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NOTE Authors Forum: The Worldview of Rothbard

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Good morning ladies and gentlemen, welcome. I'm delighted to be back again for my annual intellectual fix.

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I'm going to put the cover of this book down so you can see what it looks like.

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I can't afford this book.

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I don't know what the story is on this, but let me explain, sorry, I'm just going to put

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My justification for doing this was really, this is one of a 20 volume series of books

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on major conservative libertarian thinkers. The other books in the series deal with, let's

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see who they deal with, you have the Salamanca School, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Smith, Burke,

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Bookfields, Spencer, Mises, Schumpeter, Hayek, Oakeshott, Popper, Rand, Friedman, Kirk, Buchanan,

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the modern papacy, I like that one, Nozick and this one on Rothbard.

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So it's designed to provide a sort of resource for students so that they can have an access

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to a whole range of stuff and all of the books follow the same format so I was under very

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tight constraints in how this book was structured.

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So the first chapter is the sort of intellectual biography of Rothbard, probably completely

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unnecessary for anybody who's attending this conference to read it.

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I don't have anything new or stunning or shocking to reveal.

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The second chapter is a substantive chapter and it deals with, I tried to give an overview

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of a whole number of things.

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It's called Rothbard Libertarian and so it talks about Rothbard praxeologist, Rothbard

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the natural law ethicist, Rothbard the enemy of the state, I liked writing that part, that

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and Rothbard, Defender of Liberty.

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The third chapter is, I think, so there's really not a lot new, I would say, even in the second chapter for people who come to this conference.

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So you don't need to take out a second mortgage on the house to go buy this book and so on.

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Well, do if you want to. I mean, it's good for me. I get royalties or something. Well, maybe.

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The third chapter, Influence and Reception, however, is something I had to do, some reading there that I hadn't done before.

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It's largely about Rothbard, the historian. So it's Rothbard, the historian of liberty,

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the history of economic thought, and indeed it includes, I trolled through as many of

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the reviews of Rothbard's books that I could find to find out what the reception was of

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his material when he produced it. And it was kind of, it was interesting. It was largely,

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certainly in the beginning, unenthusiastic. I think that's the way we might phrase it

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and so on, and then sort of skeptical, and then sort of warmed up generally.

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So that material might, for people who are here who probably wouldn't benefit from reading

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the first two chapters, might find something of interest in that.

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Chapter four, the final chapter, is called Contemporary Relevance, and this was the most

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fun, okay, because that's when I could let myself go and let my hair down.

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There's not much of it to let down, but what there was, I did.

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So just to give you an idea of what I have in here, it starts with the global financial

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crisis of 2007 and following. What can we say about it? I'm in a country that's currently

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going down the tubes and so on. My government, for some reason, felt compelled to contribute

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between 85 and 120 billion of taxpayers' money to some group of people I don't even know.

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It's quite bizarre. Why? I don't know. So that every man, woman and child in Ireland

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now owes about 25,000 euros. So in my family, that means I'm 150 grand in the red. I can't

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I can't quite figure out how that happened, okay?

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So the second section is, well, I'm a Catholic,

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so things are going to hell in a hand basket, I'm happy, okay?

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I think things are normal, right, okay?

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That's what we expect, okay?

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The good suffer and the wicked prosper, okay?

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Anyway, so the second section is called

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Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste,

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and it's about the kind of thing

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that Philip was talking about in the first,

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about the way in which, for example,

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we are now under severe pressure

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to get rid of our relatively low corporation tax.

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I mean, sorry, we're causing some distortion in the market in Europe.

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Okay, Ireland is suddenly causing France and Germany to go sort of belly up

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and so on because we have a low corporation tax.

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No, it's really bizarre.

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Then I talk about Rothbard, the polemicist, and there's a lot of fun.

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I had a lot of fun in that.

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One section I did, I couldn't resist this.

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I have a small section in there called The World Full of Hate.

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This is based on a citation from Chomsky.

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In an interview in 2002 he said, quote, he said,

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the American version of libertarianism is an aberration.

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Nobody really takes it seriously.

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Now, it's difficult to know how Chomsky would substantiate

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this claim, and I suspect probably cynically

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that by nobody he means nobody he knows

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on the north bank of the Charles River

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between MIT and Harvard, right?

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Which is, which of course is the world, as we all know.

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You draw a map of America and you've got this,

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and then there's wasteland everywhere to the west,

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and so on.

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And there's a section in here on libertarian and conservatism. I dealt with this actually

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in my first chapter, and it's the substance of my talk tomorrow afternoon. I'm going to

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expand on this and talk about it in some more detail, so I won't say much more about that.

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And then a final section on strategy and coming back to the kinds of things that we all know

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and love. My hope is that somewhere in the library, somewhere, some student is going

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to pick this up and discover Rothbard, a name that students will not have come across before

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and Read It. I'm also hopeful that the Mises Institute perhaps might be able to do a deal

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with Continuum to license this so that some normal people on normal salaries will be able

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to buy this book, including me. It would be fun having spent so much time writing it.

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I feel a bit ashamed actually because I only wrote one book last year, so I feel I've been

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kind of taking it easy. So I'll try better next year and try for two. Thank you very

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much ladies and gentlemen.

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Thank you very much.