— From Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Houston: Papinian Press and Property and Freedom Society, 2026) —
The Inspiring and Courageous Intellect of Murray Rothbard
I discovered Murray Rothbard and his writings while in graduate school but my first personal encounter with him in an academic setting was at an early Mises Institute conference at the College of William and Mary in 1991. I had prepared a paper to present on the newly-enacted 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act (“Handicapping the Handicapped: The Americans With Disabilities Act”) in which I discussed various incentive effects likely to occur: the crowding out of long-standing private efforts to help the “disabled” (as all government programs do to some degree); the coming explosion in definitions of “disabled” by empire-building bureaucrats in this newly-created federal bureaucracy; the impending proliferation of lawsuits it would create; the mountains of regulations that would inevitably be created; and the law’s implicit denial that profit-seeking businesses have incentives to accommodate their valued and skilled disabled employees (such as an accountant or an economics professor in a wheelchair). I questioned whether the law would help or harm the disabled.
I had put a lot of effort and many hours of work into that paper, one reason for which is that I knew that I would be presenting it in front of Murray Rothbard. Sure enough, Murray sat right across the table from me during my presentation in which I rattled off all of the likely moral hazard and other incentive effects of the law. Shortly before the presentation one more possible effect popped into my head as I was going over the paper, but I didn’t mention it during my presentation. When I finished Murray was the first to speak up and asked about that very thing—the one thing that I left out. This may seem trivial, but it impressed upon me what a quick and brilliant economic mind Murray had.
Murray was a brilliant interdisciplinary scholar, just the opposite of what the vast majority of the drones of the “mainstream” economics profession were then and are today. In my first class of graduate microeconomics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in September of 1976, taught by Professor Richard Wagner using Mises’s Human Action and Milton Friedman’s Price Theory as the two main textbooks, Professor Wagner handed out a passage by Mises about what a professional economist should ideally be. He should be thoroughly trained in economic theory, of course, but also in history, political philosophy, philosophy of science, statistics, sociology, and other fields. Mises himself certainly qualified, as everyone who has read Human Action knows, and I would put Murray Rothbard right behind Mises himself in that regard.
That was immediately obvious to me upon listening to Murray’s lecture at that College of William and Mary conference and also for several years teaching classes at Mises University which, in the early days, was held at such places as Stanford University, Claremont College, and in Auburn. It convinced me that I should strive the best I could to conduct my own research program (and teaching) in the same way as much as I could (Never deluding myself that I could come anywhere near the Rothbardian level of genius!).
Murray loved his work and loved battling the state despite being grossly discriminated against by the academic establishment for doing so. The “court historians” of academe feared him. One could argue that he even exceeded Mises in his accomplishments: He published pathbreaking academic papers, a treatise (Man, Economy and State) at a very young age, a multivolume history of Colonial America, a history of money and banking in the U.S., a book on the plague of “Progressivism,” a famous libertarian manifesto, many other books and monographs, and hundreds (or thousands) of articles in myriad publications. Even movie reviews! All in addition to his university teaching career.
Murray was no stick-in-the-mud, don’t-rock-the-boat, tenured academic bureaucrat counting the days to retirement as so many are. He never shied away from criticizing the political establishment that he despised (as all good citizens should) in his popular writings and speeches. He could never have been an economics department chairman any place except possibly Grove City College in Pennsylvania. Such persons are considered to be part of university administration and, as such, mostly keep their mouths shut about the criminal state that funds some or all of every American college and university (except for Grove City and Hillsdale College and a few others). If not, they will not last long in those positions. (Since higher education in America is almost entirely a government-funded socialist enterprise, many department chairs are in those positions not because of their productivity or reputations but because the job is a dumping ground for those who are mediocrities or failures at research or teaching or both).
In sharp contrast to that type of bureaucratic academic animal, Murray co-founded the anti-war/anti-state in-print Rothbard-Rockwell Report newsletter which in the digital age became LewRockwell.com.2 He wrote articles, pamphlets, and books about libertarian strategy and spoke endlessly about it.
Man, Economy and State is considered by many to be a more readable version of Human Action. It is still downloaded on mises.org more than 50,000 times/month in some months. Of all of Murray’s great intellectual contributions to economic science one of my favorites, if not the favorite, is a 41-page paper entitled “Toward A Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics,” published in 1956 at the age of 30.3 Without getting into too much inside baseball here, in this paper Murray essentially demolished the entire edifice of so-called welfare economics, an elaborate system of theory used for decades to “justify” statist economic interventions while pretending to be “unbiased” and “scientific.” It was all based on the notion of interventionism “maximizing social welfare.” Murray demonstrated that no such thing exists or can exist. It is nevertheless the basis for thousands of publications in the economics literature on “market failure.” (Interestingly, the use of this body of theory to evaluate government performance and government failures is almost completely absent from the economics literature with the exception of public choice theory literature.)
In essence, Murray proved with eloquence and brilliance what my old graduate school professor, Dr. Nicolaus Tideman, said—that welfare economics was an elaborate theoretical apparatus designed to “salve the consciences” of Leftist academics who advocate the use of state coercion to force their fellow citizens to live like they, the academics, think they should live their lives. Sounds kind of communistic, doesn’t it? (One of the founding fathers of “the new welfare economics,” by the way, was the proud Polish communist Oscar Lange, author of the absurdly oxymoronic phrase “market socialism” and critic of Mises during the socialist calculation debate.4 The communist government of Poland renamed his university after him in 1974.)
One of Murray’s last public presentations was a speech entitled “Two Just Wars: 1776 and 1861” delivered at a Mises Institute “Costs of War” conference in May of 1994, less than eight months before he died. It would not surprise anyone familiar with my own writings that it is my favorite Rothbard speaking-truth-to-power speech (published online and in The Costs of War edited by John Denson).5 It is a wonderful example of Murray’s vast encyclopedic knowledge of economics, history, and philosophy and his ability to explain in clear English to a general audience some very complicated historical subjects, all in service of the cause of freedom.
He starts out citing the just war theory of Saint Thomas Aquinas which essentially says that a just war is one that is fought against people who want to coerce, plunder and dominate, or have coerced, plundered and dominated, another group. An unjust war is one that does the opposite and favors the dominators and plunderers. In that regard, said Rothbard, the only two just wars in American history were the American Revolution, a war of secession from the British empire, and the Confederate side of the 1861–1865 War to Prevent Southern Independence.6
As for whether the Americans of that time or any time had a right of secession Rothbard said:
[D]oes anyone seriously believe for one minute that any of the 13 [American colonial] states would have ratified the Constitution had they believed that it was a perpetual one-way Venus fly trap—a one-way ticket to sovereign suicide? [126]
Of course not, and yet this “monstrous illogic” was the foundational principle of Lincoln’s invasion and waging of total war on his own citizens in the Southern states.
In a statement that would cause any “woke” academic to faint, Rothbard called the Confederates “courageous seceders.” As with the American Revolution taxes were a preeminent cause. The North wanted to plunder the agricultural South with high protectionist tariffs on goods manufactured in the North and the South opposed being plundered in that way. Rothbard mentions how Lincoln bent over backwards to deny that the war was about slavery, but used the words “invasion” and “bloodshed” to describe what would happen to any state that refused to collect the federal tariff taxes that had been more than doubled two days earlier.
All the rest of the world, including the Northern states in the U.S., found a way to end slavery peacefully in the nineteenth century, Rothbard reminded us.
In every other part of the New World, slavery was peacefully bought out by agreement with the slave holders. But in these other countries . . . there were no Puritan millennialists to do their bloody work, armed with a gun in one hand and a hymn book in the other. [129]
The “Yankees,” wrote Rothbard, were mostly New Englanders who invented a new brand of Protestantism that said, essentially, that God was not really Almighty God; that he needed help from New England Puritans before Jesus Christ could return. The “help” was to be in creating a sin-free thousand year kingdom of God on earth. The major sins to these New England Puritans, Rothbard wrote, were alcohol, doing anything on the Sabbath but going to church, slavery, and Catholicism. The new Republican party embraced all of this and thus called itself “the party of great moral ideas.”
Yet Lincoln’s “major focus was on raising taxes, in particular raising and enforcing the tariff.” “Lincoln was a master politician,” said Rothbard, “which means he was a consummate conniver, manipulator, and liar.” He “made a god out of the Union” about which “there is no heresy greater.” Lincoln’s waging of total war on the civilian population of the South for four years was “one of the great war crimes, and crimes against humanity, of the past century and a half,” he wrote.
Murray’s concluding and parting words were vintage Rothbardian radicalism:
[W]e must always remember, we must never forget, we must put in the dock and hang higher than Haman those who, in modern times, opened the Pandora’s Box of genocide and the extermination of civilians: Sherman Grant, and Lincoln. Perhaps, some day, their statues, like Lenin’s in Russia, will be toppled and melted down, their insignias and battle flags will be desecrated, their war songs tossed into the fire. And then Davis and Lee and Jackson and Forrest, and all the heroes of the South, “Dixie” and the Stars and Bars, will once again be truly honored and remembered. [133]
***
Murray was on the faculty of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (holding a privately funded endowed chair in the economics department) at the time. How appropriate that their sports teams are nicknamed the “rebels.”
- Dr. Thomas J. DiLorenzo, a founding member of the PFS, was a university economics professor for forty-one years, including twenty-eight years at Loyola University Maryland, and served as president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute (2023–2025). He was the recipient, in 2012, of the The George F. Koether Free-Market Writing Award. [↩]
- His own contributions in this newsletter are collected in Murray N. Rothbard, The Irrepressible Rothbard: The Rothbard-Rockwell Report Essays of Murray N. Rothbard (Center for Libertarian Studies, 2000). [↩]
- Murray N. Rothbard, “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics,” in idem, Economic Controversies (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2011). [↩]
- See resources collected at Stephan Kinsella, “The Great Mises-Hayek Dehomogenization/Economic Calculation Debate,” StephanKinsella.com (Feb. 8, 2016). [↩]
- Murray N. Rothbard, “America’s Two Just Wars: 1775 and 1861,” in John V. Denson, ed., The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, 2d expanded ed. (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1999). Available at mises.org (audio) and on youtube. [↩]
- But see Murray N. Rothbard, “War, Peace, and the State,” The Standard (April 1963): 2-5, 15-16, republished in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, R.A. Childs, Jr., ed., 2d. ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2000), arguing that (pp. 123–124):
with modern weapons there can be no pinpointing whatever. … [A]ll of the consequences of inter-territorial war make it almost inevitable that inter-State war will involve aggression by each side against the innocent civilians—the private individuals—of the other. This inevitability becomes absolute with modern weapons of mass destruction.” And thus, “State wars are always to be condemned. … [T[he overriding consideration for the libertarian is the condemnation of any State participation in war. [↩]
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