Authors Forum: The Worldview of Rothbard

0:00Good morning ladies and gentlemen, welcome. I'm delighted to be back again for my annual intellectual fix. I'm going to put the cover of this book down so you can see what it looks like. I can't afford this book. I don't know what the story is on this, but let me explain, sorry, I'm just going to put My justification for doing this was really, this is one of a 20 volume series of books on major conservative libertarian thinkers. The other books in the series deal with, let's see who they deal with, you have the Salamanca School, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Smith, Burke, Bookfields, Spencer, Mises, Schumpeter, Hayek, Oakeshott, Popper, Rand, Friedman, Kirk, Buchanan, the modern papacy, I like that one, Nozick and this one on Rothbard.

1:14So it's designed to provide a sort of resource for students so that they can have an access to a whole range of stuff and all of the books follow the same format so I was under very tight constraints in how this book was structured. So the first chapter is the sort of intellectual biography of Rothbard, probably completely unnecessary for anybody who's attending this conference to read it. I don't have anything new or stunning or shocking to reveal. The second chapter is a substantive chapter and it deals with, I tried to give an overview of a whole number of things. It's called Rothbard Libertarian and so it talks about Rothbard praxeologist, Rothbard the natural law ethicist, Rothbard the enemy of the state, I liked writing that part, that and Rothbard, Defender of Liberty.

2:00The third chapter is, I think, so there's really not a lot new, I would say, even in the second chapter for people who come to this conference. So you don't need to take out a second mortgage on the house to go buy this book and so on. Well, do if you want to. I mean, it's good for me. I get royalties or something. Well, maybe. The third chapter, Influence and Reception, however, is something I had to do, some reading there that I hadn't done before. It's largely about Rothbard, the historian. So it's Rothbard, the historian of liberty, the history of economic thought, and indeed it includes, I trolled through as many of the reviews of Rothbard's books that I could find to find out what the reception was of his material when he produced it. And it was kind of, it was interesting. It was largely, certainly in the beginning, unenthusiastic. I think that's the way we might phrase it and so on, and then sort of skeptical, and then sort of warmed up generally.

2:57So that material might, for people who are here who probably wouldn't benefit from reading the first two chapters, might find something of interest in that. Chapter four, the final chapter, is called Contemporary Relevance, and this was the most fun, okay, because that's when I could let myself go and let my hair down. There's not much of it to let down, but what there was, I did. So just to give you an idea of what I have in here, it starts with the global financial crisis of 2007 and following. What can we say about it? I'm in a country that's currently going down the tubes and so on. My government, for some reason, felt compelled to contribute between 85 and 120 billion of taxpayers' money to some group of people I don't even know. It's quite bizarre. Why? I don't know. So that every man, woman and child in Ireland now owes about 25,000 euros. So in my family, that means I'm 150 grand in the red. I can't

3:50I can't quite figure out how that happened, okay? So the second section is, well, I'm a Catholic, so things are going to hell in a hand basket, I'm happy, okay? I think things are normal, right, okay? That's what we expect, okay? The good suffer and the wicked prosper, okay? Anyway, so the second section is called Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste, and it's about the kind of thing that Philip was talking about in the first, about the way in which, for example, we are now under severe pressure to get rid of our relatively low corporation tax. I mean, sorry, we're causing some distortion in the market in Europe. Okay, Ireland is suddenly causing France and Germany to go sort of belly up and so on because we have a low corporation tax. No, it's really bizarre. Then I talk about Rothbard, the polemicist, and there's a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun in that.

4:36One section I did, I couldn't resist this. I have a small section in there called The World Full of Hate. This is based on a citation from Chomsky. In an interview in 2002 he said, quote, he said, the American version of libertarianism is an aberration. Nobody really takes it seriously. Now, it's difficult to know how Chomsky would substantiate this claim, and I suspect probably cynically that by nobody he means nobody he knows on the north bank of the Charles River between MIT and Harvard, right? Which is, which of course is the world, as we all know. You draw a map of America and you've got this, and then there's wasteland everywhere to the west, and so on. And there's a section in here on libertarian and conservatism. I dealt with this actually in my first chapter, and it's the substance of my talk tomorrow afternoon. I'm going to expand on this and talk about it in some more detail, so I won't say much more about that.

5:24And then a final section on strategy and coming back to the kinds of things that we all know and love. My hope is that somewhere in the library, somewhere, some student is going to pick this up and discover Rothbard, a name that students will not have come across before and Read It. I'm also hopeful that the Mises Institute perhaps might be able to do a deal with Continuum to license this so that some normal people on normal salaries will be able to buy this book, including me. It would be fun having spent so much time writing it. I feel a bit ashamed actually because I only wrote one book last year, so I feel I've been kind of taking it easy. So I'll try better next year and try for two. Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen.

6:09Thank you very much.