…
(Read the rest.)

From “Faith, Snow & Government” by Skip Oliva:

It’s often said that libertarians have “faith” in free markets. I don’t think that’s the case. What we have is an understanding of the division of labor and the law of comparative advantage. Some people mistakenly confuse that with religious fanaticism. …

Government, in contrast, is an attempt to violate the natural laws of economics. The division of labor is irrelevant, claim the faithful, because we have elections to install leaders who will provide all manner of services, regardless of the leaders’ actual knowledge of experience. If we just elect the “right” people and have faith in them, the political system will outperform individual action and voluntary exchange.

See also Literature and the Economics of Liberty by Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox

Here’s what I wrote 5 years ago about what happened 15 years ago:

Friday, January 07, 2005

Murray N. Rothbard, R.I.P.

I came to libertarianism through taking The World’s Shortest Political Quiz at a gun show in Richmond. (That’s one version of the story. Another is that 10 years earlier, my mother baptized me a libertarian when I told her she wasn’t being liberal and she told me I had the wrong L-word in mind.)

I had already quit the Democrats, but was still voting and calling myself “independent”. Now I joined the Libertarian Party and started handing out the business-card-sized version of the quiz and talking to people about the ethics of economic liberty.

It turns out that around the same time, Murray Rothbard died. I had no idea who he was.

My libertarian reading consisted first of Robert Anton Wilson and later of Wendy McElroy. I can’t remember how I discovered McElroy, but Wilson was one of those writers all the weirdos in college knew and loved — so, true to my established habits, I read his stuff several years after I no longer knew anyone who had heard of him.

Wilson and McElroy (and Ken MacLeod) lead me to Benjamin Tucker and to Individualist Anarchism, which manifested in BlackCrayon.com.

Meanwhile, I was crossing the name Rothbard more and more. Never happily. Who was this “Mr. Libertarian” and how dare he (or his followers, rather) claim himself to be so central to this movement that now defined my life (but about whose history I apparently still knew nothing).

McElroy went so far as to claim that the modern libertarian movement was founded in Rothbard’s livingroom on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — which is more or less where I grew up. The nerve of this man: I’d never heard of him!

MacLeod said that the anarchies in his novel were based on the writings of Murray Rothbard and David Friedman. He also talked in the novel about Ludwig von Mises, some dead old-world economist.

Economics didn’t interest me yet, but I had to read the Friedman and Rothbard books he’d referred to. And I did. And I like them both, but I was clearly a natural-law Rothbardian and not a utilitarian Friedmanite.

I added a Murray Rothbard page to BlackCrayon.com and looked into creating a Rothbard website. But now I learned there were these other websites — Mises.org and LewRockwell.com — seeming to represent the great man’s work. Again, I was put off. Who were these people I had never heard of claiming to represent the legacy of this other guy I had only recently heard of!? Such chutzpah!

(Yes, I know that all this outrage makes me sound like I was in my teens, but I was already in my thirties. Some of us develop slower than others.)

Today, January 7th, 2005, it’s the 10-year anniversary of Murray Rothbard’s death. I’m not positive how long I’ve been part of the movement, but I’ve decided to call it 10 years as well. Nice symmetry that way.

I know that the calendar marks arbitrary units and aggregates of time only roughly corresponding to some combination of our planet’s motion around itself and our star as counted in the number system of our evolved anatomy, but still: a 10-year anniversary has an emotional impact on me. It feels meaningful. I feel sad that he died before I’d heard of him, sad that I never got to meet him. I’m now in correspondence with plenty of people who did know him, and I’m unbelievably envious of them. (See emotional-maturity comment, above.)

On my Murray Rothbard page, I link to the two books I’d recommend starting with, for those of you fortunate and unfortunate souls who don’t know them yet. (They’re also available, gratis, in electronic format here, here, and more generally here.)

To mark the occassion, today’s Daily Article from the Ludwig von Mises Institute (and also the lead article at LewRockwell.com) is here:

The Unstoppable Rothbard

His influence increases, his detractors are confounded.

posted by bkMarcus on Friday, January 07, 2005

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[From chapter 8 of The Rise and Fall of Society by Frank Chodorov.]

As everyone knows, an analogy is neither evidence nor proof. And yet, since Aristotle it has been common practice among political scientists to call upon an analogy to support a theory of the origin of Government; namely, that Government grew out of the organization of the family.

There is, of course, no historical evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between the two institutions; all that we have is an unproven hypothesis, resting on an assumed similarity between parental authority and Government authority.

The hypothesis disproves itself, however, when the biological factor in parental authority is taken into consideration. The child looks to the parent for guidance simply because of the inadequacies and insecurity of childhood, and seeks or accepts authority as a matter of necessity. Government has no such claim on its citizenry, nor is loyalty to it in any way analogous to filial devotion. Even the father-son relationship alters in character as the offspring reaches maturity and attains self-sufficiency, a relationship in which authority diminishes and disappears; the citizen’s allegiance to Government is unrelated to his age or to his ability to take care of himself.

Neat as the analogy is, it does not bear up under analysis and one must look elsewhere for some explanation of the phenomenon of Government.

Frank Chodorov was an advocate of the free market, individualism, and peace. He began as a supporter of Henry George and edited the Georgist paper the Freeman before founding his own journal which became the influential Human Events. He later founded another version of the Freeman for the Foundation for Economic Education and lectured at the Freedom School in Colorado.