This Day in History: Economist Murray Rothbard was born on this day in 1926. Wikipedia describes him as a heterodox economist of the Austrian School. Heterodox economics is any economic thought or theory that contrasts with orthodox schools of economic thought. However, the mainstream (orthodox) economic thought presently advocates for endless money printing (stimulus), so we may need some heterodox thinking in this field.
Rothbard had no regard for Government, and he 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 expanded on his view of Government, especially in his "For a New Liberty" (1973), "Anatomy of the State" (1974), and "The Ethics of Liberty" (1982). Rothbard showed how “the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large…”
Though he authored many books, Rothbard considered Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged "an infinite treasure house" and "not merely the greatest novel ever written, [but] one of the very greatest books ever written, fiction or nonfiction". It should be noted that he did not often get along with Rand.
Here are some quotes from Murray Rothbard:
“The State says that citizens may not take from another by force and against his will that which belongs to another. And yet the State…does just that.”
“The State is an inherently illegitimate institution of organized aggression, of organized and regularized crime against the persons and properties of its subjects… a profoundly antisocial institution which lives parasitically off of the productive activities of private citizens.”
“Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the state is profoundly and inherently anti-capitalist.”
“We must, therefore, emphasize that ‘we’ are not the government; the government is not ‘us.’ The government does not in any accurate sense ‘represent’ the majority of the people.”
“The State uses its coerced revenue, not merely to monopolize and provide genuine services inefficiently to the public, but also to build up its own power at the expense of its exploited and harassed subjects.”
“The State is a coercive criminal organization that subsists by a regularized large-scale system of taxation-theft.”
“The wry coupling of the twin certainties in the popular motto ‘death and taxes’ demonstrates that the public has resigned itself to the existence of the State as an evil but inescapable force of nature to which there is no alternative.”
“There is no reason to assume that a compulsory monopoly of violence, once acquired…by any State rulers, will remain ‘limited’ to protection of person and property. Certainly, historically no government has long remained ‘limited’ in this way.”
“Government was constructed neither for ability nor for the exercise of loving care; government was built for the use of force and for necessarily demagogic appeals for votes.”
“It is easy to be conspicuously ‘compassionate’ if others are being forced to pay the cost.”
“If mankind is diverse and individuated, then how can anyone propose equality as an ideal?...But what justification can equality find in the nature of man? If each individual is unique, how else can he be made ‘equal’ to others than by destroying most of what is human in him and reducing human society to the mindless uniformity of the ant heap?”
I often wonder what the great libertarian minds of the past would think of today's tech giants and their repressive actions?
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