Murray Rothbard

Murray Newton Rothbard (March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American economist, economic historian, political theorist, and activist associated with the Austrian School. He played a key role in the 20th-century American libertarian movement, especially its right-wing branches, and helped found and develop the theory of anarcho-capitalism. He authored more than twenty books covering political theory, history, economics, and other fields.

Rothbard believed that every service provided by what he called the "monopoly system of the corporate state" could be handled more effectively by the private sector. He described the state as "the organization of robbery systematized and writ large." He considered fractional-reserve banking fraudulent and opposed central banking. He also rejected any form of military, political, or economic intervention in other nations.

He dismissed mainstream economic methods in favor of Ludwig von Mises's praxeology. Alongside his writing and libertarian activism, Rothbard taught economics part-time at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute starting in 1966, and later held an endowed position at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas from 1986. With oil billionaire Charles Koch, he co-founded the Cato Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies in the 1970s. After breaking with Koch and Cato, he helped establish the Mises Institute in Alabama in 1982 with Lew Rockwell and Burton Blumert.

Though a right-libertarian, Rothbard criticized Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Adam Smith. He opposed egalitarianism and the civil rights movement, and blamed women's voting and activism for expanding the welfare state. He promoted historical revisionism and was friends with Holocaust denier Harry Elmer Barnes. Later in his career, he pushed for a libertarian alliance with paleoconservatism, which he called paleolibertarianism, favoring right-wing populism and citing David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as strategic models. In the 2010s, he gained renewed attention as an influence on the alt-right.

Rothbard was born to David and Rae Rothbard, Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia; his father was a chemist. He attended the private Birch Wathen Lenox School in New York City, which he preferred to the public school system he had experienced in the Bronx. He described growing up as a "right-winger" among communist and fellow-traveler peers, and was a member of the New York Young Republican Club. He said his father was an individualist who favored minimal government, free enterprise, and private property, and that all socialism seemed monstrously coercive. In 1952, his father was trapped during a labor strike at the Tide Water Oil Refinery in New Jersey, reinforcing their dislike of organized labor.

Rothbard earned a BA in mathematics from Columbia University in 1945 and a PhD in economics in 1956. His first political activism was in 1948, organizing a Students for Strom Thurmond chapter at Columbia in support of the segregationist South Carolinian's presidential campaign, horrifying his fellow students. His PhD was delayed by conflicts with advisor Joseph Dorfman and by Arthur Burns's rejection of his dissertation. Burns, a family friend and neighbor, only left the Columbia faculty to head President Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers before Rothbard's thesis was accepted. Rothbard later said he was one of only two Republicans at Columbia at the time.

In the 1940s, Rothbard vetted articles for Leonard Read at the Foundation for Economic Education, met Frank Chodorov, and read libertarian works by Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, Isabel Paterson, H. L. Mencken, and Ludwig von Mises. Reading Mises's *Human Action* in 1949 greatly influenced him. In the 1950s, he attended Mises's unofficial seminar at NYU. He helped form the libertarian and anarchist Circle Bastiat in New York City and joined the Mont Pelerin Society. The William Volker Fund paid him to write a textbook explaining *Human Action* for undergraduates; a sample chapter on money and credit won Mises's approval. The Fund retained him as a "senior analyst" for ten years. His project grew into the 1962 book *Man, Economy, and State*, which Mises praised. Unlike Mises, Rothbard began arguing in the 1950s for privatized military, police, and judiciary. His 1963 book *America's Great Depression* blamed government policy for the Great Depression, challenging the common view that it was caused by capitalism.