Fifty years since its initial publication, Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty continues to have a transformative impact on readers. For many, the book produces a complete paradigm shift in their thinking about politics. Starting with just a few basic and apparently commonsense principles, Rothbard’s book constructs an intellectual system that winds up overturning almost everything that readers thought they knew about freedom, justice, and the state. The effect is a kind of demystification. As Rothbard put it in one of the book’s more memorable passages,
War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian, in short, is almost completely like the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes. (1973, 29)1
As John Tomasi and I have argued in our history of libertarian thought, Rothbard’s libertarianism draws on a long tradition of classical liberal ideas regarding the moral and economic importance of private property and free markets, skepticism of state authority, and a commitment to individualism, individual liberty, and spontaneous order (Zwolinski and Tomasi, 2023). But unlike earlier classical liberals who generally regarded these ideas as presumptions that could be overturned by sufficiently weighty empirical or moral considerations, Rothbard’s libertarianism holds them as absolutes. Private property and free markets are, for Rothbard, no mere “rules of thumb” for a peaceful and prosperous society, but rationalistically derived imperatives that hold always and everywhere, without exception.
In this paper, I will argue that Rothbard’s libertarianism suffers from a number of serious deficiencies. The arguments that Rothbard provides for his particular version of libertarianism are radically incomplete and, in some cases, patently fallacious. And the conclusions that he reaches are grossly implausible, even when judged by the standard of an overriding commitment to individual liberty.
To be clear, I should state up front that the scope of this paper is quite narrowly limited. In keeping with the approach of the symposium, my focus here is on Rothbard’s arguments as they are presented in For a New Liberty. And even within that book, almost all of my attention will be on the second chapter, “Property and Exchange.” I therefore cannot claim to be providing anything like an exhaustive critique of Rothbard’s philosophy, let alone of Rothbardian philosophy as it has been developed by later scholars.
However, while the arguments that I will examine are not exhaustive of Rothbard’s political philosophy, they are nevertheless foundational to it. For it is in this chapter that Rothbard sets out his main theses regarding self-ownership, homesteading, and freedom, and it is from these ideas that almost the entirety of the remainder Rothbard’s political philosophy is derived.
Moreover, while the presentation that Rothbard gives to these ideas in For a New Liberty is by no means his last or even his most sophisticated word on the topics, it is almost certainly his most influential. A great many readers are drawn to Rothbard’s philosophy in part because of the apparent simplicity and elegance of his ideas as they appear in that book. My goal is to show that those ideas are not merely simple but simplistic, and thus that the influence of Rothbard’s arguments far outstrips their philosophic merit.
I begin my analysis in the next section with a discussion of self-ownership. I show that Rothbard’s argument for self-ownership fails, and that this failure reveals a deeper misunderstanding about the concept of ownership as such. I then turn to the relationship between property and freedom. Classical liberals have long viewed these concepts as deeply related, but on the Rothbardian. I argue that this conflation leads to both an overestimation and an underestimation of the importance of property rights, and that the Rothbardian understanding of freedom is one that is deeply unattractive as a normative ideal.
