Murray Rothbard (1926–1995)

Rothbard wrote The Betrayal of the American Right as a kind of personal intellectual history, a partizan’s idiosyncratic view of the evolution of right-wing thought in American politics through the 1960s. The laissez-faire/isolationist Old Right to which he pledged allegiance emerged from the individualist tradition, in opposition to the New Deal and US entry into WWII. By the mid-1940s, Rothbard had graduated from Colombia and was calling himself ‘an extreme right winger.’ His show more discovery of Austrian economics in 1949 and subsequent conversion to anarchism (‘a simple exercise in logic’) Rothbard calls the ‘two most exciting and shattering intellectual events’ of his life. Naturally, he says, the anarchism he adopted was individualistic and free-market. None of that ‘woolly communalism’ for Murray. In Rothbard's telling, the Old Right was suppressed during WWII, by calumny and obloquy and political espionage, but experienced a short renaissance after the war as Cold War anxieties opened up space for its freedom & free-enterprise agitation. Alas, the antiwar isolationist Old Right made its last stand at the Korean War, and by the mid-1950s had been ‘betrayed’ by the New Right and the theocratic warmongering civil-liberties-crushing ‘conservative’ intellectuals given a platform at William F. Buckley’s National Review. The Goldwater campaign was a dagger through the heart of the Old Right, and Rothbard surprisingly found himself in agreement with the Free Speech/antiwar New Left in the 1960s.

Between the lines, The Betrayal of the American Right is an entertaining intellectual dissection of the ideologue, with his aversion to complexity and ambiguity; the obsessively meticulous assignment of factional labels, from Tory Anarchists to Minnesota Trotskyists; the unfounded assumptions and the hysterical hyperbole. Murray says that ‘the despotism of Prohibition’ was ‘surely the greatest single act of tyranny ever imposed in America.’ Come on. A well-sourced narrative history of the Prohibition era like Daniel Okrent’s Last Call tells instead of the ineptitude of the State, the futility of commanding particular behaviors, and the capacity of enterprising and resourceful people to subvert stupid laws. For the ideologue, though, every slope is slippery. The New Deal unleashed ‘the tyranny of the Executive’ and transferred the ‘ultimate power of initiative’ from private enterprise to government. Nope. WWII, according to Murray, ‘would transform America into a Leviathan state, a domestic totalitarian collectivism.’ (yikes!) It did not, unless that is what you believe you see.

Murray and his friends spend a lot of time trying to figure out where exactly they sit on the ideological spectrum, which they assume is a linear arrangement from Left to Right. Time and again, though, he tells us that such and such a development led to a ‘reshuffling’ of the ideological spectrum. The drive of the New Deal toward war was supported by Left-Liberals. Business interests once opposed to FDR supported the stimulus provided by government spending on armaments and materiel. Conservatives/liberals didn't like this/that, then they did. Murray even tells us that Robert A. Taft was ‘on the extreme left wing of the extreme right wing’ (?!), but never really figures out how and why the conventional Left/Right designations are inadequate for anything but polemical jousting.

Rothbard got his anti-pragmatic myopia from his mentor, Ludwig von Mises, who wrote in his magnum opus Human Action that his economic theories were ‘not open to any verification or falsification on the ground of experience’ (p. 862). Deduce from your preferred first principle, then stick with it regardless. Except that laissez faire and isolationism in the American context are ahistorical and impracticable. The American State was never not expansionist and interventionist, and market economies do not exist apart from government activity. Perhaps they could, but they never have.

Murray wants you to think of him as a libertarian, forever committed to individual liberty, and you might if all you read was The Betrayal of the American Right, written in 1971 (published 2007). Oh, but Murray went bad. By the 1990s, he was promoting a boorish social conservatism, arguing in favor of obedience to tradition as the foundation of liberty, property and order—the individualist tendency jettisoned in favor of a retrograde right-wing populism. Blech. So long, Murray. show less

Since the Libertarian party has been getting so much attention during the 2016 election as a possible alternative to the candidates from the two major parties, it seemed like a good idea to try to learn more about the positions of the party. I started with their 2016 party platform but found it nothing more than the equivalent of a few powerpoint bullet points.

I was therefore happy to have found this book from Rothbard since it tries to layout the Libertarian position on everything from show more drugs, abortion, foreign policy, and even air and noise pollution. Although I still have many questions about their positions, after finishing this book I feel I have a real understanding of the principles of the party. The book begins with a discussion of the basic principles of the Libertarians and then, chapter for chapter applies those principles to specific topics in a well reasoned fashion. It is also easy to read depite many of the political discussions being dated to the situations in the 1970s.

The author, Murray Rothbard, is considered to be one of the founders of the Libertarian movement and had been involved with other key movement figures like Ayn Rand and the Koch brothers. According to other books about the movement, most of those relationships ended in disagreements. This book was published originally in 1973 as an attempt to layout the Libertarian principles. It succeeds very well.

Reading the book, it was hard to escape the impression that Libertarian thinking fit perfectly for a comfortably living academic who now has his own and wants to keep everyone else away. It is hard to imagine this philosophy appealing to people that are poor or downtrodden or not strong enough to protect their own interests like the women killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire or coal miners who had been forced to "sell their souls to the company store."

It is easy to imagine the movement as an association of people arguing about true principles rather than as an association of people that could actually build a society that functions. One conservative (William Buckley) described them as a group of people that would argue constantly about privatizing garbage disposal. I can imagine their get-togethers having the same level of discussion as a get-together of Trotsky and Lenin followers.

It is debatable whether many of these Libertarian approaches would work in practice. For that reason, it would be really useful if a group of Libertarians would form a community somewhere based upon their principles to see if they could really make this work. For example, many of their approaches for providing community services and infrastructure is based upon an assumption that so many firms would be competing to supply you with water and remove your garbage that those businesses would provide perfectly efficient services to you. Ironically, Rothbard's love of firms in the earlier chapters is dismissed by his attacks of our current big businesses with their tendencies to drive towards monopolies and to feed at the government trough.

The Libertarian society painted by Rotbard would likely be a very litigious society since many of Rothbard's remedies for air and noise pollution involve suing the person who caused this attack on your personal property.

Rothbard paints the Libertarian movement like other utopian movements but claims that his utopian vision is the one utopia that will really work since he feels it is the only movement based upon real human nature. The last chapter at the end of the book discusses how to make a Libertarian world come about. His proposed techniques are admittedly borrowed from Marxist movements and include many strategies that have since been implemented by the Koch brothers and the tea party movement. He also sees the need for a "crisis moment" to occur in order to get the world to adopt the Libertarian agenda. If he were still alive, Rothbard would clearly be made happy by the crisis of the 2016 election. He sees hope that "government itself has been desanctified in America. No one trusts politicians or government anymore; all government is viewed with abiding hostility, thus returning us to that state of healthy distrust of government ...."

One challenge for the Libertarian political party having a presidential candidate would be what would happen if he would actually win. Since Rothbard explains that the Libertarian movement is against government in general, it would make it very difficult for any true Libertarian to take the presidential oath to preserve the constitution.

In summary, this book is recommended as a logical and easy to read explanation of Libertarian thinking. show less

If this had been the only book on libertarianism I had ever read, I would probably have become an authoritarian. I'm aware that academics often use words differently than us normies do, but the idea that there is a school of "ethics" that includes allowing one's own baby to starve to death is unfathomable.

Clearly by the 1980s Rothbard was already well on his journey right-ward from the leftist activists had the pleasure of working with in the 1960s Peace & Liberty Party and the author of show more radical works like "Man economy & State." He spends the whole book looking at his basis for an economic and "legal" system in a libertarian society and expanding upon those for various parts of life and society. However, he just accepts his own basis as fact and doesn't even seem to attempt to argue why that should be a basis of any thought, let alone libertarianism. This is particularly true in the first section of property ownership. There is no explanation why mixing one's labor with unowned property automatically makes it the private property of the laborer. There is no question as to the idea that an individual can be private property, even to himself, while also claiming that slavery, even so-called voluntary slavery, is unethical. There is absolutely no explanation why inheritance is considered an ethical transfer of private property rights, but a promise to do so is not. (There are plenty of reasons he says why a promise is not, but I see that as little difference than inheritance). There was a whole chapter on the transfer of land titles and the problem of tracking such back to its rightful owner, yet there was 0 reference to the obvious cases of this such as European colonialization into Australia, Africa, & the Americas. An incredible western European centric viewpoint, particularly when you consider Rothbard was an American Jew.

One thing he did do right was right in the introduction he made it clear that nothing contained within would be able to challenge Marxists ideals, including the labor-theory-of-value, as the ideas are so far apart, they can't even be compared properly.

I've been a Libertarian for over 20 years, and no argument against liberty written by a statist has come nearly close to making me question my belief in libertarianism as this one of the American libertarian right. show less

An exceptionally clear and exciting essay by American economist Murray Rothbard, one of the leaders of the "Austrian School" revival. This is a challenging work, clearly articulating a particular ordinalist approach to marginal utility, attacking all cardinalist notions, and then elaborating on the classic French Harmony case for welfare economics conceived as a defense of a strict free market. Most readers will likely disagree. But you've learned nothing until you specify precisely why you show more disagree.

I recommend that one read this in tandem with Carl Menger's "Principles of Economics." show less