acceptable is that they've left out options for residents for kama-aina and for low-income individuals which were explicitly recommended in the pricing study that was released by the Department of Planning and Permitting. So Bike Share Hawaii is a non-profit organization. They had some assistance from the Department of Health and I believe the City County of Honolulu in the form of grant dollars. Correct. They received $1 million each from the State Department of Health and the City and County of Honolulu. Okay. Were the requirements of those grants were they designed to address any specific criteria regarding pricing for residents or low-income? As far as I know that there were no strings attached to the money in terms of what the pricing should be for the residents I think is a real oversight from the people who gave out the grants. Because if I recall your article it was you implied that because we're getting public tax dollars to bring Bikki bikes to Honolulu that maybe there should have been some implication that a pricing structure would be beneficial for local residents. Well I think the expectation of residents here is that if they're going to spend $2 million of their tax money towards something that they should get something out of it I think that's an expectation that goes unstated. So for them to put out these prices that expect people to pay $180 to $300 a year just to use their bikes I find that to be pretty outrageous. Okay. One thing that your article did highlight was the fact that their annual price which there is no annual price for this new Bikki bike system it was a monthly way of pricing structure of $15 and you just took that by 12 months and you came up with $180. Correct. Because the pricing studies that were released by the Department of Planning and Permanent which is actually commissioned from Nelson Nygaard a very reputable planning firm and the study that came out of the University of Hawaii, Manoa Department of Urban and Regional Planning both suggested an annual pass that it's $75. They however ignored these recommendations and went forward with only a monthly pass. So the best value for locals if you want to use this bike share system year round is to buy 12 monthly passes at $15 a pop that makes $180 a year to use this system. Right. Minimum. If you want to get the 60 minute ride version instead of 30 minutes then you have to pay a full $300 a year to use bike share. Right. Now that was very clear in your op-ed. Now you compared that to San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C. which for one year type of annual pass there were about $90. Yeah. The average for bike share annual membership rates on the mainland is $85. A little bit higher, a little bit less but that's the average. Yeah. That's a full $95 more expensive than our best option here in Honolulu. Correct. And so in fairness I don't have Laurie McCartney here at this table with you. I thought about it but I did reach out. I would have been open to it. Yeah. Good. Yeah. I have no problem with bike share. I'm not a bike share hater. I really love this system and I actually volunteered with bike share for nine months doing community outreach and engagement. So I really want this system to succeed but I think the problem is is when you do something the wrong way here in Hawaii especially people will never forget it and if you shut locals out right at your launch and you don't offer an annual pass you don't offer anything to come INA you don't offer anything to low income people that's what people are going to remember from years into the future and they're just creating bad will for themselves. Yeah. Well I don't have her here at this table but she did actually respond to this morning a publication Honolulu Civil Beat kind of responding to your editorial so we have dueling editorials going on here and she does make one point that did make sense to me and that was that in these markets be it San Francisco, Boston, YGC they have a winner and here in Honolulu they're very minimal so her point was that we have operational costs for a 12 month period versus an operational cost that maybe be 7 months in some of these other states where there's a real winter so therefore the overhead is greater here therefore that the fair recovery revenue needs to be higher to cover a 12 month period of time. Well you have to consider that's a completely different because yes they only have to pay for operations maybe 9 months out of the year which isn't even true I used to live in DC when Capital Bike Share launched and people bike throughout the winter it's just part of the life on the mainland that you live through winter and on the other hand so yes you do have to pay for the operations 12 months out of the year but you're also bringing in revenue 12 months out of the year exactly because they can operate 12 months of the year unlike a lot of other systems where they do see ridership decrease in the winter so their argument that oh we have to pay for operations year round you're also making money year round so this is no excuse Not to the degree though in some of these other cities to where here in Hawaii they'll be able to capture revenue because we have better weather and other things that were cited that makes Honolulu a good market is that the terrain is flat yeah actually McCarney CEO Larry McCarney she actually boasted about that she said quote unlike other cities we have all five factors that make for a successful bike share system good weather, flat terrain, urban density government support and lots of tourists and that was in a Hawaii business magazine interview from this past January so in this past January how this has all of the best factors to be one of the most profitable systems in the world but then she feels like it's unreasonable to give locals a fair deal so you just don't think locals are going to use this you just think that the pricing is too high and that they're not going to use it and this this bike system here that's being introduced this week is in your words the most expensive in the country or in the world it is, there's no other bike share system in the world that's more expensive than this one for an annual usage I don't see how locals are going to be able to afford that because if you think it's $180 a year well I could go to Walmart and buy a brand new bike for $100 which is almost half the price of what they're introducing just to rent a bike so I don't see how that's really affordable especially considering that this isn't an either or I've heard a lot of people trying to compare this to a bus pass for $100 a month but that's really a false argument because we're going to want people to use bike share in conjunction with the bus so say you live out on the west side or up in Mililani and you catch the bus to town but you're still eight blocks away from where you want to be for your job we want people to get off the bus and hop on a bike we want it to be convenient, we want it to be easy but that means that people are going to have to afford both a bus pass and now a bike share pass so it's actually compounding the problem of affordable transportation for locals where I see the benefit of Bikki is which you just pointed out is a connectivity issue and particularly once rail is here and you have a station but you're still six blocks away from work or even further than that this would be an ideal situation to just hop on a bike but that would be for the commuter that is using it full time every day to go to work and I'm not sure to what extent Bikki is addressing the everyday commuter I mean that is certainly a market segment that they're trying to address the other market that they're trying to address is people who use it periodically and that could still be a commuter they just not going to use it all the time but once in a while when they want to run an errand during lunch or something like that it might be a very good product to use yeah no I'm all up for experimentation and pricing and I have no issue with the current pricing system except that I feel that it lacks options that are affordable for comma INA and for low income people so there's two ways of looking at revenue and there's two ways of looking at expense and one is you keep the existing pricing structure exactly where it is but to get to your point do we charge the tourist and keep the pricing structure right where it is or do you take it in the shorts a little bit and you just reduce the pricing for local residents given the fact that they need to be viable and self-sustaining and profitable to keep this program going wouldn't it make more sense to increase the price to tourists? so the prices for tourists are already high that is how all bike share models function the idea typically is that you have monthly and annual passes and the daily, weekly and monthly passes are priced above where you would expect them to be so they make a lot of profit off of those very short periods of rental use whereas the annual pass is set at a very low level so that way it can be subsidized by all of the excess profit generated by the short term usage of tourists predominantly so basically it's a way to use tourist dollars to subsidize the mobility and the environmentally friendly form of transportation for locals to incorporate into their commute but that's not what they've done in this system with this system they're trying to get both lots of money from tourists which is understandable and traditional but also get lots of money from local people to the point where I think that locals will just simply choose not to ride it considering all of the other hassles you have to deal with as a biker in fairness to bike share so I'll draw Lori's comments about what percentage of this program is going to be dedicated to commuters versus what percentage of this program is going to be dedicated to tourism I think in your op-ed you said 70% tourism yeah it's generally that's based off of what people have seen in various bike shares across the mainland it can be anywhere from 70 to 90% of tourists depending on the city and the structure so this is going to be predominantly used for locals for our tourists minimum 70% of all users will be tourists which is an even stronger argument to offer a good deal to the 10 to 30% of local people who will be trying to use this system one thing I do know is that when cities obtain grants be it a CMAC grant or a federal T21 transportation efficiency or an active 21st century that those grants are usually when the grant proposal goes through is to address the commute market and trying to reduce congestion from commuters not more as a promotion for tourism so I guess I'm just wondering how many trips or cars will be reduced off the streets on a program that may be dedicated more to tourism than to the commuter we don't know until this program actually takes effect but it goes to your point a little bit to say well if you want commuters to take advantage of this then the pricing structure needs to be advantageous for those commuters the way that bike share was launched and sold actually began with the EPA and it started with the EPA looking at ways that we could reduce our vehicle miles traveled on the island the EPA actually put forward money to get bike share started but don't quote me on that so it all started about trying to get people to bike more instead of driving cars but as the non-profit was formed and they failed to get any private donations then it became imperative upon the city and the state to put forward money so what was originally envisioned to be a completely self-sustaining NGO non-profit then had to come to the taxpayer and beg for money to keep themselves alive until they could find a private donor what was that thought, we're running out of time we're going to take a commercial break I'm Tim Appichelle, this is Moving Hawaii Forward I'm here with Wyatt Gordon and we'll be right back Aloha and thank you Aloha, I'm Tim Appichelle welcome back to Moving Hawaii Forward I'm here with Wyatt Gordon who recently wrote an article in the Honolulu Civil Beat regarding the Bikie Bike Program which is being sponsored by Bike Share Hawaii and specifically we're talking about the fare structure and specifically to that we're talking about the fare structure of what the cost is to local residents so again welcome back thank you and you had a graph in your op-ed piece and I think we want to take a look at that I want to pull it up that would be excellent and here it is well we won't be able to look at it because that one's offline but you have it right in front of me I want you to go ahead and explain it so basically what you see here are eight of the top cities that have Bike Share systems on the mainland Honolulu, New York City, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Boston Washington D.C. and Minneapolis and there are two bars for each of them and one it explains the cost of the price per year for 30 minute unlimited rides just to be sure we're comparing apples to apples so all cities offer the same one and then the other one the darker bar is the purchasing power in the metropolitan area this comes from Forbes in 2014 so what Forbes found was that Honolulu ranks actually 107th out of 113 American cities in terms of purchasing power so if you look at the graph you see that not only is Bike Share Hawaii going to be the single most expensive system in the country if not the world but it also has the lowest purchasing power based on all of those eight cities so essentially Bike Share Hawaii is asking residents who have the least amount of money to put toward this the highest prices in the world okay again Miss McCartney is not here but I'm going to bring up a point that she raised and that was they did extensive research about the marketplace here in Hawaii and one of the things that they they came up with was that they're trying to get away from the annual pass system because they feel that those annual pass systems are restrictive and they're not as successful in these other marketplaces and so by their research which they came up with they're claiming that maybe it wasn't the best pricing structure for Bike Share Hawaii or the Biki program so annual passes do lose money and they lose money by design because annual passes are designed for the local people who actually live in the city that host the Bike Share because as we've seen over the past week hosting a Bike Share system basically as a whole doesn't always directly translate into benefits for all residents so from where we've seen parking stalls disappearing infringements on sidewalk space possible ADA compliance issues and general frustration from the thousands of oblivious bikers we're going to have added to our streets overnight basically it's a way for the Bike Share system to say hey we know that this isn't necessarily something for all individual residents but for those people who do want to use the system and be part of it we're going to make it affordable and that's a very strategic move on Bike Share systems part because what it's doing is buying them allies they need allies who are local residents you're saying that a discount for local residents is basically a mitigation from some of these things that Biki may present to it's a way to apologize and make up for all of the frustrations that come with having a large Bike Share system because we have a lot of tourists if you just think back to the Bike Share system in Kailua that was 12 bikes it was a nightmare people complained about it to this day and it's going to be like that but with a thousand bikes in urban Honolulu in Waikiki with a lot of one way streets and we're going to be dealing with a lot of tourists from other countries that have very different laws regarding bikes and the flow of traffic it's inevitable that there's going to be an immense amount of frustration and offering an affordable annual pass is a very effective strategy for a Bike Share to get buy-in from local residents that might otherwise simply complain or seek to dismantle the system completely you made your point very well on that if I recall that this program that Bike Share Hawaii was going to place ambassadors out on many of these bike stations I don't know for what period of time or duration but these bike ambassadors are going to be there to kind of help tourists get by the fact that they don't know the rules of the road here in Hawaii and try to educate them about biking courtesy I guess if you will one point you made that I do want to talk about before the show ends and that is the elimination of parking spaces that I'm already hearing about my neighborhood some of these spaces are disappearing so we're going to talk a little bit about that okay so your point is that there should just be a discount because one if you want to encourage the commute market then address the commute market but two is a mitigation for the inconveniences that local residents in the downtown core and Waikiki are going to have to experience three local tax dollars two million worth went into keeping the system alive when no private entity would pay for it before the private company of PBSC Urban Solutions swooped in and installed this new bike share system and four because they really need local allies this could become a political fight and if they don't treat locals right then locals could easily agitate for a mandatory helmet law which would effectively kill the system as just happened in Seattle so if they don't treat local people right then local people are going to look for ways to end bike share in their city so it's really just in their best interest to offer local people a good deal so that locals are also benefiting from this system and support the system's existence so if you had your way or if you had your dreams come true on this what pricing structure would you what would you feel would be a win-win I feel that they must introduce an annual pass the studies from UH Kauai Manoa and from the Department of Planning and Permitting suggest $75 for that annual pass maybe that's negotiable maybe that's where we come to a compromise and set something higher there are a couple cities on the mainland that have raised their annual pass prices but only to $85 or $99 not to $180 you said that an annual pass is a losing proposition it's always going to be a losing proposition so if I'm trying to make a program viable and viable for the future why would I implement a pass structure or a pricing structure that is going to lose money for the for our operation it's exactly the same way that they offer affordable passes to low income residents for example, Boston, New York City the Bay and Chicago $75 annual passes to people who are below the poverty line and in Washington DC they give it out for free that's not to make money but a bike share system's sole purpose isn't to make money this is a non-profit that's supposed to have a heart and it's supposed to care about the community it took all of this money $2 million from the public so it should care about the public and yes, they'll lose money on adding a $75 annual pass adding $5 low income pass options but that's what it means to be a part of this place to be a part of the community and to care for those around you you're not just out to make money you have to actually try and do something beneficial and that's why they got all the grants from the city and the state to make an impact on residents' lives and to give real benefits well they are going to make money I mean the projection for the first year is $1.2 million second year it's $2.6 million so that revenue is going to go towards expanding and investing the system as Laurie McCarney continually repeats but it also has to go back paying for the loan for the bikes that were purchased with PBSC's money the private company and a portion of that revenue is going to go to PBSC Urban Solutions or else why would they spend so much money as a private company to come in with the system for our non-profit okay the point is well made I want to talk about the issue that I hear residents talking about is the elimination of some parking spaces and I'm going to run through the math very quickly but there's a thousand bikes and each station holds 15 bikes so if you take a thousand you divide it by 15 bikes you come up with about 67 stations and that's just installed 87 because there are going to be more stalls than there are bikes so when you show up to any given station there should be extra stalls available for you to dock well I didn't do the math on 87 there are 87 I saw 87 in the news this morning about a third of all stations will or have already removed parking stalls so based on 67 you take a third of that and you're basically looking at about 44 if you take 82 times that by 2 because two parking stalls are being removed you've got about 44 46 stalls removed from these new stations is that a lot? if you take the number 87 roughly 90 we divide by 3 so we have 30 stations that are using parking multiply it by 2 so we actually have 60 parking stalls that have disappeared for bike share I personally know and understand the outrage it's extremely hard between all of the abandoned vehicles and commercial vehicles that park in our area I understand the frustration that's part of why I choose to bike for a lot of my transportation but that doesn't take away from the fact that they're taking away what were publicly available stalls and turning them into more of commercial enterprises because if these private if these bike share system isn't priced for locals to use then locals have essentially lost their parking stalls and gained a tourist amenity in their place so that's not really a good deal for local people yeah I think if there's a criticism that might come out a little bit louder it won't necessarily be over your pricing structure as you've op-ed on I think it's going to be the loss of parking spaces because people notice that right away they already know how tight these neighborhoods are I think that's where in fact on Capulani Park there's a lot of discussion about public lands the trust but the city has the right of ways there they have right of ways so it's up to them to increase parking charges if they wish or remove parking if they wish so I don't know if the public land argument works or wins the day I did see the attorney general investigating that because the Capulani trust explicitly states that there can't be any commercial enterprises and one interpretation is that bike share is based on these profit numbers so it's going to be investigated by the state attorney general I'm going to follow up with the city representative he's a public information officer about that point and I just didn't have a chance to do it before the show but yeah that needs to be kind of looked at and hopefully I'm going to tell you where I'm coming from on this I hope this program succeeds I do too I spent 18 years of my life trying to reduce traffic but at the same time I would like to see the commuter market of this program and it's great that tourists take advantage of it I just don't know how many trips or how many cars we're taking off the road from tourists and my hope is that more residents local residents take advantage of the program and we get rid of more cars so that we have less congestion I really want the system to succeed I spent nine months volunteering for them completely unpaid as an intern working on issues of community engagement and outreach this is on the community what benefit is this system going to bring to the community and the way I see it priced now I don't see local people having the opportunity to use this and enjoy any of those benefits to mobility or public health so we really just spent these two million dollars for a tourist bike system okay well I'm glad you brought your points up I may ask Lori McCarney to come back again I'd love to hear your responses thank you for taking your time to join us I'm Tim Appichella, this is Moving Hawaii Forward we'll see you in a couple weeks Aloha


Hello everybody, I'm going to be talking today about political philosophy of Hans Hoppe. As you will remember from my last lecture, I don't speak very loudly, so in case you're not hearing what I'm saying, please put up your hand and let me know. I hope people heard that because otherwise we're going to have a problem. This is the first time I've lectured on Hans Hoppe. I've spoken very briefly about him at another conference and I've written reviews of a number of his books, but I've never given a lecture on him before. I hope it doesn't go too badly because I wouldn't want to be physically removed from the Mises Institute.  I've been friends with Hans for around 35 years, so I'm very glad to be able to talk about him. Hans was born in West Germany and he did his graduate work at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. This university was founded in the Weimar Republic and it's really the progressive university, as again say the older institutions, it was explicitly founded as a more progressive institution that identified with the Weimar Republic whereas in the 1920s in many of the older German universities, the large parts of the faculty were unsympathetic to the Weimar Republic and hoped that it would be overthrown. In fact, Hans did his doctoral work with Jürgen Habermas, who's a leading member of the Frankfurt School. Some of you may have heard of them. Frankfurt School was founded, the Institute for Social Research, given its formal name, was founded in the 1920s and after a couple of initial directions, the direction became Max Horkeimer, who was a very influential person who led the school and Theodor Adorno, a well-known philosopher, was associated with him. Habermas, who was Hans's teacher, studied under both of them. So we have a bit of a paradox in that Hans Hoppe, who's a very strong libertarian, started out as a student of a Marxist. And I should say just as a digression, there is a bit of a connection between the Institute of Social Research and Ludwig von Mises, surprising as it may seem, one of the early directors of the Institute for Social Research was Carl Grunberg, who had earlier been a professor at the University of Vienna. Mises, as an undergraduate, was a student in Grunberg's seminar and his first academic publication, which was on relations between lords and peasants in Galicia, came up as a product of Grunberg's seminar and was published in 1902. So that is one connection of Mises with that institution. But to one point that when Hans studied with Habermas, although Habermas was a Marxist, Hans's, I think, politics at that time were quite moderate, because of a conventional social democrat. And what he got from Habermas, which he retained throughout his career, was a criticism of positivism. The Frankfurt School was very critical of the logical positivists in Vienna Circle, because particularly their assimilation of the social sciences to physics and the natural sciences, and also their claim that value judgments were purely subjective, that this the Frankfurt School repudiated and Hans's kept those attitudes throughout his career. And in fact, Hans's earliest publications when he studied with Habermas were in the field of philosophy of science. But while he was studying, he became very interested in the free market ideas. And he read Le Grun Mises and Murray Rothbard, and he became converted to their point of view. In fact, he was so impressed with Rothbard that he came to the United States to study with Murray Rothbard. And Rothbard thought very highly of him. I remember very well when Murray told me how excited he was that someone had come over from Germany, a very promising academic and who was sitting in on his classes and he was delighted that Hans was interested in his thought. And then in 1986, when Rothbard moved to the UNLV University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Hans Hoppe followed soon thereafter that Murray really got him the job. And they established really at the time the most important center for the study of Austrian economics that there were, both of them were there and they had classes and seminars for a number of years until then after Murray's untimely death in 1990, beginning in 1995, Hans continued as a professor for a few more years at the UNLV and then he retired and he since moved to Turkey where he and his wife live and he's continued writing and he's established. He has an organization called the Property and Freedom Society which holds annual conferences. Now, I would say Hans Hoppe is the leading successor to Murray Rothbard in political philosophy and he's made major contributions in a number of areas. And what I'm going to do in this talk is discuss three of these areas, argumentation ethics, the criticism of democracy and the theory of social evolution. And one point I like to make before attempting to do this is that, and this is one point I made at the, when I was talking about during the Rothbard graduate seminar when I was talking about Mises, when we're dealing with any significant thinker, sometimes when we read him will be inclined to criticize or think, oh, well, this doesn't sound right or I don't agree with this. But I think it's important before we criticize a significant thinker to first understand what the person is saying. So what I'm going to be doing or trying to do in what follows is to give an exposition of what Hans is saying rather than try to come between Hans and you and try to give a critical point. And I'm just going to be explaining as best I can what his views are. Now, one of the, I think one of the most valuable areas in which Hans has made a contribution is what he says is the starting point of political philosophy. He says that conflicts between people arise because of scarcity. Imagine that all goods that people wanted were super abundant, everyone could have as much of any good as he wanted. Then there wouldn't be any occasions for conflicts people could just have what they wanted wouldn't no one else would be disturbed by that. But we of course live in a world of scarcity and people want to use the same resource. So in order to resolve conflicts about the use of resources, we need rules that assign control of each resource to one person. So it doesn't have to be that say if you take all the resources that now exist, we don't have to have a rule that assigns each resource to each person. We could have rules for say there are some resources that are present, not owned by anybody, but we would have rules on how those resources can be appropriated. So this is a way to resolve. So again, Hans's view is we start off because we start political philosophy starts from conflict over resources, goods and services, and we need to specify how these goods and services are owned so that we can resolve conflicts. Now, to fully to understand Hans's thought here, we have to add another premise which here, Hans follows Murray Rothbard as he so frequently did that. According to Murray Rothbard, followed by Hans Hoppe, all rights are property rights. For example, supposing say we have a conflict over free speech for Rothbard, the way to solve that conflict would be say whose property is it. If it's once you settle that, then that person would have the right to determine what the rules for proper speech appropriate speech in his property are so all rights are property rights. So if we add that all rights are property rights to the point that we have dispute disputes over resources to be settled by assigning the property rights to people. Then we have in principle way of solving all conflicts in society since all rights are property rights, and we've specified the property rights, though that enables us to resolve all disputes. So now we have to get some way of assigning the property rights, how is that to be done. Here we get to perhaps the most famous of Hans's contributions, argumentation ethics, and here Hans developed argumentation ethics from the work of his teacher, Juergen Habermas, and another philosopher, Carl Otto Appel, actually he was more influenced by Appel. Appel wasn't very interested in politics, I think he had was a social democrat, but he was more of a pure philosopher. Hans has an extremely high opinion of Appel, and he cites him in various of his works. So what the way argumentation ethics proceeds is that if you make a claim to truth, if I say something is true, and say someone questions that and says, well, what is the basis for that, that the claim that I've made that something is true has to be supported by argument, any truth claim has to be supported by argument, and Hans says this can't be denied if someone says no, it doesn't have to be supported by argument. Hans says no, that's wrong. Hans says you can't argue that you can't argue. Well, I'm not going to argue about it then. So what the Habermas and Appel said and followed by Hans Hoppe is, so we then have to say in order to engage in argument, we then have to ask what are the conditions under which we can engage in argument, this is something both Habermas and Appel asked. They say what are the conditions for rational discussion if we have people trying to establish the truth? What are the conditions for rational discussion? And on that basis, I'm trying to find out what the conditions are for rational discussion, then they get rights from that. So you can see one criticism sometimes people make of argumentation ethics we can see isn't right. Some people will say, well, supposing we establish, say that certain conditions are needed for rational discussion, that would just show people have those rights during the rational discussion, but that doesn't show they have rights outside that process of discussion. But that isn't a good criticism because remember the way the argument goes is that the conditions for rational discussion establish what the rights people have are it isn't that the rights that you you're trying to figure out what you're limiting the rights people have to actual instances of rational discussion it's trying to figure out what these rights are required for rational discussion is gives you the rights that people have if the theory is correct. So the innovation Hans has in argumentation ethics that Habermas and Appel didn't have is that he answers the question of what rights people have in a different way from Habermas and Appel. So the key step is that Hans says, in order to argue, you must own yourself, taking that in the libertarian way each person is a self owner. And to deny this is what he calls a performative or pragmatic contradiction. In order to understand what this means I want to say a bit about what we mean by a performative contradiction. Now, there are some. Sometimes we have statements that are logically contradictory say someone says, I'm both lecturing in this room. And it's not the case that I'm lecturing in this room that would be a logical contradiction, but we can have other sorts of besides logical contradictions. There are other sorts of difficulties that we can have it with various assertions or propositions or judgments. One is that the one that Hans is concerned with here is what this something that if I say something my very saying that shows that the argument is false. Suppose I say I've never I suppose I say in English, I've never in my life uttered an English sentence. My saying that would show I, I wouldn't be able to make say that I've never uttered an English sentence. I would my saying that I'm saying that in English, I wouldn't be able to say that in English, without speaking an English sentence. So my very saying that shows that the statement is false. So this is a very good way of showing that something is wrong to show that it's it falls victim to this sort of pragmatic contradiction. Now there are many interesting issues one could talk about on the scope and limits of this kind of performative contradiction, but we can it's we can see examples of similar type. It's supposed somebody said, I know that no one knows anything. Well, if it's true that no one knows anything then the person doesn't know that he's saying, I know that no one knows anything is generate trouble to say the least. So, Hans says that suppose someone said, I don't own myself. Someone denies that each person owns himself so I don't own myself. So he could only say that if he did own himself. So this is an example of a performative contradiction. And Hans says this shows that people do own themselves. But he says this is continuing his innovation in the what in the argumentation ethics of Habermas and Apple. He says owning yourself isn't enough to engage in argument. You also have to own physical resources, because you wouldn't be able to argue if you didn't just were a kind of a body with no place to stand you have to have physical resources. So then this raises the question, how are these resources to be acquired. And he says that only a first user rule can avoid conflict. That's say the first one to use a resources resource acquires it because if say you had another rule say say I acquired something I say I take an apple from a tree. So if that doesn't give me ownership someone else could come along and say no, I want that apple and then there'd be a conflict, there'd be a fight about it which I'd be likely to lose. But so only a first users rule can avert conflict and Hans also has a further argument for this first user rule. He says that there. If we want a rule of property acquisition, then we have there only two way to possibilities. One is this first user rule or that we appropriate something by just the first one to use it or the other alternative is that you could own something just by claiming it you could just say I own this this is my without using it but he says well if we had that rule, then you could acquire people just by claiming to own them and this wouldn't would be in conflict with the with the self ownership principle, which remember is one that generates a pragmatic contradiction if it's denied so he says that only this first user rule is the one that will be acceptable and will avoid conflict and will be we can be shown to be a consequence of the self ownership principle and one point Hans makes in his consideration of ethics. And this would reply to an object and suppose you say well maybe this establishes that each person owns himself but what about other people. Maybe I own myself but why do I have to recognize that. You own yourself. What one answer would be remember we're trying to engage in figure out what are the conditions for rational discussion and we wouldn't be able to have a rational discussion. Unless each person owned himself so in Hans's view and here he's quite in accord with standard views and ethics ethical principles have to be universal. So now I want to go on to the second theme of that I want to talk about which is Hans is criticism of democracy. Now it seems at least to many people that democracy is obviously a good thing in people who have this view would say well isn't it better that people rule themselves rather than be subjects in a dictatorship. Say we wouldn't like to live in countries where there is this say people don't have the right to vote and there's a single ruler who is in charge of everything. This would seem at least very undesirable state of affairs. And even if we don't have a dictatorship isn't it better to decide conflicts by accepting who wins in a fairer election. Of course we see in the recent presidential election what's a fairer election can be a matter of quite a bit of dispute. And there are criticisms what could make from within the perspective of democracy of rule by majority for say but sort raised by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock that for example there are various ways of consider what is a majority is it a straight majority or do you require more than a majority or their various voting rules that will generate different results. So it's not clear what rule by majority really means but Hans's objection to democracy is a deeper one than the criticism say from the public public choice going Hans rejects these pro democracy arguments. He does this in a book with the title democracy that God that failed at this book comes from a famous collection of essays that was published in 1949 edited by the British socialist RHS Crossman. And in this collection there were a number of writers who were either former members of the Communist Party or sympathizers some of them were I think there was Arthur Kessler it was one. Louis Fisher was a Steven Spender Andre Gide and Ignacio Silone were contributors to this and they it was a very well known book during the Cold War so what Hans is entitling his book democracy the God that failed is suggesting that just as we recognize today that communism was a false God even though at the time in the 1930s and 40s there were many people in the West who took it quite seriously Hans is suggesting that democracy is a God false God just like communism. Now, his fundamental objection to democracy is one that we can see already from what has gone before that democracy is the objection is that democracy ignores rights in what sense does it do that. Well, if people have rights in the way Hans hop is argued for remember he said all people have property rights in each person has property right owns himself and then can acquire resources all rights or property rights and then we have rules for how resources can be acquired. So there's no further room for disputes we have the way to resolve disputes so anyone who interferes with your property rights is guilty of aggression, including majority voters. So, even if the majority and say we stipulate that there's been a free election, there's no disputes about the, how the votes are to be counted. Say majority votes that there's going should be taxes on wealthy people. That's still aggression because it's interfering with people's rights. So the majority can't tell you how to use your property. So that's his basic criticism of democracy. Now he goes further that this point I've made it can be the anti democracy argument that democracy interferes with your rights can be used to support anarchism libertarian anarchism anarcho capitalism. His argument here is that one right that stems from self ownership is your right to self defense. And he says that supposing someone as some libertarians do such as Robert Nozick in his famous book Anarchy State in Utopia 1974 are used for a minimal state, which is very minimal. It's just supposed to protect rights and it doesn't have the power of taxation. But Han says well if people surrender their rights to the to the state, even a very limited state, then there's really no stopping at the right to defend themselves to the minimal state say they've surrendered all their weapons to the state. Then there's really no stopping the state. The state can really do anything. So if once you've given up your rights, your arms to the state, then the state can just do whatever it wants. So the notion of a minimal state in which people surrender their rights to the to defend themselves to the state is one that's inherently unstable. Now you can see here a major difference between Hans Hoppe and Ludwig von Mises. Hans, as I mentioned was greatly influenced by Mises, but here there's an important distinction. Mises had a very different view of democracy from Hans Hoppe. And according to Mises, the advantage, one of the main advantages of a free market is that it's more democratic than political democracy. Say in a political democracy, you're voting for a party, a particular party or person, and then that person will have a certain platform or even if the one you voted for wins, he's probably not going to put into effect all the policies you want. And then the losers really don't get what they want at all. But in the free market, according to Mises, the consumers are really running things. And what he calls the producers, the the mandatory of the, I mean, the producers of the mandatory of the consumers, the consumers are really in control as he often says, capitalism is mass production for the masses. So according to Mises, the property owners, at least the owners, the means of production really are just not the real owner is at least that it's really the consumers are in control. So you can see, it's a very different view of democracy from Hans Hoppe's radical rejection of the whole idea. Now, Hans makes a very well, an argument that's attracted a great deal of attention is that he says, Democratic politicians need to get majority support to gain power and stay in office. So what counts for them is what will get people to support them now. And they'll make promises that can't be fulfilled because the long run doesn't matter to them. Once people find out that by time people find out that not all the promises can be fulfilled. They're probably they they'll be out of office anyway so it really doesn't matter what counts is that they just want to get elected now. And by contrast, monarchies tend to adopt a long run perspective. The king, if a king expects his family will be around for a long time so he'll try to run his state in an economically efficient way. So, I've given so far the discussion of argumentation ethics and Hans's Christmas of democracy. And he uses the two parts of his views that I've discussed so far to develop a theory of social evolution, especially social evolution is applied to European history. So in doing this he's engaging in a, I think a very significant project one could call conjectural history. That's to say, he's using social theory to account, kind of offer a rational reconstruction of history. And we could give an example of this that you will have heard about in various lectures earlier is the way that the origin of money was explained by Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises, how money originates from a commodity that has non monetary uses. So what Menger and Mises were doing is on the basis of theory, they were showing how one could rationally account for the origin of money. So what Hans is doing is trying to come up with a rational reconstruction of history. Now, the usual account of European history is emphasized as progress. History started say in a kind of primitive times with a war of all against all people to say, you can imagine primitive tribes were fighting with each other. But absolute rule put an end to this. And then, eventually, this was replaced by democracy. So in the usual view, which I think even today most historians hold, there's been a progress throughout European history from the kind of a struggle, which was continued of conflicting forces continued under feudalism, then was replaced by absolutism and then we get democracy after that. So, Hans rejects this entire myth, what he calls a myth of progress. He acknowledges though that there has been progress and there has been an economic take off after the Industrial Revolution, but he rejects this notion of historical progress. So, what his contention is, he denies that history started off as a war of all against all. He says, this is a falsehood defended by pro state intellectuals. And instead, in, say, initial state, people wouldn't naturally accept the self ownership and first appropriator accounts of rights that the these aren't made up theories. These ones that say people such as Hans Hopper, Murray Rothbard have come up with these are actually the rules that people would in practice adopt. So in settling disputes on these principles, people would tend to gravitate to natural leaders or aristocrats and feudalism developed from this. But over time, one aristocrat would tend to become stronger than others and become the king, but the king's power was strictly limited by other nobles. But as the feudalism developed and came to an end, the king undermined the other nobles by allying with the people and promised them relief from their feudal duties if the people would support him. And in doing this, he was helped by court intellectuals, which phrase Hans takes over from Murray Rothbard and also Harry on the Barnes. And the court intellectuals wanted to gain power and influence, so they defended absolute monarchy by the myth of the need for a monarchy to rescue people from the war of all against all. But after the absolute monarchy developed, the court intellectuals thought they could gain even more power by abandoning the monarch and appealing to the people through pro-democracy arguments. And this is what happened during the French Revolution. I think here Hans is relying on accounts of the influence of the intellectuals, as we find in the book by Augustine Coshan on the societies of thought before the French Revolution or the books by the British historian Nesta Webster. So I've covered only a few main themes in Hans Hoppe's political philosophy, but I hope I've shown how central his account of rights is in his thinking. So thank you.