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Murray N. Rothbard

Economist Murray N. Rothbard mounted the most comprehensive intellectual challenge ever attempted against the legitimacy of government. During a career that spanned more than 40 years, he explained why private individuals, private companies and other voluntary associations can do whatever needs to be done.

“The State indeed performs many important and necessary functions,” Rothbard wrote,” from provision of law to the supply of police and fire fighters, to building and maintaining the streets, to delivery of the mail. But this in no way demonstrates that only the State can perform such functions, or, indeed, that it performs them even passably well.”

He insisted that individuals should be free to go about their business peacefully without interference from anybody, including government. He objected to robbery whether committed by a private criminal or a tax collector. He acknowledged that there are plenty of problems affecting the private sector, but historically government has been the biggest, hardest-to-control problem, not a solution. Governments, he noted, are driven to expand their power, not to serve people. That’s why regardless of which political party is in power, governments tend to get bigger, enact more laws, tax and spend more of what hard-working people produce.

Rothbard showed how self-interest leads private individuals to find ways they can earn their livelihood by providing goods or services in demand. He demonstrated that alleged market failures turn out to be either some people seeking tax money for things which other people won’t voluntarily buy, or the consequences of laws throttling enterprise, such as high taxes, price controls, rent controls or occupational licensing.

Rothbard’s writings have been translated into Chinese, Czech, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portugese, Romanian, Russian and Spanish. He wrote authoritatively about ethics, philosophy, economics, American history and the history of ideas. He produced a dozen major books and several hundred articles. His work appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Fortune and other major publications, and he was interviewed in Penthouse. He contributed to such scholarly journals as American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Economic History, Columbia Journal of World Business, Journal of the History of Ideas, Southern Economic Journal and Journal of Libertarian Studies and The Cato Journal. Over the years, he wrote for just about every publication in the libertarian movement -- analysis, Faith and Freedom, The Freeman, New Individualist Review, Fragments, Innovator, Libertarian Analysis, Libertarian Connection, Reason, Libertarian Review and Liberty, among others. For a number of years he published his own newsletters, Left and Right and The Libertarian Forum. The New York Times Sunday Magazine featured Rothbard among the most important contemporary thinkers about liberty.

He gave talks and participated in conferences across the United States, at Harvard Law School, Yale University, Princeton University, Columbia University, Stanford University, New York University, the University of California (Los Angeles), the University of Virginia and elsewhere. For years, he was involved with the Libertarian Party after it was established in 1972. He worked with the Cato Institute (started in 1977) during its early days, and later became a key player at the Ludwig von Mises Institute which he served for the rest of his life. In 1994, Rothbard received the $20,000 Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters from the Illinois-based Ingersoll Foundation. Previous winners included historian Shelby Foote, an expert on the U.S. Civil War, and historian Forrest McDonald, who had written extensively about American Founders.

Rothbard relished debate and aimed colorful, sometimes rather personal barbs at his adversaries. He called one libertarian publication “boring swill” and another libertarian publication a “homeless shelter for nobodies.” He wasn’t at his best when he called a respected Jewish libertarian a Nazi.

He had a remarkable range of interests. University of Nevada economics professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe recalled, “He liked German Baroque churches and, while Jewish and an agnostic, the Catholic Church and classical music – up to Mozart. He was an ardent moviegoer, and in his spare time he wrote many movie reviews.” Book marketer Neil McCaffrey cherished the memory of Rothbard the fan of early jazz and American popular ballads. “Growing up in the Golden Age of popular music, his instinct could be both challenged and satisfied by our premier songwriters: Porter, Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, the Gershwins…”

Rothbard was about five feet, six inches tall. He gained weight during his adult years in New York City – he would have been horrified at the idea of jogging. He slimmed down later, when he began teaching at the University of Nevada. He kept his curly hair short. He always wore a conservative suit and bow tie. Although slightly rumpled, he looked good.

Until his late 40s, Rothbard was a New Yorker to such a degree that he had a phobia about leaving the city. For that matter, he wouldn’t take an elevator or get into an airplane. He overcame these phobias later in life and travelled around the world. When he spoke at a dinner atop Manhattan’s 110-story World Trade Center, he opened by saying:”Greetings from earth!”

He did much of his work and socializing while the city slept. “I was treated to a memorable dinner with the warmest hospitality amid the book-lined walls of the Rothbards’ Upper West Side apartment,” recalled Auburn University economics professor Roger Garrison. “The discussion was lively…The evening passed quickly, and I began to worry about overstaying my welcome. But no one else seemed to be aware of the late hour. As midnight neared, I began packing my papers away and thanking the Rothbards for an unforgettable evening. The host and other guests seemed puzzled and almost insulted by my tenuous movement in the direction of the front door. I did not know that Murray was a complete and incurable night owl. For him the evening had just begun. We had lots of discussion ahead of us…As best as I can remember, I was allowed to leave around 4:00 a.m.”

Rothbard displayed a buoyant sense of humor. Wary of his radicalism, recalled College of the Holy Cross economics professor Walter Block, “I had expected some lean, mean muscle man, say about 6’2” and 180 lbs., toting a machine gun in one hand and a bomb in the other. Instead, I met this little fat man who kept up a rapid fire of positively wicked jokes; the danger, I soon perceived, was not going to jail or being blown up, but rather dying from stomach cramps brought on by uncontrollable laughter.”

Entrepreneur Robert D. Kephart: “I think of the Handel’s Messiah singalong which the Rothbards had in their living room every Christmas season, with friends visiting all through the day and night to join in snatches of the chorus. Here you would find Murray engaged in simultaneous conversations with a half-dozen people until his wife Joey would shush him. A chastened Murray would return to the chorus, squeeky and off key, until he could restrain himself no more and stop singing to pick up the conversations.

“And there was the evening I introduced him to Victor Niederhoffer, then reigning world squash champion. Vic had long admired Murray, and over dinner the two hit it off very well. Murray was awed to be in the company of a famous athlete, and he began asking Vic about the game. On the walk home, Vic asked if we would like to stop in at the Harvard Club to see the courts where Vic had done so much training. Murray was like a little kid. He took off his shoes, and we walked onto the court, Murray peppering Vic with questions. Then Vic suggested that Murray take a racket and hit a few balls. One thing led to another, and Murray Rothbard, perhaps the unathletic person in Manhattan, slashing away at shots lobbed to him by a world champion, the walls shaking with Murray’s laughter.”

Washington and Jefferson College economics professor Jeffrey Herbener remembered hearing Rothbard speak at Dartmouth: “the cackling laughter, the flailing gestures, the heads-on-hand posture, the spectacles flipping up and down from his forehead. His lectures, like his writings, were always brilliant, bristling with insights, crammed with knowledge, seamlessly consistent with his world view, and unforgettably delivered.”

Murray Newton Rothbard was born in Bronx, New York, March 2, 1926. He was the only child of Ray Babushkin Rothbard who had emigrated from Russia, reportedly Minsk. His father David Rothbard, born in a little village near Warsaw, Poland, became chief chemist of Tidewater Oil Company, Bayonne, New Jersey. A believer in reason and liberty, David Rothbard honored the great mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton with his son’s middle name, and he encouraged Murray philosophically.

Writing about his father in Chronicles, A Magazine of American Culture, Rothbard wrote, “He had emigrated from a Jewish shtetl in 1910, impoverished and not knowing a word of English. Like most immigrants of that era, he had resolved ‘to become an American’ in every sense. And that meant, for him, not only learning English and making it his language, but also abandoning Yiddish papers and culture and purging himself of any foreign accent. It also meant devotion to the basic American Way: minimal government, belief and respect for free enterprise and private property, and a determination to rise by one’s own merits and not via government privilege or handout. Many Russian and Polish Jews before World War I were swept with communist, socialist and Zionist ideologies, or blends of the three, but my father never fell for any of them. An individualist rather than a socialist or tribalist, he believed his loyalty was to America rather than to Zionism or to any Zionist entity in the Middle East.”

Rothbard attended a public school, but because his parents were unhappy about his progress, he was transferred to private schooling in the fifth grade – first Riverside School, then Birch-Wathen School. His teachers noted that “his mind is clamoring for greater vistas…[his] pugnacity has been developed largely in protecting a smaller child…”

Rothbard reflected, “In those days, girls of the wealthier classes were protected, and so they were sent to a day school in New York, whereas upperclass boys were sent out of town to boarding school. The private day school I attended was coed, but it had difficulty attracting boys and was in danger of failing into an all-girl status. As a result, they gave scholarships to bright, middle-class boys. The girls were all wealthy, driven to and from school in chauffeured limousines, whereas at least half the boys were scholarship lads such as myself. Another fascinating note was that the students were mostly Jewish, whereas the staff and instructors were all WASPS. None of the Jewish students felt oppressed by this situation; indeed, none of us felt aggrieved when every Friday we attended chapel…singing glorious Christian hymns.”

Rothbard enrolled at Columbia University in 1942. “The universe of people I met expanded,” he wrote, “but the political ambiance remained the same. Everyone was either a communist or a social democrat, or a variety of each. The only Republican student at Columbia was an English major, and so we had little in common, as I was increasingly steeped in economics, both for its own sake and because it seemed to me that the knottiest political problems and the strongest arguments for socialism and statism were economic, dwelling on the alleged failures of free-market capitalism. The more I engaged in debates and discussions with fellow students and professors, who were all some variety of leftist, the more conservative I became.”

Majoring in economics and mathematics, Rothbard graduated from Columbia Phi Beta Kappa in 1945. He earned his M.A. in economics there the following year, then began working on his Ph.D. under economic historian Joseph Dorfman. Although Dorfman was a very conventional thinker, a fan of economics professor Thorstein Veblen who believed that business enterprises produce waste, not wealth, Rothbard later wrote: “To my first mentor in the field of American history, Joseph Dorfman…I owe in particular the rigorous training that is typical of that keen and thorough scholar.” Rothbard dedicated his last work, the two-volume An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995), to Dorfman (as well as to Mises).

Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, added, “It was Arthur Burns, the 800-pound gorilla in the Columbia University economics department who blocked Murray’s dissertation. Burns demanded that Murray re-do all his work. It was only when Burns went to Washington, D.C. and headed President Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors that Murray’s unchanged dissertation was resubmitted and quickly approved.” Rothbard finally received his Ph.D. in 1956. His thesis was subsequently published as a book The Panic of 1819 (1962), one of America’s earliest depressions.

According to Rothbard’s longtime friend Leonard Liggio, in 1946 Rothbard had taken a class from George J. Stigler at Columbia, soon after Stigler had collaborated with Milton Friedman on a pamphlet called Roofs or Ceilings. This attack on rent controls was published by the Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, about 30 miles north of New York City. Stigler suggested that Rothbard might be interested in visiting the place. Somehow Rothbard overcame his phobia about leaving Manhattan. He didn’t quite know what to expect in the provinces, so he brought his own food and water. FEE had recently been established by former Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce General Manager Leonard E. Read as America’s first institute to promote ideas of liberty. At FEE Rothbard learned about contemporary libertarian journalists like H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, Garet Garrett and John T. Flynn. “All this rapidly converted me from a free-market economist to a pure libertarian,” Rothbard remembered. “This literature also converted me to hard-core isolationism in foreign policy. I had never really thought much about foreign policy, being steeped in economics, but now I realized that a noninterventionist foreign policy was part of a devotion to freedom and resistance to statism.”

As he explained, “There was no question as to where the intellectual right of that day stood on militarism and conscription: it opposed them as instruments of mass slavery and mass murder. Conscription, indeed, was thought far worse than other forms of statist controls and incursions, for while these only appropriated part of the individual’s property, the draft, like slavery, took his most precious possession: his own person. Day after day the veteran publicist John T. Flynn – once praised as a liberal and then condemned as a reactionary, with little or no change in his views – inveighed implacably in print and over the radio against militarism and the draft. Even the Wall Street newspaper, the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, published a lengthy attack on the idea of conscription. All our political positions, from the free market in economics to opposing war and militarism, stemmed from our root belief in individual liberty and our opposition to the state.”

Rothbard evidently heard about the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises in the spring of 1949, probably from F.A. “Baldy” Harper who worked at FEE. Three decades earlier, Mises had identified the fatal flaws of socialism, reasons why socialism could never deliver decent living standards – despite all the claims being made. Mises had fled the Nazis and obtained a position at New York University where he would teach weekly seminars. “It is another blot on American academia,” Rothbard recalled, “that I had gone through all the doctoral courses at Columbia University without once discovering that there was such a thing as an Austrian school, let alone that Ludwig von Mises was its foremost living champion.”

Harper seems to have told Rothbard that Mises would be conducting a weekly seminar at 6 Washington Square North, the New York University Graduate School of Business. He attended the first seminar and continued attending for years and was among those who would gather afterward for dinner and conversation at a nearby Child’s restaurant. Rothbard stopped attending the seminar only because, in the 1960s, it was moved from the second floor of one building to the eighth floor of another building, and he had a phobia about elevators. Despite this, he was believed to have written more reports than anybody else attending the Mises seminar.

Meanwhile, Mises’ Human Action was published in September 1949 by Yale University Press. This extraordinary book explained why free markets produce higher living standards than government bureaucrats. It refuted fashionable doctrines, and as Rothbard recalled, “it provided eager libertarians with a policy of uncompromising laissez-faire: in contrast to all other free-market economists of that day or later, there were no escape hatches, no giving away the case with ‘of course, the government must break up monopolies,’ or ‘of course, the government must provide and regulate the money supply.’ In all matters, from theoretical to political, Mises was the soul of rigor and consistency. Never would Mises compromise his principles, never would he bow the knee to a quest for respectability or social or political favor. As a scholar, as an economist, and as a person, Ludwig von Mises was a joy and an inspiration, an exemplar for us all.”

Rothbard broke into print by writing book reviews for analysis, a newsletter started in November 1944 by Frank Chodorov, the New York-born son of a Russian Jewish immigrant peddler. Chodorov explained, “analysis looks at the current scene through the eyeglass of historic liberalism, unashamedly accepting the doctrine of natural rights, proclaims the dignity of the individual and denounces all forms of Statism as human slavery.” Rothbard’s first review, of A Mencken Chrestomathy, the collection of writings by H.L. Mencken, appeared in August 1949. Rothbard reviewed George Orwell’s 1984 (September 1949), John T. Flynn’s The Road Ahead (December 1949), R. Rocker’s Pioneers of American Freedom (January 1950) and Mises’ Human Action (May 1950). With fewer than 4,000 subscribers, analysis merged with a more topical weekly newsletter, Human Events, in 1951. Rothbard later told chronicler George H. Nash that Chodorov’s essay “Taxation is Robbery” had a “big impact” on him.

His first major outlet was the monthly Faith and Freedom which, launched in 1950, was the publication of Spiritual Mobilization whose mission was “to arouse ministers of all denominations in America to check the trends toward pagan stateism.” This was headed by Los Angeles businessman William Johnson. Among the contributors were Ludwig von Mises, Newsweek columnist Henry Hazlitt, Foundation for Economic Education President Leonard E. Read and Haverford College President, former Washington Post Editor and Human Events co-founder Felix Morley. Rothbard contributed 13 articles between March 1950 and December 1956, in addition to a monthly column under the pseudonym “Aubrey Herbert,” a reference to the late 19th century American advocate of life without government interference. His topics included inflation, price controls and Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy of liberty. He reviewed Human Action for Faith and Freedom.

At Columbia, while continuing his Ph.D. studies, Rothbard met and became charmed by JoAnn Beatrice Schumacher, a Presbyterian who had earned her B.A. degree at Columbia and her M.A. degree at New York University. Born in Chicago, she grew up in Virginia. They were married on January 16, 1953. He was 27, and she was 25. They moved into apartment 2E, 215 West 88th Street, New York City, their primary residence for the rest of his life. New Year’s resolution for 1954, which Joey had him sign: to be in bed every night by 5:00 A.M. and to arise no later than 1:30 P.M.

Around 1954, Rothbard met Russian-born Ayn Rand who was working on her philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged. He was among those invited to her 36 East 36th Street apartment where completed portions of the novel were read. “Murray Rothbard once told me,” reported libertarian journal editor Roy Childs, “that it was Ayn Rand who converted him to natural rights. He had been a utilitarian as was Ludwig von Mises, the greatest intellectual influence on his life…” This link to Rand must be doubted in light of Rothbard’s prior association with Frank Chodorov, his exposure to the ideas of Albert Jay Nock and others who assuredly believed in natural rights. Rand and Rothbard must have had many mutually stimulating discussions, but she didn’t share his view that the world would be better off without government compulsion. An atheist, she was horrified that Rothbard was married to a religious woman and in 1958 urged that the Rothbards get divorced. Rothbard quit Rand’s circle.

Rothbard struggled to do scholarly work and pay bills. Since January 1952, his principal income had been a $6,000 annual grant from the William Volker Fund, established by a Kansas City venetian blinds manufacturer, to help him write a primer on free market economics. The Volker Fund provided financial support for professors who wanted to write books about liberty. Rothbard’s project expanded until it became a 1,900-page manuscript tentatively called Man, the Economy and the State. The Volker Fund grant ran out on June 30, 1956, and he finished up the manuscript in 1957. He sent it to Devin-Adair (New York) and Caxton Printers (Caldwell, Idaho) which had issued libertarian books, but they declined because of the bulk. The longer a book, the more it costs to produce, and the riskier from a financial standpoint, especially when it appeals to a limited market. The manuscript was rejected by Praeger which had published radical material, and Rothbard apparently sent it to the University of Chicago Press which had published The Road to Serfdom and other books by Austrian economist F.A. Hayek, without result. Yale University Press had published Mises’ books Bureaucracy, Omnipotent Government and Human Action, but it isn’t known whether Rothbard submitted his manuscript there.

From 1952 to 1962, Rothbard earned some money reviewing books for the Volker Fund, because its National Book Foundation aimed to identify good ones promoting liberty and offer these without charge to libraries. The books went only where they were welcome. For a decade, Rothbard worked three to 15 hours a week, reading and reviewing books. He billed the Volker Fund by the hour. Some of the reviews were only a page long, but occasionally he went on for 15 pages. This work familiarized him with what was going on in history, philosophy, psychology, ecology and other fields as well as economics.

Rothbard’s income virtually dried up. His Volker Fund grant ran out. He wrote hundreds of letters looking for scholarly work. F.A. Harper, who had left the Foundation for Economic Education to work at the Volker Fund, tried to find him work. Donations were down at the Foundation for Economic Education which helped support Mises, perhaps because of the looming recession in the United States. A friend of FEE was President of Claremont Men’s College, in California, and offered Rothbard a professorship there, but he couldn’t take it because of his phobia about leaving New York. He earned a little money helping to organize four Fordham University lectures by the same Arthur Burns who had held up his Ph.D. dissertation. Rothbard earned fees by writing speeches for conservative Congressman Ralph Gwinn, on government credit and public housing. For the American Oxford Encyclopedia, he wrote 14 entries including Abdication, Alien & Sedition Acts, Arbitration, Articles of Confederation, Censorship, Coronation, Commissions and Boards and Elections, but they weren’t accepted because they lacked the correct bias, and all he received was a $50 fee for fact-checking. Joey Rothbard earned some money typing papers and fact-checking for people at Columbia.

Hopes soared when Princeton, New Jersey public opinion pollster Claude Robinson, a partner with George Gallup, began assembling the “Princeton Panel” of authors to write a library of books about free market capitalism. Rothbard was to suggest ideas and do research. John Chamberlain, who had worked at Fortune and the New York Times, wrote the first Princeton Panel book, The Roots of Capitalism (1959). But as Chamberlain reported sadly, “Claude Robinson died before he could arrange for any additional Princeton Panel titles.” So much for that.

In October 1955, Frank Meyer, who edited book reviews for National Review, the new biweekly magazine launched by conservative journalist William F. Buckley Jr., asked Rothbard to send samples of his writings on economics. His first review seems to have been of F.A. Harper’s Why Wages Rise, in the March 16, 1957 issue. Among other books, he reviewed Spencer Heath’s Citadel, Market and Altar (September 7, 1957), Sylvester Petro’s Labor Policy for a Free Society (September 7, 1957), Peter Bauer’s Economic Analysis and Policy in Underdeveloped Countries (March 1, 1958), Anthony Downs’ An Economic Theory of Democracy (December 28, 1958) and Melchior Palyi’s An Inflation Primer (June 17, 1961). Altogether, Rothbard contributed 15 reviews before he left National Review over its advocacy of an aggressive foreign policy. His last review during this period appeared in the March 25, 1961 issue. It was about This Bread is Mine, a book by Robert M. Lefevre, the passionate, white-haired journalist who founded The Freedom School in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

While Rothbard was finishing his treatise on economics for which Volker funding had run out, he had an idea which might get some new funding. The Great Depression of the 1930s was generally blamed on free markets and Rothbard knew that it was hard to convince people about the benefits of free markets as long as people assumed free markets caused the Depression. So he envisioned a book which explained why the Depression was the consequence of Federal Reserve Board monetary policies and other government interference with the economy. On April 5, 1956, Ludwig von Mises pitched in with a letter to James A. Kennedy, President of the Earhart Foundation, Ann Arbor, Michigan: “Rothbard is an extraordinarily talented young man, a keen thinker and an indefatigable worker. He has already published several articles that bear witness to his sound judgment, his familiarity with the most difficult problems of the social sciences in general and especially of economics, and his ability to present his ideas in a well organized and understandable way. I am fully convinced that he will one day be counted among the foremost economists.” A week later, Kennedy wrote Rothbard to say Earhart would give him $5,000 for a year, through May 31, 1957.

By this time the Volker Fund had supported about a dozen professors who wrote books about liberty, but the books remained unpublished. During the late 1950s, it was probably the Volker Fund’s Herbert Cornuelle who arranged with D. Van Nostrand Company, Princeton, New Jersey to publish the books. Historian Leonard Liggio, of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, recalled that the head of Van Nostrand was Edward Crane (no relation to the founder of the Cato Institute), the brother of Jasper Crane, a good friend of Rose Wilder Lane who wrote The Discovery of Freedom (1943) and co-authored the beloved Little House books for children.