Murray Rothbard gave libertarianism one of its clearest ethical structures: Individuals own themselves. From self-ownership follow property rights, contract, and the prohibition on aggression. Liberty does not mean that one person may rule another. It means that each person is bound by the same rule: do not invade the person or justly acquired property of others.
In The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard sought to establish a “social ethic of liberty.” But even if we accept his ethical argument in full, a different question remains: What keeps those boundaries stable over time? That is not a question about what is right, it is a question about power.
A Simple Thought Experiment
Suppose A and B both possess complete self-ownership. Their property is acquired in ways fully consistent with Rothbardian principles. There is no theft, fraud, state privilege, expropriation, or unjust initial acquisition.
After decades of voluntary exchange, investment, inheritance, and entrepreneurship, A owns far more property than B. Nothing about that result, by itself, violates Rothbard’s principles. Now let time continue.
A does not merely own more land, firms, and capital. He also has greater purchasing power. He can buy more security, legal services, arbitration, investigation, and protection. He can absorb the cost of a long dispute. He may be able to relocate more easily, finance alternative institutions, or endure losses that would ruin B.
B still owns himself completely. Ethically, A possesses not one additional ounce of self-ownership. But their practical capacities are no longer symmetrical. So what keeps A inside the non-aggression boundary?
To answer that “A has no right to aggress against B” is correct, but incomplete. It answers whether aggression is just. It does not answer what makes aggression unattractive when the potential aggressor possesses a large advantage in resources. Those are different questions.
Rothbard Already Saw Half of the Problem
Libertarians often argue that a free society must be sustained by education. People must understand natural rights, property, and non-aggression. A culture that respects liberty is less likely to destroy it. Rothbard himself regarded education as necessary. But he warned against treating it as sufficient.
In “Strategies for a Libertarian Victory,” he called the purely educational approach “educationism.” There was nothing wrong with education as far as it went, he argued, but by itself it avoided a harder question: How are we to confront the problem of power?
That question is usually directed at the state. Why should it stop there? If power changes the costs of action, must the source of that power always be political? This does not require the claim that wealthy people are evil or that concentrated property is unjust. It requires only a much weaker observation: Resources affect what actions a person can afford to take, what losses he can absorb, and what resistance he can overcome. If that is true, then the distribution of property may affect more than consumption. It may also affect the relative costs of aggression, resistance, adjudication, and exit.
Has Market Competition Already Solved This?
Rothbard did not leave enforcement entirely to moral education. In For a New Liberty, he envisioned competing protection agencies, private courts, and voluntary arbitration. No agency would possess the state’s legal monopoly. An abusive firm could lose customers, encounter rival agencies, and face market discipline.
That is a serious answer. But it moves the question one step back: Why should the market for protection remain unaffected by a high concentration of purchasing power? Imagine that one actor becomes the largest landowner and the largest customer of protection and judicial services in a region. He gains no additional natural rights. Yet he may become a far more important customer to the institutions that enforce those rights.
Would an arbitration firm face exactly the same incentives when ruling against its largest customer as when ruling against someone who contributes almost nothing to its revenue? Would protection firms necessarily remain decentralized if their customer base became highly concentrated? Could long-term contracts, vertical integration, network effects, or alliances among large firms change the cost of exit for smaller actors? If A and B enter a dispute, are their capacities to finance investigation, security, repeated arbitration, and prolonged conflict irrelevant simply because their rights are formally equal?
None of these questions proves that private protection must fail. None proves that wealth concentration must produce aggression. But neither can they be answered by repeating that aggression violates the non-aggression principle.
A Just Rule Is Not Necessarily a Self-Enforcing Rule
This distinction matters. Self-ownership may be correct. Property rights may be correct. The non-aggression principle may be correct. Yet a free order still requires mechanisms that make violations costly even for those with the greatest capacity to violate them.
If the final answer is education, Rothbard’s own objection returns. Education is itself a social mechanism requiring continuous effort. Moreover, those with the greatest resources also have unusually strong capacities to finance schools, scholarship, media, think tanks, legal argument, and public persuasion.
Rothbard understood this relationship very well when analyzing the state. Political power does not survive by force alone. It seeks legitimacy, and intellectuals and opinion-forming institutions help provide it. So the same question can be asked symmetrically: Why should private power, as a matter of principle, be unable to influence the institutions that produce and transmit the ideas by which private power is judged?
Again, the claim is not that this must happen. The question is what mechanism prevents it. Nor is this an argument for redistribution or state regulation. Using concentrated state power to solve the possible consequences of concentrated private power merely recreates, in a more obvious form, the very problem Rothbard spent his career exposing.
The point is narrower: A libertarian order needs an endogenous answer to the problem of power. Market competition may be part of it. Reputation may be part of it. Decentralized defense, arbitration, and exit may be part of it. Moral education may be part of it. But if these are the answer, they should themselves be analyzed dynamically.
Do they continue to work when wealth and practical capacity become highly asymmetric? Do competitive protection institutions remain competitive when the demand side becomes concentrated? Does exit remain a meaningful constraint when many of the resources required for exit are themselves privately owned? Does reputation impose comparable costs on actors whose dependence on any particular trading partner differs by orders of magnitude?
These are not objections to liberty. They are questions about the conditions under which liberty remains stable.
The Question Remains
Rothbard asked libertarians a question that should not be forgotten: How do we confront the problem of power? He supplied a powerful answer to one part of it: What ethical boundaries should constrain power? But there is another part: What makes the most powerful actors willing—or forces them, through the structure of incentives—to remain within those boundaries over long periods of time?
If libertarian theory can answer that question, its case becomes stronger. If it cannot yet answer it, that does not refute Rothbard, it simply means that his question is still unfinished.
