Rothbard A to Z

Preface

Students of Murray Rothbard owe a great debt to Edward Fuller. He has gathered together Rothbard’s remarks on a vast array of subjects. There are two ways Fuller could have done this, and he has selected the more difficult of the two. He might have chosen just the highlights, the most striking and memorable of Rothbard’s remarks. Of these there is an abundance. Rothbard says, for example, “Keynes was much more than a Keynesian. Above all, he was [an] extraordinarily pernicious and malignant figure … [he was] a charming but power-driven statist Machiavelli, who embodied some of the most malevolent trends and institutions of the 20th century.” “Keynes contributed only mischief, folly, and obfuscation.”

Rothbard, it is apparent, was no leftist. Against those leftists who uncritically oppose nationalism, he said: “While the State is a pernicious and coercive collectivist concept, the ‘nation’ may be and generally is voluntary: The nation properly refers, not to the State, but to the entire web of culture, values, tradition, and religion, and language in which the individuals of a society are raised … national self-determination is a vitally important matter in which libertarians should properly take sides.”

Rothbard scorned elites and championed the people. “The big danger is the elite, and not the masses …” “We live in a statist country and a statist world dominated by a ruling elite, consisting of a coalition of Big Government, Big Business, and various influential special interest groups. More specifically, the Old America of individual liberty, private property, and minimal government has been replaced by a coalition of politicians and bureaucrats allied with, and even dominated by powerful corporate and Old Money financial elites.”

It would have been easy, as mentioned before, to fill a book with arresting quotations like these. For example, on feminism, he says: “At the root of the women’s liberation movement is resentment against the very existence of women as a distinctive entity.” “The feminists are setting out to destroy romance.”

But Fuller has not chosen this easy course. Rather, he has provided entries on a comprehensive list of topics. Whatever the subject about which you wish to discover Rothbard’s opinion, you are likely to find it here. No matter how much you have studied Rothbard, you will learn something new by reading this book and seeing how Rothbard’s views fit into a comprehensive system.

One central thread that emerges in the book is the importance Rothbard accorded ethics. Many economists think that an economist, in recommending policy, need be concerned only with efficiency, but Rothbard dissented: “‘Efficiency,’ in contrast to ‘ethics’ sounds unsentimental, hard-nosed and ‘scientific.’ Yet extolling ‘efficiency’ only pushes the ethical problem under the rug. For in whose interests, and at whose expense, shall social efficiency be pursued? In the name of a spurious science, ‘efficiency’ often becomes a mask for plundering one set of people for the benefit of another.”

Efficiency is no substitute for ethics. “We cannot decide on public policy, tort law, rights, or liabilities on the basis of efficiencies or minimizing of costs. But if not costs or efficiency, then what? The answer is that only ethical principles can serve as criteria for our decisions. Efficiency can never serve as the basis for ethics; on the contrary, ethics must be the guide and touchstone for any consideration of efficiency. Ethics is the primary.”

Many economists seek to balance efficiency with equity, which in practice means equality. Rothbard again dissented: “it is an absurd and pernicious doctrine of ‘justice’ that each child should ‘start’ absolutely equally. It is an anti-human position, since each child manifestly begins completely unequally—with unequal abilities and parents.… To provide ‘equality of opportunity’ in the sense of equality of infants would have to mean that the state nationalizes all infants and raises them in State nurseries under precisely ‘equal’ conditions (although, even here, absolute equality is not possible.)” Rothbard sums up: “Enforced equality rests simply on envy” and “Envy is evil.”

If equality should not guide the economist in ethics, what should? The answer lies in natural law: “If apples and stones and roses each have their specific natures, is man the only entity, the only being, that cannot have one? And if man does have a nature, why cannot it too be open to rational observation and reflection? If all things have natures, then surely mans’ nature is open to inspection.”

The result of applying natural law theory to society is the non-aggression axiom. “The basic axiom of libertarian political theory holds that every man is a self-owner, having absolute jurisdiction over his own body. In effect, this means that no one else may justly invade, or aggress against, another’s person. It follows then that each person justly owns whatever unowned resources he appropriates or ‘mixes his labor with.’ From these twin axioms—self-ownership and ‘homesteading’—stems the justification for the entire system of property rights titles in a free-market society.”

I have indicated only one central thread to be found in Rothbard’s work. Readers of Rothbard A to Z will find for themselves many other threads as they study the thought of this great creative genius, made here conveniently available.

David Gordon

Los Angeles, California

November 2018