 This is Jeff Deist and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to another Human Action Podcast. We're thrilled, pleased to have as our guest this week, Patrick Newman. He's a young man I'm sure many of you are already familiar with. He's been a summer fellow here at the Mises Institute. He is also the editor and in a certain sense, ghostwriter of two new, meaning posthumous Rothbard books a couple years or so back. He edited the Progressive Era, which was based on notes and files left over by Murray Rothbard after he died, which is basically a book of history. And now he is the new editor of a book that is just coming out this month. It is the long-awaited fifth volume of Conceived in Liberty, which was the final chapter in the book that Murray Rothbard had started and written the first four volumes of in the 1970s. We thought that the fifth volume was lost forever because Murray had basically delivered it into an old-fashioned recording device back in the 1970s and those tapes had been lost. But Patrick was able to take his notes and handwriting and decipher them and somehow put together 200 odd pages of this book. So all that said, Patrick, thanks so much and welcome. Well, thank you for having me on, Jeff. I'm happy to talk about Murray Rothbard. Well, and for anybody who's in on the West Coast, Patrick and I and several others will be at an event later this month in Los Angeles. It's our annual, we're having a supporters meeting out at the California Club, a beautiful private club in Los Angeles. Go to mises.org slash events and join us if you can. I believe it's the weekend of October 26th and we will have copies of the new book by Rothbard and edited by Patrick, the fifth volume of Conceived in Liberty. So first, I guess first just tell us how difficult was that to put together for you? That, it was very difficult to say the least. I was, you know, you look at the handwriting and it was, you're like, wow, it almost looked like something a founding father wrote as a scrawl and he had things crossed out and he had a little marginalia and he had all these arrows. And for the first day and a half, I think I got two sentences in when I started it. And that was the summer of 2018. And I was very close to throwing in the towel basically and saying like, nope, I got to, you know, I can do this when I'm retired, you know, at this pace it's going to take an eternity. And both basically, you know, the Mises Institute had encouragement and I was able to persevere and I was able to get that, you know, the hang of it. It was really like learning a language. You learn each of the words and how he spells things. I mean, how he writes things and, oh, that G, you know, that's a G and how he would, you know, how he would just basically write and you got into his mind in a sense and you were able to figure out, oh, that's what those words mean, you know, that's what those words are, etc. And by the end of it, I could read the handwriting fluently. And so it took about, I want to say six weeks in the summer of 2018 and it was, they were about six and a half hour days. You know, you're clocking in 10, 12 hours of doing this. I mean, it was enjoyable. It was very stressful. I would go to sleep and you would see the words in your head and you're like, you're just surrounded by it. And, you know, I just knew to myself, I told myself, if you want to do it, you got to get it done and then you can go back and you can see, oh, you know, you get better at learning it, the handwriting. But it was an experience. It was enjoyable, but it was tough. Well, and for people who don't know, Patrick is a full-time professor with four courses every semester, not during the summer necessarily when he was working on this, but he has a day job in addition. You know, one thing you said to me after all this was that as a result of having been through so many of Rothbard's books, personal notes, personal papers, things we only have here in the archive at the Mises Institute, that you felt like you know him probably as well as anyone, except for maybe a few older people who had a personal relationship with him when he was still alive. Lou Rockwell, Joe Salerno, David Gordon. But apart from that, you feel like you know the man or at least his work as well as anybody. Yeah, I would say that, I mean, so I would say with confidence that I know Murray Rothbard, the person in his thought more than anyone who never knew Murray Rothbard when he was alive. I've certainly, you know, you spend so much time in his archives, you read his correspondence, you read all his books, you get immersed in it, and you get this, in a sense, you develop a biography in your head of the man. You know, you never knew this person, you never knew him personally, but you have tremendous respect for his struggle to say the least and everything he's done and how he thought certain things and, you know, all of his twists and turns and alliances and just, you know, intellectual contributions, et cetera. Yeah, so I think I would, you know, maybe not everything, you know, but the overall system I would certainly know better, I would say, than someone who, you know, who didn't know him personally, say like Joe Salerno or Lou Rockwell or David Gordon, Ralph Raco, et cetera. Yeah. Well, the title of our show today is Rothbard and his Critics, let's get right into that. Maybe his first or one of his most famous critics was Arthur Burns himself, who was the chair of the Econ Department at Columbia University, where Rothbard studied for his PhD. He was also later on the Council of Economic Advisers and ultimately chairman of the Fed. As a young boy, Rothbard's family knew Arthur Burns, I guess they lived either close by or in the same building, and it came to pass that Arthur Burns would be the first stumbling blocks for Murray in his professional life. So tell us the story of Murray's dissertation. Well, so Murray's dissertation is called the Panic of 1819, Reactions and Policies. It was officially published in the early 60s, I want to say 62, and Rothbard defended it in 56. And what's funny is I actually was on a podcast, the standard history podcast on the Jacksonian era last year, is that it's a history book that is still very well cited by the history profession. So whenever you read something involving the Panic of 1819 or that time period, there is a very good chance that that book will come up. And even still today in 2019, there was recently another book on the Panic of 1819, but Rothbard's dissertation is still very well respected. It shows that he, you can be a true historian, look through the primary sources and all of that and just sort of present new information. But the dissertation itself was a source of controversy. Rothbard, what happened was, I believe, is that Rothbard had written a version of the Panic of 1819, his dissertation, and basically Burns wanted him to make all sorts of changes and et cetera that basically would have made the process very difficult. Rothbard didn't want to do that. And he more or less was kind of blocked until Burns left. And then he was able to work under his mentor that he still would always reference very highly was Joseph Dorfman. So aside from Mises, you know, you'd always say my greatest intellectual debt is to Mises. He always had very high regard for Joseph Dorfman. But the Panic of 1819, you know, aside from the get-go, getting his dissertation was a struggle at Columbia University. Well, it's interesting that Arthur Burns features so prominently in his story, and we were talking about Off-Mike earlier. How many people do you think remember Arthur Burns' name today versus Rothbard's? Very little. When people remember Arthur Burns, they probably remember the Fed chairman who more or less was very obsequious to Richard Nixon in the early 70s. You know, he was sort of pressured by Nixon to inflate to get him re-elected and all of that. So he didn't, you know, his later career, he didn't exactly come out, you know, as a sort of impartial academic, I guess, or someone who could fight the power of the government. But yeah, he's a non-entity now. That's only for interested academics or someone interested in the history of the Federal Reserve. But Rothbard is definitely more famous than Arthur Burns right now. Well, Arthur Burns is no Paul Volcker. We'll just leave it at that. So what's interesting here is that during the 1950s, in part, Murray Rothbard was supporting himself through the Volcker Fund, which was paying him to read some, read books and research and write. And so actually, as early as 1952, before he was awarded his PhD, he got a head start on writing Man Economy and State, which was his first full-length book came out later in 62. And you made the point that if he had had a full-time teaching job during this period, he may not have been able to write the book. Yeah, so that's something I've, you know, I've made that point where, so interesting sort of history in terms of Rothbard, I believe he taught briefly, you know, in like the late 40s, you know, or like sometime in the 40s, like as a side teacher, but in the 50s and 60s, when he was writing Man Economy and State, America's Great Depression, what has government done to our money? You know, the bulk of Conceived and Liberty, he was, you know, he was bouncing around between research grants, but he was, he was not teaching. And that was very helpful. His full-time teaching job at Brooklyn Polytech, I believe it started in 67. And yeah, so being able to, this is something that's sort of very important just from the general perspective of, for people out there is that having sort of the right, you know, funding institutional connections is very important as an academic. And Rothbard started off with the Volcker Fund, which basically said, we value you for your ideas. So first write this textbook of human action that, you know, project became Man Economy and State. That story's been, you know, been told. Write, you know, hear reviews of books. Some of those reviews have been published in a book strictly confidential. We're working on trying to get more of them out. But basically the Volcker Fund said, hey, we value you for your ideas. Read and write and tell us about it basically. And that's extremely important to have sort of that type of environment where you're able to do that. And the, yeah, the Volcker Fund was very indispensable for Rothbard in his early career. You know what I'm reminded of? The idea of tenure that there could be professors who simply just think and write articles and read books and do research wherever it takes them. It's almost like there should be football players in college who just play football and don't attend class, you know. Yeah, only that would happen. That never happens anyway. The link between teaching and academic work is not necessarily coherent. Two different things. Yes, exactly. So the, and this is something that's, it used to be, you know, back in the old days in the 1800s and the early 1900s, when you were at a college, you know, it was basically like a modern liberal arts college where you were expected to teach. And that idea was you were teaching the very high quality students. And, you know, that, you know, most research, aside from the voluntary contributions of nonprofits, in the modern day is funded through the government, which explains, you know, very clearly that link where why so many academics of all stripes are always in favor of government intervention and spending, et cetera, and why they say, you know, their research provides public, you know, external benefits and all of that nonsense because well, if the government wasn't funding it, you know, no one else would or much less of it would, you know, would be funded by private sources and it's increasingly becoming true where academics are more and more sort of in their own world of research and away from the students. So there's an old saying that the students don't want to learn and the teachers and the professors don't want to teach, basically. And it's, yeah, it's exactly true. And now you have the third, you know, you have student athletes who are more or less just, you know, athletes, I guess. They don't even really attend class, yeah. So Rothbard releases man economy and state in 1962. He spent maybe a decade almost writing it. It included in his work the chapters that now comprise power and market, which are some of the more radical chapters dealing with the potential privatization of police and courts and military defense. So again, on the heels of Arthur Burns, Rothbard finds himself up against another set of critics who don't want this more radical epilogue to the book included. And so Von Nostrand, the original publishing house, does not permit that. Yeah, so that was a, you know, in the sense that Rothbard, he spent all this time on this project in sort of the most controversial aspect of the project, the power and market where, you know, Rothbard was basically coming out, he was fleshing out the basics of his, you know, what was later famously known as, you know, anarcho-capitalism, et cetera, that was deemed too controversial. So he basically had to be shelved more or less until he could publish it in 1970. I think he made some minor revisions. But, I mean, and, you know, a lot of that stuff on government intervention, et cetera, that many public choice scholars sort of, you know, became famous for in the 60s. Rothbard, in many ways, when you read his work, there are improvements on, you know, I find power and market superior to the arguments of the public choice scholars such as Buchanan and Tolick, James Buchanan and Gordon Tolick. He, in many ways, he beat him to the punch in that book, but it was just unfortunate because it got published in a decade late. And in the academic world, you know, people can, you know, that's a long time. But yeah, that was another sort of setback where he spent all this time on this and then, you know, kind of the main punch or the influence of the book and, you know, that got, oh, it was deemed too controversial, so he couldn't publish it. So that was sort of another setback he had to deal with. And was there a particular person involved in making this decision? I'm not sure offhand. So I believe it was Frank Meyer, who basically read, there were some people who read the manuscript and said, well, this is too controversial. So, you know, it devised basically not to, you know, sort of basically said, well, you know, it shouldn't be published. And that was, Frank Meyer was sort of a conservative libertarian. And, you know, one of the things that bears emphasizing during this time period in the 50s and the 60s is that you had many free market people, you know, Austrian travelers and not, who were very, we would call them now sort of aggressive foreign policy. So they were like, yeah, free market's good, but we also need to nuke the Soviets kind of. You know, we need government, you know, that defense of the police and the law, et cetera. And that was something that, you know, was another sort of factor Rothbard had to deal with, where not only was he advancing free markets, but he was, in a sense, by advancing free markets and things like law and police, et cetera, he was also pushing for a non-interventionist foreign policy. And that sort of alienated him from many people who strongly disagreed with him on that. One thing Rothbard talks about is he wanted man economy and state to be more accessible than human action, which Mises wrote for a more scholarly or academic audience. And do you think that this made the book better? Do you think this lends itself to some of the criticisms of the book? And I also want you to touch on the section on monopoly, which I think is still heralded by Austrians as an advancement over Austrian theory at the time, or maybe even a correction in Mises, and derided by others who think antitrust legislation is legitimate. So talk about the book. Talk about man economy and state and some of the criticisms levied against it. Well, so, you know, man economy and state, you have it. It's one of those books where you either have people say that the critics, sometimes you have critics say that, oh, he doesn't really add anything. This is Rothbard sort of libertarianizing or almost kind of dumbing down human action. Or, you know, it's just Rothbard and what Mises said in human action is, in many ways, is different than what Rothbard said in man economy and state, which undeniably in many aspects is true outside of the economics. Human action was a book that was much more than sort of an economics treatise. It was, you know, delved into things like philosophy and, you know, some legal theory and, you know, went into, you know, various sorts of ethical systems or, you know, utilitarianism and you went into some historical episodes and so on. But, you know, a lot of people are just like, oh, you know, man economy and state, you know, you don't need to read it. When it came out, it really didn't have any sort of impact and that was just because the profession didn't value it and the Austrian movement was more or less dead. I think Joe Salerno is exactly correct when he says that the Austrian revival began with man economy and state. It didn't begin at South Royalton in the early 70s. It began with Rothbard. And if Rothbard, you know, got hit by a bus or, you know, he died in like the 50s or 60s there wouldn't be Austrian economics at least in the state that it's known as today. And the book, you know, it's a book that anyone, I almost don't value them as an Austrian economist if they haven't read the book and sort of appreciate what he's doing and understand the arguments that he's making because in many ways it's a very step-by-step elaboration of the economics theorems, Mises is sort of elucidating and building upon in human action. And he's most famously known for the monopoly theory distinction where he says, oh, he came out with a monopoly theory that, you know, Mises said you could have a monopoly price on the free market and Rothbard said that, you know, you couldn't. You know, monopolies can't be established on the free market and, you know, you can get into some of the history where it's been chronicled that, you know, Mises said that, oh, I agree with what Rothbard says, depending on the source or how it's phrased, but Mises held Rothbard's theory very highly. He held the book very highly. Sometimes people, you know, you bring up the, his, Mises was a very harsh critic and, you know, he had a very good review of the book in, I want to say it was the individualist, you know, when it came out. But so Rothbard, you know, new individualist review, but, you know, one of the things I found recently in Joe Salerno who has put the quote online is that Rothbard, Mises, you know, privately he praised the book to some contemporaries. He said, oh, if you want to understand what I'm saying in human action, read Rothbard's Man Economy and State. So, you know, it sometimes doesn't get, you know, love where you have some people say that, oh, it's just a restatement of what Mises says, you know, Rothbard adds nothing new. And then some people say, oh, it's not a restatement of Mises. Rothbard, he adds all this, you know, this other stuff and that's not what Mises is saying, et cetera. And it's easily, in my opinion, it's my, I would go and say it's my favorite book, just in general. It's influenced me more than any other book and it's so indispensable and you can't consider yourself, in my opinion, an Austrian economist level and a free market economist without reading Man Economy and State. Well, it's interesting, I think Mario Rizzo, who later went on to teach at NYU, I don't know when or what era he made this statement, but I think Mario Rizzo was one of the critics who said it was a rehash of human action rather than breaking new ground or new scholarly treatise. Let me read you the real quickest quote for our listeners. This is Mises reviewing the book and he says, this is an apocal contribution to the general science of human action, praxeology, and it's practically most important and up to now best elaborated part, economics. Henceforth, all essential studies in those branches of knowledge will have to take full account of the theories and criticisms expounded by Dr. Rothbard. So that's a nice criticism from, or a critical review from Mises. Now, before our listeners think we're too self-serving, we'll all have another quote later in the show from Mises that's not as favorable towards Murray. Let's talk a little bit more about monopoly. Was that received to the extent it was received? Was that received as groundbreaking? Was that dismissed? The idea that monopolies could not exist on the free market? So it was received in the Austrian circles. Part of the issue is just the profession when it was reviewed in professional journals by regular mainstream economists. The book just completely fell flat and there was no real serious discussion of its arguments because it was just like, well, you know, this is totally old-fashioned, there's no math, and it's got this weird sort of libertarian stuff at the end, and that was that. In the Austrian movement, it was received fairly well. Israel Kursner has had some sort of, wrote some sort of critical remarks later. A lot of people don't know this, but Mises' second edition of Human Action, the much maligned edition, that it's very hard to find. When I was a PhD student, I had to go through like five interlibrary loan sources just to actually get a physical copy of the 62 edition, or excuse me, the 63, in that he, Mises, actually kind of made revisions in response to Rothbard's main economy and state. He held it that highly, that that's kind of what he was going for. He even added a footnote on America's Great Depression, and part of this was over the anarchy stuff. Some of this was on some other things you can touch on. But the monopoly theory, a lot of people, even as critics, would say that that's his strongest. It's held up well, at least for the most part, in the Austrian movement. One of my favorite empirical books in the Austrian tradition, a great example of a microeconomic analysis of Austrian economics, is a book by Dominic Armantano, antitrust in monopoly anatomy of a policy failure. And he has this great, he goes to all these supreme court cases, and he basically uses Rothbardian monopoly theory to demolish each of them. He says that, well, this is on the free market, and it's a voluntary exchange, and you can't separate a competitive price from the market price independently using sort of the older monopoly theory. And also Rothbard's analysis of perfect competition is a fantastic demolition job of the theory, and that gets overlooked sometimes. But, I mean, his monopoly theory is great because it ties in with the rest of the book. And if there was one chapter of man-economy in state, that could be standalone. You could almost like sell as a standalone, you know, a little pamphlet. It would probably be monopoly in competition, chapter 10. What's interesting to me is that as a layperson, not an economist, I find this book tougher than human action. I wonder anecdotally how, if we could poll that, if people who aren't economists, and I think I've heard other people say that as well, that man-economy in state is a bit of a slog, whereas human action's got some conceptually dense stuff and some, not flowery language, but it's, you know, it's a little prettier in some ways. It obviously doesn't contain any equations or charts or anything like that. So maybe it's just because I come at things from more of a literary perspective that that's easier. Yeah, I think, you know, I forget who said this, but there's two types of Austrians, those read human action before man-economy in state and those who read man-economy in state before human action. And I think you're right in that most economists will say that man-economy in state is an easier read because it's clearer in that it just focuses straight on the economics. And if you're kind of familiar with the tools of the trade, so to speak, and graphs and supply and demand and just sort of more of the analytical sort of focus, like step-by-step building it up, it means this human action, I mean, is on everything. And so for those who are more of a philosophical or, you know, historical background, I think they find that an easier read because they can, they understand it better because he also touches on a lot of those topics. And that's something that, you know, I guess it's different strokes for different folks, so to speak. I've found man-economy in state much, you know, much clearer, but that's because I'm an economist by training. I think one of the, I think the most under-appreciated aspect of man-economy in state is that he's trying to basically spell out all of the economic theorems in Mises' human action. And that's something that, you know, gets, you know, under-appreciated or people just say, oh, Rappard's just synthesizing stuff or, you know, he's not adding anything new. And one, both of those are incorrect. He is adding, you know, much, you know, a lot of new stuff. But, you know, it really is, for people who think human action, the thrust of human action, the methodology of human action, the epistemology of human action, just the overall procedure, the praxeological approach of Mises is different than the praxeological approach of Rappard. I've said this before. I've said it again. And I'll continue to say it is that they're just wrong. You know, you can get into that, you know, they're clearly in the same tradition. But apart from any distinctions between Mises and Rothbard on method, generally speaking, of course, method is an area where Austrians in general, and Rothbard in particular, are criticized pretty heavily, praxeology, a prioriism. So in the same period, the 1950s, of course, he has, I guess, doubles down, if you want to call it, on Mises' praxeological approach in this book. But then he also has this great essay, which appeared in 1956 in the Southern Economic Journal called In Defense of Extreme A prioriism. So talk about some of Rothbard's critics with respect to method. So interesting is, man-economy and state, unlike Mises' human action, man-economy and state spends very little on method, you know, just the methodological procedure, the, you know, in terms of the method used by Rothbard in that book as by Mises in the book is deduction. And you start off with the fact that humans act, and you have some empirical assumptions that are broadly empirical in the sense that they don't need to be tested, but they're just self-evident. Like there's a variety of resources, you know, in terms of, you know, entrepreneurial ability, land, labor, leisure as a consumer's good, et cetera. And then you basically go with the approach that if A then B, and if B then C, and so on. And Rothbard spends, I want to say, all of two paragraphs at the end of chapter one and an appendix on this, and then he goes off to the races, and that's the approach. And Austrians have been criticized for that by the saying, oh, it's anti-scientific, it's not, you're not testing anything, you're not really doing serious work because you're saying things are a priori and you don't need to test theoretical assumptions and so to speak. And many Austrians, some Austrians more recently have criticized Rothbard by saying that, well, he's actually doing something that Mises is not doing. It's that Mises, apparently, as I've sort of referenced, is that I guess Mises was a terrible writer, apparently, because no one understood what he was doing except, you know, much later on. And that, you know, Mises was much closer to, I guess, what Fritz Maklop was trying to argue in the Southern Economic Journal that Rothbard responded to in a comment between a debate and him and another economist. But, you know, that's incorrect. They were basically using the same approach. They had differences in terms of how do you, you know, is it, how do you derive the de-action axiom and things like that. But they were, you know, the praxeological approach is very simple. You start off with self-evident assumptions and then you make, you know, you use the method of deduction to make conclusions about them. And then if the assumptions hold, then the theories hold and there's no need to test the theories and you can't even test them due to the differences between the social sciences and the natural sciences. That's the approach of Austrian economics. That's the axiological approach that Mises used, that Rothbard used. And it is different than the neoclassical approach because they use unrealistic assumptions and Austrians don't use those assumptions or they start, they could use them initially but then they drop them off. That's why you hear about this, you know, the causal realist economics or just sort of this real-world economics. But the, you know, it's kind of weird now and people saying, oh, Mises and Rothbard aren't saying the same thing. And while there are differences, they were very clearly in the same theoretical, methodological framework. Well, what was helpful to me, again, I mentioned this article in defense of extreme a prioriism, we can link to it with this show, Rothbard has a paragraph about whether axioms are laws of thought or laws of reality. And he comes down on the side of the ladder that they're laws of reality. So once you think of a law of reality then you understand that we, at least at first, perceive reality through our senses and in a way that means that's empirical. We use our senses to discover something. But as Murray points out, that's so far off from the positivist methods of which have now been applied to the social sciences so that when we use the term empiricism that's so far from what Mises meant, even if there's an initial empirical element to it that it's actually correct to consider a prioriism in the context of economics and methods. So that was, do you have any thoughts on that? I mean, it was something that clarified things for me and I hope I'm not making things even more murky for our audience. Oh yeah, I think you're exactly correct on that in that Rothbard. I mean, in his sense, that's why he said in an essay later on, he said it very clearly, I want to say it was breaking out of the Volraesian box. He wrote it in the, I want to say, 87 or something, where he said, you know, Austrian economics is actually sort of broadly empirical. In a sense, it's empirical understood in the initial sense that, like you said, it's based off sort of the laws of reality. And, you know, neoclassical economics or just other economics is not because it has all these unrealistic assumptions, you know, snuck in, et cetera. And that was something Rothbard was big on. I mean, Rothbard thought, and this is continued the tradition of Mises through Menger and Bamba Verk, that, you know, you're trying to understand real world phenomenon, real world prices, real world exchange, et cetera. And you are going to basically have to use real world assumptions and so on. So, yeah, that was an important point. I think, you know, a lot of people when discussing sort of the Mises' methodology and the controversy, they get very sort of stuck up on the action axiom and not sort of the later approach. So people, oh, okay, how do you get these starting assumptions? And the more interesting question in my mind has not really been the assumptions itself, but how you actually use that. So you can get into all sorts of stuff of criticisms by Friedman and other people, but, you know, the approach is something that's highly criticized today, but it's extremely important. You know, it's very fundamental to both Mises and Rothbard. Well, you bring up Milton Friedman. Talk about some of the criticisms of Rothbard by Milton Friedman. Obviously, we don't want to debate monetarism in full here, but that was obviously a huge point of tension between the two. But did they have a particular relationship and was there a particular criticism by Friedman that stands out to you? Basically, you know, Friedman was, Friedman and Rothbard, they were, you know, free market economists in the 50s and in the 60s, and Friedman, you know, became very famous, you know, later on, he won the Nobel Prize, et cetera. And, you know, they initially had, I believe, a cordial relationship. Rothbard was actually, Friedman offered Rothbard a postdoc at the University of Chicago and Rothbard declined it. He wanted to work on America's Great Depression and that became the sort of major bone of contention between them where their analysis of the 1920s and 1930s in terms of monetary economics is very different, you know, pulls apart. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, monetary history of the United States became, you know, sort of the standard analysis of the Great Depression and once those two books came out in 1963, any sort of friendly relationship they had basically evaporated. And there are some anecdotes of Friedman criticizing Rothbard's work early on in the 60s the America's Great Depression, but Rothbard afterwards sort of always held Friedman as sort of like the establishment libertarian and it was kind of taking positions that were not as hardcore as Rothbard would have liked them to be. And since Friedman was this very big figurehead in the libertarian movement it became almost like a well even Milton Friedman said something and this was, you know, on a much, you know, Friedman was definitely a free market economist F.A. Hayek was not at least in terms of policy prescriptions and you can get into the, you know, well, even Hayek said this. And that was something Rothbard, you know, was against because he wanted to present the very hardcore radical version of, you know, economics and Friedman was in a sense standing in the way. So following his head-to-head combat with Milton Friedman we get we then move into the 1970s and he comes out with perhaps one of his most controversial books, The Ethics of Liberty this book attempts to take make the normative case for laissez-faire and as a result blow up the sort of the mises and Henry Haslett rule utilitarianism that they had both promulgated it has controversial chapters about things like evictionism and children's rights about animal rights about all kinds of things. So let's talk about The Ethics of Liberty. Yeah, so that was one of his so I've said, you know, this isn't me coming up with this, you know, Rothbard had four major projects or sort of book projects in his life first one, man economy and state with power and market, then you had his conceived and liberty series then you had Ethics of Liberty and then you had the History of Thought series that was published you know, right after he died in his Ethics of Liberty is regarded by many as, you know, very controversial in the Libertarian movement a lot of people have sort of poo-pooed it but yeah, this was something where even, you know, he said that, you know, he disagreed Mises and other utilitarian utilitarians Rothbard was a natural rights advocate and he thought that the best justification or really the only justification for Liberty Libertarianism was sort of grounded or at least had to be grounded at least in some natural rights argument as opposed to other thinkers like Mises and Hazlett who did not buy into the natural rights theories. And didn't Robert Nozick, I think already at Harvard by then, have a critique of Ethics of Liberty? Yeah, so many people had critiques of the Ethics of Liberty where Nozick criticized at least so part of this went into the anarcho-capitalism that Rod argued in For New Liberty as well as Ethics of Liberty and how he, you know, oh, is this something that can the state will just emerge from these private protection agencies and so on. And yeah, that was another relationship where Rothbard and Nozick between Rothbard and Nozick were initially started off friendly but then they had very serious intellectual disagreements between them. And I mean at the end of the day, I think a very important point, so one, people always make these arguments it bears repeating as they say like, oh, Rothbard is in favor of, you know, basically like selling your kids into quasi-slavery or all sorts of other things. And that was never really his moral positions. He was just saying that was sort of ethically or really ethically interpreted as legally permissible in a free market society. I think David Gordon said this word, it's not necessarily like the Ethics of Liberty it's really more of the political philosophy of liberty where this is just what could be possible in a libertarian, you know, what is was permissible in a libertarian society whether or not people follow that is true. And I mean the big thing is that Rothbard in this, you know, as in many other works, but especially in Ethics of Liberty is that Rothbard was a, you know, black and white type of thinker and that you had what was right and you had it was wrong. You knew what he was, you know, he stood in a position he wasn't someone who was going to be relatively, you know, all of his positions he wasn't going to be murky or sort of flip-flop etc. And, you know, in the natural rights argument, this is where he comes down for liberty, you know, this is how you have to ground libertarianism in. And that's, you know, a lot of people have brought up criticisms of the, you know, Rothbard's approach and you need other stuff. But I think the main thing is the strongest argument in favor of natural rights and this is something that has been brought up before by authors such as, you know, Robert Higgs and by Murray Rothbard and egalitarianism as a result against nature is that you, you know, when you're not a natural rights libertarian, you tend to with Waffle, so to speak, and you sort of tend to compromise and then it just becomes the well of something works and then you're not going to really hold on to the theory, but you're just going to look at what the latest sort of empirical study purportedly shows or whatever and it's something that was really a major problem with the classical economists in the mid-1800s that Rothbard touches on. But, you know, that's you're not sort of a hardcore libertarian without sort of adhering or at least the vast majority of libertarians are not without adhering sort of to at least some natural rights framework. And I would argue, you know, the natural rights framework Rothbard uses. And let's not forget Ein Rand and Nathaniel Brandon, who had their own vicious critiques of this book and of Rothbard generally and had a falling out with him. And Patrick, let's be fair, the fact that he had fallings out with Nozick and with the Randy Inns and with the Friedmans and Anna Schwartz and, you know, I'm sure he was a strictly guy. A lot of people will tell you that and that while he was very sweet and kind and generous to young people, to libertarian scholars, to all kinds of people in our circles, there was also to be fair a side of him that was a bit in transit. It was tough to deal with. Yeah, I mean, I never knew the guy, but you definitely can get that impression. I mean, he was someone who when you have such a burning conviction of what you know as the truth and what you know is right and wrong in economics and history and philosophy, et cetera. Yeah, you absolutely can be and, you know, can be tough to deal with or in transient. And Rothbard was always, everyone would say he was always very helpful to people who, you know, was working in the paradigm he wanted to build, the Austro-libertarian paradigm. But if you disagreed with him, I mean, he would go to battle, so to speak. And he would be, he would be trenchant and, you know, he could be severe in his criticisms because there was sort of a right or a wrong that he wanted to show. And that's something that I, you know, he definitely, he definitely lived it. And there was a famous letter between him and I want to say Bob Kephart, where, you know, basically Rothbard said, oh yeah, you know, I could have had a more successful professional career if I didn't pick so many fights and make so many enemies with guys like Friedman or Nozick or Criticize Herbert Hoover or things like that. He's like, I could have done that. I could have worked at Heritage or you know, et cetera. I had, you know, I had a nice gig. I could have made more money. I could have been more famous, et cetera. But he said, you know, why I did that is because I think he paraphrased Knut Vicksell on this. He said, you know, no one else was doing it. I had to do it. You know, no one else was doing it. No one else was making these arguments. No one else was defending a purely free, you know, not a minarchist society, but a purely free anarcho capitalist society. No one else was criticizing Herbert Hoover. No one else was criticizing Milton Friedman for supporting policies, you know, not the total free market policy, et cetera. He's like, so no one else was doing it. Someone had to do it and I had to basically step up to the plate, so to speak. And, you know, it absolutely cost him various sorts of friendships or allies and career success, but he was out for, you know, the truth. And that was something that he always was extremely proud of and, you know, took a very high, you know, moral stance on. Here's something interesting. You know, Hayek's career and reputation as an economist never suffered because he later in his career went off into political theory, ethics, law, legislation, et cetera in a status direction I might add. But Rothbard's career and reputation as an economist seems to have suffered because he, not so much later, but intertwined, went off into economic history, philosophy, theory, political science, et cetera. So in an anarchist direction. So I think there's a little bit of a disparate treatment here. Oh, absolutely. And even in a sense, you know, Hayek is just was regarded and still is regarded as more important finger than aside from Rothbard, someone like Mises. And I definitely don't think there's a coincidence that the year after Mises dies, Hayek gets awarded the Nobel Prize. I think they are supposed to release the minutes of their decision for that. Like it was supposed to be like 60 or 50 years after the fact. So sometime this decade, you know, we'll get the full explanation of of at least what they choose to release why Hayek was awarded the the prize to share with Gunnar Myrtle. But yeah, you know, Hayek, he had many theories that free market thinkers have utilized. I mean, even, you know, Rothbard held many of his theories on capital, you know, capital theory and his stuff on competition, you know, economic coordination very highly. But you look at the this is always my biggest criticism of constitutional liberty, just like stuff with John Stuart Mill, you know, you look at the theory, but then how they apply the theory and it's just like it becomes a mess, like Hayek kind of like ends up supporting something quasi like Obamacare and the constitutional liberty. And even like the road to serfdom is not, you know, he comes out in favor of various sorts of government regulation, etc. that, you know, a free market person would be very much against. And it definitely explains things where if you have someone who kind of takes the quote safe position sometimes, you know, not trying to be too harsh on Hayek here, it definitely adds to more, you know, fame and accolades later. But it's definitely an important difference between sort of, I guess you could say the careers of Hayek and Rothbard. Hayek actually, in the late 70s, he wrote the forward to a small little Rothbard pamphlet of papers and he said that, you know, both of us are very influenced by Mises and, you know, we've been carrying his theories in different directions that we would disagree with, that we might disagree with. And, you know, he said, there's no one better than Rothbard, something like this, to sort of explain many of Mises' theories to an English speaking audience. So it's sort of high praise, but you know, it is an important difference. It's that Rothbard took positions with other people in terms of theory, in terms of history that absolutely cost them professionally. And it's unfortunate to say, but it's the truth. Well, and I think part of it is going drifting towards anarchism and anarcho-capitalism. I just think that that's an unpopular perspective in academia. And as I said earlier, Hayek got padded on the back and ultimately got a Nobel after moving into state of direction. Let's not forget Constitutional Liberty was later, 16 years later, then road to serfdom. So he more than doubled down on some of his big government ideas. But it also cost Murray a little bit of Mises himself in Guido Hausmann's biography of Mises. He has this quote here where he's talking about learning that some of his acolytes or adherents were becoming anarchists. People like Ralph Raco, for example. And so he talks about Mises. He says in a private letter, among the things which are really disturbing is the case of Murray Rothbard. He's talking about him being an anarchist. It's sad to see a brilliant mind like his go to pot that way. So Mises himself had some criticisms of Rothbard in his 60s and early 70s period, the former. So I think fairness requires us to point that out. Yeah, exactly. I think that's a valid point. I think I mentioned part somewhat similar earlier where Mises, if you look at the difference between at least some of the changes in the third edition with the first edition, it's really the second edition of the first edition, but as far as I'm aware, there's not a single person who has published the second edition, aside from its original print, the famous mangling of a masterpiece by Yale, etc. You look at some of his, I mean Mises comes out for things like the draft. He takes a position where some people have brought this up where Rothbard thought that, it's true, Rothbard thought the government was evil. Mises in a sense thought the government was good like that basic binarcus government. I mean, they both thought it was coercive and led to all sorts of problems, but Mises never bought into any of the, as far as I think most anyone's aware, he never bought into any of the anarchists or private protection, private police protection and everything. People have always brought that up by saying, oh Rothbard just something like, oh Rothbard, he can't be a true libertarian, the immigration or something like that later in his life. But yeah, okay, but Mises you look at some of his policy at least positions later on in his life you mentioned things like the draft or military conscription and then you look at Hayek and you're like, well however right or wrong someone changes their position, it's not like people can often be unfair to Rothbard at that and they don't necessarily give him the credit of really keeping alive that sort of non-interventionist strand of libertarianism in free market economics and that still is an important distinction. You know, you have many free market think tanks et cetera, writers who they can be quite bellicose when it comes to foreign policy and war and things like that, that Rothbard in theory and history was just flatly against. I'd like to move forward and throw out some names, some current names and just a little bit about the subject and just give us some brief thoughts on each name. These are all Rothbard critics and most of whom are still alive. So just do a bit of a round robin here with me. Let's start with the amazing still alive Israel Kersner who is alive and well in New York and still to my knowledge of practicing rabbi it doesn't travel much we've invited into some events but Kersner had some gentle or gentlemanly criticism of Rothbard in the area price theory for example and really identified himself as having developed a different strand of Missessian economics from Rothbard, a wholly different strand. So talk about that a little bit. So Israel Kersner definitely someone if you are interested in Austrian economics you should read, you have to read his works, economic point of view, market theory in the price system, competition and entrepreneurship because he was someone who was very influenced by Mises and he had a lot of ways to develop. So Rothbard went concentrated on all aspects of the Mises's thought Kersner is famously known for his entrepreneurship and the alertness and things like that and many people have argued that sort of the Misesian entrepreneur and Kersner is the best student of Mises and all this stuff because he went sort of the scholarly route he went to NYU he studied under Mises and then he taught at NYU etc Kersner, if you look at market theory in the price system it's definitely have Austrian elements and many good Austrian elements I might add but it was still grounded in the general neoclassical price theory in that there's not a whole lot of difference between say that book in a standard neoclassical micro economic book in Rothbard versus Rothbard's main economy state and Kersner had criticisms of Rothbard and sometimes in private letters as well as in public interviews he said Rothbard was too focused on libertarianism and sort of got sidetracked etc they were very important colleagues I know Rothbard held him in high regard he criticized his theories his entrepreneurship theories I think Rothbard is correct in his criticism of Kersner I think sometimes people in various circles you might bring up Kersner is sort of a better economist than Rothbard I don't believe that's true certainly at least in Misesian economics Austrian economics but I would argue just in general is that Rothbard wrote on so much more and I think his analysis is much more penetrating and full of insights and many things that Kersner wrote about later Rothbard beat him to the punch in man economy and state so very important economist he criticized Rothbard you know Rothbard criticized him back I think Rothbard you know in the in the right how about the late Leland Jaeger who died just a few years ago and he was finished his career here at Auburn and he was more of he wouldn't have turned himself in Austrian but he had some specific criticisms of Rothbard yeah so Jaeger the relationship actually was long began in the 50s I believe Rothbard his famous the search for 100% gold dollar that was in a book by Leland Jaeger Leland Jaeger was a monetary disequilibrium theorist I guess is how you would describe it and he criticized Rothbard's monetary theory he was also prominent criticism in sort of the calculation debate saying that you know Mises and Hayek as what Kersner said we're not really saying anything substantively different at least in their arguments in Rothbard as well as others like Joe Salerno and so on made the argument that they were saying something differently or at least the Hayek in the use of knowledge in society is sort of very neoclassical whether speaking that audience is a different question entirely but yeah so Jaeger and Rothbard went at it you know before it deals with a lot of the criticism of or the discussion that you know how and this is something that someone like Brian Kaplan has touched on how unique is Austrian economics how different is it from just say free market, Chicago school economics etc and they had their disagreements again I tend to side with Rothbard on this I think that his monetary theory is certainly correct in terms of the business cycle theory as well as just the whole mechanics of it but that was another prominent relationship Rothbard had with someone most of his life and they disagreed on things they agreed on many things but they also disagreed on things How about Larry White and George Seljan the former at GMU they're both free banking advocates and obviously they sparred with Rothbard over free banking but monetary issues in general well so as a caveat Larry White was my dissertation advisor he you know so I wrote very Rothbardian papers under him and he was always very gracious in terms of letting you know allowing me to write those and he provided very helpful comments and things like that but they were also very noted critics of Rothbard and this became particularly in the 80s and 90s where they had various disagreements on the theory of free banking as well as the history Rothbard initially supported Larry White's analysis of Scotland in the mystery of banking then later on in the review of history economics in the 80s that was the old name for the quarterly journal sort of very seriously criticized White's his theory they were you know that's another important distinction or sort of schism there were many splits in the 80s and things like monetary economics method you get into things like the hermeneutical debate you get into the calculation debate and this is Joe Solerna has made this argument of these things have been in many ways building since the 70s and the 60s you've had these separate strands of Austrian economics it's just that once the movement so to speak became big enough by the early 80s you had this a lot of these differences these doctrinal disputes to use a cursinarian phrase I remember he would use that in several presentations I went listen to him on I always like that that phrase those became more apparent in White and Seljan Rothbard sort of criticized them and sort of having almost the Keynesian or what we described as a new Keynesian approach where you use the theory of sticky prices and there's maintaining a nominal spending stream and this gets into discussion over Austrian business cycle theory and the appropriate response after recessions and things like that but it's an important difference and that was definitely a distinction between Rothbard and other Austrian economists. Now how about Jason Brennan philosophy professor at Georgetown if I recall reading one time where not only did he think Rothbard wasn't a good economist but he didn't like the way he lived his life or something along those lines so what do you know about Jason Brennan's criticisms of Rothbard? Well I think it relates to the ethics of liberty as well as just the Austrian some of the stuff relating to man economy and state but you know Jason Brennan is a philosopher I'm not as well versed in philosophy as I am in economics and history I can go through sort of some of the basics but it relates to various comments made I believe on bleeding heart libertarians you know that website in the you know sort of the criticism I think it's apparent sort of what the Brennan comments as well as many other comments in many Austrian just in Austrian circles but in sort of various free market circles broadly conceived is that Rothbard is not held in high regard by many people there he's not sort of seen as one of the fundamental free market thinkers of the 20th century and this is partially because Rothbard had many very important theoretical as well as personal disagreements with these people or sort of older people and sort of you have these battles continuing onwards but I don't think those are I think almost part of it is blowing smoke or you're just trying to get people mad I believe I remember where you were referring to and it was almost sort of shocked when you said oh not a good philosopher or not a good economist etc. and it's just you know one it's an old saying if you strike out a king you have to kill him because if you're taking shots of people you better be prepared to back it up in terms of both sort of what you've done as well as kind of the arguments that you make and it's I think it's another example of I think what Joe Solarno has called the Rothbard haters it's a new cottage industry instead of figuring out what Hayek or Mises said you now just kind of have these related you have people you know hating on Rothbard so to speak well we're almost out of time let's finish with Brian Kaplan also at GMU he wrote among other things a famous essay why I'm not an Austrian economist where he takes to task the Austrian business cycle theory is facile I guess and also suggests we wouldn't business bad figure this out over time and if I recall correctly he does single out Rothbard he started one or two points in that essay oh yeah so the why I'm not an Austrian economist that's basically an online version I want to say Brian Kaplan might have one of the earliest websites in the history of the internet at least if you look at the old old version of it you can see that posted up it's really really fascinating that was I believe it was published in the southern economic journals called the Austrian search for realistic foundations and Kaplan makes the point where he says you know he takes the position you have these various splits in sort of Austrian the Austrian school of economics broadly conceived you have the people who say Mises and Hayek were closer together than Rothbard then you have people who say Mises and Rothbard were closer together and Hayek was better that's sort of like a Caldwell position Bruce Caldwell position and then you have other people say Mises and Hayek were closer together and they were better you know that's like the Mises Institute position and you know Kaplan makes the argument he says that you know Mises he thinks they're wrong but he thinks that Mises and Rothbard are working in the same paradigm etc and he brings in things you know from the basics of like indifference curve like probability to the business cycle he's got that very famous comment you know you critique you mentioned that well why don't just people basically learn that you know when they borrow it's going to you know it's going to cause an Austrian business cycle theory you know they're just going to be able to anticipate it and you know this gets into the well you know they're trying to make profit so they take the bait and they think they can invest in these projects and they'll be able to get out in time before other people do and Mises actually made some similar points in the revised initiative of human action but it's not really like it doesn't really criticize as well as Lochman I believe it doesn't really like it's not a fundamental criticism of Austrian business cycle theory it's almost similar like criticism oh why does consumption increase it's somewhat of like a almost like a I have tremendous respect for Brian Kaplan I'm not contributing this to him but it's people bring this argument up and it's like oh that just demolishes the theory and it's like actually no you have to you know it still holds you just have to understand it better it's almost people bring up almost like a childish argument on no I don't people just anticipate it like well you know if I was the king entrepreneur of the world then like everything I would do would be great kind of and you're like well you know it's actually not how entrepreneurs behave so you know that's an important criticism of Rothbard that Kaplan paper and I highly recommend everyone who hasn't read it to read it well we'll finish on that note and I will add Brian Kaplan actually attended an early Mises you this must have been late 80s I'm going to guess when Murray Rothbard was still alive and apparently spent quite a bit of time with him and benefited tremendously from that time so I think his criticisms are in the gentlemanly sphere ladies and gentlemen our guest is Patrick Newman we will put a link to his bio with this show we will put a link to his new book Murray Rothbard's new book Conceded Liberty which will be available for purchase soon we'll put a link to our upcoming event in Los Angeles in about two weeks which you should attend if you're within driving or flying distance and finally we will put up a link to this really intriguing little six page article in defense of extreme a prioriism because if you struggle with that those kinds of concepts as I do you'll find it very helpful so Patrick all that said thanks a million for your time buddy alright well thank you so much Jeff I appreciate you having me on The Human Action 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