March 2 would have been Murray Rothbard’s 100th birthday, so it is only fitting that I devote this week’s column to my great friend and mentor. I have often written about his life, but this time I would like to describe him as I found him in our many conversations, both in person and over the telephone.
In light of the US’s actions against Iran and the overt goal of regime change, it is worth recalling the original, covert regime change the CIA brought about in Iran and its decades-long consequences.
Session 1: “Action, Choice, and Value”
Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, pp. 1-33; Rothbard Reader, pp. 89-96
Americans are taught that the Constitution completed the Revolution. The Articles of Confederation were weak, disorder reigned, Shays’s Rebellion terrified the countryside, and sober statesmen in Philadelphia heroically designed a “more perfect Union,” as the story goes. The Constitution thus appears as the Revolution’s crowning achievement.
But, as Rothbard showed, the Constitution was not the fulfillment of 1776, but rather its undoing.
The US president’s new global trade tariffs went into effect at a 10 percent level at midnight on Tuesday, February 23, after a Supreme Court ruling struck down his so-called “reciprocal” tariffs, arguing that using emergency economic powers to impose widespread surcharges on countries around the world is illegal.
Few figures in modern intellectual history carried an idea to its logical conclusion as relentlessly as Murray Rothbard. Building upon the formidable theoretical structure developed by Ludwig von Mises, Rothbard accomplished a remarkable synthesis in economic and political thought. Where Mises constructed a rigorous scientific explanation of how economies function, Rothbard extended that framework into a comprehensive philosophy of social order.
