More Hoppe Bashing

Hans-Hermann Hoppe has an incredible, awe-inspiring faith in the power of omnipotent government:

What will a king's typical immigration and emigration policy be? Because he owns the entire country's capital value, he will, assuming no more than his self-interest, tend to choose migration policies that preserve or enhance rather than diminish the value of his kingdom.

As far as emigration is concerned, a king will want to prevent the emigration of productive subjects, in particular of his best and most productive subjects, because losing them would lower the value of the kingdom. [...]

On the other hand, as far as immigration policy is concerned, a king would want to keep the mob, as well as all people of inferior productive capabilities, out. People of the latter category would only be admitted temporarily, if at all, as seasonal workers without citizenship, and they would be barred from permanent property ownership.[...]

In brief, while through his immigration policies a king might not entirely avoid all cases of forced exclusion or forced integration, such policies would by and large do the same as what private property owners would do, if they could decide who to admit and who to exclude. That is, the king would be highly selective and very much concerned about improving the quality of the resident human capital so as to drive property values up, not down.

How, exactly, is a king supposed to know who is going to drive his values up and who will drive them down? In one of the places I snipped, Hoppe describes the British Crown's effort to keep skilled workmen from leaving Great Britain during the early Industrial Revolution, in an effort to keep that revolution from spreading.

Tell me, has the widespread industrialization of the world enhanced or reduced British prosperity?

Hoppe is of course the famous "libertarian" advocate of the superiority of authoritarian rule over democracy. Hoppe calls it monarchy, but let's call a spade a spade. Apparently, by some mystical alchemy I cannot fathom, empowering one fallible, short-sighted human being with coercive power to effect whatever plans he hatches leads to better results than letting a large group of fallible, short-sighted human beings squabble over how to use that power. Somehow, mysteriously, Hoppe believes that what works for markets is bad for governance; that in government, the fewer voices heard, the better.

We libertarians need to mercilessly drive people like Hoppe from our movement. Sure, he comes off as a marginally erudite individual, but his beliefs are plainly ridiculous. Why he so often finds fora around the libertarian web is a mystery to me.