THE ETHICS OF LIBERTY THE ETHICS OF LIBERTY Murray N. Rothbard with a new introduction by Hans-Hermann Hoppe NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London The Center for Libertarian Studies and the Ludwig von Mises Institute thank all of their donors for making possible the republication of this classic of liberty, and in particular the following Patrons: Athena Tech, John H. Bolstad, William T. Brown, Willard Fischer, Douglas E. French, Frank W. Heernstra, Franklin Lee Johnson, Richard J. Kossmann, M.D., William W. Massey, Jr., Sam Medrano, Joseph Edward Paul Melville, Mason P. Pearsall, Conrad Schneiker, Eward Schoppe, Jr., Mr. and Mrs. Thomas W. Singleton, Mary Lou Stiebling, Loronzo H. Thomson, the L.H. Thomson Co., and Mr. and Mrs. Donald F. Warmbier. For editorial assistance, thanks to Mark Brandly, Williamson Evers, Tony Flood, Jomie Gilrnan, Scott Kjar, Judy Thommesen, and Jeffrey Tucker. NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London 01998 by New York University All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rothbard, Murray Newton, 1926-1995 The ethics of liberty / Murray N. Rothbard. p. cm. Originally published: Atlantic Highlands, N.J. : Humanities Press, 1982. With new introd. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8147-7506-3 (alk. paper) 1. Liberty. 2. Natural law. 3. Ethics. I. Title. JC585.R69 1998 323.44'01--ddl 98-10058 CIP New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Manufactured in the United States of America TO THE MEMORY OF FRANK CHODOROV EA. "BALDY" HARPER and my father DAVID ROTHBARD CONTENTS PARTI: INTRODUCTION:NATURAL LAW 1. Natural Law and Reason ............................................................... 3 2 . Natural Law as "Science" ................................................................ 9 3 . Natural Law versus Positive Law ................................................ 17 4 . Natural Law and Natural Rights .................................................. 21 5 . The Task of Political Philosophy ................................................... 25 PART11: A THEORYOF LIBERTY 6 . A Crusoe Social Philosophy ........................................................... 29 7 . Interpersonal Relations: Voluntary Exchange ............................ 35 8. Interpersonal Relations: Ownership and Aggression ............... 45 9 . Property and Criminality ............................................................. 51 10 . The Problem of Land Theft .......................................................... 63 11 . Land Monopoly, Past and Present .............................................. 69 12. Self-Defense ................................................................................. 77 13. Punishment and Proportionality ................................................ 85 14. Children and Rights .................................................................... 97 15 . "Human Rights" As Property Rights ....................................... 113 16 . Knowledge, True and False ....................................................... 121 17. Bribery ........................................................................................... 129 18. The Boycott ................................................................................... 131 19 . Property Rights and the Theory of Contracts ......................... 133 20 . Lifeboat Situations ...................................................................... 149 21 . The "Rights" of Animals ............................................................ 155 PART111: THE STATEVERSUS LIBERTY 22 . The Nature of the State ............................................................... 161 23 . The Inner Contradictions of the State ...................................... 175 24. The Moral Status of Relations to the State .............................. 183 25 . On Relations Between States ..................................................... 189 PARTIV: MODERNALTERNATIVE THEORIES OF LIBERTY 26 . Utilitarian Free-Market Economics ..........................................201 A . Introduction: Utilitarian Social Philosophy ........................ 201 B. The Unanimity and Compensation Principles .................... 203 C. Ludwig von Mises and "Value-Free" Laissez Faire ........... 206 27 . Isaiah Berlin on Negative Freedom .......................................... 215 . 28 . F.A. Hayek and The Concept of Coercion ............................... 219 29 . Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State . 231 PARTV . TOWARDA THEORYOF STRATEGYFOR LIBERTY 30 . Toward a Theory of Strategy for Liberty ................................. 257 viii "As reason tells us, all are born thus naturally equal, i.e., with an equal right to their persons, so also with an equal right to their preservation . and every man having a property in his own person, the labour of his body and the work of his hands are properly his own, to which no one has right but himself; it will therefore follow that when he removes anything out of the state that nature has provided and left it in, he has mixed his labour with it, and joined something to it that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. Thus every man having a natural right to (or being proprietor of) his own person and his own actions and labour, which we call property, it certainly follows, that no man can have a right to the person or property of another: And if every man has a right to his person and property; he has also a right to defend them . and so has a right of punishing all insults upon his person and property." Rev. Elisha Williams (1744) INTRODUCTION by Hans-Herrnann Hoppe n an age of intellectual hyperspecialization, Murray N. Rothbard was a grand system builder. An economist by profession, Rothbard was I the creator of a system of social and political philosophy based on economics and ethics as its cornerstones. For centuries, economics and ethics (political philosophy) had diverged from their common origin into seemingly unrelated intellectual enterprises. Economics was a value-free "positive" science, and ethics (if it was a science at all) was a "normative" science. As a result of this separation, the concept of property had increasingly disappeared from both disciplines. For economists, property sounded too normative, and for political philosophers property smacked of mun- dane economics. Rothbard's unique contribution is the rediscovery of property and property rights as the common foundation of both economics and political philosophy, and the systematic reconstruction and concep- tual integration of modern, marginalist economics and natural-law polit- ical philosophy into a unified moral science: libertarianism. Following his revered teacher and mentor, Ludwig von Mises, Misesfs teachers Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk and Carl Menger, and an intellectual tradition reaching back to the Spanish late-Scholastics and beyond, Roth- bardian economics sets out from a simple and undeniable fact and exper- ience (a single indisputable axiom): that man acts, i.e., that humans always and invariably pursue their most highly valued ends (goals) with scarce means (goods). Combined with a few empirical assumptions (such as that labor implies disutility), all of economic theory can be deduced from this incontestable starting point, thereby elevating its propositions to the status of apodictic, exact, or a priori true empirical laws and establishing economics as a logic of action (praxeology).Rothbard modeled his first magnum opus, Man, Economy, and State1 on Mises's monumental Human Actiom2In it, Rothbard developed the entire body of economic theory-from utility theory and the law of marginal utility to monetary theory and the theory of the business cycle-along praxeological lines, subjecting all variants of quantitative-empirical and mathematical economics to critique and logical 1. Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy and State (Princeton,N.J.: D. Van Nospand, 1962). 2. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1949). xii THE ETHICS OF LIBERTY refutation, and repairing the few remaining inconsistencies in the Mises- ian system (such as his theory of monopoly prices and of government and governmental security production). Rothbard was the first to present the complete case for a pure-market economy or private-property anarchism as always and necessarily optimizing social utility. In the sequel, Power and Market: Rothbard further developed a typology and analyzed the econom- ic effects of every conceivable form of government interference in markets. In the meantime, Man, Economy, and State (including Power and Market as its third volume) has become a modern classic and ranks with Mises's Human Action as one of the towering achievements of the Austrian School of eco- nomics. Ethics, or more specifically political philosophy, is the second pillar of the Rothbardian system, strictly separated from economics, but equally grounded in the acting nature of man and complementing it to form a unified systern of rationalist social philosophy. The Ethics of Liberty, originally published in 1982, is Rothbard's second magnum opus. In it, he explains the integration of economics and ethics via the joint concept of property; and based on the concept of property, and in conjunction with a few general empirical (biologicaland physical) observations or assump- tions, Rothbard deduces the corpus of libertarian law, from the law of ap- propriation to that