Chapter 2: A Conversation with Murray N. Rothbard
AEN: How did Man, Economy, and State come to be?
Chapter 1: Murray Rothbard
The Murray Rothbard wall poster depicts a graying professor pecking at a typewriter. His words rise magically from the machine and blend into a black flag of anarchy rippling above his head. Beneath the drawing is the caption: “Murray N. Rothbard—the greatest living enemy of the state.” The poster, like almost everything else relating to politics, causes Rothbard to laugh. He has a penchant for humor that, in his younger days, let him to write an Off-Broadway play, Mozart Was a Red, which poked fun at the Ayn Rand cult of the individual. Today he still laughs very easily.
Section I: Rothbard: Man, Economist Anti-Statist
The Rothbard Reader
Introduction
Few economists manage to produce a body of work that boasts a serious following twenty years after their deaths. Murray N. Rothbard is a rare exception. More than two decades since his passing, his influence lives on, both in the work of a new generation of social scientists, and among a growing number of the general public.
Since Donald Trump condemned George W. Bush for the Iraq war in a South Carolina debate, the conventional wisdom has been that Trump hurt himself badly in a state that tends to heavily favor military intervention in general, and George W. Bush specifically.
In the cramped carriages of trains on the London underground, the bumping of body parts periodically furnishes occasion for a few murmured words between strangers. Aside from these apologetic exchanges, the passengers usually avoid getting involved with one another.
Back when I taught collegiate political science, one of my pet peeves was the habit of some students to treat republics and democracies as if they were opposites. ”The founding fathers wanted a republic, not a democracy,” it was often said.
This sentiment, I suspect, has permeated some sectors of the general population thanks to years of usage by mostly conservative writers and talk show hosts who use the two terms for mostly the rhetorical purpose of condemning “too much” democracy.
“Republic” Defined
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has come out in favor of eliminating the $100 bill. Following on the European Central Bank’s decision to scrap the €500 note, it is clear that the international war on cash is about to intensify.
The Individual member states of the EU are fortunate in that they have (so far) managed to retain their specific and separate identities to a point. While Europeans from larger countries like the UK, France, and Germany no doubt like to discount the necessity or importance of countries like Greece or Portugal, those countries at least each continue to function as states among equals, to a certain extent.
It is not so for the member states of the United States, where individual states have been all but totally subsumed into the whole that is the “United States.”
