The interest stimulated and the influence exerted by Rothbard's libertarianism and the ethics of liberty was significantly different.
Slow, intensively growing and lasting, and reaching and affecting academia from outside,
rather than being picked up by it and from the ivory tower communicated down to the non-academic public.
Rothbard, as every reader of the following treatise will quickly recognize, was the prototype
of a coercive philosopher, in the startling Nozickian definition of coercion.
He demanded and presented proofs and exact and complete answers, rather than tentative
explanations, conjectures and open questions.
Regarding Anarchy, State and Utopia, Nozick had written that some may feel that the truth
Both about ethics and political philosophy is too serious and important to be obtained
by such flashy tools.
This was certainly Rothbard's conviction.
Because man cannot not act as long as he is alive, and he must use scarce means to do
so, he must also permanently choose between right and wrong conduct.
The fundamental question of ethics—what am I here and now rightfully allowed to do
and what not—is thus the most permanent, important and pressing intellectual concern
confronting man.
Whenever and wherever one acts, an actor must be able to determine and distinguish unambiguously
and instantly right from wrong.
Thus any ethic worth its salt must, praxeologically, be a coercive one, because only proofs and
knockdown arguments can provide such definite answers as are necessary.
Man cannot temporarily suspend acting.
Hence, tentative conjectures and open questions simply are not up to the task of a human ethic.
Rothbard's coercive philosophizing, his insistence that ethics must be an axiomatic deductive
system, an ethic more geometrico, was nothing new or unusual, of course.
As already noted, Rothbard shared this view concerning the nature of ethics with the entire
tradition of rationalist philosophy.
His had been the dominant view of Christian rationalism and of the Enlightenment.
Or did Rothbard claim infallibility regarding his ethics? In accordance with the tradition
of rationalist philosophy, he merely insisted that axiomatic deductive arguments can be
attacked and possibly refuted exclusively by other arguments of the same logical status.
Just as one would insist, without thereby claiming infallibility for logicians and mathematicians,
But logical or mathematical proofs can be attacked only by other logical or mathematical
arguments.
In the age of democratic socialism, however, such old-fashioned claims, certainly if made
in conjunction with ethics and especially if this ethic turned out to be a libertarian
one, were generally rejected and dismissed out of hand by academia.
Unlike the modern Nozick, Rothbard was convinced that he had proved libertarianism, private
property anarchism, to be morally justified and correct, and that all statists and socialists
were plain wrong.
Accordingly, he advocated immediate and ongoing action.
Libertarianism, wrote Rothbard, is a philosophy seeking a policy.
The libertarian must be possessed of a passion for justice, an emotion derived from and channeled
by his rational insight into what natural justice requires.
Justice, not the weak reed of mere utility, must be the motivating force if liberty is
to be attained.
And this means that the libertarian must be an abolitionist, that is, he must wish to
achieve the goal of liberty as rapidly as possible.
He should be an abolitionist who would, if he could, abolish instantaneously all invasions
of liberty.
To the tax-subsidized intellectual class, and especially the academic establishment,
Rothbard could not but appear to be an extremist, best to be ignored and excluded from mainstream
academic discourse.
An interesting parallel exists between the treatment of Rothbard versus Nozick by the
by the Philosophy Establishment and that of Mises versus Hayek by the Economics Establishment.
Even if Mises' conclusions were significantly more radical than Hayek's, both came to largely
similar, politically incorrect free market conclusions.
Based on the similarity of their conclusions, both Mises and Hayek were considered Austrian
School economists.
But the method by which they derived their conclusions fundamentally differed.
Mises was a philosophical rationalist, systematic, rigorous, proving and demonstrating, and lucid
as a writer.
In comparison, Hayek was a philosophical skeptic, unsystematic, methodologically eclectic,
tentative and probing, and a less than lucid writer.
Consequently, Hayek's treatment by academia was significantly more friendly than that
not accorded to Mises, but also it was the pre-modern extremist Austrian Mises, not the
modern moderate Austrian Hayek, whose influence proved more intense and enduring, and whose
work led to the formation of an ideological movement.
Rothbard's unkind and intolerant libertarianism took first hold among the non-academic public,
Among Professionals, Businessmen and Educated Laymen of All Backgrounds.
Whereas Nozick's gentle libertarianism never penetrated outside academia, Rothbard and his extremist libertarianism became the fountainhead and theoretical hardcore of an ideological movement.
Rothbard became the creator of modern American libertarianism, the radical offspring of classical liberalism,
in the course of some three decades has grown from a handful of proponents into a genuine
political and intellectual movement.
Naturally, in the course of this development and transformation, Rothbard and his libertarianism
did not remain unchallenged or undisputed, and there were ups and downs in Rothbard's
institutional career, of institutional alignments and realignments.
But until his death, Rothbard remained without doubt the single most important and respected
moral authority within the entire libertarian movement.
And his rationalist, axiomatic, deductive, praxeological or Austrian libertarianism provides
to this day the intellectual benchmark in reference to which every one and everything
else in libertarianism is defined and positioned.
What proved to be unacceptable to academia, Rothbard's pre-modern method of axiomatic
deductive reasoning and system building, still found resonance among many people.
Even if modern academics, freed of the obligation of having to provide a practical justification
for their activities, can engage in unsystematic and open-ended conversation, real men, and
and especially successful men have to act and think systematically and methodically,
and such planning and future-oriented, low-time preference people also will not likely be
satisfied with anything but systematic and methodical answers to their own practical
moral concerns.
Nor did Rothbard's explicit political radicalism constitute a serious acceptance problem among
among such successful and independently minded men.
Even if increasingly marginalized, significant remnants of the original American tradition
of radical libertarianism still existed among the educated public.
In fact, the American Revolution had been largely inspired by libertarian, radical,
Lockean ideas.
And the Declaration of Independence, and in particular its author, Thomas Jefferson, reflected
and express the same rationalist spirit of the Enlightenment and the even older natural
law tradition that also characterized Rothbard and his political philosophy.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed
by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted
Among Men, Deriving Their Just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.
That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right
of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation
on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely
to effect their safety and happiness.
Experiences indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for
light and transient causes, and accordingly all experience has shown that mankind are
more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the
forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object evinces
Rothbard, apart from his theoretical work as an economist and a political philosopher,
was also an eminent historian.
In his four-volume history of colonial America, conceived in liberty, he gives a detailed
and in many essays on critical episodes in U.S. history, he notes again and again the
continuing importance of the original libertarian American spirit.
To be sure, the original radical libertarian impetus, which had led to the American Revolution
and the Declaration of Independence, had subsequently suffered one setback after another.
With the victory of the Federalists over the Anti-Federalists, and the transition from
the original Confederacy to the Union, with the de facto abolition of the Union Constitution
by Abraham Lincoln in the course and as the result of the destruction of the secessionist
Southern Confederacy, with the onset of progressivism, with Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, with
Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society, and so on, with Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan,
Bush and Clinton. Even if again and again defeated, however, the tradition of radical
individualist libertarianism could not be eradicated from the American public consciousness.
In harking back explicitly to Jefferson and the Jeffersonian tradition, Rothbard tapped
into a still widespread, if dormant, pool of activists and lay intellectuals. And owing
According to the clarity, the logical rigor, the systematic and comprehensive character,
and the passion of his writings, he succeeded almost single-handedly in reinvigorating,
radicalizing and channeling their sentiments into a unified political-philosophical movement.
It was only in light of external events, the emergence and advancement of a libertarian
movement and the central role played by Rothbard in this movement, and with a considerable delay,
that Rothbard and the ethics of liberty no longer could be overlooked by academia.
Not surprisingly, even then, the general reaction was cool. To be sure, there were also a fair and
steadily growing number of highly respectful and appreciative academic treatments of Rothbard's
and Political Philosophy.
And around the Journal of Libertarian Studies, an interdisciplinary scholarly review Rothbard
had founded in 1977, and for which he had served until his death as editor, he had assembled
a formidable number of disciples.
But in general, the academic reaction to Rothbard and his libertarianism was one of non or mis-comprehension,
indignant rejection, or even downright hostility.
In part, this was certainly due to Rothbard's unapologetic use of the language of natural
rights.
This had been the language of the Declaration of Independence.
The same natural rights language had been preserved to the present within the Christian
and in particular the Catholic Church, and it also had been adopted by a handful of contemporary
philosophers.
However, to most contemporary academics, talk of natural rights was, in Jeremy Bentham's
In fact, and more to the point, natural rights were incompatible with absolute state power,
and they did not sit well with either democracy or socialism.
Hence, in the course of the transformation of the Western world from an aristocratic
or monarchical system to a modern mass democracy within the last 100 years, natural rights
Rothbard's teachings had been successively removed from the officially approved philosophical
curriculum and replaced with modern positivistic doctrines.
Confronted with a largely unfamiliar language, even many well-intentioned philosophers were
simply befuddled or irritated by Rothbard's work.
Moreover, Rothbard may even have overstated his own agreement with classical natural rights
Theory, and not sufficiently emphasized his own distinct contribution of importing and
applying the Misesian method of praxeology to ethics, and thus unintentionally have aggravated
an already existing problem.
Typical, and at the same time instructive, were reactions like those of Peter D. McClelland,
for instance, in a chapter in a book on economic justice titled, The Market Defended, Confusions
of the Right.
Murray Rothbard, McClelland noted, is one of the acknowledged intellectual leaders among
contemporary libertarians, a group which, by American standards, is located on the far
right.
His views are interesting for purposes of this discussion for two reasons.
First, he provides a carefully reasoned defense of the income distribution generated by the
market that makes no reference to the merits of recipients.
Secondly, that defense proceeds from a handful of premises to a conclusion presumed to be
universally applicable in any situation where the justice of the economic system is at stake.
As such, it provides a classic example of how not to reason about economic justice.
To put the second point a second way, Rothbard's approach flies in the face of key points made
in earlier chapters.
That to problems of economic justice we bring a multitude of values to be honored.
These values can and do conflict.
When conflicts arise, trade-offs among competing values must be made.
General rules for making such trade-offs are difficult to formulate, and thus judgments
about economic justice are difficult to make independent of the context of the situation
in which such judgments must be made. Or, more simply put, in reaching decisions about
economic justice in a concrete situation, we do not generally rely upon universal rules
to determine the right or just choice. In all, McClellan finds that Rothbard's arguments
are somewhat strange, Aquinas' viewpoint minus the theology, and he then summarily dismisses
Several objections and questions arise immediately upon reading this, not least of which is the truly strange fact that our author apparently believes that empirical facts, such as that not many people believe P, have any bearing on the question whether or not P is true, valid or justified.
Would he also object to mathematical or logical proofs on the ground that most people are incapable of grasping them?
Moreover, granting that when conflicts arise, trade-offs among competing values must be made.
The decisive question is, who is to decide what these trade-offs should be?
Conflicting values invariably involve incompatible, mutually exclusive views of at least two actors concerning the use of some scarce resources.
Obviously then, not both of these parties can decide what these trade-offs should be.
After all, their respective values are incompatible, but only one or the other.
But how can one party be selected and not the other, unless one possesses a theory of property?
And if one cannot rely upon universal rules to determine the right or just choice, and everything depends on the context of the situation,
how then does our critic think it possible for anyone to ever know ex ante before taking it, whether or not some action qualifies as just?
Post? Or does he believe that justice is to be determined only ex post? How can such a
theory of justice qualify as a human ethic? All of these concerns may be left aside, however,
because the ultimate error in McClelland's criticism, and, by contrast, the unique Rothbardian
contribution to ethics, occurs at a logically prior stage, when McClelland claims that Rothbard's
This reductionist, that is, axiomatic deductive method, flies in the face of the existence
of a multitude of values to be honored.
McClelland does not explain why this should be so, nor could he have succeeded even if
he had tried.
First off, surely Rothbard could not have been unaware of the fact of a multitude of
conflicting values.
Indeed, it is difficult to imagine anyone unaware of this fact.
But this observation is no more than the starting point of ethics and moral reasoning.
If no conflicting values existed, then, by definition, all actions would be in perfect
harmony with each other.
Everyone would always act in such a way as everyone else thought he should act.
In this case of a pre-stabilized harmony of all interests, there is no need for an ethic,
and none would ever come into existence.
The existence of conflicting values thus poses no problem whatsoever for Rothbard's ethic,
or any other ethic for that matter.
Rather, it is from the outset taken for granted, and ethics is the very response to this universal
and eternal human dilemma.
Furthermore, if conflicts exist, and if these can be resolved at all, then such a solution
cannot possibly be found except by means of a reductionist method, that is, the subsumption
of specific cases or conflict situations under general and abstract rules or principles.
Rothbard's view in this regard is not essentially different from that of most other political
and moral philosophers.
Ethics, if it is possible at all, must and can never be anything else but reductionist.
Assuming for the sake of argument that no disagreement exists up to this point, McClellan's
charge can only mean this.
Even if one were to follow such a reductionist strategy, it will not yield a single principle
or a single set of internally consistent principles covering and resolving all cases of conflict.
In other words, even if some disagreements may be resolved by reference to increasingly
and the more general and abstract rules and principles, many other disagreements will
remain unresolvable because, as a matter of empirical fact, even on the level of abstract
rules and principles, disagreement persists and inescapably results in inconsistencies
and incompatibilities and leads to moral skepticism of some sort.
This line of reasoning is indeed characteristic of a wide-ranging group of political philosophers,
including Rawls, who, while they may disagree among themselves on how much conflict can
or cannot be resolved in this way, all conceive of ethical principles as the result, outcome,
of agreement or contract.
It is here that the fundamental error lies, and Rothbard's unique contribution to ethics
Ethics comes into play. Ethics, the validity of the principle of self-ownership and original
appropriation, is demonstrably not dependent and contingent upon agreement or contract,
and the universality claim connected with Rothbard's libertarianism is not affected
in the slightest by the circumstance that moral discussants may or may not always come
come to an agreement or contract. Ethics is the logical, praxeological presupposition,
in Kantian terminology, die Bedingung der Möglichkeit, rather than the result of agreement
or contract. The principles of self-ownership and original appropriation make agreement
and contract, including that of not agreeing and contracting, possible. Set in motion and
and stimulated by the universal experience of conflict, moral discussion and argument
can discover, reconstruct, explicate, and formulate the principles of self-ownership
and original appropriation.
But their validity in no way depends on whether or not this is the case, and if so, whether
or not these formulations then find universal ascent.
Ludwig's distinct contribution to the natural rights tradition is his reconstruction of
the principles of self-ownership and original appropriation as the praxeological precondition
— Bedingung der Möglichkeit — of argumentation, and his recognition that whatever must be
presupposed as valid in order to make argumentation possible in the first place cannot in turn
can be argumentatively disputed without thereby falling into a practical self-contradiction.
As Rothbard explains in an unfortunately brief but centrally important passage of the Ethics
of Liberty, a proposition rises to the status of an axiom when he who denies it may be shown
to be using it in the very course of the supposed refutation.
Now any person participating in any sort of discussion, including one on values, is by
virtue of so participating, alive and affirming life.
For if he were really opposed to life, he would have no business in such a discussion.
Indeed, he would have no business continuing to be alive.
Hence, the supposed opponent of life is really affirming it in the very process of his discussion,
And hence, the preservation and furtherance of one's life takes on the stature of an
incontestable axiom.
As an immediate implication of this insight into the status of the principles of self-ownership
and original appropriation as ethical axioms, Rothbard rejected as nonsense all notions
of animal rights.
Animals are incapable of engaging in propositional exchange with humans.
Indeed, it is this inability which defines them as non-rational and distinguishes them
categorically from men as rational animals.
Unable to communicate and without rationality, animals are, by their very nature, incapable
of recognizing or possessing any rights.
Rothbard noted, There is rough justice in the common quip that we will recognize the
rights of animals whenever they petition for them.
The fact that animals can obviously not petition for their rights is part of their nature,
and part of the reason why they are clearly not equivalent to, and do not possess the
rights of, human beings. Rather than rightful moral agents, animals
are objects of possible human control and appropriation. Thus Rothbard confirmed the
As academia had little to do with Rothbard's success in creating and shaping a political
philosophical mass movement in the first place, its belated, mostly negative reactions did
little to change Rothbard's growing status as a public philosopher.
To the contrary, the course of historical events, the spectacular collapse of the great socialist
experiment in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from 1989 to 1991, and the increasingly
obvious crisis of the Western welfare states, provided ever more support for fundamental
libertarian insights.
No one but his teacher, Mises, had given a more accurate account of the economic inefficiencies
of Socialism and Social Democracy than Rothbard, and no one had explained more clearly the
moral hazards and perversions created by socialism and social democracy.
Whereas the events in Eastern Europe and the economic and moral crisis of the Western states,
of stagnating or falling real incomes, staggering public debt, imminently bankrupt social security
systems, family and social disintegration, rising uncivility, moral degeneration and
crime were an obvious embarrassment and intellectual debacle for the social-democratic academic
establishment.
They provided dramatic empirical confirmation for Rothbard and his theoretical work.
In this situation, libertarianism and Rothbard's influence in particular could only grow and
gain prominence.
By the mid-1990s, Rothbard's role as the spiritus rector of a steadily growing and increasingly
threatening revolutionary libertarian movement was even acknowledged by the mainstream media.
Thus, following the right-wing Republican revolution during the 1994 Congressional
elections, the Washington Post identified Rothbard as the central intellectual figure
behind this event.
In what is probably his last publication, Rothbard took this opportunity to denounce
the newly elected Republican House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, as an anti-libertarian welfare
statist sellout.
Nor did the academic rejection make any noticeable impression on Rothbard or the further development
of libertarian theory.
The Ethics of Liberty had been published at a low point in Rothbard's career, though one
One of the founders of the Cato Institute, Rothbard had been forced out by the chief
financial backer as too extreme and intransigent.
Despite such unfavorable external circumstances and without any institutional promotion, the
book established itself quickly as the single most authoritative and comprehensive work
in libertarian theory.
Long after the book had gone out of print in the United States, it was being translated
into French, Spanish, Italian and German, further securing its status as an enduring
classic of political philosophy.
Ironically, 1982 was also the year of the founding of the Ludwig von Mises Institute,
of which he served as academic head until his death.
Together with a new academic position at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, these would
prove to be the years of Rothbard's greatest professional success.
After the original publication of the Ethics of Liberty, and until his death in 1995, Rothbard
was working on a comprehensive and encompassing history of economic and political thought.
Two massive volumes of the unfinished three-volume project were published posthumously in 1995,
under the titles Economic Thought Before Adam Smith and Classical Economics.
Based on his prior theoretical work with Austrian free market economics and libertarian political
philosophy providing the conceptual framework, Rothbard in these volumes gave a sweeping
narrative account of the history of economic and political philosophical ideas from the
ancient Greeks to near the end of the 19th century and the interplay of ideas and economic
and political reality.
Poor and abstract Austrian and libertarian theory was illustrated with historical examples
and illustrations, and at the same time intellectual and political history was presented as a systematically
comprehensible subject, methodically and thematically unified and integrated.
Rothbard here opened a panoramic view of the entire history of Western civilization, with
with new vistas and many surprising or even startling reinterpretations and reevaluations.
History was unfolded as a permanent struggle between truth and falsehood, and good, justice
and evil, of intellectual and political heroes great and small, and of economic and political
breakthroughs and progress, as well as of blunderers and villains, and of errors, perversions
and Decline, and the civilizational ups and downs of human history were explained as the
results of true and false ideas and the distribution and strength of ideologies in public consciousness.
By complementing economic and political theory with history, Rothbard provided the Austro-libertarian
movement with a grand historical perspective, sociological understanding and strategic vision,
and thus deepened and broadened libertarianism's popular anchoring and sociological base.
Besides his main work on the history of economic and political thought, however, Rothbard also
returned repeatedly to political theory.
In reaction to a growing environmentalist movement and its transformation into an anti-human
and pro-animal movement, Rothbard wrote Law, Property Rights and Air Pollution, further
The Theory of Money and Credit
In the preface to the French edition of the Ethics of Liberty, he summarily reviewed several current contributions to libertarian theory, apart from Nozick's utilitarian and contractarian libertarianisms and natural rights minarchisms, and rejected all of them as ultimately confused or inconsistent.
In the monthly Free Market, published by the Mises Institute, he provided political and economic analysis of current events, beginning in 1982 and continuing until 1995.
In addition, in 1989, he founded the monthly Rothbard-Rockwell Report, which served as the main outlet of Rothbard's political, sociological, cultural and religious commentary.
He contributed dozens of articles in which he applied libertarian principles to the full range of human events and experiences,
from war and criminal punishment to the appropriation of airspace and waves, blackmail, affirmative action and adoption, etc.,
and thus constantly illustrated and reiterated the universal applicability and versatility of libertarian theory.
None of these later writings, however, brought any systematic changes as compared to the ethics of liberty, whether on principles or remote conclusions.
Different and new problem aspects were analyzed and emphasized, but the essentials were already contained in his earlier treatise.
In distinct contrast to Nozick, Rothbard did not change his mind on essential questions.
Indeed, looking back over his entire career, it can be said that from the late 1950s, when
he had first arrived at what would later become the Rothbardian system, until the end of his
life, Rothbard did not waver on fundamental matters of economic or political theory.
Yet owing to his long and intensive work in the history of economic and political thought,
a different thematic emphasis became apparent in his later writings, most noticeably in
and the several hundred articles contributed during the last years of his life.
Apart from economic and political concerns, Rothbard increasingly focused his attention on and stressed the importance of culture as a sociological prerequisite of libertarianism.
Libertarianism as developed in the ethics of liberty was no more and no less than a political philosophy.
It provided an answer to the question of which actions are lawful and hence may not be legitimately threatened with physical violence, and which actions are unlawful and may be so punished.
It did not say anything with respect to the further question whether or not all lawful actions should be equally tolerated or possibly punished by means other than and below the threshold of a threat of physical violence,
Silence, such as public disapprobation, ostracism, exclusion and expulsion.
Even given its explicitly limited scope, the ethics of liberty had a distinctly old-fashioned
flavor and revealed libertarianism as a fundamentally conservative doctrine.
The most obvious indicator of this was the already noted emphasis placed on punishment
as the necessary complement to property.
More specifically, Rothbard presented a rigorous modern defense of the traditional proportionality
principle of punishment as contained in the Lex Talionis, of an eye for an eye, or rather,
as he would correctively explain, two eyes for an eye.
He rejected the deterrence and rehabilitation theories of punishment as incompatible with
with Private Property Rights, and championed instead the idea of victim's rights and of
restitution, compensation, and or retribution as essential to justice.
He argued in favor of such old-fashioned institutions as compulsory labor and indentured servitude
for convicted criminals and for debtors' prisons, and his analyses of causation and liability,
The burden of proof and proper assumption of risk invariably displayed a basic and staunch moral conservatism of strict individual responsibility and accountability.
This and Rothbard's own lifelong cultural conservatism notwithstanding, however, from its beginnings in the late 1960s and the founding of a libertarian party in 1971,
The libertarian movement had great appeal to many of the countercultural left that had
then grown up in the United States in opposition to the war in Vietnam.
Did not the illegitimacy of the state and the non-aggression axiom imply that everyone
was at liberty to choose his very own non-aggressive lifestyle, no matter what it was?
Much of Rothbard's later writings, with their increased emphasis on cultural matters, were
were designed to correct this development and to explain the error in the idea of a leftist
multi-counter-cultural libertarianism, of libertarianism as a variant of libertinism.
It was false, empirically as well as normatively, that libertarianism could or should be combined
with egalitarian multiculturalism.
Both were in fact sociologically incompatible, and libertarianism could and should be combined
and exclusively with traditional Western bourgeois culture, that is, the old-fashioned ideal
of a family-based and hierarchically structured society of voluntarily acknowledged rank orders
of social authority.
Empirically, Rothbard did not tire to explain, the left libertarians failed to recognize
that the restoration of private property rights and laissez-faire economics implied a sharp
and drastic increase in social discrimination. Private property means the right to exclude.
The modern social democratic welfare state has increasingly stripped private property owners of
their right to exclude. In distinct contrast, a libertarian society where the right to exclude
was fully restored to owners of private property would be profoundly unegalitarian. To be sure,
Private property also implies the owner's right to include and to open and facilitate
access to one's property, and every private property owner also faces an economic incentive
of including rather than excluding, so long as he expects this to increase the value of his property.
The Ethics of Liberty's chapter most difficult to accept for conservatives on children and rights
In this chapter, Rothbard argued in favor of a mother's absolute right to her own body,
and therefore to perform an abortion.
He rejected the right-to-life argument, not on the ground that a fetus was not life.
In fact, from the moment of conception, he agreed with the Catholic position, it was
human life.
But rather on the fundamental ground that no such thing as a universal right to life,
but exclusively a universal right to live an independent and separate life, can properly
and possibly exist, and that a fetus, while certainly human life, is just as certainly
up to the moment of birth not an independent, but biologically speaking a parasitic life,
and thus has no rightful claim against the mother.
Further, upon childbirth, a mother, and with her consent, parents jointly, would have the
trustee ownership of her children, an ownership limited only by the illegality of aggressing
against their persons and by their absolute right to run away or to leave home at any
time.
Parents would be able to sell their trustee rights in children to anyone who wished to
to buy them at any mutually agreed price.
So long as children have not left home, a parent does not have the right to aggress
against his children, but also the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed,
clothe or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced
upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights.
The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, but the parent should have the
legal right not to feed his child, that is, to allow it to die.
So as to avoid any misunderstanding, in the next sentence Rothbard reminded his reader
of the strictly delineated scope of his treatise on political philosophy, and noted that, whether
Whether or not a parent has a moral rather than a legally enforceable obligation to keep
his child alive is a completely separate question.
However, this explicit qualification and the general thrust of the ethics of liberty not
withstanding, these pronouncements were used in conservative circles in the attempt to
prevent a libertarian infiltration and radicalization of contemporary American conservatism.
Of course, conservative political theory was a contradiction in terms.
Conservatism essentially meant not to have and even reject any abstract theory and rigorous
logical argument.
Not surprisingly, Rothbard was singularly unimpressed by conservative critics such as
Russell Kirk, whose theoretical work he considered devoid of analytical and argumentative rigor.
Consequently, Rothbard did not see any reason to abandon his original conclusions. Until
the end of his life, he would not budge on the problem of abortion and child neglect,
and insisted on a mother's absolute legal, lawful right to an abortion and of letting
her children die. In fact, if women did not have such rights and had committed instead
a punishable crime, it would seem that their crime then must be equivalent to murder. Should
Should abortion accordingly be threatened with capital punishment, and convicted abortionist
mothers be executed?
But who, except its mother, can possibly claim a right to her fetus and child, and thus be
considered as the rightful victim of her actions?
Who could bring a wrongful death suit against her?
Surely not the state.
For a conservative in particular, any state interference in the autonomy of families should
be anathema.
And who else, if indeed anyone?
Yet while Rothbard unchangingly held to his conclusions concerning the rights of children
and parents, his later writings, with an increased emphasis on moral cultural matters and the
exclusionary aspect of private property rights, placed these conclusions in a wider and characteristically
conservative social context.
Thus, while in favor of a woman's right to have an abortion, Rothbard was nonetheless
strictly opposed to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, which recognized
such a right. This was not because he believed the Court's finding concerning the legality
of abortion wrong, but on the more fundamental ground that the U.S. Supreme Court had no
jurisdiction in the matter, and that by assuming it, the Court had engendered a systematic
Centralization of State Power.
The right to have an abortion does not imply that one may have an abortion anywhere.
In fact, there is nothing impermissible about private owners and associations discriminating
against and punishing abortionists by every means other than physical punishment.
Every household and property owner is free to prohibit an abortion on his own territory
and may enter into a restrictive covenant with other owners for the same purpose.
Moreover, every owner and every association of owners is free to fire or not to hire and
to refuse to engage in any transaction whatsoever with an abortionist.
It may indeed be the case that no civilized place can be found anywhere and that one must
retire to the infamous back alley to have an abortion.
Not only would there be nothing wrong with such a situation, it would be positively moral
in raising the cost of irresponsible sexual conduct, and helping to reduce the number
of abortions.
In distinct contrast, the Supreme Court's decision was not only unlawful by expanding
its, that is, the central state's, jurisdiction at the expense of state and local governments,
and ultimately of every private property owner's rightful jurisdiction regarding his own property.
It was also positively immoral in facilitating the availability and accessibility of abortion.
Libertarians, Rothbard stressed in this connection, must be opposed as are traditional conservatives.
But unlike social democrats, neoconservatives and left libertarians, on principled grounds
to any and all centralization of state power, even and especially if such centralization
involves a correct judgment, such as that abortion should be legal, or that taxes should
be abolished.
It would be anti-libertarian, for instance, to appeal to the United Nations to order the
breakup of a taxi monopoly in Houston, or to the U.S. government to order Utah to abolish
It's state certification requirement for teachers, because in doing so, one would have illegitimately
granted these state agencies jurisdiction over property that they plainly do not own,
but others do.
Not only Houston or Utah, but every city in the world and every state in the United States.
And while every state, small or large, violates the rights of private property owners and
must be feared and combated.
Large central states violate more people's rights and must be feared even more.
They do not come into existence ab ovo, but are the outgrowth of a process of eliminative
competition among originally numerous independent small local states.
Central states, and ultimately a single world state, represent the successful expansion
Concentration and Concentration of State Power, that is, of evil, and must accordingly be
regarded as especially dangerous.
Hence, a libertarian, as his second-best solution, must always discriminate in favor of local
and against central government, and he must always try to correct injustices at the level
and location where they occur, rather than empowering some higher, more centralized level
of Government to Rectify a Local Injustice. In fact, as a result of his increasing emphasis
on cultural conservatism as a sociological presupposition of libertarianism, Rothbard
succeeded in bringing about a fundamental reorientation of the libertarian movement
during the last decade of his life. Symbolic of this change in direction was Rothbard's
Dissociation in 1989 from the Libertarian Party. Rothbard's action did not, as some
prominent left libertarians vainly proclaimed at the time, mark the end of his association
with libertarianism or his role as the libertarian movement's guiding star. Rather, it marked
the beginning of a systematic ideological realignment to open libertarian access to
to the American Heartland, and foment there a rapidly growing and increasingly radicalized
populist movement among middle Americans disgusted with the welfare-warfare statism and social
disintegration produced and promoted by Federal policies.
The anti-central state shift in American politics at the decisive end of the Cold War was the
The first unmistakable sign of the burgeoning strength of the conservative libertarian grassroots movement envisioned and shaped by Rothbard.
The historical moment for Rothbardian scholarly tradition may at last have arrived, and his political movement is surely not too far in the distance.
Rothbard had always been an optimist, grounded in the fact of human rationality
and further strengthened by the Misesian-Rothbardian insight that one cannot violate moral and economic laws without having to pay a price,
and that one violation will, according to the logic of state action, lead to more violations, until the price that must be paid becomes intolerable.
Thus the ethical and economic depredations of socialism finally ended in a spectacular collapse.
Likewise, in the United States and the Western world, after nearly 100 years of social democratic welfare statism,
the moral and economic reserve fund inherited from the past has become visibly exhausted,
and has led to a manifest economic and moral crisis of stagnating or falling standards of living and societal breakdown,
as well as a widespread loss of faith and trust in the central state as the organizing agent of society.
In this situation of the obvious moral and economic bankruptcy of socialism and social democracy and an ever more strongly felt need for an explanation and a principal alternative, it can be safely predicted that Rothbard's Ethics of Liberty not only will endure as a classic, but steadily gain in prominence.
Alliance.
At the academic level, Rothbard's lifelong work for the scholarship of liberty has at
long last come to serve as the foundational theoretical edifice for the modern successors
of the old classical liberal movement, the movement that originally influenced the development
of the basic libertarian position.
Today, this movement is truly international in scope, and includes thousands of lay intellectuals
and Professional Scholars the World Over, many of whom view Rothbard's voluminous writings
over the entire course of his lifetime as the model and ideal of principled political
and economic thinking.
After his death, his reputation as leader in libertarian political theory and Austrian
school economics is increasingly obvious, even undeniable, to enthusiasts and critics
alike.
For his seminal Ethics of Liberty to be available once again should further solidify this status.
University of Nevada, Las Vegas, January 1998