Retired Professor of Economics at the University of Nevada, Hans-Hermann Hoppe is an Austrian economist at the Mises Institute and a libertarian political philosopher. He founded the Property and Freedom Society in 2005 as a discussion forum for radical libertarianism, and fuses Austrian economics and natural-rights libertarianism in defence of anarcho-capitalist politics. His most famous work, Democracy: the God that Failed (2001) takes as its thesis that, if a state must exist at all, monarchy is preferable to democracy, with the transition from the former being represented as "civilizational decline." In The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (1993), Hoppe presents the novel 'argument-from-argument' for self-ownership and property, and argues that exploitation - the subject of his address to the society - is a pervasive feature of the state, not of capitalism and private property.