Murray Newton Rothbard (March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American intellectual, individualist anarchist,[1] author, and economist of the Austrian School who helped define modern libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed “anarcho-capitalism“.[2][3] Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered by some to be “dean of the Austrian School of economics, the founder oflibertarianism, and an exemplar of the Old Right“.[4]
Building on the Austrian School’s concept of spontaneous order, support for a free market in money production and condemnation of central planning,[5] Rothbard advocated minimum coercive government control of the economy. He considered the monopoly force of government the greatest danger to liberty and the long-term wellbeing of the populace, labeling the State as nothing but a “gang of thieves writ large”—the locus of the most immoral, grasping and unscrupulous individuals in any society.[6][7][8][9]
Rothbard concluded that virtually all services provided by monopoly governments could be provided more efficiently by the private sector. He viewed many regulations and laws ostensibly promulgated for the “public interest” as self-interested power grabs by scheming government bureaucrats engaging in dangerously unfettered self-aggrandizement, as they were not subject to market disciplines which would quickly eliminate such parasitic inefficiencies if they were to occur in the competitive private sector.[10][11][12]
Rothbard was equally condemning of state corporatism. He criticized many instances where business elites co-opted government’s monopoly power so as to influence laws and regulatory policy in a manner benefiting them at the expense of their competitive rivals.[13]
He argued that taxation represents coercive theft on a grand scale, and “a compulsory monopoly of force” prohibiting the more efficient voluntary procurement of defense and judicial services from competing suppliers.[7][14] He also considered central banking and fractional reserve banking under a monopoly fiat money system a form of state-sponsored, legalized financial fraud, antithetical to libertarian principles and ethics.[15][16][17][18] Rothbard opposed military, political, and economic interventionism in the affairs of other nations.[19][20]
“Murray Rothbard,” Wikipedia
