Murray Rothbard

In a 2011 article critical of Rothbard's "reflexive opposition" to inflation, The Economist noted that his views are increasingly gaining influence among politicians and laypeople on the right. The article contrasted Rothbard's categorical rejection of inflationary policies with the monetary views of "sophisticated Austrian-school monetary economists such as George Selgin and Larry White", [who] follow Hayek in treating stability of nominal spending as a monetary ideal—a position "not all that different from Mr [Scott] Sumner's".

Later in his career Rothbard advocated a libertarian alliance with Paleoconservatism (which he called Paleolibertarianism), favoring right-wing populism and pointing to Joseph McCarthy and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke as effective examples of what he called "Outreach to the Rednecks". In the 2010s he received renewed attention from critics who saw him as an influence on the alt right.

Rothbard died of a heart attack on January 7, 1995, in St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan, at the age of 68.

Like Buchanan, Rothbard opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). However, he had become disillusioned with Buchanan by 1995, believing that the latter's "commitment to protectionism was mutating into an all-round faith in economic planning and the nation state".

After Rothbard's death in 1995, Lew Rockwell, president of the Mises Institute, told The New York Times that Rothbard was "the founder of right-wing anarchism". William F. Buckley Jr. wrote a critical obituary in the National Review, criticizing Rothbard's "defective judgment" and views on the Cold War. Hoppe, Rockwell, and Rothbard's other colleagues at the Mises Institute took a different view, arguing that he was one of the most important philosophers in history.

Rothbard held strong opinions about many leaders of the civil rights movement. He considered black separatist Malcolm X to be a "great black leader" and integrationist Martin Luther King Jr. to be favored by whites because he "was the major restraining force on the developing Negro revolution". In 1993 he rejected the vision of a "separate black nation", asking "does anyone really believe that ... New Africa would be content to strike out on its own, with no massive "foreign aid" from the U.S.A.?". Rothbard also suggested that opposition to Martin Luther King Jr., whom he demeaned as a "coercive integrationist", should be a litmus test for members of his "paleolibertarian" political movement.

Rothbard supported the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan in 1992 and wrote that "with Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy". When Buchanan dropped out of the Republican primary race, Rothbard then shifted his interest and support to Ross Perot, who Rothbard wrote had "brought an excitement, a verve, a sense of dynamics and of open possibilities to what had threatened to be a dreary race". However, Rothbard eventually withdrew his support from Perot, and endorsed George H. W. Bush in the 1992 election.

In 1989, Rothbard left the Libertarian Party and began building bridges to the post-Cold War anti-interventionist right, calling himself a paleolibertarian, a conservative reaction against the cultural liberalism of mainstream libertarianism. Paleolibertarianism sought to appeal to disaffected working class whites through a synthesis of cultural conservatism and libertarian economics. According to Reason, Rothbard advocated right-wing populism in part because he was frustrated that mainstream thinkers were not adopting the libertarian view and suggested that former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke and Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy were models for an "Outreach to the Rednecks" effort that could be used by a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition. Working together, the coalition would expose the "unholy alliance of 'corporate liberal' Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass". Rothbard blamed this "Underclass" for "looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America". Regarding the political program of the former Grand Wizard David Duke, Rothbard asserted that there was "nothing" in it that "could not also be embraced by paleoconservatives or paleolibertarians; lower taxes, dismantling the bureaucracy, slashing the welfare system, attacking affirmative action and racial set-asides, calling for equal rights for all Americans, including whites".

According to economist Peter Boettke, Rothbard is better described as a property rights economist than as an Austrian economist. In 1988, Boettke noted that Rothbard "vehemently attacked all of the books of the younger Austrians".

Rothbard continued in this role until 1986. 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. 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". He kept his position at UNLV from 1986 until his death. Rothbard founded the Center for Libertarian Studies in 1976 and the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1977. In 1982, he co-founded the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and was vice president of academic affairs until 1995. Rothbard also founded the institute's Review of Austrian Economics, a heterodox economics journal later renamed the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, in 1987.

Rothbard split with the Radical Caucus at the 1983 national convention over cultural issues and aligned himself with what he called the "right-wing populist" wing of the party, notably Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul, who ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988. Rothbard "worked closely with Lew Rockwell (joined later by his long-time friend Burton Blumert) in nurturing the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and the publication, The Rothbard-Rockwell Report; which after Rothbard's 1995 death evolved into the website, LewRockwell.com".

Libertarian economist Jeffrey Herbener, who calls Rothbard his friend and "intellectual mentor", wrote that Rothbard received "only ostracism" from mainstream academia. Rothbard rejected mainstream economic methodologies and instead embraced the praxeology of his most important intellectual precursor, Ludwig von Mises. To promote his economic and political ideas, Rothbard joined Lew Rockwell and Burton Blumert in 1982 to establish the Mises Institute in Alabama.

As a result of the economic works of Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Ludwig von Mises, and other Austrian economists, the Mises Institute was founded in 1982 by Lew Rockwell, Burton Blumert, and Murray Rothbard, following a split between the Cato Institute and Rothbard, who had been one of the founders of the Cato Institute.

Rothbard's The Libertarian Forum blamed the Middle East conflict on Israeli aggression "fueled by American arms and money". Rothbard warned that the Middle East conflict would draw the United States into a world war. He was anti-Zionist and opposed United States involvement in the Middle East. Rothbard criticized the Camp David Accords for having betrayed Palestinian aspirations and opposed Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. In his essay, "War Guilt in the Middle East", Rothbard states that Israel refused "to let these refugees return and reclaim the property taken from them". He took negative views of the two state solution for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, saying:

Rothbard was a strong critic of egalitarianism. The title essay of Rothbard's 1974 book Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays held: "Equality is not in the natural order of things, and the crusade to make everyone equal in every respect (except before the law) is certain to have disastrous consequences". In it, Rothbard wrote: "At the heart of the egalitarian left is the pathological belief that there is no structure of reality; that all the world is a tabula rasa that can be changed at any moment in any desired direction by the mere exercise of human will".

In an essay condemning "scientism in the study of man", Rothbard rejected the application of causal determinism to human beings, arguing that the actions of human beings—as opposed to those of everything else in nature—are not determined by prior causes, but by "free will". He argued that "determinism as applied to man, is a self-contradictory thesis, since the man who employs it relies implicitly on the existence of free will". Rothbard opposed what he considered the overspecialization of the academy and sought to fuse the disciplines of economics, history, ethics and political science to create a "science of liberty". Rothbard described the moral basis for his anarcho-capitalist position in two of his books: For a New Liberty, published in 1973; and The Ethics of Liberty, published in 1982. In his Power and Market (1970), Rothbard describes how a stateless economy might function.

Imbibing Randolph Bourne's idea that "war is the health of the state", Rothbard opposed all wars in his lifetime and engaged in anti-war activism. During the 1970s and 1980s, Rothbard was active in the Libertarian Party. He was frequently involved in the party's internal politics. He was one of the founders of the Cato Institute and "came up with the idea of naming this libertarian think tank after Cato's Letters, a powerful series of British newspaper essays by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon which played a decisive influence upon America's Founding Fathers in fomenting the Revolution". From 1978 to 1983, he was associated with the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus, allying himself with Justin Raimondo, Eric Garris and Williamson Evers. He opposed the "low-tax liberalism" espoused by 1980 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ed Clark and Cato Institute president Edward H Crane III. According to Charles Burris, "Rothbard and Crane became bitter rivals after disputes emerging from the 1980 LP presidential campaign of Ed Clark carried over to strategic direction and management of Cato".

From 1969 to 1984, he edited The Libertarian Forum, also initially with Hess (although Hess's involvement ended in 1971). The Libertarian Forum provided a platform for Rothbard's writing. Despite its small readership, it engaged conservatives associated with the National Review in nationwide debate. Rothbard rejected the view that Ronald Reagan's 1980 election as president was a victory for libertarian principles and he attacked Reagan's economic program in a series of Libertarian Forum articles. In 1982, Rothbard called Reagan's claims of spending cuts a "fraud" and a "hoax" and accused Reaganites of doctoring the economic statistics to give the false impression that their policies were successfully reducing inflation and unemployment. He further criticized the "myths of Reaganomics" in 1987.

Rothbard called for the elimination of "the entire 'civil rights' structure" stating that it "tramples on the property rights of every American". He consistently favored repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, including Title VII regarding employment discrimination, and called for overturning the Brown v. Board of Education decision on the grounds that state-mandated integration of schools violated libertarian principles. In an essay called "Right-wing Populism", Rothbard proposed a set of measures to "reach out" to the "middle and working classes", which included urging the police to crack down on "street criminals", writing that "cops must be unleashed" and "allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error". He also advocated that the police "clear the streets of bums and vagrants."

By the late 1960s, Rothbard's "long and winding yet somehow consistent road had taken him from anti-New Deal and anti-interventionist Robert A. Taft supporter into friendship with the quasi-pacifist Nebraska Republican Congressman Howard Buffett (father of Warren Buffett) then over to the League of (Adlai) Stevensonian Democrats and, by 1968, into tentative comradeship with the anarchist factions of the New Left". Rothbard advocated an alliance with the New Left anti-war movement on the grounds that the conservative movement had been completely subsumed by the statist establishment. However, Rothbard later criticized the New Left for supporting a "People's Republic" style draft. It was during this phase that he associated with Karl Hess and founded Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought with Leonard Liggio and George Resch, which existed from 1965 to 1968.

Although he self-identified as an Austrian economist, Rothbard's methodology was at odds with that of many other Austrians. In 1956, Rothbard deprecated the views of Austrian economist Fritz Machlup, stating that Machlup was no praxeologist and calling him instead a "positivist" who failed to represent the views of Ludwig von Mises. Rothbard stated that in fact Machlup shared the opposing positivist view associated with economist Milton Friedman. Mises and Machlup had been colleagues in 1920s Vienna before each relocated to the United States and Mises later urged his American protege Israel Kirzner to pursue his PhD studies with Machlup at Johns Hopkins University.

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". 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.

Rothbard began to consider himself a "private property anarchist" in 1950 and later began to use "anarcho-capitalist" to describe his political ideology. In his anarcho-capitalist model, the system of private property is upheld by private firms, such as hypothesized protection agencies, which compete in a free market and are voluntarily supported by consumers who choose to use their protective and judicial services. Anarcho-capitalists describe this as "the end of the state monopoly on force". He later came to terms that anarchists identified mostly with socialism, and in an unpublished article wrote that individualist anarchism is different from anarcho-capitalism and other capitalist theories due to the individualist anarchists retaining the labor theory of value and socialist doctrines, suggesting a new term to identify himself: nonarchist. In an unpublished article, Rothbard concludes his position not only by affirming that he is not [an] anarchist, but that those who "call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical", while also arguing that anarchism "in practice" leads to something that "is not really anarchism at all. It is either Communism or chaos."

In an article for Rothbard's 50th birthday, Rothbard's friend and Buffalo State College historian Ralph Raico stated that Rothbard "is the main reason that revisionism has become a crucial part of the whole libertarian position".

Throughout his life, Rothbard engaged in a number of different political movements in an effort to promote his Old Right and libertarian political principles. His first political activism came in 1948, on behalf of the segregationist South Carolinian Strom Thurmond's presidential campaign. In the 1948 presidential election, 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 attended Columbia University, where he received 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 Rothbards 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. Rothbard later said that all his fellow students were extreme leftists and that he was one of only two Republicans at Columbia at the time.

During the 1940s, Rothbard 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 economist Ludwig von Mises. In the early 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 was greatly influenced by Mises's book Human Action. He 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. 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.

During his years at graduate school in the late 1940s, Rothbard considered whether a strict adherence to libertarian and laissez-faire principles required the abolition of the state altogether. He visited Baldy Harper, a founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, who doubted the need for any government whatsoever. Rothbard said that during this period, he was influenced by 19th-century American individualist anarchists like Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker and the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari who wrote about how such a system could work. Thus, he "combined the laissez-faire economics of Mises with the absolutist views of human rights and rejection of the state" from individualist anarchists.

In 1953, Rothbard married JoAnn Beatrice Schumacher (September 17, 1928 – October 29, 1999), whom he called Joey, in New York City. JoAnn 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 Joey, 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. The Volker Fund collapsed in 1962, leading Rothbard to seek employment from 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", but Justin Raimondo writes that Rothbard liked teaching at Brooklyn Polytechnic because working only two days a week gave him freedom to contribute to developments in libertarian politics.

Murray Newton Rothbard (/ˈrɒθbɑːrd/; March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American economist of the Austrian School, economic historian, political theorist, and activist. Rothbard was a central figure in the 20th-century American libertarian movement and a founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism. He wrote over twenty books on political theory, history, economics, and other subjects.