Murray Rothbard Versus the Koch Libertarians (Cato Institute)

October 18, 2017

The following is an overview and summary, with little contribution of my own, of David Gordon’s three part series (part 1, part 2, part 3) on the relationship that Murray Rothbard had with the Koch Brothers. To understand the libertarian movement is immensely beneficial for the libertarian at all stages of development. It teaches the nuances in theory and strategy that have developed over the years and it explains where the present state of the liberty movement came from. The Gordon essay is classic Gordon. Extremely helpful, packed full of incredible detail, and uses the past struggles of Rothbard to explain current themes in the liberty movement. 

The only problem, of course, is that it is long: three essays. I have tried hard to make the following overview engaging, short, and complete; and of course, true to Gordon’s telling of the story. Murray Rothbard was the founder of the modern libertarian movement, the chief developer of the theory and the synthesizer of libertarianism as an ethical-political theory with Austrianism as a value-free science of economic thought. His story needs to be told; not just because of what happened to him –for old wounds can and do heal– but because it explains why and how libertarianism as a movement is not just a uniform thing. There are factions. There are lessons. There are very good reasons why the libertarianism of mainstream approval is not the Rothbardianism of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.

Something happened. Here is the story.

Why Mises? (and not Hayek) - by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Let me begin with a quote from an article that my old friend Ralph Raico wrote some 15 years ago:

Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek are widely considered the most eminent classical liberal thinkers of this century. They are also the two best known Austrian economists. They were great scholars and great men. I was lucky to have them both as my teachers.… Yet it is clear that the world treats them very differently. Mises was denied the Nobel Prize for economics, which Hayek won the year after Mises's death. Hayek is occasionally anthologized and read in college courses, when a spokesman for free enterprise absolutely cannot be avoided; Mises is virtually unknown in American academia. Even among organizations that support the free market in a general way, it is Hayek who is honored and invoked, while Mises is ignored or pushed into the background.

I want to speculate — and present a thesis — why this is so and explain why I — and I take it most of us here — take a very different view. Why I (and presumably you) are Misesians and not Hayekians.