Murray Rothbard

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Murray Newton Rothbard (March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American economist, historian and natural law theorist belonging to the Austrian School of Economics who helped define modern libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism.[1][2] He was son of David and Rae Rothbard. On January 16 1963, he was married to JoAnn Schumacher in New York City.

Life

Rothbard was born into a Jewish family in the Bronx. "I grew up in a Communist culture," he recalled. [Raimondo p 23] He attended Columbia University, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree (1945), a Master of Arts degree (1946), and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1956.

In the course of his life, Rothbard was associated with a number of political thinkers and movements. During the early 1950s, he studied with the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and began working for the William Volker Fund. During the late 1950s, Rothbard was briefly an intimate of Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden, whom he would later criticize strongly, and who criticized anarcho-capitalism as pro-statist. In the late 1960s, Rothbard advocated an alliance with the New Left anti-war movement, on the grounds that the conservative movement had been completely subsumed by the statist establishment. However Rothbard later criticized the New Left for not truly being against the draft and supporting a "People's Republic" style draft. It was during this phase that he associated with Karl Hess and founded Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought with Leonard Liggio and George Resch, which existed from 1965 to 1968. From 1969 to 1984 he edited the Libertarian Forum, also initially with Hess (although Hess' involvement ended in 1971. In 1977, he established the Journal of Libertarian Studies, which he edited until his death in 1995.

During the 1970s and '80s, Rothbard was active in the Libertarian Party. He was frequently involved in the party's internal politics: from 1978 to 1983, he was associated with the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus, allying himself with Justin Raimondo, and Bill Evers and opposing the "low tax liberalism" espoused by 1980 presidential candidate Ed Clark and Cato Institute President Edward H Crane III. He split with the Radical Caucus at the 1983 national convention, and aligned himself with what he called the "rightwing populist" wing of the party, notably Ron Paul, who ran for President on the LP ticket 1988. In 1989, Rothbard left the Libertarian Party and began building bridges to the post-Cold War right. He was the founding president of the conservative-libertarian John Randolph Club and supported the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan in 1992. However, prior to his death in Manhattan of a heart attack, Rothbard had become disillusioned with the Buchanan movement.

In addition to his work on economics and political theory, Rothbard also wrote on economic history. He is one of the few economic authors who have studied and presented the pre-Smithian economic schools, such as the scholastics and the physiocrats. These are discussed in his unfinished, multi-volume work, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought.

Rothbard opposed what he considered the overspecialization of the academy and sought to fuse the disciplines of economics, history, ethics, and political science to create a "science of liberty," as reflected in his many books and articles. His approach was influenced by the arguments of Ludwig von Mises in such books as Human Action and Theory and History that the foundations of the social sciences are in a logic of human action that can be known prior to empirical investigation. Rothbard sought to use such insights to guide historical research, especially in his work on economic history, but also in his four-volume history of the American Revolution, Conceived in Liberty.

He was the academic vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies (which he founded in 1976), was a distinguished professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and edited the Rothbard-Rockwell Report with Lew Rockwell.

The Austrian School

Main article: Austrian School
File:Murray Rothbard.JPG
(Rothbard circa 1955).

The Austrian School of economics was founded with the publication of Carl Menger's 1871 book Principles of Economics. Members of this school approach economics as an a priori system like logic or mathematics, rather than as an empirical science like geology. It attempts to discover axioms of human action (called "praxeology" in the Austrian tradition) and make deductions therefrom. Some of these praxeological axioms are:

  • Humans act purposefully.
  • Humans prefer more of a good to less.
  • Humans prefer to receive a good sooner rather than later.
  • Each party to a trade benefits ex ante.

These are macro-level generalizations, or heuristics, which are true for the many, but not necessarily true for any particular person.

Even in the early days, Austrian economics was used as a theoretical weapon against socialism and statist socialist policy. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, a colleague of Menger, wrote one of the first critiques of socialism ever written in his treatise The Exploitation Theory of Socialism-Communism. Later, Friedrich Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom, asserting that a command economy destroys the information function of prices, and that authority over the economy leads to totalitarianism. Another very influential Austrian economist was Ludwig von Mises, author of the praxeological work Human Action.

Murray Rothbard, a student of Mises, is the man who attempted to meld Austrian economics with classical liberalism and individualist anarchism, and is credited with coining the term "anarcho-capitalism". He was probably the first to use "libertarian" in its current (U.S.) pro-capitalist sense. He was a trained economist, but also knowledgeable in history and political philosophy. When young, he considered himself part of the Old Right, an anti-statist and anti-interventionist branch of the U.S. Republican party. When interventionist cold warriors of the National Review, such as William Buckley, gained influence in the Republican party in the 1950s, Rothbard quit that group and formed an alliance with left-wing antiwar groups. Later, Rothbard was a founder of the U.S. Libertarian Party. In the late 1950s, Rothbard was briefly involved with Ayn Rand's Objectivism, but later had a falling out. Rothbard's books, such as Man, Economy, and State, Power and Market, The Ethics of Liberty, and For a New Liberty, are considered by some to be classics of natural law libertarian thought.

Anarcho-capitalism

The Libertatis Æquilibritas is one symbol used by anarcho-capitalists [1].

In 1949 Rothbard concluded that the free market could provide all services, including police, courts, and defense services better than could the State. He was now officially an anarcho-capitalist. Rothbard described the moral basis for his anarcho-capitalist position in two of his books, For a New Liberty, published in 1972, and The Ethics of Liberty, published in 1982. He described how a stateless economy would function in his book Power and Market.

Rothbard proclaimed the right of self-ownership, that each person owned himself, and the right to private property, that each person owned the fruits of his labor. Accordingly, each person had the right to exchange his property with others. Rothbard defined the libertarian position through what is called the non-aggression principle, that "No person may aggress against anybody else." Rothbard attacked taxation as theft, because it was taking someone else's property without his consent. Further, conscription was slavery, and war was murder. Rothbard also opposed compulsory jury service and involuntary mental hospitalization.

Rothbard's law

Rothbard's law is a self-attributed adage. In essence, Rothbard suggested that an otherwise talented individual would specialize and focus in an area at which they were weaker—or simply flat out wrong. Or as he often put it: "everyone specializes in what he is worst at."

In one example, he discusses his time spent with Ludwig von Mises,

In all the years I attended his seminar and was with him, he never talked about foreign policy. If he was an interventionist on foreign affairs, I never knew it. This is a violation of Rothbard's law, which is that people tend to specialize in what they are worst at. Henry George, for example, is great on everything but land, so therefore he writes about land 90% of the time. Friedman is great except on money, so he concentrates on money. Mises, however, and Kirzner too, always did what they were best at.

Continuing on this point,

There was another group coming up in the sixties, students of Robert LeFevre's Freedom School and later Rampart College. At one meeting, Friedman and Tullock were brought in for a week, I had planned to have them lecture on occupational licensing and on ocean privatization, respectively. Unfortunately, they spoke on these subjects for 30 minutes and then rode their hobby horses, monetary theory and public choice, the rest of the time. I immediately clashed with Friedman. He had read my America's Great Depression and was furious that he was suddenly meeting all these Rothbardians. He didn't know such things existed.

Books

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File:Rothbard-agd.jpg
Cover of the Mises Institute's 2000 edition of America's Great Depression.
File:Rothbard-MES.jpg
Cover of the 2004 edition of Man, Economy, and State.
File:Rothbard-EconThought.jpg
Cover from the first volume of the 2006 Mises Institute edition of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought

References

  1. ↑ Miller, David, ed. (1991). Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought. Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 0631179445. 
  2. ↑ Wendy McElroy. "Murray N. Rothbard: Mr. Libertarian". Lew Rockwell. http://www.zetetics.com/mac/rockwell/mcelroy000706.html. 

External links

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References

  1. http://www.mises.org/journals/aen/aen11_2_1.asp - An interview with Murray Rothbard

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