I want to like Hoppe but I can’t, can you help me out
I want to like Hoppe, but covenants are very sketchy to me. Here are some criticisms I saw someone post once that I agree with. I’d appreciate someone more knowledgeable than me to tell me where I’ve gone wrong.
– Wealthier individuals or groups could dominate weaker parties by imposing terms that undermine true voluntarism.
– The threat of exclusion or economic isolation could compel individuals to conform to covenant rules, even if they disagree with them. This is a sort of soft coercion.
– Over time, powerful covenants could begin to concentrate and form cartels, replicating state-like structures they claim to oppose.
– The ability of covenants to restrict behaviors or ideas they dislike, such as banning dissent, could be contradictory to classical liberal principles of individual freedom. Without iterative improvements by virtue of dissent, these covenants could be left behind and fail to innovate as efficiently as a freer broader society: They are less efficient than truly free society.
– Organizing complex societies through purely voluntary agreements would be impractical, especially in large or diverse populations. I imagine many people in an already highly libertarian-minded society would be very hesitant to give up their unadulterated free speech for example, not to mention other rights they previously had.
– Hoppe often emphasizes that these covenants would reflect the preferences of culturally homogenous communities, but real-world societies are diverse, making consensus difficult to achieve.
– These covenants also get exponentially more infeasible as more rules are imposed on more people, as an already counter-economically minded population would likely begin to resent them if they impeded their ability to speak, transact, or otherwise act freely, and begin to secretly break the more restrictive rules. This is accelerated if the community is intrinsically valuable, as people won’t simply come to be with others who think similarly, but come for the rewards produced by that community. In other words, if your community is better than broader than any other society in any way other than that they have “better opinions”, it becomes more and more likely that people will join disingenuously and break the rules for their own benefit as long as they aren’t violating the NAP.
submitted by /u/Creepy-Rest-9068
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