Murray Rothbard (1926–1995)

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

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

The state is a parasite that uses a variety of psychological, economic and violent tools to force people to sustain its boundless expansion. It rings true to some extent but rather onesidedly. The author contrasts the state with "the people". One is bad, one is good. A thought immediately springs to mind: what about corporations? If corporations are not the state but rather "the people" and corporations are known to behave rather badly when unchecked - then both sides are bad. One is bad, show more the other is bad, everything is bad. But if corporations are small states and "the people" are good then what is the proposed way of organising labor and allocating resources among "the people"? Can "the people" survive without the state?
In the end the text felt like an angry pamphlet against immoral power abusers. Perhaps the author is right and we are all just subjects to a number of ever growing parasites that have encompassed the earth but what do i do about it? show less

Of the books my friends have recommended lately this has been the best. Rothbard does a fantastic job at exposing the state for what it is, and not what the state has taught us it is. Moreover he goes beyond the tired libertarian rhetoric “thieves with guns" and "a monopoly on force" and actually shows what’s wrong with these things. Most interesting, I founds, was Rothbard's attack on "nullification" and showing how it is just as wrong as any other government action for the protection show more of individual liberty. I'm so glad for the recommendation. show less