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Murray Rothbard
Photo: Ludwig von Mises Institute, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons17

Murray Rothbard

American economist (1926–1995)

Murray Newton Rothbard (US:; March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American economist of the Austrian School, economic historian, political theorist, and activist. Rothbard was a central figure in the 20th-century American libertarian movement, particularly its right-wing strands, and was a founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism.2

From Wikipedia’s article on Murray Rothbard (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born Mar 2, 1926, died Jan 7, 1995.1

About

He wrote over twenty books on political theory, history, economics, and other subjects.

Rothbard argued that all services provided by the "monopoly system of the corporate state" could be provided more efficiently by the private sector and wrote that the state is "the organization of robbery systematized and writ large". He called fractional-reserve banking a form of fraud and opposed central banking. He categorically opposed all military, political, and economic interventionism in the affairs of other nations.

Rothbard rejected mainstream economic methodologies and instead embraced the praxeology of Ludwig von Mises. Along with his writing and libertarian activism, he taught economics part-time at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute starting in 1966, and after 1986 in an endowed position at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Partnering with the oil billionaire Charles Koch, Rothbard was a founder of the Cato Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies in the 1970s. He broke with Cato and Koch, and in 1982 joined Lew Rockwell and Burton Blumert to establish the Mises Institute in Alabama.

While he was a right-libertarian, Rothbard was a critic of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Adam Smith. Rothbard opposed egalitarianism and the civil rights movement, and blamed women's voting and activism for the growth of the welfare state. He promoted historical revisionism and befriended the Holocaust denier Harry Elmer Barnes. Later in his career, Rothbard advocated a libertarian alliance with paleoconservatism (which he called paleolibertarianism), favoring right-wing populism and describing David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for political strategy. In the 2010s, he received renewed attention as an influence on the alt-right.

From Wikipedia’s article on Murray Rothbard, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2

Companies

Early life and education

  • 1942Columbia University Bachelor of Arts; mathematics3
  • 1956Columbia University Doctor of Philosophy; economics3
  • Date not recordedBirch Wathen Lenox School3

Education

Rothbard's parents were David and Rae Rothbard, Jewish immigrants to the United States from Poland and Russia, respectively. David was a chemist. Rothbard attended Birch Wathen Lenox School, a private school in New York City. Rothbard later said he much preferred Birch Wathen to the "debasing and egalitarian public school system" he had attended in the Bronx.

Rothbard wrote of having grown up as an adherent of the "Old Right" among friends and neighbors who were "communists or fellow-travelers". He was a member of the New York Young Republican Club in his youth. Rothbard described his father as an individualist who embraced minimal government, free enterprise, private property and "a determination to rise by one's own merits... [A]ll socialism seemed to me monstrously coercive and abhorrent." In 1952, his father was trapped during a labor strike at the Tide Water Oil Refinery in New Jersey which he managed, confirming their dislike of organized labor.

Rothbard attended Columbia University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics in 1945 and a PhD in economics in 1956. The delay in receiving his PhD was due in part to conflict with his advisor, Joseph Dorfman, and in part to Arthur Burns's rejecting his dissertation. Burns was a longtime friend of the Rothbard family and their neighbor at their Manhattan apartment building. It was only after Burns went on leave from the Columbia faculty to head President Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers that Rothbard's thesis was accepted, and he received his doctorate.

His first political activism came during the 1948 presidential election, where Rothbard, "as a Jewish student at Columbia, horrified his peers by organizing a Students for Strom Thurmond chapter, so staunchly did he believe in states' rights". Rothbard later said of his time at Columbia that all his fellow students were extreme leftists and that he was one of the university's only two Republicans at the time.

From Wikipedia’s article on Murray Rothbard (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Career

Occupation: professor, activist, economic historian, essayist, writer, historian, university teacher, philosopher.9 10

  • 1986 to 1995Worked at University of Nevada, Las Vegas4
  • 1966 to 1986Worked at New York University Tandon School of Engineering4
  • 1954 to 1958Worked at Stern School of Business4
  • Date not recordedFounded Cato Institute5
  • Date not recordedFounded Mises Institute6
  • Date not recordedFounded Center for Libertarian Studies7
  • Date not recordedFounded Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought8

Old Right

Throughout his life, Rothbard engaged in a number of different political movements to promote Old Right and libertarian principles. George Hawley writes that "unfortunately for Rothbard, the Old Right was ending as an intellectual and political force just as he was maturing as an intellectual", with the militantly anticommunist conservative movement exemplified by William F. Buckley Jr. supplanting the Old Right's isolationism.

Rothbard was an admirer of Senator Joseph McCarthy—not for McCarthy's Cold War views, but for his demagoguery, which Rothbard credited for disrupting the establishment consensus of what Rothbard called "corporate liberalism". Rothbard contributed many articles to Buckley's National Review, but his relations with Buckley and the magazine soured as he criticized the conservative movement for militarism. Specifically, Rothbard opposed how such militarism could justify and expand the state's power.

Rothbard befriended the Holocaust denier Harry Elmer Barnes in 1959. In a 1966 issue of Robert LeFevre's Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought devoted to historical revisionism, Rothbard argued that Western democracies had been to blame for starting World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Rothbard published works by Barnes in his journals before and after Barnes died in 1968, including posthumously in the Cato Institute's journal.

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Conflict with Ayn Rand

In 1954, Rothbard, along with several other attendees of Mises's seminar, joined the circle of novelist Ayn Rand, the founder of Objectivism. He soon parted from her, writing, among other things, that her ideas were not as original as she proclaimed but similar to those of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Herbert Spencer. In 1958, after the publication of Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, Rothbard wrote her a "fan letter", calling the book "an infinite treasure house" and "not merely the greatest novel ever written, [but] one of the very greatest books ever written, fiction or nonfiction." He also wrote: "[Y]ou introduced me to the whole field of natural rights and natural law philosophy," prompting him to learn "the glorious natural rights tradition." Rothbard rejoined Rand's circle for a few months but soon broke with Rand again over various differences, including his defense of his interpretation of anarchism.

Rothbard later satirized Rand's acolytes in his unpublished one-act farce Mozart Was a Red and his essay "The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult". He characterized Rand's circle as a "dogmatic, personality cult". His play parodies Rand (through the character Carson Sand) and her friends and is set during a visit from Keith Hackley, a fan of Sand's novel The Brow of Zeus (a play on Atlas Shrugged).

New Left outreach

By the late 1960s, according to The American Conservative, Rothbard's "long and winding yet somehow consistent road had taken him from anti-New Deal and anti-interventionist Robert A. Taft supporter into friendship with the quasi-pacifist Nebraska Republican Congressman Howard Buffett (father of Warren Buffett) then over to the League of (Adlai) Stevensonian Democrats and, by 1968, into tentative comradeship with the anarchist factions of the New Left." Rothbard joined the Peace and Freedom Party and contributed writing to the New Left journal Ramparts.

Rothbard later criticized the New Left for supporting a "People's Republic"-style Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays. It was during this phase that he associated with Karl Hess (a former Barry Goldwater speechwriter who had rejected conservatism) and founded Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought with Leonard Liggio and George Resch. Raimondo described Rothbard during this time as "a man of the Old Culture: he believed that it was possible to be a revolutionary, an anarchist, and lead a bourgeois life", and wrote that the "respectably dressed, if a bit rumpled" Rothbard was "immune to the blandishments of sixties youth culture". During this time, Rothbard proposed that black Americans should embrace racial separatism and secession. He was frustrated that blacks and whites in the New Left instead decided to work together for egalitarian goals. In the 1970s, Rothbard turned sharply against the left and described state-enforced equality as evil.

Libertarianism and Cato Institute

From 1969 to 1984, Rothbard edited The Libertarian Forum, also initially with Hess (although Hess's involvement ended in 1971). Despite its small readership, it engaged conservatives associated with the National Review in nationwide debate. Rothbard rejected the view that Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential election was a victory for libertarian principles, and he attacked Reagan's economic program in a series of Libertarian Forum articles. In 1982, Rothbard called Reagan's claims of spending cuts a "fraud" and a "hoax" and accused Reaganites of doctoring the economic statistics to give a false impression that their policies successfully reduced inflation and unemployment. He further criticized the "myths of Reaganomics" in 1987.

Rothbard criticized the "frenzied nihilism" of left-wing libertarians but also criticized right-wing libertarians who were content to rely only on education to bring down the state; he believed that libertarians should adopt any moral tactic available to them to bring about liberty. Imbibing Randolph Bourne's idea that "war is the health of the state", Rothbard opposed all wars in his lifetime and engaged in anti-war activism.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Rothbard was active in the Libertarian Party. He was frequently involved in the party's internal politics. Rothbard founded the Center for Libertarian Studies in 1976 and the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1977. He was one of the founders of the Cato Institute in 1977 (whose funding by Charles Koch was a major infusion of money for libertarianism) and "came up with the idea of naming this libertarian think tank after Cato's Letters, a powerful series of British newspaper essays by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon which played a decisive influence upon America's Founding Fathers in fomenting the Revolution".

From 1978 to 1983, Rothbard was associated with the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus, allying himself with Justin Raimondo, Eric Garris and Williamson Evers. He opposed the "low-tax liberalism" espoused by 1980 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ed Clark and Cato Institute president Edward H Crane III. According to Charles Burris, "Rothbard and Crane became bitter rivals after disputes emerging from the 1980 LP presidential campaign of Ed Clark carried over to strategic direction and management of Cato".

Janek Wasserman wrote, "The tempestuous tale of the Rothbard-Koch-Cato relationship has been told and retold because of its floridness." Rothbard sought to cultivate radical anarcho-capitalists, while Crane and Koch wanted a more reformist approach to influence government and gain political power. Rothbard was removed from Cato's board in 1981. Wasserman described the split as "the first of many examples of Austrian and libertarian schisms in the United States".

Mises Institute

In 1982, following his split with the Cato Institute, Rothbard co-founded the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, (with Lew Rockwell and Burton Blumert) and was vice president of academic affairs until 1995. Rothbard also founded the institute's Review of Austrian Economics, a heterodox economics journal later renamed the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, in 1987. Rothbard "worked closely with Lew Rockwell (joined later by his long-time friend Blumert) in nurturing the Mises Institute and the publication, The Rothbard-Rockwell Report; which after Rothbard's 1995 death evolved into the website, LewRockwell.com", according to the website.

Rothbard and other Mises Institute scholars criticized libertarian groups funded by the Koch brothers, referring to them as the "Kochtopus". In contrast to some other libertarian groups, the Mises Institute "pushed more politically marginal positions like the virtues of secession, the need for a return to the gold standard, and opposition to racial integration", according to historian Quinn Slobodian. Rothbard split with the Radical Caucus at the 1983 national convention over cultural issues and aligned himself with what he called the "right-wing populist" wing of the party, notably Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul, who ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988.

Paleolibertarianism

In 1989, Rothbard left the Libertarian Party and began building bridges to the post-Cold War anti-interventionist right, calling himself a paleolibertarian, a conservative reaction against the cultural liberalism of mainstream libertarianism. Paleolibertarianism sought to appeal to disaffected working-class whites through a synthesis of cultural conservatism and libertarian economics. According to Reason, Rothbard advocated right-wing populism in part because he was frustrated that mainstream thinkers were not adopting the libertarian view and suggested that former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, as well as Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, were models for an "Outreach to the Rednecks" effort that a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition could use. Working together, the coalition would expose the "unholy alliance of 'corporate liberal' Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass". Rothbard blamed this "underclass" for "looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America". Regarding Duke's political program, Rothbard asserted that there was "nothing" in it that "could not also be embraced by paleoconservatives or paleolibertarians; lower taxes, dismantling the bureaucracy, slashing the welfare system, attacking affirmative action and racial set-asides, calling for equal rights for all Americans, including whites". He also praised the "racialist science" in Charles Murray's controversial book The Bell Curve.

Rothbard co-founded and became a key figure in the John Randolph Club, which was an alliance between the Mises Institute and the paleoconservative Rockford Institute. He supported the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan in 1992, writing that "with Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy". When Buchanan dropped out of the Republican primary race, Rothbard then shifted his interest and support to Ross Perot, who Rothbard wrote had "brought an excitement, a verve, a sense of dynamics and of open possibilities to what had threatened to be a dreary race". Rothbard eventually withdrew his support from Perot, and endorsed George H. W. Bush in the 1992 election. Like Buchanan, Rothbard opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); however, he had become disillusioned with Buchanan by 1995, believing that the latter's "commitment to protectionism was mutating into an all-round faith in economic planning and the nation state".

Death

Rothbard died of a heart attack on January 7, 1995, in St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan, at the age of 68. The New York Times obituary called Rothbard "an economist and social philosopher who fiercely defended individual freedom against government intervention". Lew Rockwell, president of the Mises Institute, told The New York Times that Rothbard was "the founder of right-wing anarchism". William F. Buckley Jr. wrote a critical obituary in the National Review, criticizing Rothbard's "defective judgment" and views on the Cold War. Hoppe, Rockwell, and Rothbard's other colleagues at the Mises Institute took a different view, arguing that he was one of the most important philosophers in history.

From Wikipedia’s article on Murray Rothbard (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Personal life

  • BornMar 2, 1926, New York City11
  • DiedJan 7, 1995, New York City12 13
  • CitizenshipUnited States14

Marriage, Volker Fund, and academia

During the 1940s, Rothbard vetted articles for Leonard Read at the Foundation for Economic Education think tank, became acquainted with Frank Chodorov, and read widely in libertarian-oriented works by Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, Isabel Paterson, H. L. Mencken, and Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises. Rothbard was greatly influenced by reading Mises's book Human Action in 1949. In the 1950s, when Mises was teaching in the Wall Street division of the New York University Stern School of Business, Rothbard attended his unofficial seminar. Rothbard wanted to promote libertarian activism; by the mid-1950s, he helped form the Circle Bastiat, a libertarian and anarchist social group in New York City. He also joined the Mont Pelerin Society in the 1950s.

Rothbard attracted the attention of the William Volker Fund, a group that provided financial backing to promote right-wing ideologies in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Volker Fund paid Rothbard to write a textbook to explain Human Action in a form that could be used to introduce college undergraduates to Mises's views; a sample chapter he wrote on money and credit won Mises's approval. For ten years, the Volker Fund paid him a retainer as a "senior analyst". As Rothbard continued his work, he enlarged the project. The result was his book Man, Economy, and State, published in 1962. Upon its publication, Mises praised Rothbard's work effusively. In contrast to Mises, who considered security the primary justification for the state, Rothbard in the 1950s began to argue for a privatized market for the military, police and judiciary. Rothbard's 1963 book America's Great Depression blamed government policy failures for the Great Depression, and challenged the widely held view that capitalism is unstable.

In 1953, Rothbard married JoAnn Beatrice Schumacher (1928–1999), whom he called Joey, in New York City. She was a historian, Rothbard's personal editor, and a close adviser as well as hostess of his Rothbard Salon. They enjoyed a loving marriage, and Rothbard often called her "the indispensable framework" of his life and achievements. According to her, the Volker Fund's patronage allowed Rothbard to work from home as a freelance theorist and pundit for the first 15 years of their marriage.

The Volker Fund collapsed in 1962, leading Rothbard to seek employment at various New York academic institutions. He was offered a part-time position teaching economics to engineering students at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in 1966 at age 40. The institution had no economics department or economics majors, and Rothbard derided its social science department as "Marxist". Justin Raimondo, his biographer, writes that Rothbard liked teaching at Brooklyn Polytechnic because working only two days a week gave him the freedom to contribute to developments in libertarian politics. Rothbard continued in this role until 1986. Then 60 years old, Rothbard left Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute for the Lee Business School at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), where he held the title of S.J. Hall Distinguished Professor of Economics, a chair endowed by a libertarian businessman.

According to Rothbard's friend, colleague, and fellow Misesian economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Rothbard led a "fringe existence" in academia, but he was able to attract a large number of "students and disciples" through his writings, thereby becoming "the creator and one of the principal agents of the contemporary libertarian movement". Libertarian economist Jeffrey Herbener, who called Rothbard his friend and "intellectual mentor", said in a memoriam that Rothbard received "only ostracism" from mainstream academia. Rothbard kept his position at UNLV from 1986 until his death.

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Joey Rothbard said in a memoriam that her husband had a happy and bright spirit and that Rothbard, a night owl, "managed to make a living for 40 years without having to get up before noon. This was important to him." She said Rothbard would begin every day with a phone conversation with his colleague Lew Rockwell: "Gales of laughter would shake the house or apartment, as they checked in with each other. Murray thought it was the best possible way to start a day".

Rothbard was irreligious and agnostic about God, describing himself as a "mixture of an agnostic and a Reform Jew". Despite identifying as an agnostic and an atheist, he was critical of the "left-libertarian hostility to religion". In Rothbard's later years, many of his friends anticipated that he would convert to Catholicism, but he never did.

Children's rights and parental obligations

In the Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard explores issues regarding children's rights regarding self-ownership and contract. These include support for a woman's right to abortion, condemnation of parents showing aggression towards children and opposition to the state forcing parents to care for children. He also holds children have the right to run away from parents and seek new guardians as soon as they are able to choose to do so. He argued that parents have the right to put a child out for adoption or sell the rights to the child in a voluntary contract in what Rothbard suggests will be a "flourishing free market in children". He believes that selling children as consumer goods in accord with market forces—while "superficially monstrous"—will benefit "everyone" involved in the market: "the natural parents, the children, and the foster parents purchasing".

In Rothbard's view of parenthood, "the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights." Thus, Rothbard stated that parents should have the legal right to let any infant die by starvation and should be free to engage in other forms of child neglect. However, according to Rothbard, "the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children". In a fully libertarian society, he wrote, "the existence of a free baby market will bring such 'neglect' down to a minimum". Economist Gene Callahan of Cardiff University, formerly a scholar at the Rothbard-affiliated Mises Institute, wrote that Rothbard allowed "the logical elegance of his legal theory" to "trump any arguments based on the moral reprehensibility of a parent idly watching her six-month-old child slowly starve to death in its crib".

From Wikipedia’s article on Murray Rothbard (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Sources

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