WEBVTT NOTE Rothbard on the Warfare State 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:12.000 I have a quote from Rothbard, which I'll begin with, and this is from an interview taped in December of 1972 by Walter Grindr and Walter Block. 2 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:21.000 And in response to a question, Rothbard says, quote, the country isn't that bad, it's the government. Look where the bases are. Look where the troops are. 3 00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:27.000 I mean, what other country has troops and bases all over the world? What other country feels impelled to leap in, 4 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:33.500 to meddle in whenever anything happens to its dislike anywhere in the world. 5 00:00:33.500 --> 00:00:41.000 If something happens in northwestern Afghanistan, to pick a very remote area, the United States will obviously be there. 6 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:44.000 I mean, who else does this on a world scale? 7 00:00:44.000 --> 00:00:48.000 I'd like to see us defend ourselves in Brooklyn once in a while. 8 00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:52.000 Put that to a test. For once, wait until they get to Brooklyn. 9 00:00:52.000 --> 00:01:00.000 Now, this is in 1972, and I've been to New York City once or twice, and I don't really know the layout of the place. 10 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:06.000 Well, Brooklyn is within some miles of the former Twin Towers. 11 00:01:06.000 --> 00:01:13.000 And what's interesting is that the one time that they came here in New Brooklyn, they didn't defend the country. 12 00:01:13.000 --> 00:01:21.000 Now, it's interesting, a short book by Elaine Scaray, who's a professor of philosophy and some kind of literary criticism at Harvard, 13 00:01:21.000 --> 00:01:27.000 which came out, I think, a year ago, called Who Defended the Country? 14 00:01:27.000 --> 00:01:32.000 And she says, well, if anyone defended the country, it's the people on the fourth plane 15 00:01:32.000 --> 00:01:36.000 who, at least, as some people claim, tried to take over the plane. 16 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:43.000 This huge military-industrial complex didn't seem to be doing much on this occasion. 17 00:01:43.000 --> 00:01:48.000 So I'll let that be my starting sally. 18 00:01:48.000 --> 00:01:54.000 Now, how did Rothbard form his views on War and Peace and the Warfare State? 19 00:01:54.000 --> 00:02:00.000 Well, he commented in an unpublished manuscript that he wrote in the early 1970s called 20 00:02:00.000 --> 00:02:04.000 The Betrayal of the American Right. He commented that, quote, 21 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:08.000 During the years when I was becoming ever more conservative economically, 22 00:02:08.000 --> 00:02:12.000 I had done little or no independent thinking on foreign affairs. 23 00:02:12.000 --> 00:02:16.000 I was literally content to take my foreign policy thinking from the editorials of the good, 24 00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:18.000 by the good, great New York Times. 25 00:02:18.000 --> 00:02:20.000 This is all hard to imagine now 26 00:02:20.000 --> 00:02:23.000 that Rothbard ever took anything from the New York Times. 27 00:02:23.000 --> 00:02:24.000 And he goes on. 28 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:28.000 He became clear to me, however, that isolationism, that's in quotes, 29 00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:31.000 in foreign affairs was but the foreign counterpart 30 00:02:31.000 --> 00:02:35.000 of strictly limited government within each nation's borders. 31 00:02:35.000 --> 00:02:37.000 Now Rothbard, of course, became aware 32 00:02:37.000 --> 00:02:41.000 that there was an alternative to the New York Times point of view fairly early 33 00:02:41.000 --> 00:02:51.000 When he becomes aware that there's actually an old right political movement where they believe in the free market economy and the other things in which he already believed. 34 00:02:51.000 --> 00:02:59.000 But they have a coherent worldview that incorporates the whole scope of political issues. 35 00:02:59.000 --> 00:03:10.000 And so sometime in 1946 he's in touch with the Foundation for Economic Education and he meets Frank Chodorov who was a huge influence on him. 36 00:03:10.000 --> 00:03:17.000 and you can see his tribute to Chudorov in Left and Right in 1966, the obituary he did for Chudorov. 37 00:03:17.000 --> 00:03:25.000 So having, let's see how Rothbard summarizes what the Old Right stood for. 38 00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:35.000 Having sketched out, again in this same unpublished manuscript, the origins of the Old Right in opposition to the New Deal, 39 00:03:35.000 --> 00:03:43.000 He says, well, it underwent one change, because originally the New Deal's focus was domestic, so the critique was domestic, then he adds, 40 00:03:43.000 --> 00:03:51.000 as the Roosevelt administration moved toward World War in the late 1930s, the old right added intense opposition to the New Deal's war policies, 41 00:03:51.000 --> 00:04:01.000 to its systematic opposition to the domestic New Deal, before they realized that as the Libertarian Randolph Bourne had put it in opposing America's entry into World War I, 42 00:04:01.000 --> 00:04:18.000 War is the health of the state, and an entry into large-scale war, especially for global and not national concerns, would plunge America into a permanent garrison state that would wreck American liberty and constitutional limits at home, even as it extended the American Imperium abroad. 43 00:04:18.000 --> 00:04:25.000 As anti-Ford interventionism was added to the anti-New Deal mix, the old right lost some adherence and gained even more. 44 00:04:25.000 --> 00:04:37.000 For Eastern establishment, anti-New Dealers such as Louis Douglas, William Clayton, Dean Acheson, and the Morgan Bank embraced the entire New Deal package once it came wrapped in the enticing trappings of the American Empire. 45 00:04:37.000 --> 00:04:52.000 On the other hand, anti-war progressives, originally New Dealers, men such as Senators William Borah and Gerald Nye, and writers such as John T. Flynn and Harry Elmer Barnes, began to realize there was something very wrong with the strong state that could expand into foreign adventures. 46 00:04:52.000 --> 00:04:58.000 and so they gradually became anti-New Dealers in every sense of the word. 47 00:04:58.000 --> 00:05:01.000 So the result was, to quote Rothbard further, 48 00:05:01.000 --> 00:05:07.000 the old right was opposed to big government on every front, foreign and domestic. 49 00:05:07.000 --> 00:05:16.000 So he's achieved a kind of interesting consistency in the late 1940s. 50 00:05:16.000 --> 00:05:24.000 Now he says, I'll continue with what he's saying in this section of the unpublished betrayal. 51 00:05:24.000 --> 00:05:26.000 For the old left, quote, 52 00:05:26.000 --> 00:05:30.000 World War II was a glorious age, the fulfillment of the promise of a new dawn. 53 00:05:30.000 --> 00:05:36.000 Everywhere in the United States and in Western Europe, the liberal ideals of central planning of a new planned order 54 00:05:36.000 --> 00:05:42.000 staffed by brain trusters and liberal intellectuals seemed to be the wave of the future as well as the present. 55 00:05:42.000 --> 00:05:46.600 conservative views seemed as dead and outmoded as the dodo confined to the dustbin of history 56 00:05:46.600 --> 00:05:50.880 no one was more pleased at this burgeoning New Deal collectivism than the communist party 57 00:05:50.880 --> 00:05:53.720 this new popular front line of the late thirties 58 00:05:53.720 --> 00:05:58.360 seemed more and more vindicated by the glorious new order of borning 59 00:05:58.360 --> 00:06:01.680 in foreign affairs the United States was marching hand in hand with the Soviet Union 60 00:06:01.680 --> 00:06:05.200 in a glorious war to defeat fascism and expand democracy 61 00:06:05.200 --> 00:06:10.920 domestically the communists under Earl Browder as their leader exalted in a new found respectability 62 00:06:10.920 --> 00:06:16.860 and so on and so forth, and as if to prove Rothbard's point, virtually the entire school, 63 00:06:16.860 --> 00:06:24.160 the Frankfurt School of Marxists, including Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse and others 64 00:06:24.160 --> 00:06:30.220 served in the wartime office of strategic services on the economic desk, or what to 65 00:06:30.220 --> 00:06:34.780 do with Germany after the war desk, so we even had the Frankfurt School in the American 66 00:06:34.780 --> 00:06:40.780 and War Effort, and most of these made the transition into Cold War liberalism, 67 00:06:40.780 --> 00:06:43.780 changed their views slightly except for Marcuse. 68 00:06:43.780 --> 00:06:48.780 Reflecting the mood of left-wing triumphalism attendant on the war, 69 00:06:48.780 --> 00:06:54.780 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a homegrown American social democrat, wrote in 1947, 70 00:06:54.780 --> 00:07:00.780 quote, there seems to be no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States 71 00:07:00.780 --> 00:07:18.780 New series of new deals. Well, true enough, but much simpler if you can have a permanent crisis and the permanent or the persistence of wartime controls into time of alleged pace. 72 00:07:18.780 --> 00:07:27.780 Okay, now Rothbard has entered into the old right movement, made new friends. He also lost a friend. It's kind of interesting. 73 00:07:27.780 --> 00:07:48.780 He's writing to a guy named Spurgeon Keeney in 1947 and Keeney sends him letters from places like Warsaw saying you've got to sign up for things like the Marshall Plan and this is very important and Rothbard obviously wasn't buying this. 74 00:07:48.780 --> 00:07:51.780 He failed to buy the whole Cold War argument. 75 00:07:51.780 --> 00:07:59.780 And this friend of his goes on to be an Air Force intellectual, still around, and a kind of Cold War theorist at a high level. 76 00:07:59.780 --> 00:08:03.780 Rothbard, on the other hand, is beginning to write to people like Harry Elmer Barnes. 77 00:08:03.780 --> 00:08:10.780 He writes to Barnes in October of 1948 and discusses Charles Baird and has some questions about revisionist history. 78 00:08:10.780 --> 00:08:15.780 And this is, again, something Rothbard has just learned through the old write, 79 00:08:15.780 --> 00:08:28.780 that if you want to be able to consistently critique the state and home and abroad, you have to now and again question standing historical interpretations. 80 00:08:28.780 --> 00:08:36.780 This isn't to say that all forms of revisionism are equally good, you have to decide that on the merits. 81 00:08:36.780 --> 00:08:43.780 Now as he gets further involved in the old right, Rothbard begins to of course publish, 82 00:08:43.780 --> 00:08:48.780 and he publishes in Frank Chodorow's newsletter analysis 83 00:08:48.780 --> 00:08:53.780 and also in an obscure journal called Faith and Freedom 84 00:08:53.780 --> 00:08:56.780 which was published by Spiritual Mobilization 85 00:08:56.780 --> 00:09:00.780 which was one of those odd phenomena at the time 86 00:09:00.780 --> 00:09:04.780 what you have are Protestant ministers who are liberal theologically 87 00:09:04.780 --> 00:09:06.780 but opposed to the social gospel 88 00:09:06.780 --> 00:09:10.780 so they believe in laissez-faire liberalism and market economy 89 00:09:10.780 --> 00:09:12.780 but they're liberal theologically 90 00:09:12.780 --> 00:09:22.780 And Rothbard becomes a regular contributor to this publication for some years, usually under the pseudonym of Aubrey Herbert. 91 00:09:23.780 --> 00:09:34.780 He was still working on his doctorate and didn't want trouble caused by his association with these non-respectable right-wingers, I suppose. 92 00:09:34.780 --> 00:09:48.460 What name was that again? 93 00:09:48.460 --> 00:10:10.460 Aubrey Herbert, it's loosely based on the English individualist writer of the late 19th century, I guess Oberon Herbert. 94 00:10:10.460 --> 00:10:24.460 All right, what's interesting is to follow Rothbard's disagreements with the, what shall I call it, 95 00:10:24.460 --> 00:10:31.460 this burgeoning foreign policy of intervention which has been launched by Truman and the Cold War liberals. 96 00:10:31.460 --> 00:10:37.460 Rothbard later had to invent a language to describe this because there was a transition made within the right-wing movement. 97 00:10:37.460 --> 00:10:42.460 The right-wing movement that he had joined wasn't the same thing within a matter of a few years. 98 00:10:42.460 --> 00:10:46.460 And he invented a kind of Weberian ideal type. 99 00:10:46.460 --> 00:10:53.460 He said, well, there was the old right and then there was the new right. 100 00:10:53.460 --> 00:11:00.460 And the fundamental difference, in his view, was precisely on foreign policy. 101 00:11:00.460 --> 00:11:10.460 And as far as he was concerned, the transition had been pretty much made by 1955 with the founding of National Review. 102 00:11:10.460 --> 00:11:21.460 But of course this is all, the process is going on coming up to 1955 and the founding of that magazine. 103 00:11:21.460 --> 00:11:29.460 Now Rothbard did a kind of technical paper on the economics of war in, I think, 1949, 104 00:11:29.460 --> 00:11:32.340 where he followed Mises' line that, 105 00:11:32.340 --> 00:11:35.000 okay, let's say you have to have a wire for some reason. 106 00:11:35.000 --> 00:11:36.140 How would you finance it? 107 00:11:36.140 --> 00:11:37.840 Well, you'd want to finance it by taxes 108 00:11:37.840 --> 00:11:42.220 and not distort the market mechanism through bond, 109 00:11:42.220 --> 00:11:44.580 you know, public debt and so forth. 110 00:11:44.580 --> 00:11:47.220 So pretty straightforward technical piece. 111 00:11:47.220 --> 00:11:50.700 But in the meantime, he's also beginning to write letters 112 00:11:50.700 --> 00:11:52.260 to people like Henry Hazlitt, 113 00:11:52.260 --> 00:11:54.860 questioning some views Hazlitt has put out 114 00:11:54.860 --> 00:11:56.960 about wartime taxation. 115 00:11:56.960 --> 00:12:10.960 And by now it's 1950 and the Korean War has gotten underway and the economists are all chiming in with various plans to make all this work and still prevent inflation and so on and so forth. 116 00:12:10.960 --> 00:12:24.180 Now, he has quite a number of quarrels with Hazlitt about interpretations of past American 117 00:12:24.180 --> 00:12:33.200 history in relation to foreign policy, so I won't go into. 118 00:12:33.200 --> 00:12:38.400 But in the end, Rothbard is increasingly vocal in his personal letters to people, say, at 119 00:12:38.400 --> 00:12:42.400 The Volcker Fund, for whom he's working as a consultant. 120 00:12:42.400 --> 00:12:46.400 He's getting pretty vocal about the deterioration of the Freeman. 121 00:12:46.400 --> 00:12:54.400 He sees the Freeman magazine going over increasingly to an interventionist foreign policy based on acceptance of the Cold War framework. 122 00:12:54.400 --> 00:13:05.400 And his discontent increases as we come down to the period at which the Freeman essentially collapses 123 00:13:05.400 --> 00:13:09.440 Are Flapses and is taken over by the Foundation for Economic Education 124 00:13:09.440 --> 00:13:16.440 and then sort of replaced in one fell swoop by a national review 125 00:13:16.440 --> 00:13:20.440 taking over many of the same writers and so forth. 126 00:13:30.440 --> 00:13:34.440 He was at fee, so they bought out, 127 00:13:34.440 --> 00:13:39.440 and I think this is around 55 that this finally happens. 128 00:13:39.440 --> 00:13:42.440 I'd be able to tell you if I had everything in front of me. 129 00:13:42.440 --> 00:13:49.440 So when Fee takes over the Freeman, they reduce the format to the small magazine 130 00:13:49.440 --> 00:13:55.440 and talk strictly about economics and rather little about public issues like foreign policy. 131 00:13:55.440 --> 00:14:03.440 So I only see Rothbard in 1953 in November writing to William Johnson of Spiritual Mobilization 132 00:14:03.440 --> 00:14:15.440 which published Faith and Freedom, saying that in general Faith and Freedom was superior to the Freeman because it hadn't bought into foreign policy interventionism. 133 00:14:15.440 --> 00:14:32.440 And then he writes to someone else that the only thing good currently that he's seen is a piece by Nathaniel Weil on foreign policy, which is interesting. 134 00:14:32.440 --> 00:14:43.440 Okay, now, the last sort of outburst of the old right is this issue of faith and freedom, April 1954. 135 00:14:43.440 --> 00:14:45.440 It's kind of the all anti-interventionist issue. 136 00:14:45.440 --> 00:14:51.440 Sort of the last thing of this kind for a long time is these anti-interventionists are driven underground 137 00:14:51.440 --> 00:14:56.440 by the change in outlook of most of the right-wing base. 138 00:14:56.440 --> 00:15:09.440 Okay, and in this issue we have, of course, Rothbard's first long essay on this subject under the pseudonym Obrey Herbert. 139 00:15:09.440 --> 00:15:14.440 It's called A Real Aggressor, and this is one of the many articles that is now on the web. 140 00:15:14.440 --> 00:15:18.440 And I'll summarize this argument quickly. 141 00:15:18.440 --> 00:15:24.440 He's saying it's a contradiction for conservatives and or libertarians to champion trade. 142 00:15:24.440 --> 00:15:54.440 and then hereditary with the so-called enemy block and another theme of the time that people would rather be should rather be dead and red was all very interesting but no one had taken a poll to see if they really wanted to be dead rather than red and it seemed wrong to try to impose your idea of what they want to do on them in the event you said generic statism, statism in general ought to be the real enemy 143 00:15:54.440 --> 00:16:24.440 of Libertarians, then he goes on to discuss defense properly understood as the defense of individuals and private property and raises the paradox, and you'll be hearing a lot about this from Dr. Hoppe, the paradox of the expropriating protector of property, the paradox not usually addressed in the literature, and goes on to use terms like racket in relation to the political process and also addresses the limits of democracy 144 00:16:24.440 --> 00:16:34.440 Rothbard's ever going to crusade for democracy. He says the only thing good about democracy is that sometimes you can get a peaceful change of the people in charge. 145 00:16:34.440 --> 00:16:38.440 He doesn't say you can even always get that. That's the only advantage. 146 00:16:38.440 --> 00:16:48.440 He says we have to face up to the fact that all states are oppressive and address that where we live. 147 00:16:48.440 --> 00:17:00.440 He also takes on this very popular idea at the time, not as popular now as a rhetorical device with the present administration, but popular at that time, the idea of collective security. 148 00:17:00.440 --> 00:17:15.440 And he says, well, okay, let's assume there was an international so-called police force to go around running into corals that come up everywhere and then blowing things up to fix these corals and call that peacemaking. 149 00:17:45.440 --> 00:18:01.440 Rothbard says that the communists, after all, deluded as they may be, are not completely irrational, they don't want to be blown up either, and therefore, once in a while you might want to actually negotiate, instead of just issuing threats and taking big moral stands and so forth. 150 00:18:01.440 --> 00:18:15.440 So Rothbard's trying to unify a kind of moral argument based on an idea of national rights and individual liberty with the practical side in that we live in a world made up of states, what do we do now, and then so on. 151 00:18:15.440 --> 00:18:19.440 So this is, in a way, his first major statement on the subject. 152 00:18:19.440 --> 00:18:23.440 Now, in the same period, he's interested in the Bricker Amendment. 153 00:18:23.440 --> 00:18:25.440 Some of you may remember the Bricker Amendment. 154 00:18:25.440 --> 00:18:32.440 I was going to clarify some language in the Constitution about what treaties can commit us to. 155 00:18:32.440 --> 00:18:39.440 And he actually sent some money, and back when a dollar was a dollar, he sent in a couple of dollars to the Bricker Amendment committee. 156 00:18:39.440 --> 00:18:45.440 And someone later sent him a copy of Roger McBride's book, which was a defense of the Bricker Amendment. 157 00:18:45.440 --> 00:18:55.440 And already in 1954, he's writing to one correspondent asking if he knows anything about William Appleman Williams, the Red Historian. 158 00:18:55.440 --> 00:19:02.440 This is someone whose works Rothbard would later read with interest as a critic of the Cold War, 159 00:19:02.440 --> 00:19:11.440 but also a critic of a larger tradition in American foreign policy from 1898 onwards, the so-called Open Door Policy. 160 00:19:11.440 --> 00:19:23.440 He also writes, in 1954, to John T. Flynn discussing this break on the right wing between interventionists and anti-interventionists. 161 00:19:23.440 --> 00:19:30.440 I don't know if Flynn replied. I think Flynn was pretty tired by this time of everything. 162 00:19:30.440 --> 00:19:39.440 Now also, in 1954, Rothbard signs on as a regular columnist with Faith and Freedom 163 00:19:39.440 --> 00:19:43.440 and begins writing a feature called Along Pennsylvania Avenue. 164 00:19:43.440 --> 00:19:46.440 So this is a regular feature under his pseudonym, 165 00:19:46.440 --> 00:19:49.440 in which he talks about current politics, 166 00:19:49.440 --> 00:19:53.440 whether it's McCarthy, agricultural subsidies, 167 00:19:53.440 --> 00:19:57.440 what the Democrats are up to, Cold War liberalism. 168 00:19:57.440 --> 00:20:02.440 This is actually very interesting stuff because you can see Rothbard 169 00:20:02.440 --> 00:20:07.440 being consistent to what we expect him to be. 170 00:20:07.440 --> 00:20:14.440 This column has already worked out the major parts of his approach to politics. 171 00:20:14.440 --> 00:20:20.440 Now of course he's purged. This column doesn't last past some time in 1957. 172 00:20:20.440 --> 00:20:35.440 He wrote something about Hungary that was too radical for the management and the ministers who were the main subscribers to this publication. 173 00:20:35.440 --> 00:20:42.440 One of his constant themes, once the Republicans are in office, is that they're set out. 174 00:20:42.440 --> 00:20:48.440 The Republicans come in and they talk about free enterprise and they're going to save the petty bourgeoisie and the middle classes and so on. 175 00:20:48.440 --> 00:20:53.440 They don't really do anything substantive. This is already obvious fairly early. 176 00:20:53.440 --> 00:21:04.440 And so he's got a lot to say about creeping Eisenhowerism and his old professor, Arthur Burns, who goes to Washington to help plan the economy, things like that. 177 00:21:04.440 --> 00:21:19.440 Now, there's also a debate in 1955 in the columns of Faith and Freedom between Rothbard writing as Aubrey Herbert and Villy Schlemme as a former Social Democrat immigrant Cold Warrior 178 00:21:19.440 --> 00:21:30.440 and rehashing the points in favor of the Cold War and being very upset and feeling the communists were about to go rolling into Western Europe 179 00:21:30.440 --> 00:21:38.440 If they did that, then they'd have all this wonderful industrial equipment at their disposal, and that would be the end. 180 00:21:38.440 --> 00:21:45.440 But Rothbard pointed out, I think rather cogently, that, well, if they tried to manage it, all these industrial assets, 181 00:21:45.440 --> 00:21:51.440 and if they tried to manage these assets using their characteristic means, they'd run it into the ground pretty quickly. 182 00:21:51.440 --> 00:21:57.440 So he kind of brought the socialist calculation problem to bear on the Cold War, 183 00:21:57.440 --> 00:22:10.720 So by at least 1954, Rothbard is already interested in finding new allies, and this is the answer 184 00:22:10.720 --> 00:22:16.560 to people who think that Rothbard was just arbitrarily flailing about, making alliances 185 00:22:16.560 --> 00:22:21.840 arbitrarily, whimsically from time to time. 186 00:22:21.840 --> 00:22:27.840 The reason is, he's already deeply discontented and opposed to the direction of the right. 187 00:22:27.840 --> 00:22:41.840 This is being taken in the early Cold War, and he's willing to talk to anybody who can oppose this and doesn't really care what their domestic politics are. 188 00:22:41.840 --> 00:22:58.840 Out of some other amusing things in the correspondence, in preview of some of his later views, he does a short letter to the editor of the National Review in 1956, called it In Defensive Nasser. 189 00:22:58.840 --> 00:23:06.840 Rothbard seemed to think that Arab nationalism was an understandable phenomenon. 190 00:23:06.840 --> 00:23:29.840 Here's another thread that's interesting. Here's a letter in January 1957 where Rothbard is interested in the role of the Rockefeller interests in the Suez Crisis. 191 00:23:29.840 --> 00:23:39.840 A constant theme of Rothbard. He doesn't want to settle for the superficial CBS News presentation of the merits of something that's going on. 192 00:23:39.840 --> 00:23:43.840 He wants to find out if somebody's got a material interest in it. 193 00:23:43.840 --> 00:23:48.840 And this is not, you know, an economic deterministic theory of history. 194 00:23:48.840 --> 00:23:54.840 It's simply the frank recognition that people have interests and some people are in a better position to realize these through the state. 195 00:23:54.840 --> 00:23:59.840 is an application, if anything, of Franz Oppenheimer and Charles Baird. 196 00:23:59.840 --> 00:24:03.840 Murray always had a certain fondness for Charles Baird's writings. 197 00:24:03.840 --> 00:24:07.840 Of course this great American historian of the first half of the 20th century 198 00:24:07.840 --> 00:24:11.840 who was later regarded as a totally discredited fossil 199 00:24:11.840 --> 00:24:14.840 because he had come to oppose Roosevelt's foreign policy 200 00:24:14.840 --> 00:24:16.840 and this sort of reflected back on his earlier work 201 00:24:16.840 --> 00:24:19.840 that he couldn't have been right about much of anything. 202 00:24:19.840 --> 00:24:22.840 But nonetheless, Baird, a progressive historian, 203 00:24:22.840 --> 00:24:28.840 who thought that whenever people met, politically something was up, and there might be economic interests worth looking at. 204 00:24:28.840 --> 00:24:36.840 It's not a claim that this is the only determining factor guiding what people do, but nonetheless an important thing to follow. 205 00:24:36.840 --> 00:24:45.840 Okay, so Rothbard's already interested by this time in some theoretical analysis of what we now call corporatism, 206 00:24:45.840 --> 00:24:54.840 and the systematic relationship between the state and some part portions of the business community. 207 00:24:54.840 --> 00:24:57.840 Let's see. 208 00:24:57.840 --> 00:25:00.840 So I'm trying to follow through chronologically. 209 00:25:00.840 --> 00:25:05.840 The problem with Rothbard is that you either try to sum him up thematically or chronologically, 210 00:25:05.840 --> 00:25:12.840 you end up having to do a little bit of age because he has all the fundamental ideas very early, 211 00:25:12.840 --> 00:25:18.840 I think it adds to them as he goes or deepens the analysis. 212 00:25:18.840 --> 00:25:26.840 Now there's quite a bit of back and forth between William F. Buckley and Rothbard in these years because there being no place else to write, 213 00:25:26.840 --> 00:25:31.840 after the collapse of a number of other magazines, Rothbard does write for National Review, 214 00:25:31.840 --> 00:25:35.840 but they kind of put him in this little box where he can only write about economics. 215 00:25:35.840 --> 00:25:39.840 He did one article on Westerns, does he like Westerns? 216 00:25:39.840 --> 00:25:47.840 A little bit of cultural criticism, pure economics, and they employed him sometimes as a researcher. 217 00:25:47.840 --> 00:25:54.840 They wouldn't let him touch foreign policy, because obviously his views and theirs were at odds. 218 00:25:54.840 --> 00:25:58.840 So every so often there's a little note from Leymath Puckley rejecting a piece by Rothbard 219 00:25:58.840 --> 00:26:01.840 and saying, Rothbard, you just can't draw the proper moral distinctions. 220 00:26:01.840 --> 00:26:06.840 You should leave it to us Cold Warriors to do that, and you should read more books by James Burnham. 221 00:26:06.840 --> 00:26:14.840 a rather unlikely thing for Rothbard to do well I think he read them but he wouldn't have taken them very seriously 222 00:26:14.840 --> 00:26:19.840 now here he's also beginning Hoover revisionism he's interested in Hoover revisionism 223 00:26:19.840 --> 00:26:24.840 and this partly comes out of a project that goes back to about I'd say 1950 224 00:26:24.840 --> 00:26:30.840 he's interested in doing something on explaining the Great Depression using Austrian theory 225 00:26:30.840 --> 00:26:45.840 and this leads him into Hoover revisionism because Hoover was hardly the evil laissez-fairest that his opponents said he was after the fact and Rothbard thought this was worth knowing. 226 00:26:45.840 --> 00:27:00.840 Now in July of 1958, it's another thing to mention on the way, Rothbard writes a letter to Senator William E. Jenner commending him on his opposition to U.S. intervention in Lebanon. 227 00:27:00.840 --> 00:27:11.840 I don't believe we can ever find an intervention that Rothbard liked, as opposed to someone like Charles Krauthammer who can't find an intervention he doesn't like. 228 00:27:11.840 --> 00:27:18.840 I think I gave a talk recently saying that, well, we couldn't have democratic crusading, but we could have democratic realism. 229 00:27:18.840 --> 00:27:27.840 So in principle, we should want to make everyone democratic by force, but we have to be practical, so we can't do them all at once, so we'll set up a list and calibrate it, and so on. 230 00:27:27.840 --> 00:27:31.840 So Rothbard wouldn't, of course, like any of this. 231 00:27:31.840 --> 00:27:47.840 Now in May 9, 1958, Rothbard gets mentions to a correspondent that his essay, The New Isolationism, has been rejected by Buckley. 232 00:27:47.840 --> 00:27:53.840 Okay, well of course it would be. This has been corrected and put on the web. 233 00:27:53.840 --> 00:28:07.840 But it's a short essay, appealing to the right wing to rethink the whole thing, and consider if whether or not negotiating once in a while and taking any of disarmament seriously, 234 00:28:07.840 --> 00:28:20.840 well, they were at least worth trying, you know, it might defuse the Cold War, it might make life less of a cosmic struggle and crusade, maybe this would be worth considering that this might be more compatible with liberty and free markets and all that sort of thing. 235 00:28:20.840 --> 00:28:25.840 Now, this circulated underground since it wasn't published. 236 00:28:25.840 --> 00:28:31.840 I guess just copies where it would circulate and you got some feedback. 237 00:28:31.840 --> 00:28:37.840 But at this point, anybody who was on the right and not interventionist 238 00:28:37.840 --> 00:28:40.840 wasn't getting published, much to speak of. 239 00:28:40.840 --> 00:28:48.840 But he did get some response, favorable response to the underground version of this essay. 240 00:28:48.840 --> 00:29:03.840 Excuse me. Oh yes, and then here's a funny one. Here's someone thanking Rothbard for a contribution to an ad welcoming Khrushchev's visit. 241 00:29:03.840 --> 00:29:08.840 This is a sore point with the National Review people. They make up certain myths about this. 242 00:29:08.840 --> 00:29:14.840 Not a question of Rothbard being particularly fond of Khrushchev, any more than he was fond of, say, Winston Churchill. 243 00:29:14.840 --> 00:29:25.840 But Rothbard thought that considering that this Cold War crisis had been ratcheted up to a very high point 244 00:29:25.840 --> 00:29:31.840 and that atomic bombs were involved somehow and this seemed a rather dangerous situation 245 00:29:31.840 --> 00:29:34.840 it was probably a good thing that someone was talking to someone 246 00:29:34.840 --> 00:29:40.840 but National Review they don't think that's really worth countenancing 247 00:29:40.840 --> 00:29:52.480 Now, oh, here's the one I like. This is also, I guess, in 1959, Rothbard writes to Baldy 248 00:29:52.480 --> 00:30:02.440 Harper and in passing, again showing his lack of belief in the conventional wisdom, he advocates 249 00:30:02.440 --> 00:30:08.240 defending New York from the communists if they should come up the beach by putting the 250 00:30:08.240 --> 00:30:15.240 The J.D.'s into the breach, the juvenile delinquents, New York had enough of them and they could be a first line of defense. 251 00:30:15.240 --> 00:30:21.240 It's creative thinking, it's a kind of private militia. 252 00:30:21.240 --> 00:30:31.240 By now I see Rutherford's getting letters from people like Neil D. Hutton, who's sort of anti-colonial, liberal political scientist and so on. 253 00:30:31.240 --> 00:30:34.280 and so he's getting a few people that he's writing to. 254 00:30:34.280 --> 00:30:37.880 In fact, he's been writing again to Harry Elmer Barnes. 255 00:30:37.880 --> 00:30:42.720 There's a correspondence that's pretty large 256 00:30:42.720 --> 00:30:47.080 between 1959 and 1968 when Barnes dies. 257 00:30:47.080 --> 00:30:49.320 And he's getting new contacts by way of people 258 00:30:49.320 --> 00:30:53.760 that Barnes knows, these sort of vaguely liberal 259 00:30:53.760 --> 00:30:58.180 but non-interventionist intellectuals. 260 00:30:58.180 --> 00:31:04.180 Now, in 1960, Rothbard has joined the League of Stevensonian Democrats. 261 00:31:04.180 --> 00:31:11.180 Well, again, he wants to have some place where he can do something concrete, and it's impossible on the right. 262 00:31:11.180 --> 00:31:20.180 And he's decided that, given the facts on the ground, that Adlai Stevenson is the least awful warmonger on the block. 263 00:31:20.180 --> 00:31:24.180 So he becomes a member of the Stevensonian Committee. 264 00:31:24.180 --> 00:31:42.180 In fact, he later reminisces that one of the top leaders in this committee sort of worked out that he was a libertarian and then admitted that he was too, but he had no place else to go politically. 265 00:31:42.180 --> 00:31:47.180 Okay, so there's some letters and some manifestos that Rothbard drew up for this group. 266 00:31:47.180 --> 00:31:52.180 Kind of prefiguring his later attempted alliances. 267 00:31:52.180 --> 00:31:56.180 Let's see. 268 00:31:56.180 --> 00:32:03.180 Also, by 1961, he's interested in D.F. Fleming's revisionist account, Two Volumes on the Cold War. 269 00:32:03.180 --> 00:32:08.180 And this is a book that Rothbard thought was useful, but I doubt that he could have been entirely in harmony with it, 270 00:32:08.180 --> 00:32:19.180 with it since in the end D.F. Fleming is a Wilsonian and has some biases built into his reconstruction of the history. 271 00:32:19.180 --> 00:32:34.180 Now for a while New Individualist Review makes a slight opening, creates a little pluralism or diversity on the right, but we won't go into that. 272 00:32:34.180 --> 00:32:42.180 I have the volumes here if you want to see that there was at least a little debate possible on foreign policy in that journal. 273 00:32:42.180 --> 00:32:47.180 Now one of the things that's interesting is a folder. It's just called the War and Peace Book, War and Peace Book. 274 00:32:47.180 --> 00:32:57.180 It's a little folder. And with Rothbard's papers, something handwritten is hard to date except by sort of geological stratum. 275 00:32:57.180 --> 00:33:02.180 So I'll say early 60s, plus the readability of his handwriting. 276 00:33:02.180 --> 00:33:08.180 The older Rothbard gets, the less possible it is to read his handwriting without having an Egyptologist on hand. 277 00:33:08.180 --> 00:33:12.180 It's just a fact. So I'm saying early 60s. 278 00:33:12.180 --> 00:33:15.180 And he's got a lot of handwritten notes and some type material. 279 00:33:15.180 --> 00:33:24.180 And he's clearly working out some ideas for a general book on war peace in the state, or on this theme. 280 00:33:24.180 --> 00:33:30.180 And what happened with this is that we don't get a book, but we get a whole set of essays coming out of this, 281 00:33:30.180 --> 00:33:50.180 These notes he made. So War Peace in the State, published in 1963, is one pamphlet called Myths of the Cold War, published within a year or two of that in the Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought, which was published by Bob Lefebvre's college. 282 00:33:50.180 --> 00:33:59.180 Transformation of the American Right in Continuum, 1964, Anatomy of the State, Rampart Journal, 1965. 283 00:33:59.180 --> 00:34:05.180 And of course these essays are running parallel with Rothbard's critique of conservatism or what that's become. 284 00:34:05.180 --> 00:34:14.180 So essays like Conservatism and Freedom in the Modern Age, 1961, and going back to 1957, 285 00:34:14.180 --> 00:34:20.180 And rather prescient now, Rothbard's critique of the Cold War liberal Samuel Huntington, 286 00:34:21.180 --> 00:34:26.180 in which Huntington predicts that, well, or says, well, conservatism as such has no content. 287 00:34:27.180 --> 00:34:31.180 Anyone who's defending any establishment is a conservative, and so eventually the liberals, 288 00:34:32.180 --> 00:34:36.180 the New Deal liberals in charge of the Cold War will start calling themselves conservatives. 289 00:34:37.180 --> 00:34:42.180 I think that's a broader explanation of the neoconservative phenomenon, 290 00:34:42.180 --> 00:35:12.180 and so on and on and on, although we can allow that there are Trotskyites and other factors there, but it seems to me the broadest explanation is that the Cold War liberals decided they had something to conserve and took on a new label, for the most part, and Rothbard of course wrote a protest saying that if conservatism, by which he undoubtedly means libertarianism, doesn't have some content, what's the point? Why be involved in defending everything that is, with no basis, no reason for this? 291 00:35:12.180 --> 00:35:14.180 Analysis and the Nothing. 292 00:35:14.180 --> 00:35:20.180 All right, so the April 1963 article, I think, is quite important. 293 00:35:20.180 --> 00:35:25.180 I think it's really a starting point for any study of Rothbard's views on more peace in the state, 294 00:35:25.180 --> 00:35:27.180 which is, of course, the title. 295 00:35:27.180 --> 00:35:33.180 It recapitulates the arguments made in the Faith and Freedom essay in 1954 in The Real Aggressor. 296 00:35:33.180 --> 00:35:40.180 But here, of course, there's more of a formal scholarly apparatus, footnotes, quotations, and so on. 297 00:35:40.180 --> 00:35:44.540 and an analysis that leads him to say things like this, 298 00:35:44.540 --> 00:35:47.660 that when the aggression by a territorial state 299 00:35:47.660 --> 00:35:51.220 is only downwards towards its own population, 300 00:35:51.220 --> 00:35:52.980 we call this condition peace. 301 00:35:54.500 --> 00:35:55.700 Okay, this is peace. 302 00:35:55.700 --> 00:35:57.220 The state is only aggressing against people 303 00:35:57.220 --> 00:35:59.420 within its borders, that's peace 304 00:35:59.420 --> 00:36:01.180 by this territorial monopolist. 305 00:36:02.580 --> 00:36:06.180 Once in a while, the people get unhappy and rebel 306 00:36:07.060 --> 00:36:09.860 and that's a problem for the state. 307 00:36:10.180 --> 00:36:13.180 and they have to restore a piece, restore order. 308 00:36:13.180 --> 00:36:17.180 But right now, in general, you've only got vertical violence. 309 00:36:17.180 --> 00:36:19.180 Now, when you've got horizontal violence, 310 00:36:19.180 --> 00:36:24.180 that is, you've got these ruling classes dragooning their populations into fighting other states, 311 00:36:24.180 --> 00:36:26.180 things are much worse. 312 00:36:26.180 --> 00:36:30.180 Because then the state can claim all the resources, 313 00:36:30.180 --> 00:36:32.180 including your life, all your property. 314 00:36:32.180 --> 00:36:36.180 There's just apparently no limit to what they will claim. 315 00:36:36.180 --> 00:36:39.180 There'll be some actual physical limit to what they actually can throw into the fray, 316 00:36:39.180 --> 00:36:44.180 But no theoretical limit, certainly, under conditions of modern total war. 317 00:36:44.180 --> 00:36:52.180 The one thing that follows, of course, is that it's pretty much impossible for any modern total war to come anywhere near just war theory. 318 00:36:52.180 --> 00:36:56.180 That's one implication. 319 00:36:56.180 --> 00:37:02.180 And no one's going to be able to pinpoint actual aggressors with any precision. 320 00:37:02.180 --> 00:37:05.180 That word we hear a lot these days. 321 00:37:05.180 --> 00:37:07.180 And so on. 322 00:37:07.180 --> 00:37:23.180 So Rothbard once again says, well the best thing we can do in whatever state we live under is try to reduce the scope of this activity and avoid letting horizontal violence break out. 323 00:37:23.180 --> 00:37:28.180 It's bad enough we have the vertical violence just for living under a state. 324 00:37:28.180 --> 00:37:45.180 Now this essay, this was in the Stanford, what is it, no, the Standard, 1963, it was sort of a student publication or published for students circulated at various colleges. 325 00:37:45.180 --> 00:37:48.180 This article actually stirred up a lot of trouble. 326 00:37:48.180 --> 00:38:02.180 Rosarilder Lane wrote to Rothbard and said she liked the article in general, but how would he overthrow communism in Cuba under these strict premises? 327 00:38:02.180 --> 00:38:05.180 And I suppose he would have had to say, well, it sort of went up to the Cubans. 328 00:38:05.180 --> 00:38:11.180 But anyway, but Carrie McWilliams of The Nation magazine found the article interesting. 329 00:38:11.180 --> 00:38:17.180 Howard Buffett wrote and thought it was very interesting and mentioned that he had recently tried to show Buckley and Schlomm the dangers of war. 330 00:38:17.180 --> 00:38:20.180 and Slam the Dangers of War with Russia. 331 00:38:20.180 --> 00:38:23.180 Of course, that's naive, of course, because these guys probably actually wanted a war. 332 00:38:23.180 --> 00:38:26.180 It's hard to know, but judging by their rhetoric, 333 00:38:26.180 --> 00:38:30.180 it suddenly fazes them to say we might have a major war on our hands. 334 00:38:30.180 --> 00:38:35.180 W.H. Ferry of the Center for Democratic Institutions wrote Rothbard and liked the essay, 335 00:38:35.180 --> 00:38:40.180 suggested some new contacts, including Thomas Merton. 336 00:38:40.180 --> 00:38:43.180 I don't know that Rothbard ever got in touch with Thomas Merton, 337 00:38:43.180 --> 00:38:54.180 Justice Lawler at Continuum, which was a small Catholic Quarterly, in which Rothbard did later publish a couple of essays. 338 00:38:54.180 --> 00:38:58.180 And Rothbard's writing to David Riesman by this time, and saying, thanks for your comments. 339 00:38:58.180 --> 00:39:05.180 And he says, the right is not paranoid. This is kind of one of the notions that was around in the period. 340 00:39:05.180 --> 00:39:08.180 He says, it's not paranoid. It has leaders with bad ideas. 341 00:39:08.180 --> 00:39:12.180 And parenthetically mentions a couple, but I won't go into that. 342 00:39:12.180 --> 00:39:23.180 He's also writing to John Lukasz, the Hungarian immigrant historian, who was his own brand of conservative and had written a book at least partly critical of the Cold War. 343 00:39:24.180 --> 00:39:30.180 And now we're coming down to 1964, and Rothbard says, well, what's the most dangerous phenomenon on the block? 344 00:39:32.180 --> 00:39:37.180 He says, well, it's Goldwater. Clearly he embodies the ideology of these people, and he's the most dangerous guy around. 345 00:39:37.180 --> 00:39:56.180 The famous anti-goldwater article in Innovator, published in microscopic print in Southern California by people like Sky Darius and other early libertarians. 346 00:39:56.180 --> 00:40:03.180 Sky Darius seems to turn out to have been Dirk Pearson, the vitamin guru. 347 00:40:03.180 --> 00:40:11.180 But anyway, an interesting anti-Goldwater piece circulating among such libertarians at the time that even used that label. 348 00:40:11.180 --> 00:40:19.180 And then he had a draft of his speech, which apparently he did give somewhere on the menace of Goldwaterism and so on. 349 00:40:19.180 --> 00:40:27.180 And of course, now that we're all much older and wiser, we have to go back to our Goldwater speeches looking for bits of Strassianism. 350 00:40:27.180 --> 00:40:35.180 We see that Rothbard once again is prescient, and he considers that Harry Jaffa was one of Goldwater's speech writers in the campaign. 351 00:40:35.180 --> 00:40:39.180 Things are much more interesting when we know these things. 352 00:40:39.180 --> 00:40:47.180 Now, anyway, so Goldwater, of course, is defeated, but this doesn't really improve things because the Cold War liberals are still in charge. 353 00:40:47.180 --> 00:40:55.180 And now you've got Lyndon Johnson freed to undertake essentially what Goldwater was going to do in Vietnam anyway. 354 00:40:55.180 --> 00:41:25.180 Having run as the relative peace candidate, he can now do what he wants, or what his advisors with all their mathematical social scientists tell him will work, Robert McNamara, the proto-Rumsfeld, and so on, so he's widening the war, and at the same time he's saying, well, we have to have a great leap forward in statism at home, the great society, we have to have more government programs at home, and this sort of drives Rothbard to spare. 355 00:41:25.180 --> 00:41:30.180 and he writes a famous essay called The Great Society, A Libertarian Critique 356 00:41:30.180 --> 00:41:35.180 and by this time he is actually trying to work with some of the left against the Vietnam War 357 00:41:35.180 --> 00:41:42.180 and some of his colleagues at Brooklyn Polytechnic, they're all Marxists, pretty much as you saw from Rothbard 358 00:41:42.180 --> 00:41:50.180 plan this Great Society Raider and his article is included in this book which came out in 1967 359 00:41:50.180 --> 00:42:03.180 This is a broad-ranging critique of the Great Society, but mainly from the left, with the exception of Rothbard's article, the one by, I think, Paul Goodman, that wasn't exactly left, but anyway. 360 00:42:03.180 --> 00:42:16.180 What does Rothbard say on the Great Society libertarian critique, 1967, when he starts out from John C. Calhoun's Division of Society into the Net Taxpayers and the Net Tax Eaters, 361 00:42:16.180 --> 00:42:24.180 and induces Franz Oppenheimer's contrast of economic means to wealth and political means to wealth 362 00:42:24.180 --> 00:42:33.180 and he goes on to suggest that the great society, of course, is a further institutionalization of the political means to wealth 363 00:42:33.180 --> 00:42:40.180 and coins, as far as I can tell, he coined this phrase, I can't find it anyplace else, the welfare warfare state 364 00:42:40.180 --> 00:42:52.180 And what's the point of that? Well, the point is that you tend to get them together. 365 00:42:52.180 --> 00:42:58.180 That there's a kind of logical unity to the welfare warfare state. 366 00:42:58.180 --> 00:43:01.180 And a few other people have begun to notice this. 367 00:43:01.180 --> 00:43:09.180 I think the radical sociologist Alvin Goldner writes a couple of years after this about the welfare warfare state 368 00:43:09.180 --> 00:43:14.180 and the naivete of his left-wing colleagues who think that you can separate them out, as most liberals did, 369 00:43:14.180 --> 00:43:18.180 and support the welfare state, but not like the warfare state, and they're of a piece. 370 00:43:18.180 --> 00:43:22.180 So I don't know if he had read Rothbard or if he independently comes up with a similar analysis, 371 00:43:22.180 --> 00:43:26.180 but it's interesting that this was going on. 372 00:43:26.180 --> 00:43:31.180 I'll just mention in passing that by this time, Rothbard had also been reading C. Wright Mills, 373 00:43:31.180 --> 00:43:35.180 and if you look at Rothbard's copy of The Sociological Imagination, 374 00:43:35.180 --> 00:43:38.180 you will see it's all marked up and Rothbard's written, great, great, 375 00:43:38.180 --> 00:43:48.180 and various things in the margin, because Mills' critique of sociology is exactly parallel to the kind of critique Rothbard made of economics as a profession. 376 00:43:48.180 --> 00:43:58.180 The use of unrealistic pseudo-scientific theory on the one hand, and then empiricism that doesn't go anywhere on the other hand. 377 00:43:58.180 --> 00:44:06.180 Of course Mills was dead by this time, so he and Rothbard, as far as I know, never had any communication. 378 00:44:06.180 --> 00:44:17.180 Now, while we're still in 67, there's a draft speech that Rothbard gave, I assume he gave, called Vietnam, Product of Liberalism. 379 00:44:17.180 --> 00:44:23.180 And again, a similar discussion to what you find in the Critique of the Great Society, 380 00:44:23.180 --> 00:44:34.180 showing how there's no particular contradiction in the welfare status also wanting to extend their system abroad 381 00:44:34.180 --> 00:44:43.180 Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Mises Institute, Austrian School, Praxeology, Man Economy and State, The Theory of Money and Credit 382 00:44:44.180 --> 00:44:54.180 Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Human Action, Man Economy and State, The Theory of Money and Credit 383 00:44:54.180 --> 00:45:03.180 I mean, it's a rare state that doesn't do some of each, I guess, but that's partly a matter of capacity and ideology, I suppose, would play a role. 384 00:45:03.180 --> 00:45:16.180 Now, by 1968, Rothbard is involved in the Peace and Freedom Party, which is another one of these kind of New Left roller coaster rides. 385 00:45:16.180 --> 00:45:21.180 But his attitude is, well, yeah, they're all, you know, socialists, but at least they are mentioning peace and freedom, 386 00:45:21.180 --> 00:45:25.180 which ought to be mentioned in the same breath, and the right wing won't do it, so they're mentioning it. 387 00:45:25.180 --> 00:45:32.180 So he draws up a suggested foreign policy statement for the Peace and Freedom Party, 388 00:45:32.180 --> 00:45:39.180 which centers on American imperialism and all of that, 389 00:45:39.180 --> 00:45:48.180 suggesting abolition of NATO, CETO, and other entangling alliances, getting out of the Middle East, 390 00:45:48.180 --> 00:45:59.180 Just generally withdrawing from this foreign policy which has led to quote militarizing the American economy and society and in transforming this country into a permanent garrison state. 391 00:45:59.180 --> 00:46:10.180 So it's all very eloquent and really written in language that the leftists could accept but not the language they would necessarily have used. 392 00:46:10.180 --> 00:46:14.180 I think there's another anecdote from this period in the Peace and Freedom Party 393 00:46:14.180 --> 00:46:20.180 where Rothbard writes a plank calling for free markets and competition 394 00:46:20.180 --> 00:46:24.180 and the various communist and progressive labor types are looking at this and saying, 395 00:46:24.180 --> 00:46:30.180 what does this mean? It sounds like, you know, bourgeois devilment. 396 00:46:30.180 --> 00:46:34.180 And then one of them said to the other, well, it's just a broad anti-monopoly front. 397 00:46:34.180 --> 00:46:40.180 They're against monopoly capitalism, so we can just sort of reconcile that 398 00:46:40.180 --> 00:46:43.180 maybe the Maoists thought of that, but anyway. 399 00:46:43.180 --> 00:46:51.180 But again, there's a reason. He's seen that the right isn't going to change anytime soon. 400 00:46:51.180 --> 00:46:57.180 And what's interesting too is that Rothbard has already gone through the disillusionment with the Republican Party. 401 00:46:57.180 --> 00:47:02.180 He's already gone through this in the age of Eisenhower, so he's not exactly shocked when Reagan comes in 402 00:47:02.180 --> 00:47:05.180 and doesn't do much of what he's pledged to do. 403 00:47:05.180 --> 00:47:10.180 Or at least he does a lot of the bad stuff he's pledged to do and nothing good that he's pledged to do 404 00:47:10.180 --> 00:47:16.180 from a libertarian standpoint, he's not surprised. 405 00:47:16.180 --> 00:47:23.180 So now things are sort of in history and fast forward and Carl Hesse writes the famous article in Playboy 406 00:47:23.180 --> 00:47:29.180 announcing the right wing and saying he's converted to libertarianism and this gets certain play. 407 00:47:29.180 --> 00:47:35.180 And Rothbard founds the Libertarian Forum, which runs from 1969 through 85, and this is an interesting journal. 408 00:47:35.180 --> 00:47:42.180 The Journal. I mean there's some great stuff in there. It's not all topical and current events. There are some serious theory pieces in there. 409 00:47:42.180 --> 00:47:49.180 Just whatever Rothbard wanted to write. His own personal newsletter modeled, I suppose, somewhat on Frank Shoderob's analysis. 410 00:47:49.180 --> 00:47:58.180 But of course a lot about the Vietnam War, a lot about the corporate state, a lot about imperialism, all sorts of theory along with analysis of current events. 411 00:47:58.180 --> 00:48:04.180 of Current Events. But again, Rothbard is trying to apply what Mises talks about in Theory and History. 412 00:48:04.180 --> 00:48:12.180 There is theory and it guides you, but history itself has to be reconstructed by methods that aren't a priori. 413 00:48:12.180 --> 00:48:16.180 And so you have to know how to do that, and Rothbard does do both very well. 414 00:48:16.180 --> 00:48:23.180 The best discussion of Rothbard's method as historian is probably Joseph Salerno's preface to the History of Money and Banking, 415 00:48:23.180 --> 00:48:27.180 and Banking, which is available in the bookstore. 416 00:48:27.180 --> 00:48:31.180 Okay, so now Rothbard's already founded Left and Right, 417 00:48:31.180 --> 00:48:36.180 and the purpose of this journal, Left and Right, was to have a scholarly journal, 418 00:48:36.180 --> 00:48:40.180 probably modeled somewhat on studies on the left, 419 00:48:40.180 --> 00:48:43.180 that would reach out to libertarians wherever they were, 420 00:48:43.180 --> 00:48:47.180 for people with libertarian instincts on the left or the right, 421 00:48:47.180 --> 00:48:51.180 and get them together around some common issues. 422 00:48:51.180 --> 00:48:58.180 So Rothbard at one point did have some hopes that the New Left wouldn't just turn out to be another left. 423 00:48:58.180 --> 00:49:10.180 Now for various reasons these views somewhat proved unrewarding and by 1971, if not a little bit earlier, 424 00:49:10.180 --> 00:49:15.180 Rothbard begins to denounce the excesses of the New Left, the mass body of the New Left, 425 00:49:15.180 --> 00:49:28.180 sort of hippie nihilists and what have you for their lack of any interest in anything serious other than demonstrating and causing disruption 426 00:49:28.180 --> 00:49:34.180 and then the kind of takeover of really of most of the new left by really bad forms of Marxism 427 00:49:34.180 --> 00:49:40.180 I mean there are you can grade forms of Marxism some are worse than the others and the whole degeneration of SDS and all that 428 00:49:40.180 --> 00:49:48.180 and all that, so this is disappointing, but he gets out of this as soon as he is convinced that there's nothing to be gained 429 00:49:48.180 --> 00:49:59.180 and decides that, well, it'll have to be a separate, independent libertarian movement, and by then, enough has been learned about organizing and so on to attempt this. 430 00:49:59.180 --> 00:50:11.180 So I may have to fast-forward. So that's the end. I won't say farewell to the left as Rothbard did in one of his famous editorials. 431 00:50:11.180 --> 00:50:24.180 Now, we'll skip ahead. Well, there is one controversial bit where the regime in Saigon falls and Rothbard writes a sort of sociological discussion, 432 00:50:24.180 --> 00:50:29.180 David Hume and Mises, that governments in the end rest on opinion. 433 00:50:29.180 --> 00:50:32.180 Now, this can be a very limited sort of opinion. 434 00:50:32.180 --> 00:50:35.180 People just think, well, the government's really awful, but there's nothing we can do about it. 435 00:50:35.180 --> 00:50:37.180 But nonetheless, that's an acceptance. 436 00:50:37.180 --> 00:50:43.180 So there's, you know, the X amount of legitimacy, what someone once called legitimacy through cynicism. 437 00:50:43.180 --> 00:50:46.180 And then the Saigon government falls, and Rothbard writes an article saying, 438 00:50:46.180 --> 00:50:50.180 well, at least it's nice to see the process by which the state collapses. 439 00:50:50.180 --> 00:50:54.180 So, naturally, many people from National Review over to Reason Magazine 440 00:50:54.180 --> 00:50:59.180 thinks this means that Rothbard was really a great fan of the North Vietnamese regime. 441 00:50:59.180 --> 00:51:02.180 Well, no, he was interested in the sociological process. 442 00:51:02.180 --> 00:51:05.180 And if you want to see his discussion of the sociological process, 443 00:51:05.180 --> 00:51:09.180 you go to the long introduction he wrote to a reprint 444 00:51:09.180 --> 00:51:13.180 of Etienne de la Boite's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, 445 00:51:13.180 --> 00:51:15.180 which I think we also have. 446 00:51:15.180 --> 00:51:24.180 From about 50 pages he goes on along on this theme of why there is civil obedience in the first place as opposed to civil disobedience. 447 00:51:24.180 --> 00:51:27.180 Why is there civil obedience? This is an interesting question. 448 00:51:27.180 --> 00:51:33.180 And also for those who think that Rothbard was a dyed in the wool agent of Ho Chi Minh, 449 00:51:33.180 --> 00:51:38.180 there's the editorial he wrote in 1979 mentioning the fall of Tehran. 450 00:51:38.180 --> 00:51:44.180 Same process. The government of the Shah managed to discredit itself in the eyes of everyone 451 00:51:44.180 --> 00:51:51.180 at which point even the secret police with their American helpers couldn't keep him in power. 452 00:51:51.180 --> 00:51:57.180 Now this doesn't mean the regime that came into being thereafter was really admirable or would want to live there, 453 00:51:57.180 --> 00:51:59.180 but nonetheless the process is interesting. 454 00:51:59.180 --> 00:52:01.180 And that was the point he had in mind. 455 00:52:01.180 --> 00:52:07.180 So now apparently he's pro-Ho Chi Minh and pro-various ayatollahs, but I doubt it. 456 00:52:07.180 --> 00:52:13.180 But he's interested in the fact that the state can discredit itself and disappear. 457 00:52:13.180 --> 00:52:17.180 Okay, let's see, I have to wrap this up. 458 00:52:17.180 --> 00:52:23.180 Okay, now we move on to the next topic, which is Reaganism. 459 00:52:23.180 --> 00:52:28.180 Well, Rothbard kept up a running critique of the Reagan administration and all their policies, all their works, 460 00:52:28.180 --> 00:52:34.180 and many libertarians were puzzled by this because here the Reaganites get into power and they're always talking about free markets, 461 00:52:34.180 --> 00:52:39.180 they're always talking about liberty, they're always talking, a lot of talk. 462 00:52:39.180 --> 00:53:09.180 And so people thought, well, gee, they're really like us, and they just have a problem with all those Democrats in Congress, you know, they can't do anything, apparently Reagan's arm was broken, he couldn't veto anything, couldn't do anything at all, except pretty much business as usual, move a few programs around, you know, cut five or six dollars out of programs they didn't like. There's an interesting book, I can't remember the author's name at the moment, but it's about the myth of the Reagan Revolution, certainly in libertarian terms, like it's hard to see that much was accomplished, 463 00:53:09.180 --> 00:53:14.180 So Rothbard kept up a running critique of Reagan and Reaganism in a libertarian forum 464 00:53:14.180 --> 00:53:17.180 and he got so much feedback saying, how can you say that? 465 00:53:17.180 --> 00:53:22.180 Then he had to write one or two editorials called, Are We Being Beastly to the Gupper? 466 00:53:22.180 --> 00:53:25.180 In which he reiterated his criticisms. 467 00:53:25.180 --> 00:53:32.180 And there's a famous retrospective in Liberty Magazine and other articles 468 00:53:32.180 --> 00:53:37.180 essentially what Rothbard saw was there was no Reagan revolution if this meant 469 00:53:37.180 --> 00:53:42.180 and diminishing the scope and role of the Federal Government in American life. 470 00:53:42.180 --> 00:53:47.180 There was actually a legitimation, because people with libertarian slogans were doing it. 471 00:53:47.180 --> 00:53:51.180 It's just legitimation of the same thing. Concretely, very little happened. 472 00:53:51.180 --> 00:53:57.180 And what he said was, he'd worked it out, that there was flexibility in dogmatism. 473 00:53:57.180 --> 00:54:03.180 The Reaganites were flexible on liberty, and all their domestic promises, and they were dogmatic in foreign policy. 474 00:54:03.180 --> 00:54:11.180 So the one area where you probably wouldn't want them to be dogmatic, given that they had certain ideas, this is where they are dogmatic, and so on and so forth. 475 00:54:11.180 --> 00:54:14.180 There's much more of this, but I can't summarize everything. 476 00:54:14.180 --> 00:54:24.180 Now, let's make one more remark that while all of this is going on, Rothbard is also doing scholarly pieces on foreign policy in the nature of the state. 477 00:54:24.180 --> 00:54:30.180 One example is World War I as fulfillment, and he means as fulfillment of the progressive movement. 478 00:54:30.180 --> 00:54:50.180 So once again the welfare and the warfare in tandem together again as they always are and this is in Journal of Libertarian Studies, winter 1989 and there's also the piece on the foreign policy, the old right in the JLS, let's see, winter 1978. 479 00:54:50.180 --> 00:55:10.180 So he's working on a number of fronts, sort of the journalistic front, the scholarly front, and wherever he can, to continue what in the end is a very consistent critique, centering on the relationship between war and welfare in more powerful states. 480 00:55:11.180 --> 00:55:17.180 So I think I should leave it at that. People probably want lunch. Thank you. 481 00:55:20.180 --> 00:55:22.180 Thank you very much.