Murray Rothbard
Murray Newton Rothbard (/ˈrɒθbɑːrd/; March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American economist[1] of the Austrian School,[2][3][4][5] economic historian,[6][7] political theorist,[8] and activist. Rothbard was a central figure in the 20th-century American libertarian movement, particularly its right-wing strands, and was a founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism.[9][10][11][12][13][14] He wrote over twenty books on political theory, history, economics, and other subjects.[9]
"Rothbard" redirects here. For other uses, see Rothbard (disambiguation).
Murray Rothbard
January 7, 1995 (aged 68)
Oakwood Cemetery, Unionville, Virginia, U.S.
Columbia University (BA, MA, PhD)
Rothbard argued that all services provided by the "monopoly system of the corporate state"[15] could be provided more efficiently by the private sector and wrote that the state is "the organization of robbery systematized and writ large".[16][17][18] He called fractional-reserve banking a form of fraud and opposed central banking.[19] He categorically opposed all military, political, and economic interventionism in the affairs of other nations.[20][21]
Rothbard led a "fringe existence" in academia, as described by his protégé Hans-Hermann Hoppe.[22] 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.[8][23] Partnering with the oil billionaire Charles Koch, Rothbard was a founder of the Cato Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies in the 1970s.[9] 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.[24][25][10][11] He promoted historical revisionism and befriended the Holocaust denier Harry Elmer Barnes.[26][27][28] Later in his career, Rothbard advocated a libertarian alliance with paleoconservatism (which he called paleolibertarianism), favoring right-wing populism and defending David Duke.[29][30][24][31] In the 2010s, he received renewed attention as an influence on the alt-right.[32][10][33][34]
Life and work[edit]
Education[edit]
Rothbard's parents were David and Rae Rothbard, Jewish immigrants to the United States from Poland and Russia, respectively. David was a chemist.[35] Murray attended Birch Wathen Lenox School, a private school in New York City.[36] He later said he much preferred Birch Wathen to the "debasing and egalitarian public school system" he had attended in the Bronx.[37]
Rothbard wrote of having grown up as a "right-winger" (adherent of the "Old Right") among friends and neighbors who were "communists or fellow-travelers". He was a member of the New York Young Republican Club in his youth.[38] Rothbard described his father as an individualist who embraced minimal government, free enterprise, private property and "a determination to rise by one's own merits… "[A]ll socialism seemed to me monstrously coercive and abhorrent".[37] In 1952, his father was trapped during a labor strike at the Tide Water Oil Refinery in New Jersey, which he managed, confirming their dislike of organized labor.[39]