Murray Newton Rothbard (; March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American economist of the Austrian School,Ronald Hamowy, ed., 2008, The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, Cato Institute, Sage, , p. 62: "a leading economist of the Austrian school"; pp. 11, 365, 458: "Austrian economist". economic historian, political theorist, and activist. Rothbard was a central figure in the 20th-century American libertarian movement, particularly its right-wing strands, and was a founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism. He wrote over twenty books on political theory, history, economics, and other subjects.
Rothbard argued that all services provided by the "monopoly system of the corporate state"Rothbard, Murray. "The Great Society: A Libertarian Critique" , Lew Rockwell. could be provided more efficiently by the private sector and wrote that the state is "the organization of robbery systematized and writ large". First published in The Cato Journal, Fall 1981. He called fractional-reserve banking a form of fraud and opposed central banking. He categorically opposed all military, political, and economic interventionism in the affairs of other nations.Klausner, Manuel S. (Feb. 1973). "The New Isolationism." An Interview with Murray Rothbard and Leonard Liggio. Reason. Full issue.
Rothbard rejected mainstream economic methodologies and instead embraced the praxeology of Ludwig von Mises. Along with his writing and libertarian activism, he taught economics part-time at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute starting in 1966, and after 1986 in an endowed position at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Partnering with the oil billionaire Charles Koch, Rothbard was a founder of the Cato Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies in the 1970s. He broke with Cato and Koch, and in 1982 joined Lew Rockwell and Burton Blumert to establish the Mises Institute in Alabama.
While he was a right-libertarian, Rothbard was a critic of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Adam Smith. Rothbard opposed egalitarianism and the civil rights movement, and blamed women's voting and activism for the growth of the welfare state. He promoted historical revisionism and befriended the Holocaust denier Harry Elmer Barnes. Later in his career, Rothbard advocated a libertarian alliance with paleoconservatism (which he called paleolibertarianism), favoring right-wing populism and describing David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for political strategy. In the 2010s, he received renewed attention as an influence on the alt-right.
Life and work Education Rothbard's parents were David and Rae Rothbard, Jewish immigrants to the United States from Poland and Russia, respectively. David was a chemist. Reprinted from 15 Great Austrian Economists, edited by Randall G. Holcombe. Rothbard attended Birch Wathen Lenox School, a private school in New York City. Rothbard later said he much preferred Birch Wathen to the "debasing and egalitarian public school system" he had attended in the Bronx.
Rothbard wrote of having grown up as an adherent of the "Old Right" among friends and neighbors who were "communists or fellow-travelers". He was a member of the New York Young Republican Club in his youth. Rothbard described his father as an individualist who embraced minimal government, free enterprise, private property and "a determination to rise by one's own merits ... [A]ll socialism seemed to me monstrously coercive and abhorrent." In 1952, his father was trapped during a labor strike at the Tide Water Oil Refinery in New Jersey which he managed, confirming their dislike of organized labor.
Rothbard attended Columbia University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics in 1945 and a PhD in economics in 1956. The delay in receiving his PhD was due in part to conflict with his advisor, Joseph Dorfman, and in part to Arthur Burns's rejecting his dissertation. Burns was a longtime friend of the Rothbard family and their neighbor at their Manhattan apartment building. It was only after Burns went on leave from the Columbia faculty to head President Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers that Rothbard's thesis was accepted, and he received his doctorate.French, Doug (December 27, 2010) Burns Diary Exposes the Myth of Fed Independence , Ludwig von Mises Institute
His first political activism came during the 1948 presidential election, where Rothbard, "as a Jewish student at Columbia, horrified his peers by organizing a Students for Strom Thurmond chapter, so staunchly did he believe in states' rights". Rothbard later said of his time at Columbia that all his fellow students were extreme leftists and that he was one of the university's only two Republicans at the time.
Marriage, Volker Fund, and academia During the 1940s, Rothbard vetted articles for Leonard Read at the Foundation for Economic Education think tank, became acquainted with Frank Chodorov, and read widely in libertarian-oriented works by Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, Isabel Paterson, H. L. Mencken, and Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises. Rothbard was greatly influenced by reading Mises's book Human Action in 1949. In the 1950s, when Mises was teaching in the Wall Street division of the New York University Stern School of Business, Rothbard attended his unofficial seminar. Rothbard wanted to promote libertarian activism; by the mid-1950s, he helped form the Circle Bastiat, a libertarian and anarchist social group in New York City. He also joined the Mont Pelerin Society in the 1950s.
Rothbard attracted the attention of the William Volker Fund, a group that provided financial backing to promote right-wing ideologies in the 1950s and early 1960s.David Gordon, 2010, ed., Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard Quote from Rothbard: "The Volker Fund concept was to find and grant research funds to hosts of libertarian and right-wing scholars and to draw these scholars together via seminars, conferences, etc." The Volker Fund paid Rothbard to write a textbook to explain Human Action in a form that could be used to introduce college undergraduates to Mises's views; a sample chapter he wrote on money and credit won Mises's approval. For ten years, the Volker Fund paid him a retainer as a "senior analyst". As Rothbard continued his work, he enlarged the project. The result was his book Man, Economy, and State, published in 1962. Upon its publication, Mises praised Rothbard's work effusively. In contrast to Mises, who considered security the primary justification for the state, Rothbard in the 1950s began to argue for a privatized market for the military, police and judiciary. Rothbard's 1963 book America's Great Depression blamed government policy failures for the Great Depression, and challenged the widely held view that capitalism is unstable.
In 1953, Rothbard married JoAnn Beatrice Schumacher (1928–1999), whom he called Joey, in New York City. She was a historian, Rothbard's personal editor, and a close adviser as well as hostess of his Rothbard Salon. They enjoyed a loving marriage, and Rothbard often called her "the indispensable framework" of his life and achievements. According to her, the Volker Fund's patronage allowed Rothbard to work from home as a freelance theorist and pundit for the first 15 years of their marriage.Scott Sublett, "Libertarians' Storied Guru", Washington Times, July 30, 1987
The Volker Fund collapsed in 1962, leading Rothbard to seek employment at various New York academic institutions. He was offered a part-time position teaching economics to engineering students at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in 1966 at age 40. The institution had no economics department or economics majors, and Rothbard derided its social science department as "Marxist". Justin Raimondo, his biographer, writes that Rothbard liked teaching at Brooklyn Polytechnic because working only two days a week gave him the freedom to contribute to developments in libertarian politics. Rothbard continued in this role until 1986.Peter G. Klein, ed., F.A. Hayek, The Fortunes of Liberalism: Essays on Austrian Economics and the Ideal of Freedom, University of Chicago Press, 2012, p. 54 , Then 60 years old, Rothbard left Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute for the Lee Business School at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), where he held the title of S.J. Hall Distinguished Professor of Economics, a chair endowed by a libertarian businessman.Rockwell, Llewellyn H. (May 31, 2007). "Three National Treasures." Mises.org
According to Rothbard's friend, colleague, and fellow Misesian economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Rothbard led a "fringe existence" in academia, but he was able to attract a large number of "students and disciples" through his writings, thereby becoming "the creator and one of the principal agents of the contemporary libertarian movement".Hoppe, Hans-Hermann (1999). "Murray N. Rothbard: Economics, Science, and Liberty." Mises.org Libertarian economist Jeffrey Herbener, who called Rothbard his friend and "intellectual mentor", said in a memoriam that Rothbard received "only ostracism" from mainstream academia.Herbener, J. (1995). L. Rockwell (ed.), Murray Rothbard, In Memoriam . Auburn, AL.: Ludwig von Mises Institute. p. 87 Rothbard kept his position at UNLV from 1986 until his death.
Old Right Throughout his life, Rothbard engaged in a number of different political movements to promote Old Right and libertarian principles. George Hawley writes that "unfortunately for Rothbard, the Old Right was ending as an intellectual and political force just as he was maturing as an intellectual", with the militantly anticommunist conservative movement exemplified by William F. Buckley Jr. supplanting the Old Right's isolationism.
Rothbard was an admirer of Senator Joseph McCarthy—not for McCarthy's Cold War views, but for his demagoguery, which Rothbard credited for disrupting the establishment consensus of what Rothbard called "corporate liberalism". Rothbard contributed many articles to Buckley's National Review, but his relations with Buckley and the magazine soured as he criticized the conservative movement for militarism. Specifically, Rothbard opposed how such militarism could justify and expand the state's power.
Rothbard befriended the Holocaust denier Harry Elmer Barnes in 1959. In a 1966 issue of Robert LeFevre's Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought devoted to historical revisionism, Rothbard argued that Western democracies had been to blame for starting World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Rothbard published works by Barnes in his journals before and after Barnes died in 1968, including posthumously in the Cato Institute's journal.
Conflict with Ayn Rand
In 1954, Rothbard, along with several other attendees of Mises's seminar, joined the circle of novelist Ayn Rand, the founder of Objectivism. He soon parted from her, writing, among other things, that her ideas were not as original as she proclaimed but similar to those of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Herbert Spencer. In 1958, after the publication of Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, Rothbard wrote her a "fan letter", calling the book "an infinite treasure house" and "not merely the greatest novel ever written, [but] one of the very greatest books ever written, fiction or nonfiction." He also wrote: "[Y]ou introduced me to the whole field of natural rights and natural law philosophy," prompting him to learn "the glorious natural rights tradition.""Mises and Rothbard Letters to Ayn Rand" , Journal of Libertarian Studies, Volume 21, No. 4 (Winter 2007): 11–16. Rothbard rejoined Rand's circle for a few months but soon broke with Rand again over various differences, including his defense of his interpretation of anarchism.