Rothbard A to Z

ACTION

Individual human beings exist. Moreover, they do not simply “move,” as do unmotivated atoms or molecules; they act, that is, they have goals and they make choices of means to attain their goals. They order their values or ends in a hierarchy according to whether they attribute greater or lesser importance to them …

Economic Controversies, p. 33

… the fact of human action and of purposive choice also becomes evident to each person who bothers to contemplate it; it is just as evident as the direct sense experience of the laboratory.

Economic Controversies, p. 35

… I would deny, as an Aristotelian and neo-Thomist, any such alleged “laws of logical structure” that the human mind necessarily imposes on the chaotic structure of reality. Instead, I would call all such laws “laws of reality,” which the mind apprehends from investigating and collating the facts of the real world. My view is that the fundamental axiom and subsidiary axioms are derived from the experience of reality and are therefore in the broadest sense empirical.

Economic Controversies, p. 65

The action axiom … should be, according to Aristotelian philosophy, unchallengeable and self-evident since the critic who attempts to refute it finds that he must use it in the process of alleged refutation. Thus, the axiom of the existence of human consciousness is demonstrated as being self-evident by the fact that the very act of denying the existence of consciousness must itself be performed by a conscious being.

Economic Controversies, pp. 69–70

… human action is not like physics …

Economic Controversies, p. 105

I would consider the axiom a law of reality rather than a law of thought, and hence “empirical” rather than “a priori.”

Economic Controversies, p. 108

Human action is the use of means to arrive at preferred ends. Such action contrasts to the observed behavior of stones and planets, for it implies purpose on the part of the actor. Action implies choice among alternatives. Man has means, or resources, which he uses to arrive at various ends; these resources may be time, money, labor energy, land, capital goods, and so on. He uses these resources to attain his most preferred ends. From his action, we can deduce that he has acted so as to satisfy his most highly valued desires or preferences.

Economic Controversies, p. 290

… Mises demonstrated that all knowledge of human action rests on methodological dualism, on a profound difference between the study of human beings on the one hand, and of stones, molecules, or atoms, on the other. The difference is that individual human beings are conscious, that they adopt values, and make choices—act—on the basis of trying to attain those values and goals. He pointed out that this axiom of action is self-evident, that is (a) evident to the self once pointed out, and (b) cannot be refuted without self-contradiction, that is without using the axiom in any attempt to refute it. Since the axiom of action is self-evidently true, any logical deductions or implications from that action must be absolutely, uncompromisingly, “apodictically,” true as well. Not only is this body of economic theory absolutely true, but therefore any talk of “testing” its truth is absurd and meaningless, since the axioms are self-evident and no “testing” could occur without employing the axiom.

Ludwig von Mises: Scholar, Creator, Hero, pp. 34–35

Human action is defined simply as purposeful behavior.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1

All human beings act by virtue of their existence and their nature as human beings. We could not conceive of human beings who do not act purposefully, who have no ends in view that they desire and attempt to attain. Things that did not act, that did not behave purposefully, would no longer be classified as human.… The fact that men act by virtue of their being human is indisputable and incontrovertible. To assume the contrary would be an absurdity.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 2

The distinguishing characteristic of human beings is that all humans act. Action is purposeful behavior directed toward the attainment of ends in some future period which will involve the fulfillment of wants otherwise remaining unsatisfied. Action involves the expectation of a less imperfectly satisfied state as a result of the action. The individual actor chooses to employ elements in his environment as means to the expected achievement of his ends, economizing them by directing them toward his most valued ends (leaving his least valued ones unsatisfied), and in the ways that his reason tells him are most appropriate to attain these ends. His method—his chosen means—may or may not turn out to be inappropriate.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 7–8

All action is an attempt to exchange a less satisfactory state of affairs for a more satisfactory one.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 19

… man must always act … man is always acting.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 71

… human action is a necessary attribute of the existence of human beings …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 72

… the object of all action is to maximize psychic revenue, and to do this the actor tries to see to it that the psychic revenue from the action exceeds the psychic cost, so that he obtains a psychic profit.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 104

… in every action, men try to obtain the greatest advantage, i.e., to attain the end located on the highest possible point on their value scale. This was also called attempting to “maximize psychic revenue” or “psychic income.” This is a praxeological truth, a general law holding for all human action, with no qualification whatsoever.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 213

Each individual acts so that the expected psychic revenue, or achievement of utility, from his action will exceed its psychic cost. The latter is the forgone utility of the next best alternative that he could adopt with the available means. Both the psychic revenue and the psychic cost are purely subjective to the individual. Since all action deals with units of supply of a good, we may refer to these subjective estimates as marginal utility and marginal cost, the marginal signifying action in steps.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 319

All actions on the market are marginal.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 1049–50

When people are free to act, they will always act in a way that they believe will maximize their utility, i.e., will raise them to the highest possible position on their value scale. Their utility ex ante will be maximized … Any action, any exchange that takes place on the free market or more broadly in the free society, occurs because of the expected benefit to each party concerned.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1061

ADVERTISING

If any wants are artificial, they are those generated by government propaganda.

Economic Controversies, p. 426

… as living standards rise above subsistence, the consumer gets more particular and choosey about what he buys. The businessman must pay even greater court to the consumer than he did before; hence the furious attempts of market research to find out what the consumers want to buy.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 141

… a new firm or brand must strive to differentiate its product from existing brands, to offer something new, different, and exciting.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 710

The very function of marketing is the acquisition and dissemination of information about the goods or services available for sale.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 586

The brand name and the wide knowledge of the brand come from consumers’ desire for the product attached to that particular brand and are therefore a result of consumer demand …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 664

A brand name, therefore, is an attribute of a labor factor, specifically the owner or owners of the firm. Or, considered catallactically, the brand name represents the decision-making rent accruing to the owner and his name.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 679

Every man as a self-owner freely decides his own scale of valuations. On the free market no one can force another to choose his product. And no other individual can ever “create” someone’s values for him; he must adopt the value himself.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 738

… the very writers who complain most of the wiles and lures of advertising never apply their critique to the one area where it is truly correct: the advertising of politicians.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 888

… it is not true that advertising “creates” wants or demands on the part of the consumers.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 978

It is because the range of goods available to the consumers is expanding so much beyond simple staples needed for subsistence, in quantity, quality, and breadth of product substitutes, that businessmen must compete as never before in paying court to the consumer, in trying to obtain his attention: in short, in advertising. Increasing advertising is a function of the increasingly effective range of competition for the consumer’s favor.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 980–81

ANARCHY

… anarchism [is] a simple matter of libertarian logic.

Betrayal of the American Right, p. 145

Once concede the power of the people to consent as well as the natural law of “equal freedom from subjection,” and the logical consequence must be anarchism.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 279

Once admit any right of secession whatever, and there is no logical stopping-point short of the right of individual secession, which logically entails anarchism, since then individuals may secede and patronize their own defense agencies, and the State has crumbled.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 182

… law and the State are both conceptually and historically separable, and law would develop in an anarchistic market society without any form of State.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 236

… liberty is a profoundly revolutionary concept and it can only be achieved through the liquidation of the oppressor State.

Left and Right, p. 492

We must hold as our foremost objective the abolition of [the] State.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 92

The aim of free-market anarchists is precisely to end governmental omnipotence and planning, and to substitute for this each man’s planning for himself.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 129

As long as the State exists and has its being, none of us can be totally free …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 184

Libertarians want the end of politics; they wish to abolish politics forever, so that each individual may live his life unmolested and as he sees fit.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 207

Anarcho-capitalism is an easily explainable system …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 215

… I am a dedicated anarchist.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 471

I am indeed opposed to the State and therefore to politics. If the State-and-politics disappeared tomorrow no one would be happier than myself.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 518

… I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual. Anarchists oppose the State because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 535

… only the State can confiscate my property or put me in jail if I do not pay its tax-tribute. Therefore, only the State regularly exists and has its very being by means of coercive depredations on private property.

… anarchists are interested in the abolition of this type of action: e.g., aggressive physical violence against person and property …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 535

What anarchism proposes to do, then, is to abolish the State, i.e., to abolish the regularized institution of aggressive coercion.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 535

… the hallmark of an anarchist society is one where no man may legally compel someone who is not a convicted criminal to do anything, since that would be aggression against an innocent man’s person or property.

… under anarchism there can be no coercion of the non-criminal …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 538

… our ultimate objective [is] to privatize all of society, to turn all governmental operations over to private enterprise.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 952

… the State should be abolished and all functions privatized …

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 1178

… a truly free market is totally incompatible with the existence of a State, an institution that presumes to “defend” person and property by itself subsisting on the unilateral coercion against private property known as taxation.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1056

… there is no accepted meaning to the word “anarchism” itself. The average person may think he knows what it means, especially that it is bad, but actually he does not. …

One very popular charge against anarchism is that it “means chaos.” … anarchists have always believed that the establishment of their system would eliminate the chaotic elements now troubling the world.… The root of the word comes from the term anarchos, meaning opposition to authority or commands.

Strictly Confidential, pp. 26–27

We must conclude that the question “are libertarians anarchists?” simply cannot be answered on etymological grounds.

Strictly Confidential, p. 32

ANIMALS

Animals are “economic land,” since they are original nature-given resources.

Economic Controversies, p. 358

It is more than a jest to point out that animals, after all, don’t respect the “rights” of other animals; it is the condition of the world, and of all natural species, that they live by eating other species. Inter-species survival is a matter of tooth and claw. It would surely be absurd to say that the wolf is “evil” because he exists by devouring and “aggressing against” lambs, chickens, etc. The wolf is not an evil being who “aggresses against” other species; he is simply following the natural law of his own survival. Similarly for man. It is just as absurd to say that men “aggress against” cows and wolves as to say that wolves “aggress against” sheep. If, furthermore, a wolf attacks a man and the man kills him, it would be absurd to say either that the wolf was an “evil aggressor” or that the wolf was being “punished” for his “crime.” And yet such would be the implications of extending a natural-rights ethic to animals. Any concept of rights, of criminality, of aggression, can only apply to actions of one man or group of men against other human beings.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 156

The fact that animals can obviously not petition for their “rights” is part of their nature, and part of the reason why they are clearly not equivalent to, and do not possess the rights of, human beings.

Ethics of Liberty, pp. 156–57

Man, in particular, must use his mind to learn, to formulate his goals and the means to attain them. He has no inborn instinct to guide him automatically to the correct choices, as the bird or the salmon are supposed to be guided.

… animals are bound within the environment in which they find themselves. If a group of animals are adapted only to the environment of a certain area, X, and they are forced to leave X they will die. They must then defend this environment to the death. Man, on the contrary, is unique among living beings for his capacity to change his environment, to leave, transform, and alter his circumstances on behalf of his own survival and progress. Man is not bound to a fixed plot of earth and all the environmental conditions upon it; he can move, he can build shelter against the elements, he can transform the earth, etc.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, pp. 140, 142

Animals are “economic land,” because they are equivalent to physical land in being original, nature-given factors of production.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 172

… animals are also “land” in the sense of given original nature factors …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 173

Animals are born with “instincts”; these instincts are, in essence, sense-determined responses. Animals do not possess a free will or rational consciousness, hence they can only adapt, in sensory fashion, to their environment. Man, on the other hand, can alter his given environment by use of his reason and his free will.

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 123

ANTI-TRUST LAWS

… the intervention by the federal government was designed, not to curb big business monopoly for the sake of the public weal, but to create monopolies that big business (as well as trade associations of smaller business) had not been able to establish amidst the competitive gales of the free market.

Left and Right, p. 18

… antitrust laws and prosecutions, while seemingly designed to “combat monopoly” and “promote competition,” actually do the reverse, for they coercively penalize and repress efficient forms of market structure and activity.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 907

The only viable definition of monopoly is a grant of privilege from the government. It therefore becomes quite clear that it is impossible for the government to decrease monopoly by passing punitive laws. The only way for the government to decrease monopoly, if that is the desideratum, is to remove its own monopoly grants. The antitrust laws, therefore, do not in the least “diminish monopoly.” What they do accomplish is to impose a continual, capricious harassment of efficient business enterprise.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1117

AQUINAS, THOMAS

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) was the towering intellect of the High Middle Ages, the man who built on the philosophical system of Aristotle, on the concept of natural law, and on Christian theology to forge “Thomism,” a mighty synthesis of philosophy, theology and the sciences of man.… It was the Summa, more than any other work, that was to establish Thomism as the mainstream of Catholic scholastic theology in centuries to come.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 51

… Aquinas was a firm believer in the superiority of private to communal property and resource ownership. Private ownership becomes a necessary feature of man’s earthly state. It is the best guarantee of a peaceful and orderly society, and it provides maximum incentive for the care and efficient use of property.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 56

… Aquinas, anticipating the famous theory of John Locke, grounded the right of original acquisition of property on two basic factors: labor and occupation. The initial right of each person is to ownership over his own self, in Aquinas’s view in a “proprietary right over himself.” Such individual self-ownership is based on the capacity of man as a rational being.

Next, cultivation and use of previously unused land establishes a just property title in the land in one man rather than in others.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, pp. 56–57

… in reviving and building on Aristotle, St. Thomas introduced and established in the Christian world a philosophy of natural law, a philosophy in which human reason is able to master the basic truths of the universe. In the hands of Aquinas as in Aristotle, philosophy, with reason as its instrument of knowledge, became once again the queen of the sciences. Human reason demonstrated the reality of the universe, and of the natural law of discoverable classes of entities. Human reason could know about the nature of the world, and it could therefore know the proper ethics for mankind. Ethics, then, became decipherable by reason.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 57

Thomism … demonstrated that the laws of nature, including the nature of mankind, provided the means for man’s reason to discover a rational ethics. To be sure, God created the natural laws of the universe, but the apprehension of these natural laws was possible whether or not one believed in God as creator. In this way, a rational ethic for man was provided on a truly scientific rather than on a supernatural foundation.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 58

… St. Thomas Aquinas was the systematizer of the entire range of intellectual endeavor …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 81

In Thomist thought, reason and empiricism are not separated but allied and interwoven. Truth is built up by reason on a solid groundwork in empirically known reality. The rational and empirical were integrated into one coherent whole.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 129

The Thomist tradition … vindicating the independence of philosophy from theology and proclaiming the ability of man’s reason to understand and arrive at the laws, physical and ethical, of the natural order.… The assertion of an order of natural laws discoverable by reason is, by itself, neither pro- nor anti-religious.

… The statement of absolute independence of natural law from the question of the existence of God was implicit rather than flatly asserted in St. Thomas himself …

Ethics of Liberty, p. 4

… in the Thomistic tradition, natural law is ethical as well as physical law; and the instrument by which man apprehends such law is his reason—not faith, or intuition, or grace, revelation, or anything else.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 6

Aquinas … realized that men always act purposively, but also went beyond this to argue that ends can also be apprehended by reason as either objectively good or bad for man.

Ethics of Liberty, pp. 6–7

For the Thomist or natural-law theorist, the general law of morality for man is a special case of the system of natural law governing all entities of the world, each with its own nature and its own ends.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 7

ARISTOTLE

… Menger studied and cited Aristotle extensively in his methodological work. …

… Menger and, following him, Böhm-Bawerk were Aristotelian social ontologists, maintaining the absolute and apodictic reality of economic laws.

Economic Controversies, p. 158

… Mises’s analysis … rests squarely upon the Aristotelian insight into action …

Economic Controversies, p. 196

To Aristotle and the classic philosophers, happiness was acting in accordance with man’s unique and rational nature.

Economic Controversies, p. 617

… the great Athenian philosopher Aristotle … a magnificent and creative systematizer known to later ages as The Philosopher …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 3

Man, in the famous Aristotelian phrase, is uniquely the rational animal—the species that uses reason to adopt values and ethical principles, and that acts to attain these ends. Man acts; that is, he adopts values and purposes, and chooses the ways to achieve them.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 5

… every man, deep down, is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, and the divisions run throughout their thought.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 5

While Aristotle was politically more moderate than Plato, his aristocratic devotion to the polis was fully as evident.

… Plato’s and Aristotle’s thought was statist and elitist to the core, a statism which unfortunately permeated “classical” (Greek and Roman) philosophy as well as heavily influencing Christian and medieval thought. Classical “natural law” philosophy therefore never arrived at the later elaboration, first in the Middle Ages and then in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of the “natural rights” of the individual which may not be invaded by man or by government.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 7

The views of the great philosopher Aristotle are particularly important because the entire structure of his thought had an enormous and even dominant influence on the economic and social thought of the high and late Middle Ages, which considered itself Aristotelian.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 13

Although Aristotle, in the Greek tradition, scorned moneymaking and was scarcely a partisan of laissez-faire, he set forth a trenchant argument in favor of private property.… private property is more highly productive and will therefore lead to progress.… people will devote the greatest interest and care to their own property.… private property is clearly implanted in man’s nature.… Aristotle, a great observer of past and present, pointed out that private property had existed always and everywhere.

… only private property furnishes people with the opportunity to act morally, e.g., to practice the virtues of benevolence and philanthropy.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, pp. 13–14

Aristotle, like Plato, was hostile to economic growth and favored a static society …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 15

… Aristotle defended a regime of private property and Aristotle demolished Plato’s portrayal of an ideal communism …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 20

Aristotle had analyzed the advantages of money, and its overcoming of the double-coincidence-of-wants problem of barter, but his outlook was clouded by his fundamental hostility to trade and money-making. To Aristotle, therefore, money was not natural but an artificial convention, and therefore basically a creature of the state or polis.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 73

To Aristotle and the classic philosophers, happiness was acting in accordance with man’s unique and rational nature.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 267

… man, as Aristotle pointed out, is the rational animal, or to be more precise, the rational being.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 31

… Aristotle and Plato were statists in their approach to natural law …

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 94

ART

For all too many people, laymen and professionals alike, obscurity and bad writing equal profundity. If they can’t understand it, and they hear at every hand that so-and-so is a great man and his theories the current light, their belief in his profundity will be redoubled. There are great charms to obscurity. Moreover, there are particular charms for the adepts who cluster around the great man, the circle of initiates who claim—probably correctly—that only they can truly understand his work.

Classical Economics, p. 103

Mushiness of mind, especially in an eminent man, is all too often mistaken for wisdom.

Classical Economics, p. 173

… the style very much reflects the quality of mind; clearheaded thinkers are usually lucid writers, and confused and inchoate thinkers usually write the same way.

Classical Economics, pp. 277–78

… academics and their constituencies all too often confuse contradictory wavering with complexity, wisdom, and judiciousness of mind.

Classical Economics, p. 294

One man’s “ugliness” is another’s “beauty,” and vice versa.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 178

From the onset of civilization down to the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of art-for-art’s-sake would have been considered absurd, by the critics, the general public, and by the artists themselves. While each art of course has its own aesthetic criteria, these criteria have always been intimately intertwined with ethics, religious values, world views, and even directly with political philosophies held by the artist. Aristotle’s definition of art in the Poetics: depicting man as he can be and should be, is typical of all art and not the eccentric statement of one philosopher.

All artists have had moral messages and moral outlooks entwined in their art.

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 295

… the glorious and magnificent Baroque was a conscious “in-your-face” Catholic answer to Protestantism.

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 296

… Baroque, in music, art, architecture, was the pinnacle that human civilization has yet reached.

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 431

Since only aspects of objective reality can be meaningfully communicated, this means that art is the reshaping of reality by the artist and its subsequent communication to others.

… art is necessarily communication …

Strictly Confidential, p. 385

… art: the reshaping of reality in accordance with the artist’s values and the communication of these values to the reader or beholder.

In short, art is the objectification, the bringing into tangible reality, of an artist’s values.… the artist wishes to objectify his values in concrete reality.

Strictly Confidential, p. 386

Since all art conveys values, all art is intimately bound up with morals.

… all artists are presenting reality not as it is, but as they believe it ought to be.

Strictly Confidential, p. 387

… the plot is the objectification within the novel of the values and personalities of the characters. The plot is a purposeful logical progression of events, and it is through this progression of action that the author’s values, and the personalities of his characters, take on concrete form. The author who presents characters without plot is not writing a novel, but a psychological casebook, which may or may not have value as psychology. Plot is therefore the critical distinguishing attribute of the novel.

A plot necessarily involves drama and conflict, and it is also a logical succession of events flowing out of the interplay of the novel’s characters. A plot also implies that each individual has free will, that he is free to choose his values and to try purposefully to attain them.

Strictly Confidential, p. 388

The climax of the plot is of enormous importance, since this is the final resolution of the conflict, the final lesson, the concluding presentation of the author’s implied philosophy of life, the ultimate impact on the reader.

Strictly Confidential, p. 389