Hans-Hermann Hoppe Quotes

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff

Huge inequality gaps in a democratic society will tend to erode the respect for and security of doctrines of private property. The large majority must either own property or have reasonable prospects of attaining property if they are to support and maintain private property laws and traditions.

If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be the private ownership of the means of production as a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being. All civilizations have up to now been based on private property. Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art, and literature. There is no experience to show that any other social system could provide mankind with any of the achievements of civilization.

In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned.

An argument fatal to the communist theory, is suggested by the fact, that a desire for property is one of the elements of our nature.

Economics is sometimes associated with the study and defense of selfishness and material inequality, but it has an egalitarian and civil libertarian core that should be celebrated.

The reason socialism has failed around the world every time it's been tried is because people in socialist countries have looked at the United States and have said if they can have it that good, we can. It's a failed, flawed ideology, but if you ask socialists why it's always failed, it's because the United States has stood in the way.

I want to destroy ownership in order that possession and enjoyment may be raised to the highest point in every section of the community.

I think anytime that you go to the extreme of any mode of economics, be it capitalism or communism, you have these feedback mechanisms that make the system turn in on itself.

I believe that all forms of socialism have been proven over time to result in a loss of both economic and civil liberties, with increasing poverty.

That sort of fundamentalism which treats possession of private property not as a desirable economic and personal asset but as a condition of liberty is a form of primitive religion.

Don't talk to me about socialism. What we have, we hold.

Support of private ownership does not mean that anyone has the right to unlimited accumulation of wealth

The insecurity of property in Ireland, whether real or supposed … prevents the English or Scotch capitalist from transmitting materials to be manufactured in Ireland.

They have got as far as they can go, because they own their land in common .... there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization. Till this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens ... they will not make much more progress.

In order to have economic democracy you have to have equal access to property.

If the land was divided among all the inhabitants of a country, so that each of them possessed precisely the quantity necessary for his support, and nothing more; it is evident that all of them being equal, no one would work for another. Neither would any of them possess wherewith to pay another for his labor, for each person having only such a quantity of land as was necessary to produce a subsistence, would consume all he should gather, and would not have anything to give in exchange for the labor of others.

I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where the profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.

America is a young country, with small inequalities of property, and without manufactures. Few people are here dependent on the rich, for every man has an opportunity of becoming rich himself…the people of New England enjoy an equality of condition unknown in any other part of the world.

The capitalist process shapes things and souls for socialism.

If a Tory does not believe that private property is one of the main bulwarks of individual freedom, then he had better become a socialist and have done with it.

When private property ceases to make free men, its only spiritual justification goes. Democracy and the widespread distribution of private property go together.

The proprietor [land owner], producing neither by his own labor nor by his implement, and receiving products in exchange for nothing, is either a parasite or a thief.

The sanctity of private property is so fundamental a part of the American settlement that the country's conservatives look with suspicion on any policy that seems to prevent people from doing what they will with what is theirs.