HEN THE LIBERTARIAN philosopher Robert Nozick dragged his landlord before the Cambridge Rent Control Board, Murray Rothbard, who also lived in a rent-controlled apartment and also did philosophy, argued that there is a moral difference between accepting a subsidy and agitating for one. “One is living your life within a State-created matrix, while trying to work against the system,” Rothbard wrote in a 1987 issue. “The other is actively using the State to benefit yourself and screw your fellow man, which means initiating and abetting aggression and theft.”
