Quotes About Rothbard

This emphasis on the need for a conservative, traditionalist cultural context for libertarianism in his later years—and the way he turned venomously on every part of the libertarian movement not under the paleo tent in the pages of the newsletter he and Rockwell launched in 1990, the Rothbard/Rockwell Report—lost Rothbard many of his old fans and friends in the movement.

The Rothbard crowd began its own official organization—the Radical Libertarian Alliance. (Its slogan: "War is murder. Taxation is theft. Conscription is slavery Government is chaos.")

Both Mises and Rothbard have passed away, but their outlook—including Ph.D.s who subscribe to it—lives on in the Ludwig von Mises Institute. But groups like these have basically given up on mainstream economics; members mostly talk to each other and publish in their own journals. The closest thing to market fundamentalists are not merely outside the mainstream of the economics profession. They are way outside.

Only individuals have ends and can act to attain them. There are no such things as ends of or actions by 'groups,' 'collectives,' or 'States,' which do not take place as actions by various specific individuals.

According to Rothbard, complete gridlock is the best one can hope for in Washington. A paralyzed government was fairly close to his anarchist ideal.

For money as for all other activities of man, "liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order.

I believe that fractional-reserve banking is disastrous both for the morality and for the fundamental bases and institutions of the market economy.