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Concept
Murray Rothbard
Summary
Murray Newton Rothbard (ˈrɒθbɑːrd; March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American economist of the Austrian School, economic historian, political theorist, and activist. Rothbard was a central figure in the 20th-century American libertarian movement and a founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism. He wrote over twenty books on political theory, history, economics, and other subjects.
Rothbard argued that all services provided by the "monopoly system of the corporate state" could be provided more efficiently by the private sector and wrote that the state is "the organization of robbery systematized and writ large". He called fractional-reserve banking a form of fraud and opposed central banking. He categorically opposed all military, political, and economic interventionism in the affairs of other nations. According to his protégé Hans-Hermann Hoppe, "[t]here would be no anarcho-capitalist movement to speak of without Rothbard".
Hoppe described Rothbard as leading a "fringe existence" in academia. Rothbard rejected mainstream economic methodologies and instead embraced the praxeology of Ludwig von Mises. Rothbard taught economics at a Wall Street division of New York University, later at Brooklyn Polytechnic, and after 1986 in an endowed position at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Partnering with the oil billionaire Charles Koch, Rothbard was a founder of the Cato Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies in the 1970s. He broke with Koch and joined Lew Rockwell and Burton Blumert in 1982 to establish the Mises Institute in Alabama.
Rothbard opposed egalitarianism and the civil rights movement, and blamed women's voting and activism for the growth of the welfare state. Later in his career, Rothbard advocated a libertarian alliance with paleoconservatism (which he called paleolibertarianism), favoring right-wing populism and defending David Duke. In the 2010s, he received renewed attention as an influence on the alt-right.
Rothbard's parents were David and Rae Rothbard, Jewish immigrants to the United States from Poland and Russia, respectively.
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