Murray Rothbard - Ethical and Political Views

Ethical and Political Views

In the late 1940s Rothbard questioned why under laissez-faire economics private police protection could not replace government protective services and in 1949 came to the conclusion it could. He was influenced by nineteenth-century American individualist anarchists like Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker and the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari who wrote about how such a system could work. Thus he "combined the laissez-faire economics of Mises with the absolutist views of human rights and rejection of the state" from individualist anarchists.

Rothbard parted with Mises on the issue of ethics, since Mises preferred to avoid ethical arguments and show that interventionist economic laws failed to achieve their goals. Rothbard held that interventionist laws did in fact benefit some, including even people who might be destructive, and therefore an ethical basis for the free market was necessary. His principle was "self-ownership". Applying this to contract law, he wrote that it was not ethical for people to contract themselves into slavery. Rothbard's ethical views also were influenced by classical liberalism and the anti-imperialism of the Old Right.

In 1954, Rothbard, along with several other students of Ludwig von Mises, such as George Reisman and Ralph Raico, associated with 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 her novel Atlas Shrugged, Rothbard wrote a "fan letter" to Rand, calling her book "an infinite treasure house," and "not merely the greatest novel ever written, it is one of the very greatest books ever written, fiction or nonfiction." He also wrote that "you introduced me to the whole field of natural rights and natural law philosophy," prompting him to learn "the glorious natural rights tradition." He rejoined her circle for a few months, but soon broke with Rand over various differences including his defense of anarchism. Later, Rothbard lampooned Rand's circle in his play Mozart Was a Red and essay, "The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult."

In later years he would fully develop his ethical and political views. Sheldon Richman describes him as "the leading theorist of radical Lockean libertarianism combined with Austrian economics, which demonstrates that free markets produce widespread prosperity, social cooperation, and economic coordination without monopoly, depression, or inflation—evils whose roots are to be found in government intervention." He connected these to more modern views, writing: "There is, in the body of thought known as 'Austrian economics', a scientific explanation of the workings of the free market (and of the consequences of government intervention in that market) which individualist anarchists could easily incorporate into their political and social Weltanschauung."

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." Rothbard described the moral basis for his anarcho-capitalist position in two of his books: For a New Liberty, published in 1973, and The Ethics of Liberty, published in 1982. In his Power and Market (1970), Rothbard describes how a stateless economy might function.