Murray Rothbard

Murray Rothbard
Born	(1926-03-02)March 2, 1926 Bronx, New York, U.S.
Died	January 7, 1995(1995-01-07) (aged 68) New York City, New York, U.S.
Nationality	American
Academic career
Institution	Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
School or tradition	Austrian School
Alma mater	Columbia University
Influences	John Locke, Ludwig von Mises, Lysander Spooner, Harry Elmer Barnes, Pat Buchanan
Contributions	Anarcho-capitalism, paleolibertarianism, and historical revisionism

Murray Newton Rothbard (/ˈmʌri ˈrɑːθbɑːrd/; March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American economist of the Austrian School, a revisionist historian, and a political theorist whose writings and personal influence played a seminal role in the development of modern libertarianism. Rothbard was the founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism, a staunch advocate of historical revisionism, and a central figure in the twentieth-century American libertarian movement. He wrote over twenty books on anarchist theory, history, economics, and other subjects. Rothbard asserted that all services provided by the "monopoly system of the corporate state" could be provided more efficiently by the private sector and wrote that the state is "the organization of robbery systematized and writ large." He called fractional reserve banking a form of fraud and opposed central banking. He categorically opposed all military, political, and economic interventionism in the affairs of other nations. In the words of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, "There would be no anarcho-capitalist movement to speak of without Rothbard."

Rothbard was a heterodox economist who refused to publish in academic journals. According to economist Jeff Herbener, who calls Rothbard his friend and "intellectual mentor", Rothbard received "only ostracism" from mainstream academia. Rothbard rejected the application of the scientific method to economics, and dismissed econometrics, empirical and statistical analysis, and other tools of mainstream social science as useless for the study of economics. He instead embraced the strictly a priori Misesian method, which conceives of economic laws as akin to geometric or mathematical axioms: fixed, unchanging, objective, and discernible through logical reasoning, without the use of any evidence. Rothbard's Misesian methodology, according to fellow Misesian Hans-Hermann Hoppe, is regarded as "dogmatic and unscientific" by all non-Misesian economists. To promote his economic and political ideas, Rothbard joined Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. and Burton Blumert in 1982 to establish the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama.

Life and work

Murray Rothbard's parents were David and Rae Rothbard, Jewish immigrants who had immigrated to the U.S. from Poland and Russia respectively. David Rothbard was a chemist. Rothbard was born in the Bronx, but the family moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he attended Birch Wathen, a private school on the Upper East Side. Rothbard later stated that he much preferred Birch Wathen to the "debasing and egalitarian public school system" he had previously attended.

Rothbard wrote of having grown up as a "right-winger" (adherent of the "Old Right") among friends and neighbors who were "communists or fellow-travelers." Like Rothbard, his father was a rightist. To Rothbard's father, "all socialism seemed ... monstrously coercive and abhorrent."

Rothbard in the mid-1950s

He attended Columbia University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics in 1945 and, eleven years later, his PhD in economics in 1956. The delay in receiving his PhD was due in part to conflict with his advisor, Joseph Dorfman, and in part to Arthur Burns rejecting his doctoral dissertation. Burns was a longtime friend of the Rothbard family and their neighbor at their Manhattan apartment building. It was only after Burns went on leave the Columbia faculty to head President Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisors that Rothbard's thesis was accepted and he received his doctorate. Rothbard later stated that all of his fellow students there were extreme leftists and that he was one of only two Republicans on the Columbia campus at the time.

During the early 1950s, Rothbard attended the unofficial seminar of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, who was then teaching at the Wall Street division of New York University Business School. Rothbard was greatly influenced by Mises' book, Human Action. Rothbard attracted the attention of the William Volker Fund, a group that provided financial backing to promote various "right-wing" ideologies in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Volker Fund paid Rothbard to write a textbook to explain Human Action in a form which could be used to introduce college undergraduates to Mises' views; a sample chapter he wrote on money and credit won Mises's approval. As Rothbard continued his work, he enlarged the project. The result was Rothbard's book Man, Economy, and State, published in 1962. Upon its publication, Mises praised Rothbard's work effusively and, for Mises, uncharacteristically.

In 1954, Rothbard, along with several other attendees of Mises' seminar, joined the circle of novelist Ayn Rand, the founder of Objectivism. He soon parted from her, writing, among other things, that her ideas were not as original as she proclaimed but similar to those of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Herbert Spencer. In 1958, after the publication of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, Rothbard wrote a "fan letter" to Rand, calling her book "an infinite treasure house," and "not merely the greatest novel ever written, it is one of the very greatest books ever written, fiction or nonfiction." He also wrote that "you introduced me to the whole field of natural rights and natural law philosophy," prompting him to learn "the glorious natural rights tradition." He rejoined her circle for a few months, but soon broke with Rand over various differences, including his defense of anarchism. Later, Rothbard ridiculed Rand's circle in his play Mozart Was a Red and essay, "The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult."

In 1964, at age 37, Rothbard took his first academic job as one of two instructors who taught economics to the engineering students at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Rothbard continued in this role for twenty-two years, until 1986. Then 60 years old, Rothbard left Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute for the Butt Business School at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he held the title of S.J. Hall Distinguished Professor of Economics, an endowed chair paid for by an admirer of his work. Rothbard maintained his position at UNLV from 1986 until his death. Rothbard founded the Center for Libertarian Studies in 1976 and the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1977. He was associated with the 1982 creation of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and was vice president of academic affairs until 1995. In 1987, he started a journal called Review of Austrian Economics, now called the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

Rothbard with his wife "Joey"

In 1953, in New York City, he married JoAnn Schumacher (1928–1999), whom he called Joey. After Rothbard's death, Joey reflected on Rothbard's happiness and bright spirit. "...he managed to make a living for 40 years without having to get up before noon. This was important to him." She recalled how Rothbard would begin every day with a phone conversation with his colleague Llewellyn Rockwell. "Gales of laughter would shake the house or apartment, as they checked in with each other. Murray thought it was the best possible way to start a day." Rothbard was an atheist. He died in 1995 in Manhattan of a heart attack. The New York Times obituary called Rothbard "an economist and social philosopher who fiercely defended individual freedom against government intervention."

"Mozart Was a Red"

"Mozart Was a Red" was Rothbard's unpublished one-act play written in the 1960s. The morality play was written as a farce, inspired by the author's association with Ayn Rand. Rothbard criticized Ayn Rand's circle as a dogmatic personalty cult. The play parodied Rand (through the character "Carson Sand") and her friends during a visit from Keith Hackley, a fan of Sand's novel The Brow of Zeus (a play on Rand's most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged).

Ethical and philosophical views

Ludwig von Mises

Ethics

Although Rothbard adopted von Mises' deductive methodology for his social theory and economics, he parted with Mises on the question of ethics. Specifically, he rejected Mises conviction that ethical values remain subjective, and opposed utilitarianism in favor of principle-based, natural law reasoning. In defense of his free market views, Mises employed utilitarian economic arguments aimed at demonstrating that interventionist policies made all of society worse off. Rothbard, on the other hand, concluded that interventionist policies do in fact benefit some people, including certain government employees and beneficiaries of social programs. Therefore, unlike Mises, Rothbard attempted to assert an objective, natural law basis for the free market. He called this principle "self-ownership," loosely basing the idea on the writings of John Locke and also borrowing concepts from classical liberalism and the anti-imperialism of the Old Right. Philosopher Matt Zwolinski wrote, "Rothbard's discussion of self-ownership in chapter six of The Ethics of Liberty rests on a fundamental confusion between descriptive and normative claims." In an article entitled "How Not to Argue for Libertarianism", Zwolinski examines the critical role of self-ownership in Rothbard's thought and states that Rothbard's "argument for the self-ownership thesis itself is disappointingly weak."

Rothbard advocated the Lockean proviso, arguing that if an individual mixes his labor with unowned land then he becomes the proper owner, and that after that time it is private property which may change hands only by trade or gift.

Rothbard was a strong critic of egalitarianism. The title essay of Rothbard's 1974 book Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays held, "Equality is not in the natural order of things, and the crusade to make everyone equal in every respect (except before the law) is certain to have disastrous consequences." In it, Rothbard wrote, "At the heart of the egalitarian left is the pathological belief that there is no structure of reality; that all the world is a tabula rasa that can be changed at any moment in any desired direction by the mere exercise of human will."

Linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky described Rothbard's vision as a "world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it". He condemned Rothbard's idea that even public goods like roads and education, which benefit all people in a community, should only be funded at the behest of those who can afford to pay for them. He concluded that Rothbard's moral theory "isn't even worth talking about", since a world governed by an absolutist conception of property rights "couldn't function for a second -- and if it could, all you'd want to do is get out, or commit suicide". He also noted that Rothbard's ideas are not taken seriously by mainstream thinkers.

Anarcho-capitalism

Rothbard is the founder and central theorist of anarcho-capitalism and is regarded by many contemporary libertarian anarchists with great respect and reverence. In the words of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, "There would be no anarcho-capitalist movement to speak of without Rothbard." According to Llewellyn Rockwell, Rothbard is the "conscience" of all the various strains of libertarian anarchism, whose contemporary advocates are former "colleagues" of Rothbard personally inspired by his example. In addition to founding anarcho-capitalism, Rothbard provided the intellectual heft to "anarcho-Southern agrarianism, anarcho-anti-federalism, anarcho-protectionism, anarcho-monarchism" and other political movements.

During his years at graduate school in the late 1940s, Murray Rothbard considered whether a strict laissez-faire policy would require that private police agencies replace government protective services. He visited Baldy Harper, a founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, who doubted the need for any government whatsoever. During this period, Rothbard was influenced by nineteenth-century American individualist anarchists, like Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker, and the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari who wrote about how such a system could work. Thus he "combined the laissez-faire economics of Mises with the absolutist views of human rights and rejection of the state" from individualist anarchists. In an unpublished memo written around 1949 Rothbard concluded that in order to believe in laissez-faire one must also embrace anarchism.

Rothbard began to consider himself a private property anarchist in the 1950s and later began to use "anarcho-capitalist". In his anarcho-capitalist model, a system of protection agencies compete in a free market and are voluntarily supported by consumers who choose to use their protective and judicial services. Anarcho-capitalism would mean the end of the state monopoly on force.

In Man, Economy, and State Rothbard divides the various kinds of state intervention in three categories: "autistic intervention", which is interference with private non-economic activities; "binary intervention", which is forced exchange between individuals and the state; and "triangular intervention", which is state-mandated exchange between individuals. According to Sanford Ikeda, Rothbard's typology "eliminates the gaps and inconsistencies that appear in Mises's original formulation." Rothbard writes in Power and Market that the role of the economist in a free market is limited but is much larger in a government that solicits economic policy recommendations. Rothbard argues that self-interest therefore prejudices the views of many economists in favor of increased government intervention.

Heterodox economics

Rothbard embraced Ludwig von Mises' economics methodology, which Mises termed praxeology. According to Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Rothbard's friend and colleague at the Mises Institute and UNLV business department, praxeology is distinguished from mainstream economic methodologies insofar as it conceives of economics "as an a priori science, a science whose propositions can be given a rigorous logical justification". On Hoppe's account, eschewing the scientific method and empirical evidence distinguishes the Misesian approach "from all other current economic schools". Mark Skousen of Grantham University and the Foundation for Economic Education, a critic of mainstream economics, praises Rothbard as brilliant, his writing style persuasive, his economic arguments nuanced and logically rigorous, and his Misesian methodology sound. However, citing Rothbard's absence of academic publications, Skousen concedes that Rothbard was effectively "outside the discipline" of mainstream economics and that his work "fell on deaf ears" outside his ideological circles. Paralleling Skousen's remarks, Hans Hoppe laments the fact that all non-Misesian economists dismiss the Misesian approach, which both he and Rothbard embraced, as "dogmatic and unscientific".

Though he self-identified as an Austrian economist, Rothbard's methodology was at odds with many other Austrians. In 1956, Rothbard deprecated the views of Austrian economist Fritz Machlup, stating that Machlup was no praxeologist, and calling him instead a "positivist" who failed to represent the views of Ludwig von Mises. Rothbard stated that in fact Machlup shared the opposing positivist view associated with economist Milton Friedman. Mises and Machlup had been colleagues in 1920's Vienna before each relocated to the United States, and von Mises later urged his American protege, Israel Kirzner, to pursue his PhD studies with Machlup at Johns Hopkins University. Professors Gabriel J. Zanotti and Nicolas Cachanosky recently reviewed the controversy. They prefer Machlup's reading of Mises to Rothbard's, and state, " Machlup's interpretation shows that Austrian epistemology is well grounded in post-Popperian epistemology and that most criticisms of Austrian economics based on its aprioristic character are misplaced. Furthermore, Machlup's interpretation provides us with a setting to re-build the academic interaction between Austrians and non-Austrians that was characteristic of the early twentieth century." They conclude that Rothbard's approach to economics was an "outdated and untenable extreme apriorism."

According to libertarian economists Tyler Cowen and Richard Fink, Rothbard wrote that the term evenly rotating economy ("ERE") can be used to analyze complexity in a world of change. The words ERE had been introduced by von Mises as an alternative nomenclature for the mainstream economic method of static equilibrium and general equilibrium analysis. Cowen and Fink found "serious inconsistencies in both the nature of the ERE and its suggested uses." With the sole exception of Rothbard, no other economist adopted Mises' term, and the concept continued to be called "equilibrium analysis."

In a blog post written in response to Lew Rockwell's claim that Rothbard has been much more influential than Milton Friedman, economist George Selgin wrote that "as a monetary economist, Rothbard was mediocre to bad. His version of the Austrian business cycle theory was naive – in essence it equated behavior of M consistent with keeping interest rates at their "natural" levels with the elimination of fractional-reserve banking, an equation that holds only with the help of about a dozen auxiliary assumptions, all of which are patently false. He then went on to conjure up an equally false history of banking and of bank contracts designed to square his theory of the cycle, with its implied condemnation of fractional reserve banking, with his libertarian ethics." Rothbard strongly opposed central banking, fiat money, and fractional reserve banking and advocated a gold standard and a 100% reserve requirement for banks.

Rothbard vilified Adam Smith, calling him a "shameless plagiarist" who set economics off-track, ultimately leading to the rise of Marxism. In response to Rothbard's charge that Smith's The Wealth of Nations was largely plagiarized, David Friedman castigated Rothbard's scholarship and character, saying that he "was [either] deliberately dishonest or never really read the book he was criticizing". Tony Endres called Rothbard's treatment of Adam Smith a "travesty". Rothbard was contemptuous of John Maynard Keynes, and wrote that governmental regulation of money and credit creates a "dismal monetary and banking situation". He demeaned John Stuart Mill as a "wooly man of mush", and speculated that Mill's "soft" personality led his economic thought astray. Rothbard's perspective on these and other major figures in the history of economics were presented in his book, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. In a review of the book, Peter Hans Matthews and Andreas Ortmann conclude that "few readers, Austrian or otherwise, will find [Rothbard's book] a decisive contribution to our understanding of the discipline's foundations".

Rothbard denigrated Milton Friedman, a Nobel Laureate economist and a competing libertarian theorist. In a polemic entitled "Milton Friedman Unraveled", he maligned Friedman as a "statist", a "favorite of the establishment", a friend of and "apologist" for Richard Nixon, and a "pernicious influence" on public policy. Rothbard said that libertarians should scorn rather than celebrate Friedman's academic prestige and political influence. Noting that Rothbard has "been nasty to me and my work", Friedman responded to Rothbard's criticism by calling him a "cult builder and a dogmatist."

In an 2011 article critical of Rothbard's "reflexive opposition" to inflation, The Economist noted that his views are increasingly gaining influence among politicians and laypeople on the Right. The article contrasted Rothbard's categorical rejection of inflationary policies with the monetary views of "sophisticated Austrian-school monetary economists such as George Selgin and Larry White, [who] defend rule-based inflation-targeting policies not all that different from Mr Sumner's".

According to economist Peter Boettke, Rothbard is better described as a property rights economist than as an Austrian economist. In 1988, Boettke noted that Rothbard "vehemently attacked all of the books of the younger Austrians".

Race, gender and civil rights

Michael O'Malley, Associate Professor of History at George Mason University, characterizes Rothbard's "overall tone regard[ing]" the black civil rights movement and the women's suffrage movement to be "contemptuous and hostile". On O'Malley's account, "Rothbard found the idea of freedom for Negroes alarming [because] they did not understand it properly". Rothbard vilified women's rights activists, attributing the growth of the welfare state to politically active spinsters "whose busybody inclinations were not fettered by the responsibilities of health and heart". He believed that Jewish and lesbian women were responsible for the movement to enact child labor laws, which he viewed with disgust. O'Malley summarized Rothbard's views: "votes for women and equality for African Americans ... upset the natural order".

Rothbard called for the elimination of "the entire 'civil rights' structure" stating that it "tramples on the property rights of every American." Rothbard also urged the (state) police to crackdown on "street criminals", writing that "cops must be unleashed" and "and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error". He also advocated that the police "clear the streets of bums and vagrants", and quipped "Who cares?" in response to the question of where these people would go after being removed from public property.

Rothbard held strong opinions about many leaders of the civil rights movement. He considered black separatist Malcolm X to be a "great black leader" and integrationist Martin Luther King to be favored by whites because he "was the major restraining force on the developing Negro revolution." Rothbard praised Malcolm X for "acting white" through use of his intellect and wit, and contrasted him favorably with the "fraudulent intellectual with a rococo Black Baptist minister style, "Dr." King". But while he compared Malcolm X's black nationalism favorably to King's integrationism, he ultimately rejected the vision of a "separate black nation", asking "does anyone really believe that ... New Africa would be content to strike out on its own, with no massive "foreign aid" from the U.S.A.?" Rothbard also suggested that opposition to King, whom he demeaned as a "coercive integrationist", should be a litmus test for members of his "paleolibertarian" political movement.

Race and intelligence

Both Michael O'Malley and political scientist Jean Hardisty have noted Rothbard's "praise" of the argument, made in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's book The Bell Curve, that blacks are genetically inferior to whites with respect to intelligence. Both authors quote Rothbard's remark that intellectual and "temperamental" differences between races are "self-evident". O'Malley quotes Rothbard as stating that public acceptance of the book's thesis "would put a bullet through the heart of the egalitarian socialist project", by providing an intellectual justification for racial inequalities.

Opposition to war

Like Randolph Bourne, Rothbard believed that "war is the health of the state." According to David Gordon, this was the reason for Rothbard's opposition to aggressive foreign policy. Rothbard believed that stopping new wars was necessary and that knowledge of how government had led citizens into earlier wars was important. Two essays expanded on these views "War, Peace, and the State" and "The Anatomy of the State." Rothbard used insights of Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels to build a model of state personnel, goals, and ideology. In an obituary for his friend historical revisionist Harry Elmer Barnes, Rothbard wrote:

Our entry into World War II was the crucial act in foisting a permanent militarization upon the economy and society, in bringing to the country a permanent garrison state, an overweening military-industrial complex, a permanent system of conscription. It was the crucial act in creating a mixed economy run by Big Government, a system of state-monopoly capitalism run by the central government in collaboration with Big Business and Big Unionism.

Rothbard's The Libertarian Forum blamed the Middle East conflict on Israeli aggression "fueled by American arms and money." Rothbard warned that the mid-East conflict would draw the U.S. into a world war. He was strongly anti-Zionist and also opposed U.S. involvement in the Middle East. Rothbard personally denounced the Camp David Accords for having betrayed Palestinian aspirations and opposed Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. In his essay, "War Guilt in the Middle East," Rothbard states that Israel refused "to let these refugees return and reclaim the property taken from them."

Historical revisionism

Rothbard embraced "historical revisionism" as an antidote to what he perceived to be the dominant influence exerted by corrupt "court intellectuals" over mainstream historical narratives. Rothbard wrote that these mainstream intellectuals distorted the historical record in favor of "the state" in exchange for "power, prestige, and loot" from the state. Rothbard characterized the revisionist task as "penetrating the fog of lies and deception of the State and its Court Intellectuals, and to present to the public the true history". He was influenced by and a champion of Harry Elmer Barnes. Rothbard endorsed Barnes's revisionism on World War II and the Cold War and promoted him as an influence for revisionists.

Rothbard's endorsing of World War II revisionism and his association with Barnes and other Holocaust deniers have drawn criticism from within the political right. Kevin D. Williamson wrote an opinion piece published by National Review which condemned Rothbard for "making common cause with the 'revisionist' historians of the Third Reich", a term he used to describe American Holocaust deniers associated with Rothbard, such as James J. Martin of the Institute for Historical Review. The piece also characterized "Rothbard and his faction" as being "culpably indulgent" of Holocaust denial, the view which "specifically denies that the Holocaust actually happened or holds that it was in some way exaggerated".

In an article celebrating Rothbard's 50th birthday, Rothbard's longtime friend and Buffalo State College historian Ralph Raico stated that Rothbard "is the main reason that revisionism has become a crucial part of the whole libertarian position."

Children's rights and parental obligations

In the Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard explores issues regarding children's rights in terms of self-ownership and contract. These include support for a woman's right to abortion, condemnation of parents showing aggression towards children, and opposition to the state forcing parents to care for children. He also holds children have the right to run away from parents and seek new guardians as soon as they are able to choose to do so. He asserted that parents have the right to put a child out for adoption or sell the rights to the child in a voluntary contract in what Rothbard suggests will be a "flourishing free market in children". He believes that selling children as consumer goods in accord with market forces, while "superficially monstrous", will benefit "everyone" involved in the market: "the natural parents, the children, and the foster parents purchasing".

In Rothbard's view of parenthood, "the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights." Thus, Rothbard stated that parents should have the legal right to let any infant die by starvation. However, according to Rothbard, "the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children". In a fully libertarian society, he wrote, "the existence of a free baby market will bring such 'neglect' down to a minimum".

Economist Gene Callahan of Cardiff University, formerly a scholar at the Rothbard-affiliated Mises Institute, argues that Rothbard allows "the logical elegance of his legal theory" to "trump any arguments based on the moral reprehensibility of a parent idly watching her six-month-old child slowly starve to death in its crib." He criticizes the absolutism of Rothbard's system, arguing that Rothbard has "taken a valid concern in political reflection, that of property rights, and treated it as if it were the only valid concern".

Retributive theory of criminal justice

In The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard advocates for a "frankly retributive theory of punishment" or a system of "a tooth (or two teeth) for a tooth". Rothbard emphasizes that all punishment must be proportional, stating that "the criminal, or invader, loses his rights to the extent that he deprived another man of his". Applying his retributive theory, Rothbard states that a thief "must pay double the extent of theft". Rothbard gives the example of a thief who stole $15,000, and says he not only would have to return the stolen money, but also provide the victim an additional $15,000, money to which the thief has forfeited his right. The thief would be "put in a [temporary] state of enslavement to his victim" if he is unable to pay him immediately. Rothbard also applies his theory to justify beating and torturing violent criminals, although the beatings are required to be proportional to the crimes for which they are being punished.

Susumu Morimura, Professor of Law at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, examined and rejected Rothbard's theory. She argued that it is "very doubtful that retributive considerations alone" justify inflicting harm on people. She concluded that the personal feeling or desire for retribution is not an adequate foundation for criminal justice.

Torture of criminal suspects

In chapter twelve of Ethics, Rothbard turns his attention to suspects arrested by the police. He argues that police should be able to torture certain types of criminal suspects, including accused murderers, for information related to their alleged crime. Writes Rothbard, "Suppose ... police beat and torture a suspected murderer to find information (not to wring a confession, since obviously a coerced confession could never be considered valid). If the suspect turns out to be guilty, then the police should be exonerated, for then they have only ladled out to the murderer a parcel of what he deserves in return; his rights had already been forfeited by more than that extent. But if the suspect is not convicted, then that means that the police have beaten and tortured an innocent man, and that they in turn must be put into the dock for criminal assault". Gene Callahan examines this position and concludes that Rothbard gives no consideration to the widely held belief that torture is inherently wrong, no matter who the victim. Callahan goes on to state that Rothbard's scheme gives the police a strong motive to frame the suspect, after having tortured him or her.

Science, evolution and scientism

In an essay condemning "scientism in the study of man", Rothbard rejected the application of causal determinism to human beings, arguing that the actions of human beings, as opposed to those of everything else in nature, are not determined by prior causes but by "free will". He argued that "determinism as applied to man, is a self-contradictory thesis, since the man who employs it relies implicitly on the existence of free will." Rothbard opposed what he considered the overspecialization of the academy and sought to fuse the disciplines of economics, history, ethics, and political science to create a "science of liberty." Rothbard described the moral basis for his anarcho-capitalist position in two of his books: For a New Liberty, published in 1973, and The Ethics of Liberty, published in 1982. In his Power and Market (1970), Rothbard describes how a stateless economy might function.

U.S. public policy and the Libertarian Forum

Rothbard rejected the view that Ronald Reagan's 1980 election as President was a victory for libertarian principles, and he attacked Reagan's economic program in a series of Libertarian Forum articles. In 1982, Rothbard called Reagan's claims of spending cuts a "fraud" and a "hoax", and accused Reaganites of doctoring the economic statistics in order to give the false impression that their policies were successfully reducing inflation and unemployment. The Libertarian Forum provided a platform for Rothbard's writing. Despite its small readership, it engaged conservatives associated with the National Review in nation-wide debate.

Political activism

Llewellyn Rockwell

As a young man, Rothbard considered himself part of the Old Right, an anti-statist and anti-interventionist branch of the Republican Party. In the 1948 presidential election, Rothbard, "as a Jewish student at Columbia, horrified his peers by organizing a Students for Strom Thurmond chapter, so staunchly did he believe in states' rights."

By the late 1960s, Rothbard's "long and winding yet somehow consistent road had taken him from anti-New Deal and anti-interventionist Robert Taft supporter into friendship with the quasi-pacifist Nebraska Republican Congressman Howard Buffett (father of Warren Buffett) then over to the League of (Adlai) Stevensonian Democrats and, by 1968, into tentative comradeship with the anarchist factions of the New Left." Rothbard advocated an alliance with the New Left anti-war movement, on the grounds that the conservative movement had been completely subsumed by the statist establishment. However, Rothbard later criticized the New Left for supporting a "People's Republic" style draft. It was during this phase that he associated with Karl Hess and founded Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought with Leonard Liggio and George Resch, which existed from 1965 to 1968. From 1969 to 1984 he edited The Libertarian Forum, also initially with Hess (although Hess's involvement ended in 1971).

Rothbard criticized the "frenzied nihilism" of left-wing libertarians, but also criticized right-wing libertarians who were content to rely only on education to bring down the state; he believed that libertarians should adopt any moral tactic available to them in order to bring about liberty.

Imbibing Randolph Bourne's idea that "war is the health of the state", Rothbard opposed all wars and engaged in anti-war activism. During the 1970s and 1980s, Rothbard was active in the Libertarian Party. He was frequently involved in the party's internal politics. He was one of the founders of the Cato Institute, and "came up with the idea of naming this libertarian think tank after Cato's Letters, a powerful series of British newspaper essays by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon which played a decisive influence upon America's Founding Fathers in fomenting the Revolution." From 1978 to 1983, he was associated with the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus, allying himself with Justin Raimondo, Eric Garris and Williamson Evers. He opposed the "low-tax liberalism" espoused by 1980 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ed Clark and Cato Institute president Edward H Crane III. According to Charles Burris, "Rothbard and Crane became bitter rivals after disputes emerging from the 1980 LP presidential campaign of Ed Clark carried over to strategic direction and management of Cato."

Rothbard split with the Radical Caucus at the 1983 national convention over cultural issues and aligned himself with what he called the "right-wing populist" wing of the party, notably Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul, who ran for President on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988. "Rothbard worked closely with Lew Rockwell (joined later by his long-time friend Burt Blumert) in nurturing the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and the publication, The Rothbard-Rockwell Report; which after Rothbard's 1995 death evolved into the website, LewRockwell.com."

Paleolibertarianism

In 1989, Rothbard left the Libertarian Party and began building bridges to the post-Cold War anti-interventionist right, calling himself a paleolibertarian, a conservative reaction against the cultural liberalism of mainstream libertarianism. Paleolibertarianism sought to appeal to disaffected working class whites through a synthesis of cultural conservatism and libertarian economics.

Rothbard wrote in 1992 that David Duke had won a majority of the white vote in a recent election by running as a "right-wing populist". According to Reason, Rothbard advocated right-wing populism in part because he was frustrated that mainstream thinkers were not adopting the libertarian view and suggested that Duke and former Wisconsin U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy were models for an "Outreach to the Rednecks" effort that could be used by a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition. Rothbard described "right wing populism" as opposition to a "statist world dominated by a ruling elite, consisting of a coalition of Big Government, Big Business, and various influential special interest groups". He also wrote favorably about Duke's political program, writing that there was "nothing" in it that "could not also be embraced by paleoconservatives or paleo-libertarians; lower taxes, dismantling the bureaucracy, slashing the welfare system, attacking affirmative action and racial set-asides, calling for equal rights for all Americans, including whites." In an interview on Reason TV Gene Epstein', described as "a devotee" of Rothbard, lamented Rothbard's period of "infatuation" with Southern populism, Pat Buchanan and David Duke.

Rothbard supported the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan in 1992, and wrote that "with Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy." In the January 1992 Rothbard-Rockwell Report, Rothbard's friend and confidante Llewellyn Rockwell reflected on the paleolibertarian vision, stating "We have a dream. (Hell, if 'Dr.' King can have a dream, why can't we?) Our dream is that, one day, we Buchananites can present Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the liberal and conservative and centrist elites, with a dramatic choice....We can say: 'Look, gang: you have a choice, it's either Pat Buchanan or David Duke." When Buchanan dropped out of the Republican primary race, Rothbard then shifted his interest and support to Ross Perot, who Rothbard wrote had "brought an excitement, a verve, a sense of dynamics and of open possibilities to what had threatened to be a dreary race." Rothbard ultimately supported George Bush over Bill Clinton in the 1992 election.

Like Buchanan, Rothbard opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). However, by 1995, Rothbard had become disillusioned with Buchanan, believing that the latter's "commitment to protectionism was mutating into an all-round faith in economic planning and the nation state."

After Rothbard's death in 1995 Lew Rockwell, President of the von Mises Institute, told The New York Times that Rothbard was "the founder of right-wing anarchism". William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote a critical obituary in the National Review criticizing Rothbard's "defective judgment" and views on the Cold War. The von Mises Institute published Murray N. Rothbard, In Memoriam which included memorials from 31 individuals, including libertarians and academics. Journalist Brian Doherty summarizes Buckley's obituary as follows: "when Rothbard died in 1995, his old pal William Buckley took pen in hand to piss on his grave. Rothbard, Buckley wrote, spent his life "huffing and puffing in the little cloister whose walls he labored so strenuously to contract, leaving him, in the end, not as the father of a swelling movement…but with about as many disciples as David Koresh had in his little redoubt in Waco. Yes, Murray Rothbard believed in freedom, and yes, David Koresh believed in God."

Works

Books

• Man, Economy, and State, D. Van Nostrand Co., 1962; Full text reprint of second edition (Scholar's Edition), Mises Institute, 2004, ISBN 0-945466-30-7
• The Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies, Columbia University Press, 1962; Full text reprint, Mises Institute, 2004, ISBN 1-933550-08-2.
• America's Great Depression, D. Van Nostrand Co., 1973; Full text reprint, fifth edition, Mises Institute, 2005, ISBN 0-945466-05-6
• Power and Market: Government and the Economy, Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1970; Full text reprint, reattached to Man, Economy, and State, Mises Institute, 2004, ISBN 0-945466-30-7
• For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Collier Books, 1973, 1978; Full text reprint/Audio book, Mises Institute, ISBN 0-945466-47-1)
• The Essential von Mises, "Bramble Minibook", 1973; Full text reprint, Mises Institute, 1988
• Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, Libertarian Review Press, 1974; Full text reprint, Second edition, Mises Institute, 2000, ISBN 0-945466-23-4.
• Conceived in Liberty, (4 vol.), Arlington House Publishers 1975–1979; Full text collected in single volume, Mises Institute, 2012, ISBN 0-945466-26-9
• The Logic of Action (2 vol.), Edward Elgar Pub, 1997, ISBN 1-85898-015-1 and ISBN 1-85898-570-6; Full text reprint as Economic Controversies, Mises Institute, 2011
• The Ethics of Liberty, Humanities Press, 1982; New York University Press, 1998; Full text reprint/Audio Book, Mises Institute, ISBN 0-8147-7506-3
• The Mystery of Banking, Richardson and Snyder, Dutton, 1983; Full text reprint, Mises Institute, 2007, ISBN 978-1105528781
• The Case Against the Fed, Mises Institute, 1994; Full text reprint, Mises Institute, ISBN 0-945466-17-X
• An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, (2 vol.), Edward Elgar Pub, 1995, ISBN 0-945466-48-X; Full text reprints Vo1. 1 and Vol. 2, Mises Institute, 2009
• Making Economic Sense, Mises Institute, 2007, ISBN 0-945466-18-8; Full text reprint updated 7/15/2011 version
• The Betrayal of the American Right, Mises Institute publication of 1970s unpublished work, 2007, ISBN 978-1-933550-13-8, Full text reprint

Monographs

• The Case for the 100 Percent Gold Dollar, originally published in Leland B. Yeager (editor), In Search of a Monetary Constitution, Harvard University Press, 1962; published separately by Mises Institute, 1991, 2005, ISBN 0-945466-34-X; Full text reprint/Audio Book
• What Has Government Done to Our Money?, Pine Tree Press, 1963; Full text reprint, Mises Institute, 1980; Audio book, ISBN 0-945466-44-7
• Economic Depressions: Causes and Cures, Constitutional Alliance of Lansing, Michigan, 1969; Full text reprint, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007
• Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy, World Market Perspective, 1984; Center for Libertarian Studies, 1995, Mises Institute 2005; Full text reprint, Second edition, Mises Institute, 2011
• Education: Free and Compulsory, Center for Independent Education, 1972; Full text reprint, Mises Institute, 1999, ISBN 0-945466-22-6
• Individualism and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, introduction by Friedrich Hayek, Cato Institute, 1979, ISBN 0-932790-03-8

Articles/Essays

• Left and Right, Selected Essays 1954–65, (includes essays by Rothbard, Leonard Liggio, etc.), Arno Press (The New York Times Company), 1972, ISBN 0405004265; Mises Institute information page
• Ebeling, Richard M., (editor), The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle and Other Essays, (includes also essays by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Gottfried Haberler, Mises Institute, 1996, ISBN 0-945466-21-8; Full text reprint, Mises Institute, 2009
• ——— (2008). "Free Market". In David R. Henderson (ed.) (ed.). Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (2nd ed.). Indianapolis: Library of Economics and Liberty. ISBN 978-0865976658. OCLC 237794267. {{cite encyclopedia}}: |author= has numeric name (help); |editor= has generic name (help)

Collections

• Rockwell, Llewellyn H., Jr., (editor), The Irrepressible Rothbard: The Rothbard-Rockwell Report Essays of Murray N. Rothbard, LewRockwell.com, 2000, ISBN 1-883959-02-0
• Salerno, Joseph T., (editor), A History of Money and Banking in the United States, (Rothbard writings), Mises Institute, 2002, ISBN 0-945466-33-1, Full tex reprint
• Rothbard, Murray (editor), The Complete Libertarian Forum (1969–84; 2 vol.), 2006; Full text reprint at LewRockwell.com, ISBN 1-933550-02-3
• Modugno, Roberta A. (2009). Murray N. Rothbard vs. The Philosophers: Unpublished Writings on Hayek, Mises, Strauss, and Polanyi, Mises Institute, 2009, ISBN 978-1-933550-46-6; Full text reprint

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

Further reading

• Boettke, Peter (Fall/Winter 1988). "Economists and Liberty: Murray N. Rothbard" (PDF). Nomos. American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy: 29–34, 49–50. ISSN 0078-0979. OCLC 1760419. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Block, Walter E. (2003). "Toward a Libertarian Theory of Inalienability: A Critique of Rothbard, Barnett, Gordon, Smith, Kinsella and Epstein" (PDF). Journal of Libertarian Studies. 17 (2). SSRN 1889456. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Doherty, Brian (2007). Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. PublicAffairs. ISBN 1-58648-350-1
• Frech, H. E. (1973). "The public choice theory of Murray N. Rothbard, a modern anarchist". Public Choice. 14: 143–53. doi:10.1007/BF01718450. JSTOR 30022711.
• Hudík, Marek (2011). "Rothbardian demand: A critique". The Review of Austrian Economics. 24 (3): 311–8. doi:10.1007/s11138-011-0147-3.
• Klein, Daniel B. (2004). "Mere Libertarianism: Blending Hayek and Rothbard". Reason Papers. 27: 7–43. SSRN 473601. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Pack, Spencer J. (1998). "Murray Rothbard's Adam Smith" (PDF). The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. 1 (1): 73–9. doi:10.1007/s12113-998-1004-5.
• Touchstone, Kathleen (2010). "Rand, Rothbard, and Rights Reconsidered" (PDF). Libertarian Papers. 2 (18): 28. OCLC 820597333.

External links

• Murray Rothbard full bibliography at Mises.org
• Murray Rothbard at Mises.org Wiki
• Rothbard videos at YouTube channel of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
• Murray N. Rothbard Library and Resources from LewRockwell.com
• Murray Rothbard Institute, Belgium
• Murray Newton Rothbard at Find a Grave