Murray Rothbard
Murray Rothbard
Murray Newton Rothbardwas an American heterodox economist of the Austrian School, a revisionist historian, and a political theoristwhose writings and personal influence played a seminal role in the development of modern libertarianism. Rothbard was the founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism, a staunch advocate of historical revisionism, and a central figure in the twentieth-century American libertarian movement. He wrote over twenty books on political theory, revisionist history, economics, and other subjects. Rothbard asserted that all services provided by the "monopoly...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth2 March 1926
CountryUnited States of America
Positivism eliminates any kind of natural law principle - for example, that there are economic laws which can be transgressed only at your peril. With positivism, there is a tendency to leap into ad hoc economic theory.
Subjectivism is not an absolute principle; it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for sound methodology.
Placing the state in charge of moral principles is equivalent to putting the proverbial fox in charge of the chicken coop.
The libertarian must never advocate or prefer a gradual, as opposed to an immediate and rapid, approach to his goal. For by doing so, he undercuts the overriding importance of his own goals and principles. And if he himself values his own goals so lightly, how highly will others value them.
Early economic theory was rooted in the Italian, French, and Spanish traditions, which were subjectivist oriented. Then it shifted onto the terrible path by Smith and Ricardo and the British classical tradition, which is 'objectivist' - values are in inherent in production.
[W]hich category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely? [T]hose against private citizens or those against itself? The gravest crimes in the State's lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax.
The fundamental axiom, then, for the study of man is the existence of individual consciousness
Only the State legally obtains its revenue by coercion.
Unlike every other person and institution in society, government obtains its revenue from coercion, from taxation.
The more consistently Austrian School an economist is, the better a writer he will be.
Modern economics is a set of formal models and equations purporting to fully determine human behaviour, at least in the economic realm. And there is no way that uncertainty can be compressed into determinate mathematical models.
The ingenious slogan that the public debt does not matter because 'we owe it to ourselves' is clearly absurd.
Liberty and morality had to win their way slowly over many centuries, until finally expanding liberty made possible the great technological advance of the Industrial Revolution and the flowering of modern capitalism.
I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself (or, with Lord Acton, as the highest political good), but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilization, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity.