The libertarian movement has been chided by William F. Buckley, Jr., for failing to use its “strategic intelligence” in facing the major problems of our time. We have, indeed, been too often prone to “pursue our busy little seminars on whether or not to demunicipalize the garbage collectors” (as Buckley has contemptuously written), while ignoring and failing to apply libertarian theory to the most vital problem of our time: war and peace.
Scientism and Values, Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand), 1960; The Logic of Action One: Method, Money, and the Austrian School (Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar, 1997), pp. 3-23.
Until a few years ago, the conservative spectrum could be comfortably sundered into the “traditionalists” at one pole, the “libertarians” at the other, and the “fusionists” as either judicious synthesizers or muddled moderates (depending on one’s point of view) in between.
The flat tax draws virtually unanimous support from the “right-thinking” intellectuals in our society, including academics, writers, and media pundits—all people who have managed successfully to identify their own views, whatever they may be, with the general welfare. Any policy that draws unanimous support from these people can’t be all good. There must be a catch somewhere.
Editors note: On Aug. 8, 1957, Murray N. Rothbard wrote to Richard C. Cornuelle of the Volker Fund, strongly recommending Emil Kauder’s reseaches into the Aristotelian background of marginal utility and Austrian economic theory (Rothbard Papers). In a memo of February 1957, “Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism,” reproduced below, Rothbard set down some thoughts on these matters. Rothbard’s letters reveal an early and keen interest in the history of economic thought.
In this unpublished memo to the Volcker Fund in May 1960, Rothbard discusses some of the enormous differences among Catholics on political and economic questions: Catholics can be found who are left-wing anarchists, socialists, middle-of-the-roaders, fascists, and ardent free-enterprisers and individualists. Furthermore, even on such strict dogmatic matters as the immorality of birth control, for example, Catholics agreeing on that point differ as to whether birth control should or should not be illegal.
A huge listing of all published works, from 1949 to the present.
The modern American Right began, in the 1930’s and 1940’s, as a reaction against the New Deal and the Roosevelt Revolution, and specifically as an opposition to the critical increase of statism and state intervention at home, and to war and state intervention abroad. The guiding motif of what we might call the “old American Right” was a deep and passionate commitment to individual liberty, and to the belief that this liberty, in the personal and the economic spheres, was gravely menaced by the growth and power of the Leviathan state, at home and abroad.
Conceived in Liberty, Volume 1 (Mises Institute, 1999 [1975], pp. 174-181.
