“…[J]ust because the state is “privately” owned by a single individual does not mean that the owner particularly “cares” about their subjects or is necessarily going to treat them well.”

Certainly, if you mean necessarily in the strong logical sense, I’d agree. But, Julian is undoubtedly correct, in the strong logical sense, that the owner has the incentive to treat them better than if the slave couldn’t be a means to the owner’s end.

Now let me back up. I don’t think that another human being could ever be a means to another human’s end. I think the only meaningful way we can talk about humans-as-means is when considering the human experience as a means towards objective flourishing — as opposed to, say, the canine experience as a means towards objective flouring. But, I still think your last point is an overstatement.

It’s a quite common attitude. My adopted stepfather manages to enjoy a significant quality of alcohol while prominently advocating for more restrictions on bars. Those other people can’t handle it, you see, while if one has a nice salary one can make any ‘vice’ appear decorous.

In Thailand, desperately poor people will work their lives to buy bits of gold to press into enormous statues of the Buddha. If they used the gold to decorate themselves instead they would undoubtedly be dismissed as selfish and irresponsible. Behold altruism, in all its sweetness and gentility!

Kinsella’s right that Hoppe’s not precisely the crude bigot he comes across as in an American context, just as Rand wasn’t precisely the crude apologist for established capitalism which she comes across as in an American context.. Hoppe, I see, is a European. His opposition to democracy is at heart a naturalisation of pre-1914 European social heirarchies; his argument against ‘democracy’ takes advantage of the ambiguity inherent in a word which retains a different sense and reference in different cultural and class discourses.

The practical difference is that one can hold social double standards in good rather than bad conscience; American hard rightists are almost always spiritually sick; European hard rightists are often more spiritually healthy but conceal an infinite capacity for selective callousness.

I prefer not to try to make logical sense of something which doesn’t make logical sense. Don’t bother to examine a folly. What it accomplishes is obvious.

Libertarianism has done something *seriously* wrong to have become usable by apologists for monarchy, aristocracy, feudalism, or slavery.

> S.O.: And classical Athens was something of a *democracy*, no?

‘Public slavery’ is not a term for ‘democracry’. As I said at the outset, Roderick has confused two arguments of Hoppe’s. One compares monarchy and democracy, the other compares private slavery and public slavery. They’re similar in that both point out that a monarch and a private slave-owner also own the capitalized value of respectively the country and the slave. To rebut this point you would have to say that capitalized value doesn’t matter, or that it has actually the reverse implications. Ask: if I had no-consequences complete ownership over you for just today, would I be more or less likely to end the day by rendering you into hamburger, than I would I also owned you for tomorrow, for the rest of the week, for the rest of your life? Or: if you were to get evicted from your house today, would you be more or less likely to repaint the main bedroom than if you expected to own it for another ten years?

But for slaves retained for hard labor, such as cash crop agriculture? Well, in every case, private or “public” (which really just ends up being de facto private, necessarily), the brutal methods rather more contemptuous of human life always dominated.