{"id":400,"date":"2017-07-24T00:14:42","date_gmt":"2017-07-24T04:14:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/pickledpencil\/?p=400"},"modified":"2023-01-10T18:46:00","modified_gmt":"2023-01-10T22:46:00","slug":"learned-murray-rothbard-mises-u-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/pickledpencil\/2017\/07\/learned-murray-rothbard-mises-u-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"What I Learned from Murray Rothbard – Mises U 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

<\/p>\n

Thanks for joining me for this series of posts on Mises University 2017. If you missed my first post where explain what this is all about, it\u2019s here<\/a>. I hope you learn something from this \u2013 something about economics, history, and political-economy \u2013 something about an uncommon, but very old\u00a0perspective, a way of thinking about human action and social order with which you may disagree, but also may not fully understand.<\/strong> I am admittedly a sympathetic reviewer, but I nonetheless hope\u00a0to give an even-handed account of these lectures.<\/p>\n

Thomas Woods delivered the Sunday evening\u00a0talk of Mises U 2017. \u00a0Woods\u00a0has made quite a name for himself since I first read his Politically Incorrect Guide to American History<\/em> when I was a senior in high school in 2004. He\u2019s authored (at least) eleven or twelve\u00a0books and has two popular libertarian podcasts. One is called the Tom Woods Show<\/em>, which is a 5-day a week libertarian podcast, and the other is\u00a0called Contra Krugman<\/em> which he hosts with economist Bob Murphy, where they dissect Paul Krugman\u2019s weekly New York Times column. I\u2019ve heard\u00a0Tom speak several times and he\u2019s exceptionally gifted at holding\u00a0an audience\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n

The talk was entitled \u201cWhat I Learned From Murray Rothbard.\u201d Murray Rothbard was a student of Ludwig von Mises and a tremendously influential economist and libertarian. Where Mises was a classical liberal, however, Rothbard was an anarcho-capitalist. He believed in the complete dismantling of the state apparatus and the replacement of all government services with voluntarily funded, private firms, enterprises, services, charities, communities, and networks.<\/strong> Consequently, he was an extreme critic of the American warfare state and of the corporate interests which benefit from overseas military adventures, nation-building, and entangling alliances. Rothbard was a phenomenally productive academic. He published books and papers\u00a0on economics, ethics, history, economic-history, American politics, political philosophy, and foreign policy. He died in 1995, but his unpublished works and archives are still being\u00a0released.<\/p>\n

This talk wasn\u2019t just a rundown of Rothbard\u2019s political and economic views. Woods\u00a0shared a personal account about how as a college student he first met the man\u00a0at Mises U 1993. Rothbard delivered the opening lecture. He came out to the podium and explained, rather immodestly, that he was the \u201cworld\u2019s foremost expert\u201d on the Panic of 1819 \u2013 not that there was much competition, \u201csince I\u2019m the only one who\u2019s ever written a book about it!\u201d Murray joked and laughed. A second story involved the day Jeffrey Dahmer was killed in prison. That day, during an academic talk, Murray sat down next to a young Tom Woods, leaned over, and in his loud, nasally New York accent proclaimed, \u201cDid you hear about Dahmer?! They got him!\u201d<\/p>\n

Rothbard was an economist by trade, a prolific writer, and published a great number of technical economic papers and books, including his magnum opus Man, Economy, and State.\u00a0<\/em>However, he also wrote extensively on American political and economic history (which includes a four volume, 1,500 page history of colonial America). The first book I ever bought of Rothbard\u2019s was\u00a0America\u2019s Great Depression<\/em>, where he outlines how the Federal Reserve\u2019s meddling monetary policy caused the boom of the 1920s and the crash of 1929<\/strong> and, if I remember correctly, also revisits the myth of Herbert Hoover as a non-interventionist free-marketeer, instead showing\u00a0that Hoover was an advocate of state economic interventions and further documenting how his activist response to the crisis made matters worse. Rothbard also took on the various 19th century panics and business cycles in his A<\/em>\u00a0History of Money and Banking in the United States<\/em>, applying Austrian Business Cycle Theory to explain how these episodes were the product of non-market state interventions.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Woods relayed the story of a 100-page<\/em>\u00a0indictment\u00a0Murray wrote of an old run-of-the-mill American history book, not for bias, but for omissions and confusions and imprecision. In this review, a hilariously passionate Rothbard called the Land Ordinance of 1785 a \u201cdictatorial intrusion into the Western region<\/strong>, which set too high a minimum land sale and price, thus restricting settlement, and also enforced rectangular surveying, thus forcing the purchase of submarginal land within an otherwise good rectangle, instead of conforming as in the Southern methods of surveying to the natural topography of the land in question.\u201d Who\u00a0formulates a fiery opinion over\u00a0that?<\/em>\u00a0This tale is to some degree an illustration of the breadth of Rothbard\u2019s historical knowledge, as most folks aren\u2019t even aware of the Land Ordinance of 1785, let alone so well acquainted with both it and economic theory that they\u2019ve staked a flag on it as some critical issue of justice.<\/p>\n

Woods told of how Rothbard\u2019s influence and writings moved his ideology from \u201cmoderate Republican,\u201d which Woods\u00a0described as being \u201cbasically wrong on everything,\u201d to libertarian. The basic Rothbardian moral analysis of the state: If a particular undertaking isn\u2019t morally acceptable on a personal\/individual level, how can it then become so\u00a0simply because a democratic majority says it is?<\/strong> Does, for example, the\u00a0forcible expropriation of money or property \u2013 called theft when committed by a private person \u2013 suddenly become morally permissible\u00a0because a majority approves it? For Woods, a Catholic, this line of thinking was persuasive and as a young man put him on the road to libertarianism.<\/p>\n

Woods speech was Rothbardian beyond the anecdotes, book titles, and ideas. He took shots at the Beltway libertarian crowd with whom Rothbard had some infamous falling-outs and, in Woods telling, would rather get an invitation to a New York Times cocktail party than take an unpopular libertarian position against the state, the establishment, the banking system, and war. He didn\u2019t name names, but I think the folks at CATO can read between the lines.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks for joining me for this series of posts on Mises University 2017. If you missed my first post where explain what this is all about, it\u2019s here. I hope you learn something from this \u2013 something about economics, history, and political-economy \u2013 something about an uncommon, but very old\u00a0perspective, a way of thinking about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4887,"featured_media":401,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mises-university-2017"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat I Learned from Murray Rothbard - Mises U 2017<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Thanks for joining me for this series of posts on Mises University 2017. If you missed my first post where explain what this is all about, it's here. 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