rothbard, murray
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JAVIER MILIEI
i find no connection david to murray (except m's dad is named david)
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pow
Robert L. Bradley Jr. received his Ph.D. in political economy with distinction from International College in 1985, where renowned libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard served as his dissertation committee chairman. [1, 2]
Bradley also holds a B.A. in economics from Rollins College and an M.A. in economics from the University of Houston. He is best known as the founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research, a free-market think tank based in Washington, D.C. [1, 2, 3]
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b/c can't win democ, hired Rothbard, M fan of lenin, need movement, so cadre; Crane also rad; on surface ref to cato's lts FF, but also Cato elder; Carthage must be destroyed"[scAife fdn?]; overthrow unions, corps that want gov't $ and intellectuals who support gov't action 141 parasites; shocked conserv when called for no foreign war, weed, prostitution;
Reason fdn: pvtize all Poole YAF; pvtize bit by bit
Democracy In Chains
That larger strategy to undermine democracies the world over is chronicled in an excellent book “Democracy In Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America” by award-winning historian Nancy MacLean of Duke University. The book was a finalist in the prestigious National Book Awards for 2017.
MacLean found what George Monbiot calls the “missing link” that helps to explain the radicalisation of governments from the US to the UK and beyond. In an abandoned building on the campus of George Mason University, MacLean found the paper trail of the life's work of James McGill Buchanan, including confidential letters with Charles Koch that confirm millions of Koch's dollars flowed to GMU in support of Buchanan's work.
Buchanan — who was a member and past-president of the Mont Pelerin Society — developed a strategy along with MPS member Charles Koch and other elite industrialists to construct a network of neoliberal think tanks that, as MacLean writes and documents, have infected democracies with radical right wing policy ideas designed to shield and benefit the wealthy elite, and to disempower the majority of citizens.
Buchanan served on the advisory board of the Exxon- and Koch-funded Independent Institute, and as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute, which Charles Koch co-founded with Murray Rothbard and Edward Crane. Crane is a long-standing member of MPS, and Rothbard is credited as having suggested to Charles Koch that he study the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and to view government as “our enemy.”
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nyt
no lnx
The Far Right’s Love-Hate Relationship With Globalization
A new book by the historian Quinn Slobodian examines right-wing figures who have positioned themselves as populist critics of neoliberalism while weaponizing some of its founders’ ideas.
:{:{Elon Musk brandishes a chain saw given to him by President Javier Milei of Argentina, to his right, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland in February.}:
By Jennifer Szalai
Published April 9, 2025
Updated May 12, 2025
HAYEK’S BASTARDS: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, by Quinn Slobodian
Argentina’s mutton-chopped president, Javier Milei, doesn’t exactly come across as a placid figure. A self-described “anarcho-capitalist,” he rails against “sick wokeism” and gleefully brandishes a chain saw to mimic his evisceration of government spending. (At the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, he gave a shiny red one to Elon Musk.) But standing before the world’s elite at Davos last year, Milei offered some soothing reassurance to the businesspeople in his audience. “You are social benefactors, you’re heroes,” he said. “Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral. If you make money, it’s because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general well-being.”
:{:{The combination of emollient platitudes, economic shock therapy and strongman authoritarianism is why Milei features prominently in the concluding chapter of Quinn Slobodian’s bracingly original new book, “Hayek’s Bastards.” Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, traces how right-wing figures across the world have positioned themselves as populist critics of “neoliberal policies” even while they pay frequent homage to Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, who laid the foundations for the neoliberal tradition, with its gospel of free markets.}:
This so-called New Right has adopted the furious nostalgia of a backlash to what Milei has called a “global hegemony” while embracing radical deregulation. At Davos, Slobodian writes, “Milei spoke less as a defector from the global capitalist order than its latest photogenic cheerleader.”}:
:{:{Slobodian locates a hinge moment in the end of the Cold War. For hardcore believers in the primacy of free markets, the collapse of communism was a surprisingly scary time. Instead of the end-of-history triumphalism emanating from more mainstream quarters, thinkers on the far right warned about the persistence of big states and public spending. Socialism hadn’t been left for dead, they insisted; it had “simply mutated,” as one writer put it.}:
“The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s had injected the poison of civil rights, feminism, affirmative action and ecological consciousness into the veins of the body politic,” Slobodian writes, paraphrasing the reactionary strain of neoliberal thinking at the time. According to this besieged worldview, egalitarian demands led inexorably to “victimology” and bloated states. “Neoliberals needed an antidote.”}:
Image
The cover of “Hayek’s Bastards,” by Quinn Slobodian
:{:{Against centrists’ soft-focus visions of incremental reforms and an expanding pie, a number of thinkers on the right turned to severe, zero-sum assertions of what Slobodian calls the three “hards”: hard borders, hard-wired human difference and hard money. (President Trump’s antagonistic trade war is the reductio ad absurdum of this brutal worldview.)}:
They argued by making appeals to nature (though not the idea that nature that imposes limits on economic growth). Slobodian vividly shows how far-right intellectuals took to promoting racial homogeneity, an obsession with I.Q. and gold as the ultimate currency. They presented themselves as faithful followers of Hayek and Mises, who traded their early calls for the free movement of labor for an acceptance of closed borders, especially to keep out nonwhite migrants.}:
The title of Slobodian’s book is an explicit echo of “Voltaire’s Bastards” (1992), John Ralston Saul’s bravura work of intellectual history. Saul posited that technocratic elites had fetishized the Enlightenment ideal of rationality to the point of extremism. Slobodian sees a similar dynamic at play with the ideas of Hayek and Mises, and the “intellectual free-for-all” among their epigones on the far right. Hayek, for instance, claimed that in his critiques of immigration he was assuming not innate differences in people’s genes but, rather, cultural differences — a notion that his “bastards” would stretch, warp and deform. “The point is not to salvage the honor of the Austrian school sages,” Slobodian writes, “but to show how ideas are instrumentalized, adapted and weaponized.”
“Hayek’s Bastards” demonstrates how a history of ideas can be riveting. Slobodian grounds intellectual abstractions in the lives of the people who espoused them. The cast of hard-right thinkers in this book include the economist Murray Rothbard; the financial writer Peter Brimelow, who founded the anti-immigration website VDARE; the political scientist Charles Murray and the psychologist Richard Herrnstein, who together wrote “The Bell Curve” (1994), the notorious treatise on race and I.Q. that described affirmative action as “leaking a poison into the American soul.”
Rothbard was adamant that “biology stands like a rock in the face of egalitarian fantasies.” Like the other figures in this book, he presumed that hierarchy and inequality were entirely natural. As Herrnstein put it in a letter to another like-minded psychologist, “It continually amazes me that even biologists deny having eugenic sentiments, as if they were shameful.”
The economic ideas that are predicated on such a worldview are inevitably ruthless and cutthroat. In a universe based on hierarchy and inequality, cruelty can never be eliminated, only ameliorated. The same year that “The Bell Curve” was published, Rothbard pointed to the wars in the former Yugoslavia as proof that “national heterogeneity simply does not work.” The year after that, he lauded Patrick J. Buchanan’s presidential campaign as “a revolution of white Euro-males.” According to Rothbard, segregation was good. He said that South Africa needed not less apartheid but more.
But for the hard right, even such preferred forms of government could never be trusted. Slobodian lays out how, for right-wingers fearful of a spendthrift government “debauching” the currency, gold became the objective standard of value. Some “goldbugs” actually welcomed the prospect of a currency collapse, anticipating the “twin pleasures” of vindication and financial enrichment. Before the internet, they stoked fear and excitement in what Slobodian calls the “profane space” of the newsletter and advice manual. The key was to portray a collapse as imminent and inevitable: “An essential part of the goldbug formula was instilling a basic mistrust in the utterances of public authorities.”
It’s a formula that has been turbocharged in the digital age. A similar mix of gullibility and paranoia fuels today’s rush for the “new gold” of cryptocurrency, in which suspicions of central banks meet credulous frenzies for memecoins. Slobodian’s book offers an illuminating history to our current bewildering moment, as right-wing populists join forces with billionaire oligarchs to take a chain saw to the foundations of public life, until there’s nothing left to stand on.
HAYEK’S BASTARDS: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right | By Quinn Slobodian | Zone Books | 279 pp. | $29.95
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
A version of this article appears in print on April 10, 2025, Section C, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Entangled in a Love-Hate Relationship With Globalization.
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no lnx lib curr
The Bastards of Mont Pèlerin
Hayek's Bastards should serve as a reminder to the defenders of Hayek and neoliberalism generally to be vigilant in differentiating themselves from the far right figures and groups that have attempted to graft onto what they defend.
Gary T. Gunnels
The Bastards of Mont Pèlerin
July 16 2025
Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (2025) is an exploration of the ideological intersections between neoliberalism, far-right politics, and pseudoscientific racism. Slobodian argues that a distorted offshoot of Friedrich Hayek’s economic philosophy has been hijacked by far-right thinkers to create an ideological matrix that fuses free-market absolutism with ethnonationalism and racial hierarchies based upon IQ. He then attempts to connect these to the politics of figures like Donald Trump today. I aim to evaluate Slobodian’s arguments, focusing on the major figures and institutions he identifies as central to this ideological synthesis.
Slobodian’s central thesis is that Hayek’s intellectual edifice, rooted in his arguments for spontaneous order and market mechanisms, has been warped by a group of unwanted “bastards” into a justification for a racially hierarchical social order. A “new fusionism” as he calls it—a play on the “old fusionism” associated with Bill Buckley Jr. Slobodian contends that while Hayek’s ideas weren’t inherently racist, they've been co-opted by figures who have twisted his emphasis on competition and its alleged advantages to legitimize ethnonationalism, restrictive immigration policies, and pseudoscientific claims about racial superiority. The three thematic pillars of the book are race, IQ, and gold. All three are used as defenses against any sort of ameliorative politics. And they form the basis for what he calls the “three hards” meant to keep progressive politics at bay: hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money.
Behind the scenes of much of Slobodian’s analysis is Hayek’s so-called “savanna story” (a phrase which Hayek admittedly never used), a just-so story about our species’ ancestors that attempts to use culture in a Lamarckian sense to explain modern human differences. To Hayek certain cultures were simply better at overcoming our small band communitarianism as our species formed larger polities. For Hayek this explains the modern differences between cultures and states. This story, Slobodian argues, is used to naturalize modern inequalities in ways that we can do little about as a matter of policy. In turn certain far-right thinkers invoked the savanna story to argue that humans are biologically predisposed towards inequality, thereby justifying policies like closed borders or racially homogeneous communities as natural extensions of market-driven choices.
The book’s cast of characters and institutions forms the backbone of Slobodian’s case. Murray Rothbard, a pioneer of anarcho-capitalism, and someone who aligned with Hayek’s concept of spontaneous order, is a primary example. In particular Slobodian focuses on Rothbard’s “paleolibertarian” turn in the 1990s, when he forged alliances with various cultural conservatives and ethno-nationalists. Through writings in the Rothbard-Rockwell Report Rothbard defended cultural homogeneity, a shift that Slobodian argues helped lay the groundwork for a synthesis of free-market absolutism and ethnonationalism. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a disciple of Rothbard, is a similar figure. Hoppe’s concept of private, contract-based societies that could exclude individuals based on cultural or racial criteria (“covenant communities”) is of particular importance to Slobodian’s analysis. It’s a sort of Hayekian spontaneous order towards xenophobic ends that justifies exclusionary communities that prioritizes homogeneity over more universal values.
:{:{The Ludwig von Mises Institute, founded by Lew Rockwell (a paleoconservative with a long history of using racial resentment as a political strategy) and closely associated with Rothbard, is a key institution that also disseminated these ideas. Slobodian points to the institute’s conferences and publications, such as The Mises Review, as having provided a platform for thinkers like Hoppe and Rockwell to advance their ideas. It’s also not the only hub for libertarian thought that has overlapped into far-right discourse.}:
Similar critiques are made of the Mont Pèlerin Society (a highly influential invitation-only free market organization that has shaped much of global economic policy since its inception by Hayek and likeminded classical liberals in 1947 through its network of Nobel prize winning economists, government advisors, and scholars) and the Institute for Humane Studies, both of which have hosted or flirted with a number of ethno-nationalists, “race realists,” and the like. As an ex-libertarian I was a bit shocked by the number of hard-right figures the Mont Pèlerin Society in particular found comfortable inviting to its meetings, especially given its outsized role in legitimizing neoliberal thought and the prominent positions of its members. }:
:{:{This gets to one of the book's greatest strengths: Slobodian's careful mapping of the intellectual networks that form far right politics of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. For example, Slobodian shows how figures like Charles Murray (a Mont Pèlerin Society member) and Peter Brimelow became central nodes in a broader ecosystem of societies and think tanks that fused market fundamentalism with biological determinism.}:
:{:{Murray, whose work The Bell Curve provided pseudoscientific justification for racial hierarchies through IQ testing, proved particularly attractive to neoliberals seeking to counter civil rights advances because it offered a seemingly objective, data-driven rationale for opposing state efforts to promote equality in an almost Malthusian sense. Murray and his allies could advocate for pure market solutions while claiming to be above racial politics, envisaging a sort of meritocratic “neurocaste,” (Slobodian's word) based upon IQ.}:
Peter Brimelow, a founder of the white nationalist website VDare and author of Alien Nation, explicitly connected immigration restriction to preserving American economic and cultural superiority and free market economics. Slobodian demonstrates that both had significant influence on the formation of the alt-right.}:}:
:{:{What all of this suggests is that Hayek's "savanna story" provided an intellectual framework (a “blank check” as Slobodian calls it) that far-right thinkers subsequently appropriated and distorted for their exclusionary agendas, despite Hayek's own intentions. Hayek’s philosophy, whatever else one might think of it, was explicitly universalist and cosmopolitan in its defense of individual liberty and open markets. The far-right thinkers that Slobodian examines, by contrast, prioritized group identity and exclusion from the start. In this sense their engagement with Hayek’s work appears as much opportunistic as foundational.}:
They were seizing upon elements of Hayek’s work that they could twist towards their own ends as much as they were deriving their worldview from Hayek’s principles. This doesn’t mean that Slobodian didn’t find some cringe-inducing racist-adjacent comments by Hayek over the years. Hayek’s remarks about “un-domesticated barbarians” and their unwillingness to accept the “discipline” required of a free market society at a 1976 lecture is highly reminiscent of nineteenth century attitudes towards colonized or enslaved people that merely reinforced unequal social relationships rooted in nothing more than coercion. }:
Slobodian adeptly shows how the far right, much like previous generations of pseudoscientific racists, misused evolutionary biology to lend scientific legitimacy to their ideologies. Indeed, when figures within the Mises Institute or Mont Pèlerin Society circles draw on discredited race science to justify social inequalities that surely has something to say about the nature of what neoliberalism will tolerate in its defense of free market economics. This broader historical outlook underscores the dangers of pseudoscience in legitimizing discriminatory and bigoted ideologies. Still, this approach has its limitations. While it effectively captures the far right’s tendency to invoke evolutionary metaphors, it, as Slobodian admits at the start, is only one part of the story of how we got here.
Slobodian’s effort to squeeze gold in the narrative is to this reviewer a bit clunky. But it does serve the purpose of demonstrating just how committed far right thinkers were to a certain set of ideas about the state (especially a democratic one) and its role in society. The advocacy for "hard money" became a vehicle for opposing democratic governance and social programs (that were pointless because of natural hierarchies in the first place) that required the flexibility of a fiat currency. That goldbugs and other hard money advocates became part of an alt-right coalition is understandable from this perspective. Hard money meant a so-called natural economic restraint on the government in its efforts to pursue redistributive policies.
What can be said of all of this? First, Slobodian focuses a great deal on a number of minor figures. Individuals like Hoppe (and there are quite a few of them in the book) are frankly marginal compared to more mainstream libertarian or conservative thinkers. This risks giving readers an incomplete understanding of how libertarian and neoliberal thought actually developed and gained prominence over time. As a reader I want to understand just how close a connection existed between these minor figures and some of the larger personalities in the movement. That connection could have been drawn a bit more tightly. Still, given the frequent involvement of these minor characters in the cornerstone institutions of the movement, there is merit to Slobodian’s approach.
Not that all were minor characters. Slobodian doesn't ignore individuals like Milton Friedman, whom he quotes as viewing the Americans with Disabilities Act as a sort of coercive “paternalism” that merely expanded statism at the expense of a laissez-faire social order. This frankly callous and tone-deaf dismissal of disability rights surprised me and it makes me wonder what other views by Friedman I may have missed.
:{:{Also, notwithstanding the excellent research that is the heart of the book, Slobodian’s portrayal of Hayek as an accidental progenitor of far-right ideologies is difficult to prove. There is something of a speculative bridge one has to make to go from Hayek’s abstract principles about spontaneous order to the concrete policies of ethno-nationalists. A deeper set of connections needs to be made in order to make this bridge more concrete. That Slobodian focuses so much on intellectual history comes at a cost. Surely there is more going on here in the formation of the alt-right than this.}:
If we think of the alt-right in its broadest scope as a largely online phenomenon based upon white identity politics, and as a loose connection of groups and people opposed to concepts like multiculturalism and feminism, then a larger discussion of how forerunners of the alt-right that Slobodian identifies (like the paleoconservatives or the European New Right) meshed with this new movement seems in order. Slobodian does make a nod to this from time to time, but he could have been more explicit. }:
:{:{Hayek’s Bastards resonates with historical examples of pseudoscience-supported racism, such as the American eugenics movement’s advocacy for forced sterilizations. Slobodian thus underscores the enduring danger of pseudoscience in legitimizing racism and inequality. Of course Slobodian’s work has faced significant criticism from a number of libertarian and neoliberal reviewers of the book (I won't wade into these here), however, I would argue that these largely miss the point.}:
The book should serve as a reminder to Hayek's defenders—and libertarians and neoliberals more generally—to be vigilant in differentiating themselves from the far right figures and groups that have attempted to graft onto what they defend. That a lot of the mainstream organizations in the neoliberal movement chose to invite racist crackpots to their conferences and soirées is exactly the opposite of that, and is merely summoning the sort of confluences that Slobodian discusses in his book. Libertarians could use this opportunity to more forcefully articulate how genuine free market principles are incompatible with racial determinism.}:
In conclusion, Slobodian effectively highlights the far right’s misuse of evolutionary theory (and IQ), and his analysis of figures like Rothbard, Hoppe, Murray, and Brimelow, as well as institutions like the Mises Institute and the Mont Pèlerin Society, provides a compelling portrait of an ideological undercurrent that has gained visibility in recent years. But his attempt to tie these figures directly to Hayek’s legacy is less convincing, as it relies on a set of speculative connections that need more heft. This isn't to suggest that Slobodian is wrong, just that he needs to demonstrate his claims more concretely. Ultimately, I believe that Slobodian is attempting to provide us with a cautionary tale about how theories of human development, when stripped of ethical moorings, can support exclusionary and oppressive ends.
Author
Gary T. Gunnels
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Milei’s calls himself an anarcho-capitalist following M.N. Rothbard, but his actions seem more in line with Hayek’s classical liberalism
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism - Wikipedia
Anarcho-capitalists oppose the state and seek to privatize government services such as education, infrastructure, or law enforcement. [61][62] They see capitalism and the free market as the basis for a free and prosperous society. Murray Rothbard states that the difference between free-market capitalism and state capitalism is the difference between "peaceful, voluntary exchange" and a ...
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Murray_Rothbard
Murray Rothbard - Wikipedia
Murray Newton Rothbard (US: / ˈrɔːθbɑːrd /; March 2, 1926 - January 7, 1995) was an American economist [1] of the Austrian School, [2][3][4] economic historian, [5][6] political theorist, [7] 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 ...
propertyandfreedom.org
Feldman, The thinkers of liberalism - Murray Rothbard and anarcho ...
May 10, 2026Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was an American economist. A student of Ludwig von Mises and a university professor, he radicalized the Austrian School towards anarcho-capitalism, becoming its leading proponent.
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Why I Am an Anarcho-Capitalist
Tags:Entrepreneurship,Free Markets
12/04/2013•Mises Daily•Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
Print this page
A great many people — more than ever, probably — describe themselves as supporters of the free market today, in spite of the unrelenting propaganda against it. And that’s great. Those statements of support, however, are followed by the inevitable but: but we need government to provide physical security and dispute resolution, the most critical services of all.
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NAT MAG The 2 Murrays and the Age of Pretend Anarchy | The Nation
JEET HER
Murray Bookchin and Murray Rothbard are both examples of how formerly obscure thinkers can rise to posthumous fame—at home, and in faraway places. They follow a trajectory similar to that of Jeremy Bentham as described by William Hazlitt in an essay in The Spirit of the Age (1815), written while the utilitarian philosopher was still alive. According to Hazlitt, Bentham’s “reputation lies at the circumference; and the lights of his understanding are reflected, with increasing lustre, on the other side of the globe. His name is little known in England, better in Europe, best of all in the plains of Chile and the mines of Mexico. He has offered constitutions for the New World, and legislated for future times.”
Bookchin was born in 1921 and died in 2006, Rothbard’s dates are from 1926 to 1995. Both were relatively obscure figures in their lifetime, known to readers of small journals and followers of fringe political factions, but hardly makers of front-page news. Writing in The Baffler in 2017, John Ganz described Rothbard as “the forgotten man.” Yet it’s increasingly evident that their political philosophies, often disdained by the mainstream arbiters of the left and right, have had a lasting impact. Like Bentham, they legislated for future times.
Bookchin’s vision of decentralized political radicalism has left its mark on movements like Occupy Wall Street and antifa. Even more consequentially, Bookchin’s brand of libertarian socialism has become one of the animating ideologies of Kurdish nationalism, informing the government of Rojava (a region of Syria under Kurdish control) and the Kurdish political movement in southeastern Turkey.
Rothbard, a firebrand who created an extreme version of libertarianism called anarcho-capitalism, also has a restless and far-traveling ghost. As Ganz convincingly shows, Rothbard was a crucial precursor to Trumpism. In the 1980s, Rothbard married the traditional anarcho-capitalist desire to dismantle the state with the racial resentment of paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan, creating a synthesis that had robustness and reach. The newly elected president of Argentina, Javier Milei, styles himself an anarcho-capitalist. Milei owns five cloned dogs whom he calls his “four-legged children” and often turns to for political advice. Each dog is named after a libertarian economist. One is called Murray, after Rothbard.
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ALL
Politics / December 15, 2023
The 2 Murrays and the Age of Pretend Anarchy
The strange global influence of anarcho-capitalism.
Jeet Heer
Murray Bookchin (left) and Murray Rothbard.
Murray Bookchin and Murray Rothbard are both examples of how formerly obscure thinkers can rise to posthumous fame—at home, and in faraway places. They follow a trajectory similar to that of Jeremy Bentham as described by William Hazlitt in an essay in The Spirit of the Age (1815), written while the utilitarian philosopher was still alive. According to Hazlitt, Bentham’s “reputation lies at the circumference; and the lights of his understanding are reflected, with increasing lustre, on the other side of the globe. His name is little known in England, better in Europe, best of all in the plains of Chile and the mines of Mexico. He has offered constitutions for the New World, and legislated for future times.”
Bookchin was born in 1921 and died in 2006, Rothbard’s dates are from 1926 to 1995. Both were relatively obscure figures in their lifetime, known to readers of small journals and followers of fringe political factions, but hardly makers of front-page news. Writing in The Baffler in 2017, John Ganz described Rothbard as “the forgotten man.” Yet it’s increasingly evident that their political philosophies, often disdained by the mainstream arbiters of the left and right, have had a lasting impact. Like Bentham, they legislated for future times.
Bookchin’s vision of decentralized political radicalism has left its mark on movements like Occupy Wall Street and antifa. Even more consequentially, Bookchin’s brand of libertarian socialism has become one of the animating ideologies of Kurdish nationalism, informing the government of Rojava (a region of Syria under Kurdish control) and the Kurdish political movement in southeastern Turkey.
Rothbard, a firebrand who created an extreme version of libertarianism called anarcho-capitalism, also has a restless and far-traveling ghost. As Ganz convincingly shows, Rothbard was a crucial precursor to Trumpism. In the 1980s, Rothbard married the traditional anarcho-capitalist desire to dismantle the state with the racial resentment of paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan, creating a synthesis that had robustness and reach. The newly elected president of Argentina, Javier Milei, styles himself an anarcho-capitalist. Milei owns five cloned dogs whom he calls his “four-legged children” and often turns to for political advice. Each dog is named after a libertarian economist. One is called Murray, after Rothbard.
Despite sharing the same first name, both styling themselves as anarchists and sharing other similarities, in life Bookchin and Rothbard didn’t get along. As Brian Doherty writes in his 2007 book, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, “Anarcho-left theorist Murray Bookchin became an occasional visitor to the famous Rothbard living room—until Rothbard one day angrily kicked him out of the house.” Later, Bookchin would resent the fact that Rothbard falsely accused him of being a Marxist.
The spat between the two Murrays was not just the typical sectarian squabble found in radical politics but based on a fundamental disagreement. Bookchin’s libertarianism was authentic: He really wanted not just a decentralized state but also the breakdown of the hierarchies of class, race, and gender that are foundational to oppression. By contrast, Rothbard’s anarchism was a pretend ideology with anti-statist rhetoric hiding the desire to create a much more rigidly hierarchical society.
July/August 2026 Issue
Rothbard was a curious mixture of extremist goals pursued by opportunistic means. At various points in his life, he was aligned with figures and movements as diverse as William F. Buckley, Ayn Rand, William Appleman Williams, the Peace and Freedom Party’s Maoist faction, Charles Koch, and Pat Buchanan.
Rothbard’s wild peregrinations across the political spectrum make sense if we understand that he saw each tactical alliance as a necessary step in destroying the welfare state. Although he grew up in a largely left-wing family, Rothbard, influenced by his father, was a rabid opponent of the New Deal. His early heroes were Robert Taft and Joseph McCarthy. For a period, he was an ally of Ayn Rand and part of William F. Buckley’s National Review circle, but he came to distrust both. He was wisely wary of the fanatical nature of Rand’s movement (which he described as a “totalitarian religious cult”) and saw the Cold War militancy of National Review as a bulwark of statism.
Rothbard’s conviction that the Cold War was locking the United States into a permanent warfare-welfare state led him to his most creatively interesting period, the 1960s, when he formed alliances with New Left thinkers like William Appleman Williams as well as the Peace and Freedom Party. This was the period where Murray Bookchin was briefly allowed into Rothbard’s living room. Working with these allies, Rothbard developed a critique of technocratic and corporate liberalism that remains valuable. Corporate liberalism was something that both the New Left and libertarians could unite in seeing as an enemy.
In 1972, Rothbard coedited with Ronald Radosh (then also part of the New Left, although later a neoconservative) a book titled A New History of Leviathan. As historian Gary Gerstle notes in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022), the Rothbard and Radosh volume was a “foundational text” that would “significantly influence the writing of American political history across the next quarter century.”
But by the time A New History of Leviathan appeared, Rothbard’s alliance with the New Left was already fraying. In 1969, moving from the simple hardline libertarianism he inherited from the economist Ludwig von Mises, Rothbard started describing himself as an anarcho-capitalist (borrowing from his one-time ally Karl Hess, a former speechwriter for Barry Goldwater who became a New Left radical).
As historian Quinn Slobodian writes in his recent study Crack-Up Capitalism, Rothbard “had no tolerance for government of any kind…. In his ideal world, government would be eliminated altogether. Security, utilities, infrastructure, health care: all would be bought through the market with no safety net for those unable to pay.”
Working through anarcho-capitalist thinking in his book Ethics of Liberty (1982), Rothbard argued that parents have the right to starve their children to death. The flavor of Rothbard’s reasoning is caught in this passage:
Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that 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, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die.
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Feature / William Hogeland
In the same spirit, Javier Melei has proposed legalizing the sale of children.
This conception of parental rights is characteristic of Rothbard’s defense of extreme hierarchy, which can also be seen in his advocacy of racial separatism. In the 1960s, as Slobodian notes, Rothbard “believed that Black secession from the United States was achievable; indeed, communities should respect the principle of racial separation. He became frustrated by the cross-racial collaboration of white and Black radicals. Blacks should work with Blacks, he thought, just as it was ‘the responsibility of whites to build the white movement.’”
Rothbard’s rejection of anti-racism and feminism was the pivot point in his intellectual journey and foreclosed any alliances he might have made with Bookchin or others on the left. Slobodian observes that “the deviation of the New Left from his preferred script of racial exit turned Rothbard violently against it by the early 1970s. Their dogged egalitarianism was an affront to his belief in the biologically hardwired hierarchy of talent and ability in both individuals and groups.”
Turning away from the New Left, Rothbard helped found the Charles Koch Foundation in 1974, rechristened the Cato Institute in 1974. Although Rothbard briefly found genuine influence as the éminence grise of the Koch brothers’ network, he bristled at what he saw as their compromised vision of liberty. They merely wanted to cut back the state, whereas he wanted to destroy the state altogether.
In 1982 Rothbard helped launch a new think tank, the Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian Economics, housed in Auburn, Ala. His ally in this enterprise was a neo-Confederate libertarian named Llewellyn Rockwell Jr., described by Slobodian as “both a radical libertarian and an advocate of racial separatism ever since his first position at the conservative publisher Arlington House (named, with little subtlety, after the last residence of Confederate general Robert E. Lee).” In a 1970 letter, Rockwell said he supported “de facto segregation for the majority of both races.”
This partnership with Rockwell inaugurated Rothbard’s final and most lastingly influential phase. He now called himself a paleo-libertarian (to distinguish himself from New Left–influenced libertarians who were socially liberal). Under that rubric, Rothbard worked to forge an alliance with figures like Pat Buchanan and Samuel T. Francis, who were rebranding themselves as paleoconservatives (to distinguish their politics from the then-dominant neoconservatism of Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol). According to Rockwell in a 1990 essay for “The Rockwell-Rothbard Report” (a newsletter put out by the team), the task was to purge the “hippies, druggies, and militantly anti-Christian atheists” from the libertarian movement. In a 1992 article for “The Rockwell-Rothbard Report,” Rothbard upheld David Duke as a model for the politics of the new right-wing populism that he felt was necessary.
In that article, Rothbard showed how far he had abandoned any pretence of anarchist anti-statism. On the issue of crime he wrote, “Take Back the Streets: Crush Criminals. And by this I mean, of course, not ‘white collar criminals’ or ‘inside traders’ but violent street criminals—robbers, muggers, rapists, murderers. Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.” He added, “Take Back the Streets: Get Rid of the Bums. Again: unleash the cops to clear the streets of bums and vagrants. Where will they go? Who cares?”
On Friday, David Adler of the Progressive International reported on X: “President Javier Milei announces a total crackdown on Argentine civil society, calling on armed forces to break strikes, arrest protestors, ‘protect’ children from families that bring them to demos, and form a new national registry of all agitating organisations.” The naïve will say that Milei is betraying the spirit of libertarianism and anarchism. But in truth, the brutal use of state power to repress free speech and activism is central to the anarcho-capitalist agenda.
This vision of society is not anarchist. Nor is it even libertarian. It is authoritarian. No wonder Murray Rothbard couldn’t get along with Murray Bookchin. Nor is it surprising—as the political right grows more authoritarian around the world—that Rothbard is the Murray of the moment.
Jeet Heer
Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.
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DISSENT
The Ideology Behind Trump’s Favorite President
Following the teachings of Murray Rothbard, Javier Milei wants to dismantle the state while also using it to consolidate his power.
Pablo StefanoniMarch 4, 2025
Argentinian President Javier Milei wields a chainsaw as he arrives on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 20, 2025. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Shortly after Donald Trump was elected in November 2024, he placed a call to Argentina’s Javier Milei. “You are my favorite president,” Trump told Milei. “The end.” The two had met briefly at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last February, where Milei revealed he was a Trump fan. Milei uses the chainsaw as a symbol to indicate his approach to cutting the size of the Argentine state. This approach has been a reference for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE); Musk has consulted with Milei’s specially appointed Minister of Deregulation, and, like Milei, he plans a 30 percent reduction in the U.S. federal budget.
Milei is a neoliberal of the Austrian school—a believer that the private market offers true freedom, while the state offers only repression. He is a particular admirer of Murray Rothbard, the Ludwig von Mises disciple and once-fringe libertarian whose thinking has become increasingly influential on the right. One of Milei’s five cloned dogs is named Murray. “We are fulfilling [Murray] Rothbard’s dream,” Milei announced in April 2024, while speaking about deficit reduction at a dinner hosted by the Fundación Libertad in Buenos Aires.
Rothbard, as Melinda Cooper and John Ganz have argued, helps bridge the gap between the libertarian and authoritarian elements of the contemporary right. Back in 1992, he prefigured the Trumpist rhetorical strategy:
The reality of the current system is that it constitutes an unholy alliance of “corporate liberal” Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America. Therefore, the proper strategy of libertarians and paleos is a strategy of “right-wing populism,” that is: to expose and denounce this unholy alliance, and to call for getting this preppie-underclass-liberal media alliance off the backs of the rest of us.
Rothbard remains a fringe figure in the United States, but one linked to a minority current in a country where distrust of the state has been a consistent theme. In many ways, his ideas seem more out of place in Argentina. Though Argentina also has a federal system, there is no culture of states’ rights, nor are there the radical religious groups or militias that consider the central government the source of all evil. When Milei began to publicly preach the virtues of an anarcho-capitalist utopia, he appeared as a solitary prophet.
But some young post-adolescents began to be attracted to Milei’s rhetoric and foul language. These young people started to create WhatsApp groups to take part in events organized by Milei—including public classes on Austrian economics in city squares, book presentations, and plays—and to respond to Milei’s television appearances on social networks. In 2019, I conducted a series of interviews with these young libertarians. One of them (who had an image of Trump on his phone’s home screen) told me that Rothbard was the theoretical inspiration of the Argentine libertarian movement. He and his companions (more men than women, at least then) were reading the New York theorist, several of whose texts were being published in Spanish for the first time.
Rothbard’s ideas may seem like an unstable philosophy for a president, given that he seeks to abolish state authority. And Milei doesn’t shy away from this position. “I am a mole who came to destroy the state from within,” he repeats. But Rothbard’s work also provides a basis for Milei’s alliances with other reactionary groups—and the convergence between libertarians and far-right groups taking place in a number of countries. Milei really wants to abolish the state, but he also uses it to consolidate his power.
Born in 1926 in the Bronx, Rothbard came from a family of Russian and Polish Jews. Although many members and acquaintances of his family belonged to the Communist Party, his father had remained closer to the right. Rothbard first developed anti-statist feelings during his time in public school—“the most unhappy period of my life.” In the 1950s, he earned a doctorate in economics from Columbia University. Rothbard also felt close from a young age to the old right, rooted in an interpretation of the ideas of Thomas Jefferson: distrust of the central government, isolationism, and pacifism. Libertarianism led Rothbard—who was one of the founders of the Libertarian Party in 1971—to common action with the left in various areas, especially against the Vietnam War.
Later in life, Rothbard grew critical of the marginality of the Libertarian Party and developed an agenda he described as “paleolibertarian.” He reconnected with reactionary positions that he had never in fact abandoned and advocated “right-wing populism” as a political strategy.
Lew H. Rockwell Jr., a disciple of Rothbard, wrote a manifesto titled “The Case for Paleo-Libertarianism” in 1990. The text was full of contempt for the drift of the Libertarian Party toward countercultural positions on drugs and sex work. “Conservatives have always argued that political freedom is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the good society,” he wrote,
and they’re right. Neither is it sufficient for the free society. We also need social institutions and standards that encourage public virtue, and protect the individual from the State. Unfortunately, many libertarians—especially those in the Libertarian Party—see freedom as necessary and sufficient for all purposes. Worse, they equate freedom from State oppression with freedom from cultural norms, religion, bourgeois morality, and social authority.
Rockwell later added that the party “may never have gotten 1% in a national election, but it has smeared the most glorious political idea in human history with libertine muck.” Paleolibertarians, by contrast, believed that one must not confuse “natural authority” (which arises from “voluntary” social structures like families, businesses, and churches) with the authority imposed by the state. From their perspective, the Libertarian Party had transformed into a group of anti-authority hippies isolated from the American people and their beliefs.
When it came to civil rights, the paleos rejected them outright. “State-enforced segregation, which also violated property rights, was wrong,” Rockwell wrote, “but so is State-enforced integration.” For Rockwell, forced segregation was not wrong in itself, but because it was a state imposition; communities, however, were free to make their own rules. The same went for restrictions favored by others on the right, like anti-abortion laws. These types of positions allowed libertarians to form alliances with various sectors on the right, from fundamentalist Christians to the Ku Klux Klan, in the name of freedom, autonomy, and the rejection of federal power.
Although paleolibertarianism did not prosper as a political movement in the strict sense, Rothbard accurately perceived the crisis brewing in traditional conservatism and the rebellion gathering at the base of the Republican Party. These energies eventually produced the Tea Party and then Trumpism, which took on a number of elements of the paleo program.
Milei, who trained as an economist at the University of Belgrano, was converted to the Austrian school of economics around 2013, after reading Rothbard’s “Monopoly and Competition”—a text that made him revise all his previous convictions. After this point, Milei began to appear on television programs, gaining popularity for his eccentric performances, which would veer from Austrian economics to tantric sex. He grew adept at generating attention through controversy, a talent he put in service of his new cause: the anarcho-capitalism professed by Rothbard. He would call Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money “general garbage,” and make declarations like, “between the mafia and the state, I prefer the mafia,” because “the mafia has morals, the mafia fulfills, the mafia doesn’t lie, the mafia competes.” He defined himself, in language incomprehensible outside certain niches, as “minarchist in static terms and ANCAP [anarcho-capitalist] in dynamic terms.” In other words: the minimum program is minarchism, the minimum state; the maximum program is its abolition.
As a public figure, Milei made an enemy not just of the eclectically center left-wing Peronist party but also the center-right party of then-President Mauricio Macri. To Milei, the center-right party represented a “yellow socialism.” In El consultorio de Milei—a ramshackle 2019 theatrical work in which Milei delivers monologues on economics—Milei attacked the moderate wing of Macri’s administration as the enemy of freedom, while the public insulted his ministers. The work ended with Milei crudely destroying a prop Central Bank with a baseball bat.
Milei saw himself as engaged in a cultural battle for a country that he believed was dominated by leftists. He combined Rothbard’s ideas with the epic vision of capitalism found in the novels of Ayn Rand, all seasoned with the post-democratic sensibilities germinating in Silicon Valley. In his earlier TV appearances, the “economist with weird hair” (as the newspaper Clarín called him) dodged direct political questions, taking shelter in the notion that he only knew about economics. As he began to move from a cultural battle to a political-electoral one, he sought answers in the ideas of the alt-right. Milei shaped an Argentine version of MAGA ideology—the local translation of a more global zeitgeist—and made common cause with other reactionary forces, united in their shared contempt for “progressivism.”
Milei’s intellectual consigliere is the far-right writer Agustín Laje, who provides readymade arguments for the “anti-woke” battle. Laje, who is popular in right-wing networks throughout Latin America, discovered Rothbard when asked by the Unión publishing house to write the prologue to a 2019 Spanish translation of Rothbard’s Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature. In it, Laje vindicates the “right-wing Rothbard,” who “foresees the cultural struggles that we endure and resist today.” Rothbard is, according to Laje, a breath of fresh air in the face of so much political correctness. He provided justification for the central idea that libertarianism “not only has to recognize existing inequality; it has to defend that if that inequality is the result of free and voluntary interactions, it must endure over time.”
Prior to Milei’s presidential campaign, the name Murray Rothbard was unknown to the public. But a number of controversies have brought him to public consciousness. At one event on the campaign trail, a journalist asked Milei about Rothbard’s defense of markets in children. Milei responded that it was “not the time” for that discussion, because “society is not ready.” Patricia Bullrich, the rival candidate from the more traditional right-wing coalition (who now serves as Milei’s security minister), tried to use Milei’s affinity for Rothbard to disqualify him, saying Milei wants “a society where you can let your children starve to death.” But for many of the voters who launched Milei into office, fed up with years of devastating inflation overseen by establishment parties, the provocation was the point.
During an interview on the campaign trail, he was asked a simple question: “Do you believe in democracy?” Milei countered: “Do you know Arrow’s paradox?” He was appealing to a model made by an American economist on inconsistencies between individual and social preferences to express his objections to liberal democracy. But Arrow’s paradox has little to do with Milei’s distaste for democracy. Liberal democracy requires parties, and parliamentary politics, which are interdependent with the state—the “pedophile in the kindergarten,” as he once defined it. Milei also despises democratic deliberation as a waste of time and parliamentary deliberation as an expression of the politicking of the political caste.
In his disillusionment with democracy, Milei resembles many of the libertarians who swarm around Silicon Valley, like Peter Thiel, who said that he “no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible.” (Thiel visited Milei in Argentina last May.) There is also the obvious affinity with Elon Musk, Thiel’s former partner. Milei has paid homage to him on a number of occasions; at the most recent CPAC, Musk wielded a chainsaw given to him by Milei. For these libertarians, freedom is compatible with an authoritarian regime like the one proposed by neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin, who has expressed that the United States “must lose its phobia of dictators” and to whom radicalized sectors of the Republican Party now listen attentively.
In the government, Milei has had to deal with the absence of Rothbardian cadres. As a result, he has had to appoint former officials from Macri’s government and the administration of Carlos Menem (the president in the 1990s who symbolized the neoliberalism of that era). Even so, the governmental dynamics are far from continuous with the past. The unusually minoritarian character of his administration (his party, La Libertad Avanza, is new and has little representation in Congress) has reinforced his right-wing populist discourse, in the form of anti-parliamentarianism and a direct rhetorical relationship with “the people.” Milei has aroused a growing cult of personality among his followers. They mix old forms of exaltation with new technologies (like the AI-constructed memes where he appears as a lion) and languages (he is often compared to a comic book superhero).
Milei boasts of his global influence. He loves attending the international summits of the far right. At the same time, he seems bored by day-to-day administration. He delegates much of his job to trusted officials, including his sister Karina Milei, known as “The Boss,” and his advisor Santiago Caputo; management, negotiation, and administration would attenuate his utopian perspective. Meanwhile, at the international events, he can deploy his maximalist discourse and messianic vision of politics (he has compared himself to Moses)—no longer a mere president but a “world leader of freedom.”
Paleolibertarianism allows for broader alliances with far-right groups. But it also sets limits that Milei has transgressed. Rothbard was always anti-militarist, since the armed forces are the heart of the state. Milei, however, supports authoritarian governments abroad, such as those of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and seeks to reinforce the military and intelligence apparatus in Argentina. (He is also a staunch ally of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu, despite Rothbard’s comments on the “uniquely pernicious” nature of the Zionist project.)
Because there are so few true paleolibertarian believers in Argentina, Milei’s adherence to Rothbard is only shared by a handful of militants in government. The effect has been a duality between a hydroponic anarcho-capitalism without real roots in society (or the state) and an authoritarian neoliberalism that mobilizes anti-progressive perspectives on the cultural terrain.
Nevertheless, Milei has essentially retained the support of those who voted for him—approximately half of the electorate—because the “shock treatment” he has applied has been successful in curbing inflation. Milei pushed through a series of spending cuts—especially in public works—and has stifled universities with his warnings about “cultural Marxism,” but he has avoided cutting social assistance for fear of causing unrest. (The second Trump administration and DOGE inherited very different conditions, and voters in the United States might not respond the same way to shock treatment applied to a relatively healthy patient.)
Perhaps that will not last. Rothbard inveighed endlessly against the power of central banks and “fiat currency.” But if Rothbard preferred gold, his descendants today favor cryptocurrency. Trump made billions from a useless memecoin as he was taking office, which has since lost much of its value. In February 2025, Milei endorsed a different memecoin called $LIBRA from his personal account on X. As fears grew that the coin would engage in a “rug pull”—destroying its value while enriching its creator—he deleted the post. The coin’s creator has claimed he controls Milei, texting: “I send $$ to his sister and he signs whatever I say and does what I want.” The boundaries of the scandal are expanding quickly in Argentina. His fate may show that extremism, whatever its momentary appeal, exacts a heavy cost in the end. The rug pull is on all of us.
Translated by Patrick Iber.*
Pablo Stefanoni is a journalist and historian. He is the author of ¿La rebeldía se volvió de derecha?And the editor-in-chief of the journal Nueva Sociedad.
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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/06/late-libertarian-icon-murray-rothbard-charles-koch-considers-himself-above-law
no links
Late Libertarian Icon Murray Rothbard on Charles Koch: He "Considers Himself Above the Law"
One of Charles Koch's most vocal detractors was an intellectual forefather of the Libertarian movement.
By Daniel Schulman | Thu Jun. 5, 2014
Social Title:
Libertarian icon on Charles Koch: He "considers himself above the law"
Cross-posted from Kochology [1], where Daniel Schulman is releasing exclusive documents and other materials gathered in the process of reporting his new book Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty [2].
Long before Charles Koch became the left's public enemy number one (or two, depending on where David Koch falls in the rankings), some of his most vocal detractors were not liberals but fellow libertarians. None of his erstwhile allies would come to loathe him more fiercely than Murray Rothbard, one of the movement's intellectual forefathers, with whom Charles had worked closely to elevate libertarianism from a fringy cadre of radical thinkers to a genuine and growing mass movement.
In the 1970s, Charles helped fund Rothbard's work, as the economist churned out treatise after treatise denouncing the tyranny of government. Rothbard was a man with a plan when it came to movement-building. Where some libertarians had bickered over whether to advance the cause through an academic or an activist approach, Rothbard argued that the solution wasn't to choose one path, but both. Charles was taken with his strategic vision.
Rothbard dreamt of creating a libertarian think tank to bolster the movement's intellectual capacity. Charles Koch made this a reality in 1977, when he co-founded the Cato Institute with Rothbard and Ed Crane, then the chairman of the national Libertarian Party. This was a high point for libertarianism, when a busy hive of libertarian organizing buzzed on San Francisco's Montgomery Street, home to Cato and a handful of other ideological operations bankrolled by Charles Koch.
But the relationship between Cato's co-founders soon soured.
"Charles Koch has a practice of misusing nonprofit foundations for his own personal ends. He wants to spend that money on things that will enhance his personal image and goals, even it these expenditures are not consistent with the publicly stated goals of the foundation."
:{:{Rothbard, who was feisty by nature, chafed under the regime of Crane and Koch—the libertarian movement's primary financier at that time. His breaking point came during the 1980 election, when David Koch ran as the Libertarian Party's vice presidential nominee. Rothbard and his supporters felt that, in a bid for national legitimacy, David Koch and his running mate, Ed Clark, had watered down the core tenets of libertarianism to make their philosophy more palatable to the masses.}:
Americans today would consider their platform—which called for abolishing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and eliminating federal agencies including the EPA and the Department of Energy—a radical one. But to Rothbard and his circle, it wasn't radical enough. For instance, the Clark-Koch ticket stopped short of calling for the outright repeal of the income tax. And Clark, to Rothbard's horror, had even defined libertarianism as "low-tax liberalism" in a TV interview.}:
Following the 1980 election, in which the Clark-Koch campaign claimed a little over one percent of the popular vote, Rothbard did not hold back. He penned a scathing polemic [3] titled "The Clark Campaign: Never Again," in which he wrote that Ed Clark and David Koch had "sold their souls—ours, unfortunately, along with it—for a mess of pottage, and they didn't even get the pottage." Thanks in part to Rothbard's rabble-rousing, factional feuds and recriminations splintered the libertarian movement just as it was gaining momentum. A few months after Rothbard's diatribe, Charles Koch and Ed Crane tossed him out of the Cato Institute and voided his shares in the think tank (which was set up, under Kansas law, as a nonprofit corporation with stockholders), a rebuke that turned their libertarian brother-in-arms into a lifelong adversary.
Rothbard would later play a cameo role in the messy battle [4] between the four Koch brothers. In 1988, when Bill and Frederick Koch sued their brothers over control of the family foundation that had been established by their father, they dredged up Rothbard as a possible witness, seeking to depose him in the case. They hoped his testimony would damage Charles Koch's credibility and support their contention that their brother was a tyrannical control freak who used nonprofit entities to advance his own aims.
A document summarizing Rothbard's anticipated testimony was filed in the case, and I came across it as I pored over thousands of documents at the district court house in the Koch family's hometown of Wichita. Rothbard, it seemed, was only too eager to denounce his onetime benefactor.
Charles Koch, Rothbard planned to testify, "involves himself in the minutest details related to the non-profit foundations with which he is associated…. He insists on personally approving even the minutest matters, such as $100 grants, stationery design and color of offices." Rothbard contended that Charles would go "to any end to acquire/retain control over the nonprofit foundations with which he is associated" and "considers himself above the law." And the economist further alleged:
Charles Koch has a practice of misusing nonprofit foundations for his own personal ends. Charles Koch wants absolute control of the non-profit foundations, but wants to be able to spend other people's money not his own. He wants to spend that money on things that will enhance his personal image and goals, even it these expenditures are not consistent with the publicly stated goals of the foundation. Amongst other things, Charles Koch uses his involvement with non-profit foundations to aquire access to, and respect from, influential people in government and elsewhere.
Rothbard died in 1995, taking his grudge to the grave. By then, Charles and David Koch had abandoned the libertarian movement and struck out on their long path to becoming Republican powerbrokers. As their influence has expanded within the broader GOP in recent years, I've heard echoes of Rothbard's past criticisms in the conservative nonprofit world by recipients of Koch network funding who complain of micromanagement by the Koch brothers' political adjutants. "Nobody really works with them," said the leader of one conservative group. "They work for them or not at all. They are kind of creating a monopoly" and attempting to "make the conservative movement theirs."
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dad? austrian school , cato founder
Murray?
:{:{Rothbard was born to Jewish parents, David and Rae Rothbard, and raised in Bronx, New York. His father, a chemist, "emigrated to the United States from a Polishshtetl in 1910, impoverished and knowing not a word of English",[23] while his mother came from Russia.[24] Rothbard wrote of having grown up as a "right-winger" (adherent of the "Old Right") among family, friends and neighbors who were "communists or fellow-travelers." In contrast, he recalled that "all socialism seemed to [him] monstrously coercive and abhorrent."[23] }:
He attended Columbia University, where received a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics in 1945 and his PhD in economics, under Joseph Dorfman, in 1956. He later stated that all of his fellow students there were extreme leftists.[25] His thesis title was "Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics".[26][27]}:
During the early 1950s, Rothbard attended the seminar of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises at New York University and was greatly influenced by Mises' book, Human Action. Rothbard attracted the attention of theWilliam Volker Fund, a group that provided financial backing to promote various "right-wing" ideologies in the 1950s and early 1960s.[28][29][verification ^needed] The Volker Fund paid Rothbard to write a textbook to explainHuman Action in a fashion suitable for college students; a sample chapter he wrote on money and credit won Mises’s approval. As Rothbard continued his work, he enlarged the project. The result was Rothbard's book Man, Economy, and State, published in 1962. Upon its publication, Mises praised Rothbard's work effusively and, for Mises, uncharacteristically.[30]:14
From 1963 to 1985, Rothbard taught at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, in Brooklyn, New York[5] where he was a professor[31] with an endowed chair paid for by an admirer of his work.[32] From 1986 until his death[5] he was the S. J. Hall Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.[6] Rothbard founded theCenter for Libertarian Studies in 1976 and the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1977. He was associated with the 1982 creation of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and was vice president of academic affairs until 1995.[5] In 1987, he started a journal called Review of Austrian Economics, now called the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.[26]
In 1953, in New York City, he married JoAnn Schumacher (1928–1999), whom he called the "indispensable framework" for his life and work.[26] He died in 1995 in Manhattan of a heart attack. The New York Times obituary called Rothbard "an economist and social philosopher who fiercely defended individual freedom against government intervention."[5] His widow, JoAnn Rothbard, died four years later.[33]
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business insider
Murray Rothbard was the student of Ludwig Von Mises and a friend of Ayn Rand. Rothbard was a racist, and believed in the "voluntary" separation of the races. I have argued that his teacher, Mises, was an elitist with fascist tendencies.This part of libertarian history is a part that the libertarians would like to cover up. It slips out at times and has done so with Ron Paul, Rand Paul and others. But we need to take a look at what these guys believed, circa 1990 because that was not so long ago.
We know that Rothbard spoke kindly of David Duke, the KKK office seeker. One disaffected libertarian was dismayed that Rothbard would seek to align himself with a pure racist just because he believed in limited government. The only reason that Rothbard did not back a separate state for blacks was because he was afraid it would cost too much in "foreign aid".
It should be noted that Ron Paul distanced himself from Rothbard's racism, in stating that racism is a collectivist view. Still, there is a strong racial tension in libertarian thought. Ron Paul's newletters had racist thoughts in them, although Dr Paul stated they were put in his publications without his knowledge. I have no reason to doubt that. But these were mistakes that are significant.
But even Rand Paul made a racial gaff right after he won the senate seat, that he regretted, when he said he was for the repeal of the 1964 civil rights act. It would seem that this racial/libertarian theme continues.
So then, we need to look at more history to see if this is a constant pattern or if it is just an aberration. After all, many buy into the financial views of the libertarians. They are used to justify Wall Street excess. But are they more insidious and dangerous than that? Racism is actually quite compatible with libertarian economics.
Libertarian economics stresses individualism, even though these guys know that their moms changed their diapers and they had to get help all along the way growing up. Individualism is great, but I remember going to class reunions and seeing that once you got to the 20th reunion, there was a lot less individualism and a lot more humility. We all need people. We are not islands.
Yet there is a theme historically that comes from Mises. For Mises, as I quoted in Ludwig Von Mises Implies Being a Savage Animal Is Ok!, the newborn child is born a savage. This is why libertarians only accept the legitimacy of voluntary relationships. This plays into the desire to repeal the civil rights act, so that you can kick out ethnic minorities from your restaurant without serving them.
This plays into the desire of Rothbard to voluntarily separate from blacks in a nation and in public activity. You can see how this insidious morality breaks down society and good will.
One can deduce that if the foundation of libertarianism is rotten, so is the elitist financial decay that seeks limited government to the extreme. It is a decay because it is based upon the desire to ignore the needs of the greater society. But that society has been stronger because capitalism is tempered with compassion. Where capitalism becomes anarcho-capitalism, a term coined by Rothbard, it becomes a capitalism of unwholesome greed. The capitalist still has to take the subway, or drive his car into the city. If he gets shot at in a destabilized society how does that benefit him? If there is no money to fix the roads, how can he do his job?
The danger, of course, is that people will become less socialized if there are tech gadgets to allow people to stay at home and work from home. One can hope that these young people who have this wealth and independence will come to see the importance of the common good anyway.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/exposing-the-racist-history-of-libertarianism-and-murray-rothbard-2011-10#ixzz3DiUq5Sbt
==
wikifluff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard
ok to let a baby starve
Children's rights and parental obligations
:{:{:{In the Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard explores issues regarding children's rights in terms of self-ownership and contract.[108] These include support for a woman's right to abortion, condemnation of parents showing aggression towards children, and opposition to the state forcing parents to care for children. He also holds children have the right to run away from parents and seek new guardians as soon as they are able to choose to do so.}:
He asserted that parents have the right to put a child out for adoption or sell the rights to the child in a voluntary contract in what Rothbard suggests will be a "flourishing free market in children". He believes that selling children as consumer goods in accord with market forces, while "superficially monstrous", will benefit "everyone" involved in the market: "the natural parents, the children, and the foster parents purchasing".[109][110][clarification ^needed]}:}:
In Rothbard's view of parenthood, "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."[109] Thus, Rothbard stated that parents should have the legal right to let any infant die by starvation, considered child neglect. However, according to Rothbard, "the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children". In a fully libertarian society, he wrote, "the existence of a free baby market will bring such 'neglect' down to a minimum".[109]
Economist Gene Callahan of Cardiff University, formerly a scholar at the Rothbard-affiliated Mises Institute, observes that Rothbard allows "the logical elegance of his legal theory" to "trump any arguments based on the moral reprehensibility of a parent idly watching her six-month-old child slowly starve to death in its crib."[111]
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