Today’s featured article at Mises.org, “National Review and the Triumph of the New Right,” was written in the early 1970s, when the Vietnam War and a Nixon White House had already convinced many libertarians that Buckleyite conservatism was as or more dangerous than the Establishment Left.

But 20 years earlier, many individualists embraced young William F. Buckley, Jr. as a future leader of the resistance and a fellow enemy of the State.

Twenty-six-year-old Murray Rothbard was one the very few able to congratulate himself "for treating the Buckley Boom on the intellectual Right with considerable skepticism."

Rather than "a welcome newcomer to the libertarian ranks," wrote Rothbard, “Buckley is really, in 1952 terms, a totalitarian socialist, and what is more, admits it.” FULL ARTICLE

Actually, that’s the wrong question, since the law-enforcement lobby would make it very, very expensive to abolish the police through legal channels, and any violent attempt to bypass legal channels would probably end up having the opposite effect.

What I mean is this: if we pushed the Rothbardian button* and made all the cops go away tomorrow, how much would it cost to implement a private libertarian replacement, where person and property are protected, and victimless so-called crimes are nobody’s business but the nonexistent victims?

Gil Guillory, et al. have crunched the numbers. He summarizes on LRC. Here’s my summary of his summary (dollar amounts are per annum per household):

* Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, final chapter, “A Strategy for Liberty”:

“The libertarian, then, should be a person who would push the button, if it existed, for the instantaneous abolition of all invasions of liberty.”

** If the payouts were capped at your homeowner’s insurance deductible, it would only be $25.