Rothbard on Conspiracy Theories

by Stephan Kinsella on July 10, 2026

I’ve ranted before about the problems with conspiracy theories.¹

First, such theories are usually not needed; and they are usually maintained by people who have a naive view of the state. For them, if we can just get rid of the bad guys (and often they are bankers, capitalists, etc.) and elect good guys, things return to normal. As Hoppe has noted,

“democratic competition” guarantees that only the “best” thieves-fences advance into the decisive power positions, i.e., those who from the property-owner standpoint are the worst of all rulers. Democracy ensures – and all the more, the larger it is (!) – that only and exclusively bad persons, plagued by no moral scruples whatsoever and obsessed with hunger for power and megalomania, reach the top of the state – the respective “best” smooth-talkers and know-nothings who promise the “people” the most in a demagogic manner without having the slightest prospect of success therewith.²

Second, the state is evil on its face. It kills hundreds of thousands of people in the open. It is usually not even illegal to do this. It does not always need to hide what it is doing or pretend that it is not doing what it is. It is able to do this because it has succeeded in deceiving the people as to its legitimacy.³

… socialism, by no means an invention of nineteenth century Marxism but much older, must be conceptualized as an institutionalized interference with or aggression against private property and private property claims. Capitalism, on the other hand, is a social system based on the explicit recognition of private property and of nonaggressive, contractual exchanges between private property owners. Implied in this remark, as will become clear in the course of this treatise, is the belief that there must then exist varying types and degrees of socialism and capitalism, i.e., varying degrees to which private property rights are respected or ignored. Societies are not simply capitalist or socialist. Indeed, all existing societies are socialist to some extent.⁴

This is why some of us hate the state.⁵ Even Rothbard, aptly described by Justin Raimondo as the happy scholar-warrior of liberty,⁶ would sometimes say “hatred is my muse.”⁷ As Jesse Walker notes:

Murray Rothbard used to say that the mark of a true libertarian radical was that he hated the state. If this is so, libertarianism may soon be declared a hate crime. Talk radio, the Internet, fringe publishers—almost every outlet for dissent has now been attacked for contributing to “an atmosphere of fear and hatred,” by which it is meant fear and hatred of the government.⁸

Third, it ignores the fact that the state has internal rules. (( See, e.g, Alfred G. Cuzán‘s classic paper “Do We Ever Really Get Out of Anarchy?, J. Libertarian Stud. 3, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 151–58; also “Revisiting ‘Do We Ever Really Get Out of Anarchy?’”, J. Libertarian Stud. 22, no. 1 (2010): 3–21. )) People who rise to power inside the state are good at following these rules; and you can be sure opponents inside the state would latch onto violations of them (remember Clinton being impeached for something minor?). Fourth, the conspiracy theorists often have little evidence to back up their wild claims.

I was reminded of this when my friend Vijay Boyapati, of The Bullish Case for Bitcoin,⁹ brought to my attention this priceless reaction by Rothbard (in a 1989 Q&A after a speech) to a questioner’s suggestion that “the government” is trying to spread AIDS.

This starts about about 49:50:

Rothbard: I never heard of that.. I don’t know anything about that

Conspiracy Theorist: It sounds far out.

Rothbard: Yeah it sounds far out. I don’t see any evidence to that effect. My favorite story about the government medicine was the swine flu caper if anyone remembers that – (interrupted)¹⁰

Conspiracy Theorist: – what’s the difference?

Rothbard: well that was documented.

And as he wrote in Reason magazine in 1977:

There are, of course, good conspiracy analysts and bad conspiracy analysts, just as there are good and bad historians or practitioners of any discipline. The bad conspiracy analyst tends to make two kinds of mistakes, which indeed leave him open to the Establishment charge of “paranoia.” First, he stops with the cui bono; if measure A benefits X and Y, he simply concludes that therefore X and Y were responsible. He fails to realize that this is just an hypothesis, and must be verified by finding out whether or not X and Y really did so. (Perhaps the wackiest example of this was the British journalist Douglas Reed who, seeing that the result of Hitler’s policies was the destruction of Germany, concluded, without further evidence, that therefore Hitler was a conscious agent of external forces who deliberately set out to ruin Germany.) (( Murray N. Rothbard, “Viewpoint: The Conspiracy Theory of History Revisited,” Reason (April 1977). ))

See also (from Facebook):

The Conspiracy Theorist as Praxeologist

by T.C. Bell

TC’s Notes|Notes about TC|TC’s Profile

Last weekend when Professor Woods come to CU Boulder to talk about the basic analytics of Austrian Business Cycle Theory a wide variety of ideological beliefs found their way into Humanities room 1B50. One less prominent group was the 9/11 Truthers, who after the lecture, passed out fliers for their upcoming “Truth Convention ’09” or some such gathering. One of the ladies from the Truther sect was standing near her seat with a not so pleasant expression on her face. I asked her what she had thought about the speech. She replied that it was a shame that Tom Woods didn’t get into the “facts” that our “overlords” consciously set up events like the financial collapse for their own benefit. I countered that Dr. Woods was only trying to get the main ideas of a very overlooked and insightful theory of business cycles to “the masses”. I got the feeling that this answer was not acceptable for the Truthista because she kind of hinted at the idea that Tom Woods is just another shill for “our masters”. Precisely because Tom Woods doesn’t follow up his lecture with a power point presentation on how the Council on Foreign Relations “caused” 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Financial Collapse (Takeover) of 2008 and whatever other problems individuals face in their daily lives this somehow proves that he is the Power Elite’s shill? Being diplomatic about the situation I recommended that she read Dr. Rothbard’s great essay on “The Conspiracy Theory of History”. For Rothbard, unlike most scholars, is not a flat out rejecter of “conspiracy theory”; only “bad conspiracy analysis”.

As Rothbard says in the essay “Far from being a paranoid or a determinist, the conspiracy analyst is a praxeologist; that is, he believes that people act purposively, that they make conscious choices to employ means in order to arrive at goals.” So far so good. People like Alex Jones and the Truther mentioned above all start in the right place; by examining the situation and asking the all important question qui bono? Who benefits? The problems start because that is where the stop their scholarship. With the answer to the question in hand the “bad” conspiracy analyst rushes to the rooftops to proclaim to the world his “incredible” findings. While on the rooftop he also takes the time to denounce any and all “unbelievers” as accessories to The Crime.

In my opinion bad conspiracy theorists give Governments way too much credit. They seem to forget two things 1) the fact that governments are inefficient monoliths that only know how to “react” to a given situation and 2) F.A. Hayek’s important contribution to economic thought known as “The Pretence of Knowledge”. Economic collapse happens because a small group of people think they can control everything; not because some CFR board member says “Throw the switch!”

Kinsella, On Conspiracy Theories; Conspiracy Libertarians, Waystation Libertarians, Activists vs. Principled Libertarians; Crank warning about Iran Nuking New York City, and A Conspiratorial Pseudoscience Manifesto on Free Energy, Perpetual Motion, Holograms, and Utopia; On the UN, the Birchers, and International Law; Common Law Court and Militia Nut Material from the 1990s. [↩]
Democracy or Private Law Society: Hoppe’s Schweizer Monat Interview (2010), HansHoppe.com (June 9, 2026). [↩]
See Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Banking, Nation States and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order,” in The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy (2006)). It is a criminal gang, in essence one that, like a mafia, gets away with it, but unlike a mafia, has persuaded most of its victims that it is necessary and therefore legitimate. But it is a criminal gang. As Hoppe notes,

Let me begin with the definition of a state. What must an agent be able to do to qualify as a state? This agent must be able to insist that all conflicts among the inhabitants of a given territory be brought to him for ultimate decision-making or be subject to his final review. In particular, this agent must be able to insist that all conflicts involving himself be adjudicated by him or his agent. And implied in the power to exclude all others from acting as ultimate judge, as the second defining characteristic of a state, is the agent’s power to tax: to unilaterally determine the price that justice seekers must pay for his services.

Based on this definition of a state, it is easy to understand why a desire to control a state might exist. For whoever is a monopolist of final arbitration within a given territory can make laws. And he who can legislate can also tax. Surely, this is an enviable position. (( Hoppe, Reflections on the Origin and the Stability of the State; Kinsella, The Nature of the State and Why Libertarians Hate It, StephanKinsella.com (May 3, 2010). [↩]
Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, ch. 1. See also Hoppe, “Coming of Age with Murray,” in Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Papinian Press and The Saif House, 2026), n.8; Kinsella, Classic Hoppe on the Realistic Right vs. the Egalitarian Left. [↩]
Kinsella, The Nature of the State and Why Libertarians Hate It. [↩]
Justin Raimondo, “Rothbard Against the Dismalists,” Chronicles (Nov. 1994). Rothbard himself described Mencken as “The Joyous Libertarian.” Murray N. Rothbard, “H.L. Mencken: The Joyous Libertarian,” LewRockwell.com (Feb. 3, 2000), originally published in New Individualist Review, vol. 2, no. 2, Summer 1962, pp. 15–27, available in New Individualist Review, Omnibus volume (Liberty Fund, 1982); Kinsella, The Joyous Libertarian, StephanKinsella.com (Aug. 27, 2009). [↩]
Walter E. Block, “On Winning the Rothbard Medal of Freedom,” LewRockwell.com (March 7, 2005): “When asked what was the source of his prodigious scholarly and popular output, he would reply: ‘Hatred is my muse.’ He would read something, say by a Marxist, Keynesian, or Chicagoite, become infused with disgust, and swear a mighty oath that this particular bit of idiocy would no longer stand, at least without a reaction from him.” [↩]
Jesse Walter, “Motivated by Hate,” Liberty (July 1995), p. 21. [↩]
Vijay Boyapati, The Bullish Case for Bitcoin (2021; Amazon; landing page; original article). [↩]
Related: See Bruce W. Davidson, “A Brief History of Disease Hysteria,” Brownstone Journal (May 12, 2023); David Bell, “Pandemic History, Retold and Adjusted for Financial Return,” Brownstone Journal (Dec. 12, 2022). [↩]