On Murray Rothbard

On Murray Rothbard Here are some parts that I have marked in my copy of the book“Murray Rothbard” by Gerard Casey. Murray Rothbard 1. “Murray Rothbard was an economist, historian, political and moral philosopher, and legal theoretician. Rothbard’s work in these diverse social science disciplines was unified by a passionate and resolute commitment to libertarianism. The particular brand of libertarianism that Rothbard espoused may be characterized as ‘anarcho-capitalism’. Whereas conventional libertarianism implies a belief that only a minimal state which does no more than provide a basic framework of the rule of law and the protection of private property rights may be justified, anarcho-capitalism implies a belief that even the legal system may be provided privately without the need for a coercive collective authority. Hence, anarcho-capitalists envisage a society where the traditional role of government is wholly subsumed by private, profit-making enterprises and air social relationships are ultimately founded upon consent.” 2. “Rothbard’s unique intellectual contribution was to build this system of thought from many www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 1 On Murray Rothbard pre-existing but previously disparate strands and to develop it to its logical (some would say extreme) conclusion. Rothbard’s starting points, then, were the well-established notions of methodological individualism, natural rights theory and individual self-ownership. But Rothbard showed that if we wish to take methodological individualism, natural rights theory and individual self-ownership seriously – that is, if we really believe that the individual is the relevant unit of analysis, that all individuals have basic rights that cannot be violated and that all people have a complete right of ownership over their own persons – then the justification for government falls away. According to Rothbard, then, government can only be ‘justified’ if we abandon the notion that individuals have the right to determine what to do with their own bodies, a step Rothbard believed to be unconscionable.” 3. “The character of some thinkers, such as St Augustine and Soren Kierkegaard, comes through in everything they write; their intellectual hearts are, so to speak, displayed prominently on their sleeves. Other thinkers, such as St Thomas Aquinas and Baruch Spinoza, reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. Murray N. Rothbard – economist, historian, political and moral philosopher, legal theoretician, political activist, polemicist and, above all, libertarian – can be firmly located in the Augustinian/Kierkegaardean camp. To read him is to know him, not just whatever he happens to be writing about. Everything he wrote is invested with his personality and his character.” 4. “Those who didn’t have the privilege of knowing Rothbard personally have available to them some sound and vision recordings of him in action and these should be listened to and watched in order to get a flavour of the man. Let’s take the opening of one of these talks, on ‘Keynes the Man: Hero or Villain?’ This begins: ‘First of all, I’d like to launch a pre-emptive strike [audience laughter] against any critics … who might accuse this talk of being ad hominem. In the first place, the ad hominem fallacy is that … instead of attacking the doctrine of a person, you attack the person, and that’s fallacious and that doesn’t refute the www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 2 On Murray Rothbard argument. I’ve never been in favor of that. I’ve always been in favor of refuting the doctrine and then going on to attached person!” 5. “The little bit of truth in Buckley’s remark lies in its muddled misidentification of distinctive Rothbardian character trait, namely, his ability, from the earliest age, to determine his own line, his own position, and to question seemingly unquestionable orthodoxies. If one thing characterized Rothbard all his life it was this fundamental independence of mind.” 6. “In 1956, after some travails with his dissertation supervision, Rothbard finished his PhD dissertation which was subsequently published in 1962 asThe Panic of 1819. In this book, Rothbard argues that the first major economic crisis in the new-born republic was brought about by the monetary interventions of the Bank of the USA.” 7. “Rothbard began to work on the book in 1952. Just over ten years later, with the support of the Volker Fund, Man, Economy, and State was published – not, after all, a Mises-made- www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 3 On Murray Rothbard simple but a complete treatise on Austrian economics that, by general consensus among Austrians, is second only to Human Action in its scope and brilliance.” 8. “Despite the hugely powerful influence of Mises on Rothbard’s intellectual development, it is important to note that Rothbard’s conversion to libertarianism was primarily a moral- political conversion rather than simply a consequence of economic reflection. Gary North goes so far as to maintain that ‘By 1963, [Rothbard] had grown discontented with economic analysis as an end in itself’. Logical consistency eventually forced Rothbard towards an acceptance of anarchism – the rejection of state power and control – for once one accepts the proposition that the state is justified for the provision of even limited services, for example, legal and security services, on the basis of a kind of social contract, nothing prevents the extension of that social contract to all manner of things – roads, postal services, social welfare, and so on. Rothbard realized that there is and can be no sustainable midpoint between statism and anarchism; that being the choice, there was only one way for him to go.” 9. “Echoing the thoughts of Lysander Spooner, Rothbard castigates the state for arrogating to itself the right to a monopoly of violence. If racketeering is a crime, it is not any less criminal if the racketeers call themselves the state. Llewellyn Rockwell makes the key point that Rothbard’s political thought is simple at its core but astounding in its application. He believed that common moral strictures, and standards of evaluation, should apply to the state. If theft is wrong, it is wrong. The same goes for murder, kidnapping, lying, and fraud. They are as wrong for the state as for everyone else.” 10. “He believed that the communist system was innately incoherent and its self-inflicted demise inevitable and he wrote to Buckley to this effect in 1956.” www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 4 On Murray Rothbard 11. “On the other hand, his fellow Mises Seminar participant Ralph Raico noted, Ro bard was always ‘totally inner-directed, in every way his own man, guided always by values that were an inseparable part of him – above all, his love of liberty and of human excellence’ and wasn’t to be constrained in his act on by mere labels.” 12. “Koch Industries gave Rothbard a research grant to enable him to writeThe Ethics of Liberty. Of this book, Rothbard later said, ‘It was supposed to be a reconciliation of libertarianism with conservative culture and personal ethics, what is called paleolibertarianism today. But as worked on it, it turned into an Anarcho-libertarian treatise. By the early sixties, conservatives had become pro-war and the whole idea of reconciling us with them had lost its attraction for me.” 13. “The relationship between libertarians and conservatives can often be fraught. Whatever about some other libertarians, many of whom adopt hostile attitudes towards custom, habit www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 5 On Murray Rothbard and tradition and, in particular, towards religion, this was not Rothbard’s position. In an essay on Frank Meyer, who sought a rapprochement between the conservative’s reverence for tradition and the libertarian’s love of liberty, he wrote: ‘[C]ustom must be voluntarily upheld and not enforced by coercion … people would be well advised (although not forced) to begin with a presumption in favor of custom…’ One point of tension between conservatives and libertarians is precisely this question of coercion but once it had been granted that one should not be coerced into observing customs or traditions Rothbard was more than happy to go along with much of conservative thought. In a late essay, Rothbard wrote: ‘Contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language, and a culture. Every person is born into one or several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group, with specific value, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions’.” 14. “Walter Block contends that, as an economist, Rothbard made contributions to utility theory, the theory of business cycles, public goods and monopoly, monetary theory, trade, banking and economic methodology. These topics are dealt with in his monumentalMan, Economy, and State and elsewhere. As an historian, he produced four large volumes, Conceived in Liberty dealing with liberty in the American tradition and completed, shortly before his death, two extensive volumes of economic history. His moral and political philosophy can be found in Power and Market, For a New Liberty, The Ethics of Liberty and in many articles. His political and polemical activism is evident from the astonishing mass of occasional material that he produced, some of it collectedMaking in Economic Sense and still more of it in The Irrepressible Rothbard. Of all that he did, I think it fair to say that Rothbard is best known for being a libertarian. Here, his contributions were immense. Characterizing libertarianism as the ‘philosophy of absolute individual rights based on natural law’, Wendy McElroy identifies Roth bard as a system builder who put together www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 6 On Murray Rothbard systematically elements that were not necessarily uniquely his.” 15. “He understood that widespread antinomian self-indulgence will eventually produce a social catastrophe.

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