The man who would weaken the state must begin, not at the tax office, but at its ministry of opinion. Rothbard shows in his classic essay, The Anatomy of the State, that a predatory ruling apparatus cannot endure by force alone; it requires a caste of “court intellectuals” to wrap plunder in a halo of necessity, science, and morality. In his discussion of revisionism, he underlines that these intellectuals are paid to “bamboozle” the public in favor of power, fogging history and theory alike.
In the modern world, that ministry of opinion is housed above all in tax-financed universities and research institutes. There the state’s preferred intellectuals are trained, credentialed, and installed as guardians of “knowledge,” and from thence they sanctify the state’s depredations as inevitable, “evidence-based,” and morally enlightened. Any libertarian strategy against the state must therefore put the delegitimization and defunding of this caste at the center of its program.
The Academic Cartel
The university must be described not as a neutral temple of truth but as a cartelized guild. Hoppe notes in his analysis of natural elites and intellectuals that modern intellectuals are overwhelmingly tax-funded, tenured, and shielded from consumer feedback, which allows their output to become “ever more voluminous” and “viciously statist.” This is a structural result of their position as publicly funded monopolists. The mechanisms are straightforward:
- Control of entry through degrees, accreditation, and hiring committees;
- Use of jargon and hyper-technical writing as a shield against lay scrutiny;
- Reward of ideological conformity to interventionist fashions in economics, law, sociology, and education
Rothbard’s history of public schooling already shows this pattern at a lower level. From the early republic, public schools were openly justified as instruments to mold citizens into obedient servants of the state, crush dissenting sects, and assimilate minorities. Schooling was consciously used as a weapon to regiment language, belief, and behavior. The modern university is simply the same project at a higher intellectual tier.
The academic aura of “disinterest” is fraudulent. The material existence of the professoriate depends on ever-expanding budgets, subsidies, and grants. When the very livelihood of a class depends on state expenditure, its purported neutrality is a joke.
Manufactured “Consensus”
The prestige of the academic caste rests heavily on appeals to “the consensus of experts.” The libertarian must relentlessly unmask this consensus as a manufactured product of political incentives. Within any discipline there are real disagreements; yet what the layman hears as “the consensus” is usually the viewpoint that survived three filters:
- Funding priorities that reward certain questions and conclusions;
- Hiring and tenure that quietly exclude heterodox thinkers;
- Professional position statements that bless official policies as “science”
Hoppe’s account of the modern intellectual class describes how—once education is thoroughly state-funded and dominated by democratic ideology—the number of intellectuals multiplies while their quality falls and their politics converge toward ever more interventionism, precisely because their jobs and status depend on it. Hoppe makes explicit that today’s academics form an opinion cartel: they set the boundaries of “respectable” thought and brand those outside as cranks or heretics.
In Rothbard’s terms, academics function as court intellectuals whose task is to render the state’s actions plausible and inevitable. Rothbard describes how this caste bamboozles the public about war, welfare, and every other extension of power. The supposed academic “consensus” is simply the intellectual wing of that operation.
Academia as Engine of Statism
The court intellectual likes to pose as a detached observer. Rothbard’s historical work shows that this is false. Progressive academics have repeatedly been the architects of the very policies that disfigure modern society.
In his study of American entry into World War I, Rothbard shows how progressive journalists, ministers, and professors exulted in the war as the “fulfillment” of their ideals—central planning, regimentation, and permanent technocratic management. Likewise, in his analysis of the welfare state’s origins, Rothbard traces the rise of intervention, not to impersonal “industrialization,” but to a coalition of technocratic intellectuals and corporate interests. These groups sought subsidies, cartelization, and prestige, and they found in the welfare state the perfect vehicle. Ideology and economic interest fused: intellectuals supplied the moral and technical rationalizations, while business elites supplied money and political leverage. The result is a self-serving feedback loop:
- Policy disasters created by academic theories are reinterpreted as evidence that the state lacked power or funding;
- The same experts then demand new programs, commissions, and regulations to correct the mess;
- Each failure becomes a pretext for more intervention and more professors on the payroll
Rothbard underscores that exposing this pattern—showing that “welfare” and war routinely serve ruling coalitions of bureaucrats, big business, and intellectuals—is a central libertarian task precisely because it delegitimizes academia’s role as disinterested advisor.
Drying Up the Academic Tithe
If the university is the state’s ministry of opinion, its lifeblood is the compulsory levy. The libertarian must therefore turn taxpayers against the academic tithe, not with anti-intellectual slogans but with a sense of violated rights. Taxpayers are currently forced to finance institutions that:
- Teach their children doctrines they may regard as false or hostile;
- Train specialists who design the regulations that cripple their businesses;
- Develop pseudo-scientific rationalizations for wars, surveillance, and expropriation
Rothbard’s critique of public education highlights that “there is only one solution”: the state must be removed entirely from schooling, and no public funds should be used for education at any level, including higher education.
Tactically, one may exploit existing ideological fractures. If conservatives object to paying for radical cultural projects, and progressives object to funding military or corporate research, each successful veto chips away at the myth of neutral “public” funding. The goal is to drive all parties toward the same conclusion: no one should be forced to subsidize ideas he rejects.
Decentralizing Knowledge
Academia will portray any attack on its privileges as an attack on knowledge itself. The libertarian must reverse the framing: a cartelized, tax-funded intellectual class is the enemy of knowledge, not its guardian.
Rothbard’s account of the growth of the welfare state shows how a proliferating class of “overeducated” experts sought power, subsidies, and licensed monopolies for their professions, and how they used ideology to justify this to the public. Concentrated intellectual power is itself a political construct.
Hoppe’s reconstruction of the fate of intellectuals in democracy points out that once schools and universities are brought under state control, intellectuals become public employees and their production becomes predictably statist. This shows the importance of a program of decentralization: break the monopoly, and ideas will once again have to earn their keep in a market of voluntary patrons.
Alternative centers of learning—independent institutes, online platforms, apprenticeships, reading circles—are not a regrettable second best; they are embodiments of what Albert Jay Nock calls social power: the network of voluntary cooperation that stands opposed to state power. The task is not to abolish scholarship but to relocate it from the realm of coercion to the realm of choice.
From State Power Back to Social Power
The larger aim is to strip the state of one of its most important supports: the prestige of a compliant intellectual class. As that prestige erodes, and as compulsory funding is challenged, academics must either serve willing patrons in a competitive market of ideas or shrink to the scale that voluntary contributions can sustain. In either case, the state loses a vital organ of legitimation.
The enemy, then, is not thought, learning, or theory. The enemy is intellect captured and armed by the state—intellect turned into a salaried priesthood for power. To attack the university in its current form is not to attack knowledge; it is to liberate knowledge from its role as handmaiden to coercion. Only by unmasking academia as the state’s ministry of opinion, and by cutting its compulsory rations, can we hope to move power back from the state to society.
