Hans-Hermann Hoppe: "Put Your Hope In Radical Decentralization"



All major political parties in Western Europe, regardless of their different names and party programs, are nowadays committed to the same fundamental idea of democratic socialism. They use democratic elections to legitimize the taxing of productive people for the benefit of unproductive people. They tax people, who have earned their income and accumulated their wealth by producing goods or services purchased voluntarily by consumers (and of course especially the “rich” among those), and they then re-distribute the confiscated loot to themselves, i.e., the democratic State that they control or hope to control, and their various political friends, supporters, and potential voters.



Looking at the EU, the picture becomes even worse. The EU is the first step on the way toward the creation of a European Super-State, and ultimately of a one-world government, dominated by the USA and its central bank, the FED. From its very beginnings, and despite all high-sounding political proclamations to the contrary, the EU was never about free trade and free competition. For that, you don’t need tens of thousands of pages of rules and regulations! Rather, the central purpose of the EU, supported all-along by the USA, was always the weakening in particular of Germany as Europe’s economic powerhouse. To facilitate this, Germany was sent on a seemingly never-ending “guilt trip” and thus pressured to transfer increasingly larger parts of its already limited (vis-à-vis the USA) sovereignty to the EU in Brussels. 


The EU, then, is characterized by three main features:
  • First: The harmonization of the tax and regulation structure across all member states, so as to reduce economic competition and especially tax-competition between different countries and make all countries equally uncompetitive.

  • Second: On top of the economic and moral perversity within each country of punishing the productive and subsidizing the unproductive, another layer of international income- and wealth-redistribution is added: of punishing economically better performing countries like Germany and the countries of northern Europe and rewarding economically worse performing countries (mostly of southern Europe) and thus successively rendering the economic performance of all countries equally worse.

  • And third, of increasing importance especially during the last decade: In order to overcome the rising resistance, in many countries, against the steadily increasing transfer of national sovereignty to Brussels, the EU is on a crusade to erode, and ultimately destroy, all national identities and all social and cultural cohesion. The idea of a nation and of different national and regional identities is ridiculed, and multiculturalism is hailed instead as an unquestionable “good.” As well, in promoting the award of legal privileges and of “special protection” to everyone, except white, heterosexual men, and especially married family men (who are portrayed as historic “oppressors” owing compensation to everyone else as their historic “victims”) — euphemistically called “anti-discrimination” or “affirmative action” policy — the natural social order is systematically undermined. Normality is punished, and abnormity and deviance is rewarded.

In fact, the EU elites are typically political has-beens, with the same mentality as their domestic counterparts, on the lookout for the super-lavish salaries, benefits, and pensions doled out by the EU.


For one, instead of swallowing the high-sounding blabber of politicians about “freedom,” “prosperity,” “social justice,” etc., people must learn to recognize the EU for what it really is: a gang of power-lusty crooks empowering and enriching themselves at other, productive people’s expense.

In conclusion, then: Don’t put your trust in democracy, but neither should you trust in a dictatorship. Rather, put your hope into radical political decentralization, not just in India and China, but everywhere.







On to Moscow, where “war fever” is at fever pitch. Here, there is no softening of language; NATO and the U.S. are the enemy and Russia must be ready for attack.
The government website Sputnik News blares the headline: “New Russian Bomber to Be Able to Launch Nuclear Attacks From Outer Space,” a story later found to be false.
RT television’s English-language website breathlessly reports on “Killer airwaves: Russia starts trial of electromagnetic warfare system” that would “guarantee complete neutralization of all enemy electronics.”
But it’s not just sensationalist media that are fanning the flames.
Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev complains that NATO’s rhetoric at its summit in Warsaw “simply howls about the effort to almost announce war against Russia.”
Russia’s envoy to NATO, Alexander Grushko, says that NATO’s “confrontational policy” is being built on a “mythical threat” from Russia. The alliance’s announcement that it is locating four new battalions on permanent rotation in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland is proof, he says, that those countries “are being transformed into a bridgehead for military/political pressure on Russia.”
Russia, he says, must respond to a “new security situation.”
“This is absolutely not our choice but, of course, from outside, everything necessary will be done to reliably ensure the defense capability of the country.”
“Not our choice” is now the bumper sticker of Russia’s foreign policy, a modern take on the Soviet Union’s “mir i druzhba” (мир и дружба) (“peace and friendship”) claim that it would never want war.

At her Wednesday briefings, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, lambastes the “demonization” of Russia. NATO, she claims, exists in a kind of “military and political looking-glass world,” reacting to a “non-existent ‘threat from the East.’”
“Are there specific examples of how Russia is undermining peace and order in Europe?” she asks. “What lies behind these words? Sweden claims that we are threatening them. The U.K. says we are a threat. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says we are undermining peace and order. What are the specific examples? Show them to us--and we will work on them.”
In an interview widely quoted in the Russian media, a foreign affairs expert and a member of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Foreign Policy and Defense Council, Sergei Karaganov, told the German magazine Der Spiegel that Western propaganda against Russia “is reminiscent of the period preceding a new war.”
“The help offered by NATO is not symbolic help for the Baltic states,” he said. “It is a provocation. If NATO initiates an encroachment--against a nuclear power like ourselves--it will be punished.”
President Vladimir Putin himself plays both sides against the middle, warning the West that Russia will have to “strengthen the potential of its strategic nuclear forces” in order to counter the United States’ missile shield, while at the same time insisting it’s the West, not Russia, that’s destroying the balance that kept the world from nuclear conflict during the Cold War.

During the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June, he tells the heads of international news agencies that the U.S. is lying when it claims its missile defense system will not threaten Russia:

“We know what’s going to happen, and they know that we know,” he told the group. “They’re just ‘hanging noodles on your ears’ (‘pulling the wool over your eyes,’) as we say, and you, in turn, broadcast it to your populations. People don’t feel the fear--that’s what worries me. How can’t we understand that the world is being pulled into a completely new dimension--that’s the problem. They pretend that nothing is going on. I don't know how to get through to you anymore!”

The world, right now, is a very unstable place, for everyone, including Vladimir Putin.