Murray Rothbard

Murray Newton Rothbard (March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American economist and writer. He helped make the Austrian School of economics popular in the United States.

Murray Rothbard
Murray Rothbard
Era	20th-century Economists (Austrian Economics)
Region	Western Economists
School	Austrian economics
Main interests	Economics, Political economy, Anarchism, Natural law, Praxeology, Numismatics, Philosophy of law, Ethics, Economic history
Notable ideas	Founder of Anarcho-capitalism, Rothbard's law, largely influenced Agorism
Influences Aristotle, Aquinas, Mises, Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, Molinari, Hayek, Say, Spooner, Tucker, Bastiat, Spencer, Nock, Oppenheimer, Locke, Laozi, Mencken, Burke
Influenced Hoppe, Friedman, Rockwell, Konkin, Narveson, Heath, Callahan, Raico, Salerno, Sobran, McElroy, Tucker, Bylund, Long, Caplan, Murphy, Lottieri, Woods, Kinsella, Nozick, Molyneux, Thornton, Horton, Hülsmann, Raimondo, DiLorenzo, Block, Linda & Morris Tannehill, Paul, Robert Higgs

Rothbard circa 1955

Rothbard helped to create modern libertarianism, a political belief in less government and more personal freedom. He founded a form of free-market anarchism which he called "anarcho-capitalism".^[1][2] Rothbard believed society should organise itself, and he didn't like central planning.^[3]

Rothbard wrote over twenty books and was an important central figure in the American libertarian movement.^[4]

His ideas

Rothbard supported the abolition of government. He considered the government having a monopoly on force the greatest danger to liberty and the long-term well-being of the people. He called the state a "gang of thieves writ large — the most immoral, grasping and unscrupulous individuals in any society".^[5][6][7][8]

Rothbard thought that all services provided by monopoly governments could be provided more efficiently by the private sector. According to him, many regulations and laws passed "for the public interest" were self-interested power grabs by scheming government bureaucrats to make themselves look important. These schemes were not subject to market disciplines.

Government services were not efficient, and would get eliminated, if the services could be provided by competition in the private sector.^[9][10][11]

Rothbard was equally condemning of big business working with government. Business elites, he thought, used government's monopoly power so as to influence laws and regulatory policy to help themselves at the expense of their competitive rivals.^[12]

He argued that taxation was theft on a grand scale, backed by law. It was "a compulsory monopoly of force" which prevented the more efficient voluntary procurement of defense and judicial services from competing suppliers.^[6][13] He also argued against central banking and fractional reserve banking.^[14] A monopoly system where the government decides how much money to print is, to him, a form of state-sponsored, legalized financial fraud. It is against libertarian principles and ethics.^{[15][16][17][18]} Rothbard opposed military, political, and economic interferences in the affairs of other nations.^[19][20]

Books

• Man, economy, and state Full text Archived 2006-08-13 at the Wayback Machine; ISBN 0-945466-30-7 (1962)
• The panic of 1819. 1962, 2006 edition: ISBN 1-933550-08-2
• America's great depression. Full text ISBN 0-945466-05-6. (1963, 1972, 1975, 1983, 2000)
• What has government done to our money? Full text / Audio Book Archived 2009-02-26 at the Wayback Machine ISBN 0-945466-44-7 (1963)
• Economic depressions: causes and cures (1969)
• Power and market. ISBN 1-933550-05-8. (1970) restored to Man, economy, and state ISBN 0-945466-30-7, 2004
• Education: free and compulsory. ISBN 0-945466-22-6 (1972)
• Left and Right, selected essays 1954-65 (1972)
• For a new liberty: the libertarian manifesto Full text / Audio book ISBN 0-945466-47-1 (1973, 1978)
• The essential von Mises (1973)
• The case for the 100 percent gold dollar. ISBN 0-945466-34-X Full text / Audio Book Archived 2009-02-26 at the Wayback Machine (1974)
• Egalitarianism as a revolt against nature and other essays ISBN 0-945466-23-4 (1974)
• Conceived in liberty 4 vols ISBN 0-945466-26-9 (1975-79)
• Individualism and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. ISBN 0-932790-03-8 (1979)
• The ethics of liberty Full text / Audio Book Archived 2009-04-26 at the Wayback Machine ISBN 0-8147-7559-4 (1982)
• The mystery of banking ISBN 0-943940-04-4 (1983)
• Ludwig von Mises: scholar, creator, hero. OCLC 20856420 (1988)
• Freedom, inequality, primitivism, and the division of labor. Full text included as Chapter 16 in Egalitarianism above (1991)
• The case against the Fed. ISBN 0-945466-17-X (1994)
• An Austrian perspective on the history of economic thought 2 vols ISBN 0-945466-48-X (1995)
• Wall Street, banks, and American foreign policy. Full text with an introduction by Justin Raimondo. (1995)
• Making economic sense. ISBN 0-945466-18-8 (1995, 2006)
• Logic of action 2 vols ISBN 1-85898-015-1 and ISBN 1-85898-570-6 (1997)
• The Austrian theory of the trade cycle and other essays. ISBN 0-945466-21-8 (also by Mises, Hayek, & Haberler)
• Irrepressible Rothbard: the Rothbard-Rockwell report: essays of Murray N. Rothbard. Full Text ISBN 1-883959-02-0 (2000)
• A history of money and banking in the United States. ISBN 0-945466-33-1 (2005)
• The complete Libertarian Forum 2 vols Full text ISBN 1-933550-02-3 (2006)
• The betrayal of the American Right. ISBN 978-1-933550-13-8 (2007)

Related pages

• List of anarchists
• anarcho-capitalism