Murray Rothbard

Murray Rothbard was a pseudo-economist and pseudo-thinker whose ideas were incredibly influential in libertarian circles. He was a student of Ludwig von Mises' Austrian School of economics, and along with Lew Rockwell, helped found the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He was the mentor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and his conversations with Robert Nozick helped inspire the latter's Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

On Race
'Well, they finally got David Duke. But he sure scared the bejesus out of them. It took a massive campaign of hysteria, of fear and hate, orchestrated by all wings of the Ruling Elite, from Official right to left, from President Bush and the official Republican Party through the New York-Washington-run national media through the local elites and down to local left-wing activists. It took a massive scare campaign, not only invoking the old bogey images of the Klan and Hitler, but also, more concretely, a virtual threat to boycott Louisiana, to pull out tourists and conventions, to lose jobs by businesses leaving the state."

"Until literally mid-October 1994, it was shameful and taboo for anyone to talk publicly or write about, home truths which everyone, and I mean everyone, knew in their hearts and in private: that is, almost self-evident truths about race, intelligence, and heritability. What used to be widespread shared public knowledge about race and ethnicity among writers, publicists, and scholars, was suddenly driven out of the public square by Communist anthropologist Franz Boas and his associates in the 1930s, and it has been taboo ever since. Essentially, I mean the almost self-evident fact that individuals, ethnic groups, and races differ among themselves in intelligence and in many other traits, and that intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary." -from his review of infamous "race realist" book The Bell Curve.

"In the last analysis, then, it is not Malcolm’s ideas, militant or not, nationalist or not, that continue to fascinate, and to attract followers. Not at all. On the contrary, it was Malcolm as a person who was the great attraction when alive and still is, thirty years after his death. For Malcolm was indeed unique among black leadership, past and present. He did no shuckin’ and jivin’, he was not a clown like “the Rev.” Al Sharpton, he was not moronic like Ben Hooks or Thurgood Marshall, he did not simply threaten Whitey in a loutish manner like the Black Panthers, he was not a fraudulent intellectual with a rococo Black Baptist minister style, like “Dr.” King. He stood out like a noble eagle among his confreres. He carried himself with great pride and dignity; his speaking style was incisive and sparkled with intelligence and sardonic wit. In short, his attraction for blacks was and is that he acted white. It is a ridiculous liberal clich that blacks are just like whites but with a different skin color; but in Malcolm’s case, regardless of his formal ideology, it really seemed to be true."

On Crime
"A right-wing populist program, then, must concentrate on dismantling the crucial existing areas of State and elite rule, and on liberating the average American from the most flagrant and oppressive features of that rule. In short:

1. Slash Taxes. All taxes, sales, business, property, etc., but especially the most oppressive politically and personally: the income tax. We must work toward repeal of the income tax and abolition of the IRS.

2. Slash Welfare. Get rid of underclass rule by abolishing the welfare system, or, short of abolition, severely cutting and restricting it.

3. Abolish Racial or Group Privileges. Abolish affirmative action, set aside racial quotas, etc., and point out that the root of such quotas is the entire "civil rights" structure, which tramples on the property rights of every American.

4. 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.

5. 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? Hopefully, they will disappear, that is, move from the ranks of the petted and cosseted bum class to the ranks of the productive members of society.

6. Abolish the Fed; Attack the Banksters. Money and banking are recondite issues. But the realities can be made vivid: the Fed is an organized cartel of banksters, who are creating inflation, ripping off the public, destroying the savings of the average American. The hundreds of billions of taxpayer handouts to S&L banksters will be chicken-feed compared to the coming collapse of the commercial banks.

7. America First. A key point, and not meant to be seventh in priority. The American economy is not only in recession; it is stagnating. The average family is worse off now than it was two decades ago. Come home America. Stop supporting bums abroad. Stop all foreign aid, which is aid to banksters and their bonds and their export industries. Stop gloabaloney, and let's solve our problems at home.

8. Defend Family Values. Which means, get the State out of the family, and replace State control with parental control. In the long run, this means ending public schools, and replacing them with private schools. But we must realize that voucher and even tax credit schemes are not, despite Milton Friedman, transitional demands on the path to privatized education; instead, they will make matters worse by fastening government control more totally upon the private schools. Within the sound alternative is decentralization, and back to local, community neighborhood control of the schools."

"It is interesting to observe the contrasting attitudes of our left-liberal culture to the two kinds of crime, organized versus unorganized. Organized crime is essentially anarcho-capitalist, a productive industry struggling to govern itself; apart from attempts to monopolize and injure competitors, it is productive and non-aggressive. Unorganized, or street, crime, in contrast, is random, punkish, viciously aggressive against the innocent, and has no redeeming social feature. Wouldn’t you know, then, that our leftist culture hates and reviles the Mafia and organized crime, while it lovingly excuses, and apologizes for, chaotic and random street punks violence which amounts to 'anarchy' in the bad, or common meaning. In a sense, street violence embodies the ideal of left-anarchism: since it constitutes an assault on the rights of person and property, and on the rule of law that codifies such rights."

On Non-Violence
"There are many successful examples of violent revolution against the State in modern history; the state only two examples of successful non-violent revolution. (Professor Gene Sharp, the current apostle of non-violence, mainly cites marginal examples which have a similar standing to Konkin’s black markets: they ease some of the pain of oppression without doing much to end it. E.g., Danish slowdowns in obeying Nazi orders during the German occupation in World War II). These two examples are instructive, especially in light of the fact that violent revolutions are attacked from all sides as leading to new forms of State oppression. For they are Gandhi’s India, which led to Mrs. Gandhi’s dictatorship and the horrifying experiment in compulsory sterilization; and the Khomeini revolution in Iran, which brought down the Shah’s regime by a series of non-violent actions culminating in a universal general strike. The non-violent Khomeini revolution, of course, has brought forth the monstrous tyranny of Khomeini’s Islamic fundamentalism.

The comparative record of non-violent revolutions is, then, worse than that of violent ones, for the violence of the American Revolution after all brought forth a pretty good result, while non-violence has accomplished nothing fruitful at all.

Which leads to a fundamental libertarian point: What’s so great about non-violence anyway? Libertarians, after all, are not opposed to violence per se; they are opposed only to violent aggression, to the initiation of violence against another’s person or property. With the exception of the LeFevrian aberration, all libertarians, including Konkin and the Smithian Voluntaryists, concede the right to use violence in defense against violent invasion of person and property. So what’s so great about non-violence? Why wantonly abandon an important tool of self-defense?"

On Science
"Yes, I confess: I’m a veteran anti-fluoridationist, thereby – not for the first time – risking placing myself in the camp of 'right-wing kooks and fanatics.' It has always been a bit of mystery to me why left-environmentalists, who shriek in horror at a bit of Alar on apples, who cry 'cancer' even more absurdly than the boy cried 'Wolf,' who hate every chemical additive known to man, still cast their benign approval upon fluoride, a highly toxic and probably carcinogenic substance. And not only let fluoride emissions off the hook, but endorse uncritically the massive and continuing dumping of fluoride into the nation’s water supply.

First: the generalized case for and against fluoridation of water. The case for is almost incredibly thin, boiling down to the alleged fact of substantial reductions in dental cavities in kids aged 5 to 9. Period. There are no claimed benefits for anyone older than nine! For this the entire adult population of a fluoridated area must be subjected to mass medication!

The case against, even apart from the specific evils of fluoride, is powerful and overwhelming."

On Feminism
"It is high time, and past due, that someone blew the whistle on “Women’s Liberation.” Like The Environment, Women’s Lib is suddenly and raucously everywhere in the last few months. It has become impossible to avoid being assaulted, day in and day out, by the noisy blather of the Women’s Movement. Special issues of magazines, TV news programs, and newspapers have been devoted to this new-found “problem”; and nearly two dozen books on women’s lib are being scheduled for publication this year by major publishers. [...] In the meanwhile, the male “oppressors” are acting, in the manner of Liberals everywhere, like scared, or guilt-ridden, rabbits. When the one hundred viragos of Women’s Lib bullied their way into the head offices of the Ladies’ Home Journal, did the harried editor-in-chief, John Mack Carter, throw these aggressors out on their collective ear, as he should have done? Did he, at the very least, abandon his office for the day and go home? No, instead he sat patiently for eleven hours while these harridans heaped abuse upon him and his magazine and his gender, and then meekly agreed to donate to them a special section of the Journal, along with $10,000 ransom."

"For whether or not 'encouragement' took place, it strikes me as crystal-clear that if the girl did not say no and did not physically resist, then sex did indeed take place by 'clear mutual consent.' What do the feminists want? Will they only be satisfied if (a) the two parties sign an express consent form before the act, and then (b) sign another one immediately after? And have them both notarized on the spot, with forms sent in triplicate to their respective attorneys and to the county clerk? If so, the notary publics in college towns are in for a thriving business, plus some Peeping Tom (or Tomasina) opportunities on the side.

[...]

There are several ways by which this terrible crisis on the campus can be solved. One, we can go back to the prohibition of alcohol, which our culture is almost ready for in any case. Two, we can go back to the good old days of campuses before the 1950s, especially in the South: not only the banning of coed dorms, and abolishing coeducation altogether, but insisting on official chaperons for girls on every date, on dance-cards filled out in advance and cleared with the chaperon, on boys being barred from the entire girls’ campus except the official room, etc. And finally, why not go the whole hog toward Left Puritanism and define all sex as per se coercive? That would clear up all the fuzziness and sex, or at least hetero-sex, could be outlawed completely. Or is that the point, after all?"