Salerno J. - The Rothbard Reader

T he Murray Rothbard wall poster depicts a graying professor pecking at a typewriter. His words rise magically from the machine and blend into a black flag of anarchy rippling above his head. Beneath the drawing is the caption: Murray N. Rothbardthe greatest living enemy of the state. The poster, like almost everything else relating to politics, causes Rothbard to laugh. He has a penchant for humor that, in his younger days, let him to write an Off-Broadway play, Mozart Was a Red, which poked fun at the Ayn Rand cult of the individual. Today he still laughs very easily. If someone mentions the name of almost any establishment economist or political figure, Rothbard will respond with a nasal guffaw. Abe Beame, Jerry Ford, Hubert Humphrey, John Kenneth Galbraith, Alan Greenspan, Ronald Reaganthey all receive the same response: a laugh followed by a theoretical disputation in which Rothbard employs buzz-saw logic to rip into these persons he views as enemies of liberty, prosperity, and the common good.

Rothbards freewheeling style and strong opinions have gradually earned him a public following. Today he is regarded as the chief theorist and spokesman for the new libertarian philosophya role he relishes after years of obscurity spent writing economic tomes and articles in scholarly periodicals. Now he frequently appears on national television, and he is much in demand as a speaker on college campuses. His many books, some of which were long out of print, are reappearing in new editions issued by major publishers. And they have begun to sell. The first two volumes of Rothbards five-volume history of Colonial America and the Revolution, Conceived in Liberty, have become best-sellers among scholarly books.

Of course, not everyone is pleased with the new interest in Rothbards thought, which synthesizes both liberal and conservative ideas. Chief among his detractors are many of his professional economist colleagues, with whom Rothbard has been feuding for twenty-five years. The main outlines of the dispute are simple. Rothbard doesnt think that most of them know what they are talking about. They have retaliated by, so to speak, exiling him from his own profession. For a long time he has paid for his outspokenness by earning what must be regarded as a very narrow living for someone with a Ph.D. from Columbia. Instead of being invited to serve on a prestigious university faculty, he has had to settle for commuting by subway from his Manhattan home to the New York Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn. Rothbard has also lost out on lucrative private consulting work, which makes economists rank among the highest paid of all professions. Instead of encouraging firms and government agencies to hire him, Rothbard wrote books and articles disputing the value of most economic advice. His contention that the charts and graphs and tables are mostly misleading dampened the demand for his services. Only one firma mushroom factoryhas called on him for consulting advice in the past twenty years.

Although Rothbard may have disputed the commercial application of his work, others, such as Harry Browne (see the Penthouse interview with Browne, February 1975), have made fortunes in the financial-advice field by popularizing concepts developed in Rothbards early books on depressions, such as The Panic of 1819 and Americas Great Depression. Browne and many lesser prophets of doom and gloom are earning thousands of dollars per day telling clients to head for the hills because the government-controlled economy is doomed to fail. What does Rothbard think of such advice? Not much. He refuses to comment directly on Browne to avoid the appearance of personal animosity. But his general feeling about dropping out is that taking such a step would be disastrous. Besides, Rothbard says, there arent that many hills to fly to.

Penthouse interviewer Jim Davidson questioned Professor Rothbard about his controversial views. The conversation shows why the fifty-year-old economist has been described as the one political theorist who is to the Left and the Right of everybody. Attacking the current political leadership and virtually every element of government policy, Rothbard explains why he still has confidence in the future of America.

Penthouse: If you had a magic wand for correcting whats wrong in America, what would you do?

Rothbard: I would get the government out of the lives and the properties of all American citizens. I would first repeal all the legislation thats been undertaken and all the administrative edicts of the last century or so.

Penthouse: Even the laws have been designed to help the poor, to protect consumers, and to provide for the young, the ill, and the aged?

Rothbard: Yes. The laws to help the poor are phony. The poor dont really benefit from the welfare state.

Studies were made of a ghetto district in Washington, D.C. After estimating the taxes those people paid to the federal government and balancing that figure against the money the federal government gives back to them, it turned out that they are getting less from the government than they are giving. Theyre paying for the welfare state just as much as everybody else! The money is simply siphoned off into the military-industrial complex, into bureaucratic salaries, and so forth.

Penthouse: If welfare programs dont benefit the needy, why are they continued?

Rothbard: Because they build up a constituency of government employees for the rulers of the country, for the state apparatus, and for the people who benefit from it. Also they build up a faade of altruism, behind which the people who actually benefit from the statethe people who get the contracts and the subsidies and the monopoly privileges and so forthare able to operate.

Penthouse: Can you be more specific?

Rothbard: For example, the Civil Aeronautics Board, which regulates the airline industry, was created because of lobbying pressure from the big airlines: Pan Am, United, and others. It was created in order to raise the rates, not to benefit the consumer. And that is how the CAB has functioned. It creates monopolies, restricts airline service on various key routes, and keeps rates up. The result has been the inefficiency and the high costs that the consumer has had to live with. The CAB put out of business quite a few small airlines that were operating very efficiently and very safely but that were undercutting the rates of the big airlines. The CAB just stopped issuing them certificates of convenience and necessity, I think theyre called. Thats just one example of the sort of thing the government does on the federal, state, and local levels.

Penthouse: Then you are advocating that all governmental functions be abolished.

Rothbard: I think all these functions could be performed considerably better by voluntary meansfinanced by the consumers who actually use these services, not by taxpayers who are forced to pay for something they dont personally receive. The income of the policemen, the firemen, and the civil servants should be equivalent to the efficiency of their service to the consumers, not based on political manipulation and coercive taxation. Then they wouldnt be an entrenched bureaucracy anymore. Government employees would have to shape up like everybody else. All other goods and services are provided by businesses or individuals who receive their compensation because they have efficiently supplied a product that consumers want. The government supplies services through coercive taxation and therefore doesnt have to be efficient.

Penthouse: But how could the free market provide such services as the police?

Rothbard: There is no difference between saying that and saying, How can the free market provide shoes? In the present society, wealthy people can hire private guardsand they do just that, its the poor people who have no choice but to rely on the public police.