Rothbard on the Warfare State

0:00I have a quote from Rothbard, which I'll begin with, and this is from an interview taped in December of 1972 by Walter Grindr and Walter Block. And in response to a question, Rothbard says, quote, the country isn't that bad, it's the government. Look where the bases are. Look where the troops are. I mean, what other country has troops and bases all over the world? What other country feels impelled to leap in, to meddle in whenever anything happens to its dislike anywhere in the world. If something happens in northwestern Afghanistan, to pick a very remote area, the United States will obviously be there. I mean, who else does this on a world scale? I'd like to see us defend ourselves in Brooklyn once in a while.

0:48Put that to a test. For once, wait until they get to Brooklyn. Now, this is in 1972, and I've been to New York City once or twice, and I don't really know the layout of the place. Well, Brooklyn is within some miles of the former Twin Towers. And what's interesting is that the one time that they came here in New Brooklyn, they didn't defend the country. Now, it's interesting, a short book by Elaine Scaray, who's a professor of philosophy and some kind of literary criticism at Harvard, which came out, I think, a year ago, called Who Defended the Country? And she says, well, if anyone defended the country, it's the people on the fourth plane who, at least, as some people claim, tried to take over the plane.

1:36This huge military-industrial complex didn't seem to be doing much on this occasion. So I'll let that be my starting sally. Now, how did Rothbard form his views on War and Peace and the Warfare State? Well, he commented in an unpublished manuscript that he wrote in the early 1970s called The Betrayal of the American Right. He commented that, quote, During the years when I was becoming ever more conservative economically, I had done little or no independent thinking on foreign affairs. I was literally content to take my foreign policy thinking from the editorials of the good, by the good, great New York Times. This is all hard to imagine now that Rothbard ever took anything from the New York Times.

2:23And he goes on. He became clear to me, however, that isolationism, that's in quotes, in foreign affairs was but the foreign counterpart of strictly limited government within each nation's borders. Now Rothbard, of course, became aware that there was an alternative to the New York Times point of view fairly early When he becomes aware that there's actually an old right political movement where they believe in the free market economy and the other things in which he already believed. But they have a coherent worldview that incorporates the whole scope of political issues. And so sometime in 1946 he's in touch with the Foundation for Economic Education and he meets Frank Chodorov who was a huge influence on him.

3:10and you can see his tribute to Chudorov in Left and Right in 1966, the obituary he did for Chudorov. So having, let's see how Rothbard summarizes what the Old Right stood for. Having sketched out, again in this same unpublished manuscript, the origins of the Old Right in opposition to the New Deal, He says, well, it underwent one change, because originally the New Deal's focus was domestic, so the critique was domestic, then he adds, as the Roosevelt administration moved toward World War in the late 1930s, the old right added intense opposition to the New Deal's war policies, to its systematic opposition to the domestic New Deal, before they realized that as the Libertarian Randolph Bourne had put it in opposing America's entry into World War I, War is the health of the state, and an entry into large-scale war, especially for global and not national concerns, would plunge America into a permanent garrison state that would wreck American liberty and constitutional limits at home, even as it extended the American Imperium abroad.

4:18As anti-Ford interventionism was added to the anti-New Deal mix, the old right lost some adherence and gained even more. For Eastern establishment, anti-New Dealers such as Louis Douglas, William Clayton, Dean Acheson, and the Morgan Bank embraced the entire New Deal package once it came wrapped in the enticing trappings of the American Empire. On the other hand, anti-war progressives, originally New Dealers, men such as Senators William Borah and Gerald Nye, and writers such as John T. Flynn and Harry Elmer Barnes, began to realize there was something very wrong with the strong state that could expand into foreign adventures. and so they gradually became anti-New Dealers in every sense of the word. So the result was, to quote Rothbard further, the old right was opposed to big government on every front, foreign and domestic.

5:07So he's achieved a kind of interesting consistency in the late 1940s. Now he says, I'll continue with what he's saying in this section of the unpublished betrayal. For the old left, quote, World War II was a glorious age, the fulfillment of the promise of a new dawn. Everywhere in the United States and in Western Europe, the liberal ideals of central planning of a new planned order staffed by brain trusters and liberal intellectuals seemed to be the wave of the future as well as the present. conservative views seemed as dead and outmoded as the dodo confined to the dustbin of history no one was more pleased at this burgeoning New Deal collectivism than the communist party this new popular front line of the late thirties seemed more and more vindicated by the glorious new order of borning in foreign affairs the United States was marching hand in hand with the Soviet Union in a glorious war to defeat fascism and expand democracy domestically the communists under Earl Browder as their leader exalted in a new found respectability

6:10and so on and so forth, and as if to prove Rothbard's point, virtually the entire school, the Frankfurt School of Marxists, including Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse and others served in the wartime office of strategic services on the economic desk, or what to do with Germany after the war desk, so we even had the Frankfurt School in the American and War Effort, and most of these made the transition into Cold War liberalism, changed their views slightly except for Marcuse. Reflecting the mood of left-wing triumphalism attendant on the war, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a homegrown American social democrat, wrote in 1947, quote, there seems to be no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States New series of new deals. Well, true enough, but much simpler if you can have a permanent crisis and the permanent or the persistence of wartime controls into time of alleged pace.

7:18Okay, now Rothbard has entered into the old right movement, made new friends. He also lost a friend. It's kind of interesting. He's writing to a guy named Spurgeon Keeney in 1947 and Keeney sends him letters from places like Warsaw saying you've got to sign up for things like the Marshall Plan and this is very important and Rothbard obviously wasn't buying this. He failed to buy the whole Cold War argument. And this friend of his goes on to be an Air Force intellectual, still around, and a kind of Cold War theorist at a high level. Rothbard, on the other hand, is beginning to write to people like Harry Elmer Barnes.

8:03He writes to Barnes in October of 1948 and discusses Charles Baird and has some questions about revisionist history. And this is, again, something Rothbard has just learned through the old write, that if you want to be able to consistently critique the state and home and abroad, you have to now and again question standing historical interpretations. This isn't to say that all forms of revisionism are equally good, you have to decide that on the merits. Now as he gets further involved in the old right, Rothbard begins to of course publish, and he publishes in Frank Chodorow's newsletter analysis and also in an obscure journal called Faith and Freedom which was published by Spiritual Mobilization which was one of those odd phenomena at the time what you have are Protestant ministers who are liberal theologically but opposed to the social gospel so they believe in laissez-faire liberalism and market economy but they're liberal theologically And Rothbard becomes a regular contributor to this publication for some years, usually under the pseudonym of Aubrey Herbert.

9:23He was still working on his doctorate and didn't want trouble caused by his association with these non-respectable right-wingers, I suppose. What name was that again? Aubrey Herbert, it's loosely based on the English individualist writer of the late 19th century, I guess Oberon Herbert.

10:10All right, what's interesting is to follow Rothbard's disagreements with the, what shall I call it, this burgeoning foreign policy of intervention which has been launched by Truman and the Cold War liberals. Rothbard later had to invent a language to describe this because there was a transition made within the right-wing movement. The right-wing movement that he had joined wasn't the same thing within a matter of a few years. And he invented a kind of Weberian ideal type. He said, well, there was the old right and then there was the new right. And the fundamental difference, in his view, was precisely on foreign policy.

11:00And as far as he was concerned, the transition had been pretty much made by 1955 with the founding of National Review. But of course this is all, the process is going on coming up to 1955 and the founding of that magazine. Now Rothbard did a kind of technical paper on the economics of war in, I think, 1949, where he followed Mises' line that, okay, let's say you have to have a wire for some reason. How would you finance it? Well, you'd want to finance it by taxes and not distort the market mechanism through bond, you know, public debt and so forth. So pretty straightforward technical piece.

11:47But in the meantime, he's also beginning to write letters to people like Henry Hazlitt, questioning some views Hazlitt has put out about wartime taxation. And by now it's 1950 and the Korean War has gotten underway and the economists are all chiming in with various plans to make all this work and still prevent inflation and so on and so forth. Now, he has quite a number of quarrels with Hazlitt about interpretations of past American history in relation to foreign policy, so I won't go into.

12:33But in the end, Rothbard is increasingly vocal in his personal letters to people, say, at The Volcker Fund, for whom he's working as a consultant. He's getting pretty vocal about the deterioration of the Freeman. He sees the Freeman magazine going over increasingly to an interventionist foreign policy based on acceptance of the Cold War framework. And his discontent increases as we come down to the period at which the Freeman essentially collapses Are Flapses and is taken over by the Foundation for Economic Education and then sort of replaced in one fell swoop by a national review taking over many of the same writers and so forth.

13:30He was at fee, so they bought out, and I think this is around 55 that this finally happens. I'd be able to tell you if I had everything in front of me. So when Fee takes over the Freeman, they reduce the format to the small magazine and talk strictly about economics and rather little about public issues like foreign policy. So I only see Rothbard in 1953 in November writing to William Johnson of Spiritual Mobilization which published Faith and Freedom, saying that in general Faith and Freedom was superior to the Freeman because it hadn't bought into foreign policy interventionism.

14:15And then he writes to someone else that the only thing good currently that he's seen is a piece by Nathaniel Weil on foreign policy, which is interesting. Okay, now, the last sort of outburst of the old right is this issue of faith and freedom, April 1954. It's kind of the all anti-interventionist issue. Sort of the last thing of this kind for a long time is these anti-interventionists are driven underground by the change in outlook of most of the right-wing base. Okay, and in this issue we have, of course, Rothbard's first long essay on this subject under the pseudonym Obrey Herbert.

15:09It's called A Real Aggressor, and this is one of the many articles that is now on the web. And I'll summarize this argument quickly. He's saying it's a contradiction for conservatives and or libertarians to champion trade. and then hereditary with the so-called enemy block and another theme of the time that people would rather be should rather be dead and red was all very interesting but no one had taken a poll to see if they really wanted to be dead rather than red and it seemed wrong to try to impose your idea of what they want to do on them in the event you said generic statism, statism in general ought to be the real enemy of Libertarians, then he goes on to discuss defense properly understood as the defense of individuals and private property and raises the paradox, and you'll be hearing a lot about this from Dr. Hoppe, the paradox of the expropriating protector of property, the paradox not usually addressed in the literature, and goes on to use terms like racket in relation to the political process and also addresses the limits of democracy

16:24Rothbard's ever going to crusade for democracy. He says the only thing good about democracy is that sometimes you can get a peaceful change of the people in charge. He doesn't say you can even always get that. That's the only advantage. He says we have to face up to the fact that all states are oppressive and address that where we live. He also takes on this very popular idea at the time, not as popular now as a rhetorical device with the present administration, but popular at that time, the idea of collective security. And he says, well, okay, let's assume there was an international so-called police force to go around running into corals that come up everywhere and then blowing things up to fix these corals and call that peacemaking.

17:45Rothbard says that the communists, after all, deluded as they may be, are not completely irrational, they don't want to be blown up either, and therefore, once in a while you might want to actually negotiate, instead of just issuing threats and taking big moral stands and so forth. So Rothbard's trying to unify a kind of moral argument based on an idea of national rights and individual liberty with the practical side in that we live in a world made up of states, what do we do now, and then so on. So this is, in a way, his first major statement on the subject. Now, in the same period, he's interested in the Bricker Amendment. Some of you may remember the Bricker Amendment. I was going to clarify some language in the Constitution about what treaties can commit us to.

18:32And he actually sent some money, and back when a dollar was a dollar, he sent in a couple of dollars to the Bricker Amendment committee. And someone later sent him a copy of Roger McBride's book, which was a defense of the Bricker Amendment. And already in 1954, he's writing to one correspondent asking if he knows anything about William Appleman Williams, the Red Historian. This is someone whose works Rothbard would later read with interest as a critic of the Cold War, but also a critic of a larger tradition in American foreign policy from 1898 onwards, the so-called Open Door Policy. He also writes, in 1954, to John T. Flynn discussing this break on the right wing between interventionists and anti-interventionists.

19:23I don't know if Flynn replied. I think Flynn was pretty tired by this time of everything. Now also, in 1954, Rothbard signs on as a regular columnist with Faith and Freedom and begins writing a feature called Along Pennsylvania Avenue. So this is a regular feature under his pseudonym, in which he talks about current politics, whether it's McCarthy, agricultural subsidies, what the Democrats are up to, Cold War liberalism. This is actually very interesting stuff because you can see Rothbard being consistent to what we expect him to be. This column has already worked out the major parts of his approach to politics.

20:14Now of course he's purged. This column doesn't last past some time in 1957. He wrote something about Hungary that was too radical for the management and the ministers who were the main subscribers to this publication. One of his constant themes, once the Republicans are in office, is that they're set out. The Republicans come in and they talk about free enterprise and they're going to save the petty bourgeoisie and the middle classes and so on. They don't really do anything substantive. This is already obvious fairly early. And so he's got a lot to say about creeping Eisenhowerism and his old professor, Arthur Burns, who goes to Washington to help plan the economy, things like that.

21:04Now, there's also a debate in 1955 in the columns of Faith and Freedom between Rothbard writing as Aubrey Herbert and Villy Schlemme as a former Social Democrat immigrant Cold Warrior and rehashing the points in favor of the Cold War and being very upset and feeling the communists were about to go rolling into Western Europe If they did that, then they'd have all this wonderful industrial equipment at their disposal, and that would be the end. But Rothbard pointed out, I think rather cogently, that, well, if they tried to manage it, all these industrial assets, and if they tried to manage these assets using their characteristic means, they'd run it into the ground pretty quickly.

21:51So he kind of brought the socialist calculation problem to bear on the Cold War, So by at least 1954, Rothbard is already interested in finding new allies, and this is the answer to people who think that Rothbard was just arbitrarily flailing about, making alliances arbitrarily, whimsically from time to time. The reason is, he's already deeply discontented and opposed to the direction of the right. This is being taken in the early Cold War, and he's willing to talk to anybody who can oppose this and doesn't really care what their domestic politics are.

22:41Out of some other amusing things in the correspondence, in preview of some of his later views, he does a short letter to the editor of the National Review in 1956, called it In Defensive Nasser. Rothbard seemed to think that Arab nationalism was an understandable phenomenon. Here's another thread that's interesting. Here's a letter in January 1957 where Rothbard is interested in the role of the Rockefeller interests in the Suez Crisis.

23:29A constant theme of Rothbard. He doesn't want to settle for the superficial CBS News presentation of the merits of something that's going on. He wants to find out if somebody's got a material interest in it. And this is not, you know, an economic deterministic theory of history. It's simply the frank recognition that people have interests and some people are in a better position to realize these through the state. is an application, if anything, of Franz Oppenheimer and Charles Baird. Murray always had a certain fondness for Charles Baird's writings. Of course this great American historian of the first half of the 20th century who was later regarded as a totally discredited fossil because he had come to oppose Roosevelt's foreign policy and this sort of reflected back on his earlier work that he couldn't have been right about much of anything.

24:19But nonetheless, Baird, a progressive historian, who thought that whenever people met, politically something was up, and there might be economic interests worth looking at. It's not a claim that this is the only determining factor guiding what people do, but nonetheless an important thing to follow. Okay, so Rothbard's already interested by this time in some theoretical analysis of what we now call corporatism, and the systematic relationship between the state and some part portions of the business community. Let's see. So I'm trying to follow through chronologically. The problem with Rothbard is that you either try to sum him up thematically or chronologically, you end up having to do a little bit of age because he has all the fundamental ideas very early, I think it adds to them as he goes or deepens the analysis.

25:18Now there's quite a bit of back and forth between William F. Buckley and Rothbard in these years because there being no place else to write, after the collapse of a number of other magazines, Rothbard does write for National Review, but they kind of put him in this little box where he can only write about economics. He did one article on Westerns, does he like Westerns? A little bit of cultural criticism, pure economics, and they employed him sometimes as a researcher. They wouldn't let him touch foreign policy, because obviously his views and theirs were at odds. So every so often there's a little note from Leymath Puckley rejecting a piece by Rothbard and saying, Rothbard, you just can't draw the proper moral distinctions. You should leave it to us Cold Warriors to do that, and you should read more books by James Burnham.

26:06a rather unlikely thing for Rothbard to do well I think he read them but he wouldn't have taken them very seriously now here he's also beginning Hoover revisionism he's interested in Hoover revisionism and this partly comes out of a project that goes back to about I'd say 1950 he's interested in doing something on explaining the Great Depression using Austrian theory and this leads him into Hoover revisionism because Hoover was hardly the evil laissez-fairest that his opponents said he was after the fact and Rothbard thought this was worth knowing. Now in July of 1958, it's another thing to mention on the way, Rothbard writes a letter to Senator William E. Jenner commending him on his opposition to U.S. intervention in Lebanon.

27:00I don't believe we can ever find an intervention that Rothbard liked, as opposed to someone like Charles Krauthammer who can't find an intervention he doesn't like. I think I gave a talk recently saying that, well, we couldn't have democratic crusading, but we could have democratic realism. So in principle, we should want to make everyone democratic by force, but we have to be practical, so we can't do them all at once, so we'll set up a list and calibrate it, and so on. So Rothbard wouldn't, of course, like any of this. Now in May 9, 1958, Rothbard gets mentions to a correspondent that his essay, The New Isolationism, has been rejected by Buckley.

27:47Okay, well of course it would be. This has been corrected and put on the web. But it's a short essay, appealing to the right wing to rethink the whole thing, and consider if whether or not negotiating once in a while and taking any of disarmament seriously, well, they were at least worth trying, you know, it might defuse the Cold War, it might make life less of a cosmic struggle and crusade, maybe this would be worth considering that this might be more compatible with liberty and free markets and all that sort of thing. Now, this circulated underground since it wasn't published. I guess just copies where it would circulate and you got some feedback. But at this point, anybody who was on the right and not interventionist wasn't getting published, much to speak of.

28:40But he did get some response, favorable response to the underground version of this essay. Excuse me. Oh yes, and then here's a funny one. Here's someone thanking Rothbard for a contribution to an ad welcoming Khrushchev's visit. This is a sore point with the National Review people. They make up certain myths about this. Not a question of Rothbard being particularly fond of Khrushchev, any more than he was fond of, say, Winston Churchill. But Rothbard thought that considering that this Cold War crisis had been ratcheted up to a very high point and that atomic bombs were involved somehow and this seemed a rather dangerous situation it was probably a good thing that someone was talking to someone but National Review they don't think that's really worth countenancing Now, oh, here's the one I like. This is also, I guess, in 1959, Rothbard writes to Baldy Harper and in passing, again showing his lack of belief in the conventional wisdom, he advocates defending New York from the communists if they should come up the beach by putting the

30:08The J.D.'s into the breach, the juvenile delinquents, New York had enough of them and they could be a first line of defense. It's creative thinking, it's a kind of private militia. By now I see Rutherford's getting letters from people like Neil D. Hutton, who's sort of anti-colonial, liberal political scientist and so on. and so he's getting a few people that he's writing to. In fact, he's been writing again to Harry Elmer Barnes. There's a correspondence that's pretty large between 1959 and 1968 when Barnes dies. And he's getting new contacts by way of people that Barnes knows, these sort of vaguely liberal but non-interventionist intellectuals.

30:58Now, in 1960, Rothbard has joined the League of Stevensonian Democrats. Well, again, he wants to have some place where he can do something concrete, and it's impossible on the right. And he's decided that, given the facts on the ground, that Adlai Stevenson is the least awful warmonger on the block. So he becomes a member of the Stevensonian Committee. In fact, he later reminisces that one of the top leaders in this committee sort of worked out that he was a libertarian and then admitted that he was too, but he had no place else to go politically. Okay, so there's some letters and some manifestos that Rothbard drew up for this group.

31:47Kind of prefiguring his later attempted alliances. Let's see. Also, by 1961, he's interested in D.F. Fleming's revisionist account, Two Volumes on the Cold War. And this is a book that Rothbard thought was useful, but I doubt that he could have been entirely in harmony with it, with it since in the end D.F. Fleming is a Wilsonian and has some biases built into his reconstruction of the history. Now for a while New Individualist Review makes a slight opening, creates a little pluralism or diversity on the right, but we won't go into that.

32:34I have the volumes here if you want to see that there was at least a little debate possible on foreign policy in that journal. Now one of the things that's interesting is a folder. It's just called the War and Peace Book, War and Peace Book. It's a little folder. And with Rothbard's papers, something handwritten is hard to date except by sort of geological stratum. So I'll say early 60s, plus the readability of his handwriting. The older Rothbard gets, the less possible it is to read his handwriting without having an Egyptologist on hand. It's just a fact. So I'm saying early 60s. And he's got a lot of handwritten notes and some type material. And he's clearly working out some ideas for a general book on war peace in the state, or on this theme.

33:24And what happened with this is that we don't get a book, but we get a whole set of essays coming out of this, These notes he made. So War Peace in the State, published in 1963, is one pamphlet called Myths of the Cold War, published within a year or two of that in the Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought, which was published by Bob Lefebvre's college. Transformation of the American Right in Continuum, 1964, Anatomy of the State, Rampart Journal, 1965. And of course these essays are running parallel with Rothbard's critique of conservatism or what that's become. So essays like Conservatism and Freedom in the Modern Age, 1961, and going back to 1957, And rather prescient now, Rothbard's critique of the Cold War liberal Samuel Huntington, in which Huntington predicts that, well, or says, well, conservatism as such has no content.

34:27Anyone who's defending any establishment is a conservative, and so eventually the liberals, the New Deal liberals in charge of the Cold War will start calling themselves conservatives. I think that's a broader explanation of the neoconservative phenomenon, and so on and on and on, although we can allow that there are Trotskyites and other factors there, but it seems to me the broadest explanation is that the Cold War liberals decided they had something to conserve and took on a new label, for the most part, and Rothbard of course wrote a protest saying that if conservatism, by which he undoubtedly means libertarianism, doesn't have some content, what's the point? Why be involved in defending everything that is, with no basis, no reason for this?

35:12Analysis and the Nothing. All right, so the April 1963 article, I think, is quite important. I think it's really a starting point for any study of Rothbard's views on more peace in the state, which is, of course, the title. It recapitulates the arguments made in the Faith and Freedom essay in 1954 in The Real Aggressor. But here, of course, there's more of a formal scholarly apparatus, footnotes, quotations, and so on. and an analysis that leads him to say things like this, that when the aggression by a territorial state is only downwards towards its own population, we call this condition peace. Okay, this is peace. The state is only aggressing against people within its borders, that's peace by this territorial monopolist.

36:02Once in a while, the people get unhappy and rebel and that's a problem for the state. and they have to restore a piece, restore order. But right now, in general, you've only got vertical violence. Now, when you've got horizontal violence, that is, you've got these ruling classes dragooning their populations into fighting other states, things are much worse. Because then the state can claim all the resources, including your life, all your property. There's just apparently no limit to what they will claim. There'll be some actual physical limit to what they actually can throw into the fray, But no theoretical limit, certainly, under conditions of modern total war. The one thing that follows, of course, is that it's pretty much impossible for any modern total war to come anywhere near just war theory.

36:52That's one implication. And no one's going to be able to pinpoint actual aggressors with any precision. That word we hear a lot these days. And so on. So Rothbard once again says, well the best thing we can do in whatever state we live under is try to reduce the scope of this activity and avoid letting horizontal violence break out. It's bad enough we have the vertical violence just for living under a state. Now this essay, this was in the Stanford, what is it, no, the Standard, 1963, it was sort of a student publication or published for students circulated at various colleges.

37:45This article actually stirred up a lot of trouble. Rosarilder Lane wrote to Rothbard and said she liked the article in general, but how would he overthrow communism in Cuba under these strict premises? And I suppose he would have had to say, well, it sort of went up to the Cubans. But anyway, but Carrie McWilliams of The Nation magazine found the article interesting. Howard Buffett wrote and thought it was very interesting and mentioned that he had recently tried to show Buckley and Schlomm the dangers of war. and Slam the Dangers of War with Russia. Of course, that's naive, of course, because these guys probably actually wanted a war. It's hard to know, but judging by their rhetoric, it suddenly fazes them to say we might have a major war on our hands.

38:30W.H. Ferry of the Center for Democratic Institutions wrote Rothbard and liked the essay, suggested some new contacts, including Thomas Merton. I don't know that Rothbard ever got in touch with Thomas Merton, Justice Lawler at Continuum, which was a small Catholic Quarterly, in which Rothbard did later publish a couple of essays. And Rothbard's writing to David Riesman by this time, and saying, thanks for your comments. And he says, the right is not paranoid. This is kind of one of the notions that was around in the period. He says, it's not paranoid. It has leaders with bad ideas. And parenthetically mentions a couple, but I won't go into that. He's also writing to John Lukasz, the Hungarian immigrant historian, who was his own brand of conservative and had written a book at least partly critical of the Cold War.

39:24And now we're coming down to 1964, and Rothbard says, well, what's the most dangerous phenomenon on the block? He says, well, it's Goldwater. Clearly he embodies the ideology of these people, and he's the most dangerous guy around. The famous anti-goldwater article in Innovator, published in microscopic print in Southern California by people like Sky Darius and other early libertarians. Sky Darius seems to turn out to have been Dirk Pearson, the vitamin guru. But anyway, an interesting anti-Goldwater piece circulating among such libertarians at the time that even used that label.

40:11And then he had a draft of his speech, which apparently he did give somewhere on the menace of Goldwaterism and so on. And of course, now that we're all much older and wiser, we have to go back to our Goldwater speeches looking for bits of Strassianism. We see that Rothbard once again is prescient, and he considers that Harry Jaffa was one of Goldwater's speech writers in the campaign. Things are much more interesting when we know these things. Now, anyway, so Goldwater, of course, is defeated, but this doesn't really improve things because the Cold War liberals are still in charge. And now you've got Lyndon Johnson freed to undertake essentially what Goldwater was going to do in Vietnam anyway. Having run as the relative peace candidate, he can now do what he wants, or what his advisors with all their mathematical social scientists tell him will work, Robert McNamara, the proto-Rumsfeld, and so on, so he's widening the war, and at the same time he's saying, well, we have to have a great leap forward in statism at home, the great society, we have to have more government programs at home, and this sort of drives Rothbard to spare.

41:25and he writes a famous essay called The Great Society, A Libertarian Critique and by this time he is actually trying to work with some of the left against the Vietnam War and some of his colleagues at Brooklyn Polytechnic, they're all Marxists, pretty much as you saw from Rothbard plan this Great Society Raider and his article is included in this book which came out in 1967 This is a broad-ranging critique of the Great Society, but mainly from the left, with the exception of Rothbard's article, the one by, I think, Paul Goodman, that wasn't exactly left, but anyway. What does Rothbard say on the Great Society libertarian critique, 1967, when he starts out from John C. Calhoun's Division of Society into the Net Taxpayers and the Net Tax Eaters, and induces Franz Oppenheimer's contrast of economic means to wealth and political means to wealth and he goes on to suggest that the great society, of course, is a further institutionalization of the political means to wealth and coins, as far as I can tell, he coined this phrase, I can't find it anyplace else, the welfare warfare state

42:40And what's the point of that? Well, the point is that you tend to get them together. That there's a kind of logical unity to the welfare warfare state. And a few other people have begun to notice this. I think the radical sociologist Alvin Goldner writes a couple of years after this about the welfare warfare state and the naivete of his left-wing colleagues who think that you can separate them out, as most liberals did, and support the welfare state, but not like the warfare state, and they're of a piece. So I don't know if he had read Rothbard or if he independently comes up with a similar analysis, but it's interesting that this was going on.

43:26I'll just mention in passing that by this time, Rothbard had also been reading C. Wright Mills, and if you look at Rothbard's copy of The Sociological Imagination, you will see it's all marked up and Rothbard's written, great, great, and various things in the margin, because Mills' critique of sociology is exactly parallel to the kind of critique Rothbard made of economics as a profession. The use of unrealistic pseudo-scientific theory on the one hand, and then empiricism that doesn't go anywhere on the other hand. Of course Mills was dead by this time, so he and Rothbard, as far as I know, never had any communication. Now, while we're still in 67, there's a draft speech that Rothbard gave, I assume he gave, called Vietnam, Product of Liberalism.

44:17And again, a similar discussion to what you find in the Critique of the Great Society, showing how there's no particular contradiction in the welfare status also wanting to extend their system abroad Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Mises Institute, Austrian School, Praxeology, Man Economy and State, The Theory of Money and Credit Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Human Action, Man Economy and State, The Theory of Money and Credit I mean, it's a rare state that doesn't do some of each, I guess, but that's partly a matter of capacity and ideology, I suppose, would play a role.

45:03Now, by 1968, Rothbard is involved in the Peace and Freedom Party, which is another one of these kind of New Left roller coaster rides. But his attitude is, well, yeah, they're all, you know, socialists, but at least they are mentioning peace and freedom, which ought to be mentioned in the same breath, and the right wing won't do it, so they're mentioning it. So he draws up a suggested foreign policy statement for the Peace and Freedom Party, which centers on American imperialism and all of that, suggesting abolition of NATO, CETO, and other entangling alliances, getting out of the Middle East, Just generally withdrawing from this foreign policy which has led to quote militarizing the American economy and society and in transforming this country into a permanent garrison state.

45:59So it's all very eloquent and really written in language that the leftists could accept but not the language they would necessarily have used. I think there's another anecdote from this period in the Peace and Freedom Party where Rothbard writes a plank calling for free markets and competition and the various communist and progressive labor types are looking at this and saying, what does this mean? It sounds like, you know, bourgeois devilment. And then one of them said to the other, well, it's just a broad anti-monopoly front. They're against monopoly capitalism, so we can just sort of reconcile that maybe the Maoists thought of that, but anyway. But again, there's a reason. He's seen that the right isn't going to change anytime soon.

46:51And what's interesting too is that Rothbard has already gone through the disillusionment with the Republican Party. He's already gone through this in the age of Eisenhower, so he's not exactly shocked when Reagan comes in and doesn't do much of what he's pledged to do. Or at least he does a lot of the bad stuff he's pledged to do and nothing good that he's pledged to do from a libertarian standpoint, he's not surprised. So now things are sort of in history and fast forward and Carl Hesse writes the famous article in Playboy announcing the right wing and saying he's converted to libertarianism and this gets certain play. And Rothbard founds the Libertarian Forum, which runs from 1969 through 85, and this is an interesting journal. The Journal. I mean there's some great stuff in there. It's not all topical and current events. There are some serious theory pieces in there.

47:42Just whatever Rothbard wanted to write. His own personal newsletter modeled, I suppose, somewhat on Frank Shoderob's analysis. But of course a lot about the Vietnam War, a lot about the corporate state, a lot about imperialism, all sorts of theory along with analysis of current events. of Current Events. But again, Rothbard is trying to apply what Mises talks about in Theory and History. There is theory and it guides you, but history itself has to be reconstructed by methods that aren't a priori. And so you have to know how to do that, and Rothbard does do both very well. The best discussion of Rothbard's method as historian is probably Joseph Salerno's preface to the History of Money and Banking, and Banking, which is available in the bookstore.

48:27Okay, so now Rothbard's already founded Left and Right, and the purpose of this journal, Left and Right, was to have a scholarly journal, probably modeled somewhat on studies on the left, that would reach out to libertarians wherever they were, for people with libertarian instincts on the left or the right, and get them together around some common issues. So Rothbard at one point did have some hopes that the New Left wouldn't just turn out to be another left. Now for various reasons these views somewhat proved unrewarding and by 1971, if not a little bit earlier, Rothbard begins to denounce the excesses of the New Left, the mass body of the New Left, sort of hippie nihilists and what have you for their lack of any interest in anything serious other than demonstrating and causing disruption and then the kind of takeover of really of most of the new left by really bad forms of Marxism I mean there are you can grade forms of Marxism some are worse than the others and the whole degeneration of SDS and all that

49:40and all that, so this is disappointing, but he gets out of this as soon as he is convinced that there's nothing to be gained and decides that, well, it'll have to be a separate, independent libertarian movement, and by then, enough has been learned about organizing and so on to attempt this. So I may have to fast-forward. So that's the end. I won't say farewell to the left as Rothbard did in one of his famous editorials. Now, we'll skip ahead. Well, there is one controversial bit where the regime in Saigon falls and Rothbard writes a sort of sociological discussion, David Hume and Mises, that governments in the end rest on opinion.

50:29Now, this can be a very limited sort of opinion. People just think, well, the government's really awful, but there's nothing we can do about it. But nonetheless, that's an acceptance. So there's, you know, the X amount of legitimacy, what someone once called legitimacy through cynicism. And then the Saigon government falls, and Rothbard writes an article saying, well, at least it's nice to see the process by which the state collapses. So, naturally, many people from National Review over to Reason Magazine thinks this means that Rothbard was really a great fan of the North Vietnamese regime. Well, no, he was interested in the sociological process. And if you want to see his discussion of the sociological process, you go to the long introduction he wrote to a reprint of Etienne de la Boite's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, which I think we also have.

51:15From about 50 pages he goes on along on this theme of why there is civil obedience in the first place as opposed to civil disobedience. Why is there civil obedience? This is an interesting question. And also for those who think that Rothbard was a dyed in the wool agent of Ho Chi Minh, there's the editorial he wrote in 1979 mentioning the fall of Tehran. Same process. The government of the Shah managed to discredit itself in the eyes of everyone at which point even the secret police with their American helpers couldn't keep him in power. Now this doesn't mean the regime that came into being thereafter was really admirable or would want to live there, but nonetheless the process is interesting. And that was the point he had in mind.

52:01So now apparently he's pro-Ho Chi Minh and pro-various ayatollahs, but I doubt it. But he's interested in the fact that the state can discredit itself and disappear. Okay, let's see, I have to wrap this up. Okay, now we move on to the next topic, which is Reaganism. Well, Rothbard kept up a running critique of the Reagan administration and all their policies, all their works, and many libertarians were puzzled by this because here the Reaganites get into power and they're always talking about free markets, they're always talking about liberty, they're always talking, a lot of talk. And so people thought, well, gee, they're really like us, and they just have a problem with all those Democrats in Congress, you know, they can't do anything, apparently Reagan's arm was broken, he couldn't veto anything, couldn't do anything at all, except pretty much business as usual, move a few programs around, you know, cut five or six dollars out of programs they didn't like. There's an interesting book, I can't remember the author's name at the moment, but it's about the myth of the Reagan Revolution, certainly in libertarian terms, like it's hard to see that much was accomplished,

53:09So Rothbard kept up a running critique of Reagan and Reaganism in a libertarian forum and he got so much feedback saying, how can you say that? Then he had to write one or two editorials called, Are We Being Beastly to the Gupper? In which he reiterated his criticisms. And there's a famous retrospective in Liberty Magazine and other articles essentially what Rothbard saw was there was no Reagan revolution if this meant and diminishing the scope and role of the Federal Government in American life. There was actually a legitimation, because people with libertarian slogans were doing it. It's just legitimation of the same thing. Concretely, very little happened. And what he said was, he'd worked it out, that there was flexibility in dogmatism.

53:57The Reaganites were flexible on liberty, and all their domestic promises, and they were dogmatic in foreign policy. So the one area where you probably wouldn't want them to be dogmatic, given that they had certain ideas, this is where they are dogmatic, and so on and so forth. There's much more of this, but I can't summarize everything. Now, let's make one more remark that while all of this is going on, Rothbard is also doing scholarly pieces on foreign policy in the nature of the state. One example is World War I as fulfillment, and he means as fulfillment of the progressive movement. So once again the welfare and the warfare in tandem together again as they always are and this is in Journal of Libertarian Studies, winter 1989 and there's also the piece on the foreign policy, the old right in the JLS, let's see, winter 1978.

54:50So he's working on a number of fronts, sort of the journalistic front, the scholarly front, and wherever he can, to continue what in the end is a very consistent critique, centering on the relationship between war and welfare in more powerful states. So I think I should leave it at that. People probably want lunch. Thank you. Thank you very much.