American Anarchist

Murray Rothbard's Echoes at the End of the World

(American Anarchist: Murray Rothbard)

“If the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another Mafia gang.”

― Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty

Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World...

When we signed off on Tuesday, we left you with what the great 20th Century philosopher, Ned Flanders, would call a “dilly of a pickle.” 

As dear readers know, we’ve been following the Greatest Political Experiment of Our Age from our post down here at the End of the World, the epicenter of the “libertarian revolution.” 

It’s been decades... generations, even... since the freedom movement had much of anything to celebrate. But we have a soft spot for underdogs, die-hards and long shots... as well as pre-vindicated conspiracists, pre-loved fashion and pre-award winning novelists. (Notes members can access our own pre-bestsellers on Substack.)

And so when crisis-ridden Argentina, a once-prosperous nation subjugated under 75 long years of collectivist imbecility, saw fit to cast off their statist yoke last year, electing a president who not only threatened... but promised!... to shrink their putrefied Leviathan, we were all ears...

Marxist (Oxy)Morons

Of course, career naysayers were quick to remind us – summoning just enough cerebral juice to power one side of a broken toaster – that our libertarian fancies were just that, utopian castles in the sky. 

“It’s never happened before,” they chorused, ignoring the fact that the same could be said about literally every single thing in existence, from about the Big Bang onwards.

“But without government, who will build the [XYZ]?” they chanted, seemingly unaware that the government has never built anything without capital it didn’t first confiscate from “we, the people.”

“It’ll be anarchy!” they wailed, neglecting to comprehend both the definition of the word itself and the fact that this was, if they had bothered paying attention, the stated goal. 

We mightn’t have expected much more from those Marxist intellectuals, mired as they are in their endless proletariat class struggle. And yet, quite as much resistance was to be found among nit-picking sectarian combatants on the limited-government side. 

The source of the latter conflict seemed to be one of simple confusion: how can a movement rooted in freedom, one that holds itself in opposition to the state – which, as a “bandit gang writ large,” claims a monopoly on violence – work from within that very same state to achieve the peaceful and prosperous ends it seeks? 

After all, isn’t the very notion of an “anarchist politician” itself a kind of oxymoron... like “friendly fire” or “voluntary tax” or “government organization”? (Or, for that matter, “Marxist intellectuals”...)

To help us “undilly Ned’s salty pickle” (an expression you can’t have imagined reading when you got out of bed this morning), we turn to an American anarchist often cited by Sr. Javier Milei himself:

Enter Rothbard. Murray Rothbard. 

Man vs State

In an article published in the early ‘90s, Rothbard dared to notice what was glaringly obvious to most right-thinking Americans. 

“The basic right-wing populist insight is that we live in a statist country and a statist world dominated by a ruling elite, consisting of a coalition of Big Government, Big Business, and various influential special interest groups.”

As both the founder and leading theoretician of the anarcho-capitalism movement in the United States, Rothbard understood better than anyone how “the old America of individual liberty, private property, and minimal government has been replaced by a coalition of politicians and bureaucrats allied with, and even dominated by, powerful corporate and Old Money financial elites.”

And yet, even though he was a philosophical purist, Rothbard was also a real world pragmatist. Unlike so many paper libertarians of today, who appear all too willing to sacrifice the great on the mystical altar of the perfect, Rothbard proposed actionable policies that, he reasoned, would bring America closer to the kind of market-driven economy about which his colleagues only theorized. 

Rothbard argued that, though “libertarians have often seen the problem plainly [...] as strategists for social change they have badly missed the boat.” The correct ideas were necessary, he argued, but insufficient. Moreover, the model of gradual, “Hayekian conversion,” whereby the correct ideas would percolate among pointy-headed intellectuals, stuffy academics and policy wonks, then “trickle down” into the public sphere, ignored the fact that many of these same “thought leaders” were, themselves, compromised by their own economic self-interest. They were part of the system. 

Any libertarian strategy must recognize that intellectuals and opinion-moulders are part of the fundamental problem, not just because of error, but because their own self-interest is tied into the ruling system.

Nor could we simply sit around vegetating, like so many blissed out omphaloskeptics, waiting for the system to collapse under the weight of its own gathering navel lint. 

“A strategy for liberty must be far more active and aggressive,” he asserted.

From Ideas to Human Action

And so, recognizing that those on what we might call the “far left” were already gone with the wind, Rothbard proposed a “two-pronged” approach, designed to consolidate individuals of a similar, freedom-oriented persuasion and simultaneously alert and mobilize the voting public by explaining to them the nature of the rapacious political class feeding on their lives and property. Rothbard’s strategy aimed...

(a) to build up a cadre of our own libertarians, minimal-government opinion-moulders, based on correct ideas; and 

(b) to tap the masses directly, to short-circuit the dominant media and intellectual elites, to rouse the masses of people against the elites that are looting them, and confusing them, and oppressing them, both socially and economically.

To this end, Rothbard laid out an actionable game plan for libertarians and those on the non-interventionist (anti-war) right, whom he called paleoconservatives. It consisted of eight basic points... and it resembles, rather closely, the ten point Pacto de Mayo (May Pact) set forth by Argentina’s pereident recently.

Coincidence? Hmm...

We will look at both plans, in detail, next time.

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. Thanks again to our dear Notes members, old and new. Your support helps us spread the ideas of liberty from our far-flung post down at the End of the World to more than 120 countries around the globe.

In fact, owing to your support, we’re now #26 in World Politics here on Substack…a mighty run having only began our little project this year!

If you’d like to join our growing community of folks interested in free markets, free minds and free people, please consider getting involved by becoming a Notes member today. Cheers! JB