The Fate of the Future: The Prescience of Murray Rothbard

Already, within a week of the launch of Hot H2O History, two subscribers (special shout-out to one emerging and new convert to libertarianism hailing from Milwaukee) have asked, then inquired, then demanded that I address those who are first being exposed to libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism and Austrian economics by offering something of an introduction to it all.

Point well taken, since these three ideologies represent the dominant lenses through which I look at and then analyze history (cf. Me, Myself and I to get a more elaborate description of my more general approach to the discipline).

This will most likely become a series on the site, but it will not necessarily be filled with my stuff, i.e. purely my explanations of and defenses of the aforementioned. Sure, I can’t help myself–I’ll definitely be posting my arguments for human liberty, the non-aggression principle, and praxeology and thus arguments against the state, centralization, and coercion (sorry for the redundancy there)–but much of this work has been done by the true geniuses of our time and a little bit before our time.

The consensus view among libertarians is that the newly interested should read Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt and I, Pencil by Leonard Read. Can’t go wrong there to be sure. But, I’d like to offer another possibility, especially if you happen to have kids. I have four so AOC can complain about me when the world ends in minus 12 years…

The alternative entry point for those interested in libertarianism and free markets: The Tuttle Twins Series. Author Connor Boyack and illustrator Elijah Stanfield distill the great works against state interventionism and for free markets in such a way as to make the ideas accessible to everyone from middle-school students to adults. Each book in the series focuses on the contributions of the great contributors to libertarianism: Frederick Bastiat to Ayn Rand to the last iteration featuring Murray Rothbard. I can attest that even my 6 year old daughter relishes before bedtime stories starring Ethan and Emily Tuttle, and my 10 year old daughter learned so much from them that she’s done book reports for school on the works. She started out by saying to her class: “Who knows about monopolies?” All hands raised. Her quick response: “Not the game.” All hands lowered and teacher was in stitches. Finally, I’ve distributed the Tuttle Twins series to advanced high school and college students–and rather than seeing that as an insult and accuse me of treating them in a pedantic way, they absolutely love them because the ideas within them run so contrary to the messages droned into them from about the age of 2.

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Just this past Saturday would have been Murray Rothbard’s 93rd birthday–he died in 1995, the year I graduated from high school. He was a great champion of individual liberties and personal freedom. I really wish I could have met the man and thanked him for his life’s work, but alas he lives on in Man, Economy and State, The Panic of 1819, and America’s Great Depression, not to mention the other books, countless articles, letters and lectures he penned and recorded.

OK: I have to mention one of those works, his treatise The Anatomy of the State. Here Rothbard defines the government as:

[T]hat organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion.

God, you just got to love that, right? No punches pulled. And, who can seriously argue that the national government, in particular today, operates any differently than a criminal enterprise, running up trillions of dollars of debt, engaging in multiple foreign wars with no end in sight, declaring random emergencies, and then pilfering American citizens of dollars that its own central bank has devalued at an over 90% clip in a century?!

I just wish someone would have handed me some Rothbard when I was 18 so that I could have saved myself a lot of time fumbling around with soft leftism and milquetoast conservatism–nodding along with my professors and even listening to a Jack Kemp speech–until my 30’s. What a waste.

Don’t let it happen to you–get truly “woke”…