Murray N. Rothbard and American Libertarianism
The genesis of Murray N. Rothbard's thought. Michael the Great's Notepad
In 1946 George Stigler , a future Nobel Prize winner but then a young economics professor, was teaching at Columbia University. Freshman Murray N. Rothbard (New York, 1926) was immediately fascinated by his personality and his brilliant lessons. Stigler criticized rent control and the minimum wage, demonstrating that it ended up excluding marginal workers from the labor market. Rothbard turned to the Foundation for Economic Education, which had published Stigler and Milton Friedman's essay, "Roofs or Ceilings," for a copy. It is on this occasion that he comes into contact with the libertarian movement for the first time. As he himself said, one winter evening in 1949, during a conversation with some friends he became convinced that one could not be in favor of the free market and, at the same time, the interference of the state in the lives of citizens: "My entire position it was inconsistent […], there were only two alternative logics: socialism or anarchism. Since becoming a socialist was out of the question for me, the irresistible logic of chance impelled me to become a private property anarchist or, as I would later say, an anarcho-capitalist” (“Liberty,” July 1988). He thus begins "to devour the texts of the individualist anarchists of the American tradition, such as Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner" (Roberta Adelaide Modugno, "Murray N. Rothbard", IBL Libri, October 2022).
But the event that marks a watershed in his cultural education is the meeting with Ludwig von Mises. After the Anschluss (1938), numerous exponents of the Austrian school of economics emigrated to the USA. Among these was also its dean, whose library had been burned by the Nazis. When he landed in the American metropolis, he was elderly and without an official academic position. Thus in 1949 the Volker Fund sponsored an economics seminar held by Mises at New York University. It is in that seminar that the young Murray definitively matured his faith in the virtues of "laissez-faire".
His house on the Upper West Side of Manhattan thus becomes a point of reference for supporters of the theories of the father of modern libertarianism. In fact, already in the mid-1950s the first generation of the Old Right, created in 1933 to fight Roosevelt's New Deal, was on the decline. With the advent of the Cold War, his old anti-imperialist and anti-militarist line had faded considerably. From the pages of "Faith and Freedom", with which he had begun to collaborate, Rothbard did not allow himself to be persuaded, and launched a harsh attack against the exponents of the New Right, guilty of having lowered the flags of peace and disarmament. The attack cost him his dismissal from the magazine. He will suffer the same fate at William Buckley's "National Review", where he is purged for his "accommodating" positions on the Soviet danger.
Its real enemy is another: the Leviathan state, the alliance between "big government", "big business" and the military-industrial apparatus signed behind the backs of an increasingly exploited middle class. From this perspective, The Progressive Era, published posthumously in 2017, deserves a special mention. It is a relevant text, written with the aim of unearthing the origins of the paternalistic and welfare state that established itself in the USA in the forty years from the mid-1940s to 1880s to the mid-1920s. In a nutshell, his thesis is that the resurgent statism in that period was determined by the converging interests of two groups: one of big businessmen eager to replace the competitive economy with a cartelized economy permeable to his influence; the other made up of a dense group of technocrats, engineers, planners eager to obtain benefits and remunerative jobs from the government. In Rothbard's opinion, for this operation to succeed, it required a new elite of collectivist intellectuals, admirers of the social model built by Chancellor Bismarck in Germany.
After approaching the youth protest movement against the war in Vietnam, in 1968 Rothbard decided to join the "Peace and Freedom Party", the party of which he was an emanation. The following year a group of libertarians, staunchly hostile to compulsory conscription, laid the foundations of an independent movement. It is the first step on a path from which the "Libertarian Party" was born in 1972, which Rothbard looks upon with benevolence. In 1982, the Ludwig von Mises Institute was inaugurated in Auburn, Alabama. Under his leadership, the Institute quickly gained international fame. In 1985 the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, offered him the chair of economics. A recognition that for a decade (it expired in 1995) allowed him to resume his old passion for study and writing at a good pace.
At this point, it is perhaps useful to clarify some terms used above. In the Anglo-Saxon world the term "liberal" designates a progressive aligned in favor of civil rights and public intervention. With Roosevelt's New Deal the American left definitively appropriated this meaning. On the other hand, as has already been mentioned, the Cold War caused a historic fracture between "conservative" and "libertarian", mainly attributable to the attitude to be taken towards the communist bloc. For the former, the Soviet threat had to be actively fought. For the latter, an isolationist position awaiting the collapse of the USSR predicted by Mises was more convenient. We are therefore faced with "a different division compared to the classic one between conservatives and liberals, attributable to the preference for order or freedom as a key value of political discourse" (Nicola Iannello, "Il libertarianism: bibliographical essay", Ethics & Politics).
This articulation of the American political lexicon must also be inserted into the generally two-party system of that country; on the "right" the label of "conservative" prevailed, especially with the 1964 presidential campaign, in which the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater proudly claimed the definition of "conservative". Since then, in the US political and party landscape, the Democrats, supporters of "big government" and the welfare state, are the "liberals". The Republicans, supporters of market deregulation and the traditional values of the founding fathers, the "conservatives". Therefore the "libertarians" place themselves outside this scheme, as supporters of a radical, almost absolute freedom, which implies the prohibition of any form of prohibitionism and the decriminalization of all "deviance", from sexual to expressive ones.
In 1973 Rothbard published one of his most famous works, “For a new freedom. The libertarian manifesto” (Liberilibri, 2004). The incipit analyzes the historical roots of libertarianism, which he discovered in the civil conflicts fought in Great Britain between 1642 and 1651, in which the Levellers' struggles against royal absolutism stand out. According to Rothbard, they were a kind of libertarians ante litteram, champions of a government limited in powers and functions, of freedom of trade and of the inviolable right to private property. But the heart of the Manifesto beats elsewhere, in the denunciation of the criminal and aggressive nature of the state: “The state habitually commits mass murder, calling it 'war', or sometimes 'elimination of subversives'; the state practices slavery in its military forces, and calls it 'conscription'; lives and justifies its existence through the practice of robbery, and calls it 'taxation'.
The libertarian maintains that the fact that such atrocities are or are not sanctioned by the majority of the population does not alter their true nature. That is, regardless of popular ratification, war is and remains mass murder, conscription is slavery, taxation is robbery. Further on, Rothbard addresses the topic of civil rights, starting from the freedom of expression that the libertarian must defend without reservations, except in particular cases such as inciting a riot. Freedom that must be protected even in the most thorny and controversial fields, such as pornography, prostitution, abortion. “No victims, no crimes” is the libertarian motto: if there is no victim, there is no crime. It is not the state's job to make individuals morally blameless. Taking drugs is bad for you, as is abusing alcohol, eating too much fat, getting too much sun or smoking tobacco. But the state should also leave a person free to harm himself, paying the consequences.
Lastly, Rothbard's polemic against state welfare is scorching. Against a welfare system that is increasingly presented as a right, where if taxation increases to finance it, it is clear that it will be considered more advantageous to live on public charity rather than work and be taxed. Once upon a time – he observes – living off national production was perceived by the beneficiary himself as a mark of infamy, as something to be ashamed of. And once upon a time the typical role of the social worker was to help the needy to help themselves, to find a job and to walk on their own two feet. Now, however, the "liberal" social worker limits himself to a bureaucratic illustration of the subsidies that are available to those in difficulty, contributing more or less consciously to swelling the lists of unemployed. It is legitimate to suspect that these reflections, developed by Rothbard exactly half a century ago, at least in part also apply to our country today.
(Excerpt from an article for Il Foglio)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/murray-n-rothbard-e-il-libertarismo-americano/ on Sat, 25 Nov 2023 06:30:06 +0000.