| Title | : | For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 338 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1973 |
For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto Reviews
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A facile argument that attempts to borrow authority from Locke and the natural rights tradition.
Interestingly, what is wrong about this book is fairly easily summarized. On p.38, he quotes from one of Locke's treatises on government:
. . . every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined it to something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to.
Now, what is interesting is not that he is quoting Locke (or the natural rights tradition, flawed as it is, more generally), or what he is quoting from Locke, but rather what Rothbard is omitting. Consider the full paragraph, which runs as follows:Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined it to something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.
See what is left out? It is basically because of this omission that Rothbard can make his case at all (ignoring the fact that the rest of the book is filled to the brim with false dichotomies and other kinds of sloppy argumentation). Because most if not all of the rest of his argument rests on the twin assumptions that a. a society is just only if there exist private property rights, and b. these rights are necessarily absolute, which these omissions -- concerning the absolute nature of this status, and property rights as an organizing principle more generally -- are explicitly meant as checks against. -
a truly evil man who believed parents should have the right to starve their children and a 'free trade in children''! Libertarians bug the crap out of me with their self-righteousness when they actually totally amoral. And I am NOT a woke lefty!
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Words like liberal, conservative, left and right were twisted, distorted and deformed in such a manner that their meaning is kind of lost. Rothbard explains the values of libertarianism - so in this book you will find not only Rothbard's views on money, banking, FED and gold standard - which are leading topics of the majority of his work - but also on many other fields of the organization of a human society.
Rothbard defends liberty, property rights and gives a thorough description of functioning of a society built upon few simple principles.
This kind of an "axiomatic" way is innovative and refreshing compared to that of main stream politicians, whose claims and policies contradict the common sense and sometimes even themselves.
The book can be downloaded for free at Ludvig von Mises Institute's website (
www.mises.org) in PDF and also as audiobook in MP3 - I strongly recommend reading it to everyone. -
For A New Liberty systematically exemplifies the philosophical theory of libertarianism while categorically denouncing the destructive violent and coercive nature of government. The existence of government is preposterous given it is the only entity that enjoys the monopolistic legal use of violence and coercion and obtain revenue without voluntary exchange by some arbitrary decree. Rothbard brilliantly chronicles the nascent of libertarianism while in addition to explaining the philosophy of the libertarian creed in establishing free markets, personal liberty and property rights, yet government intervention continually disrupts voluntary action and exchange thus acting as a combative to individualism. All societal problems originate from government intervention, so Rothbard applies the libertarian creed as a remedy.
The American Revolution sparked the greatest event to libertarianism but commenced by the French and English Revolutionaries before it. The fundamental axiom to the libertarian creed is “that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else.” The non aggression axiom is naturally amended to property rights for individual ownership. The most important aspect of the market economy is voluntary exchange for mutual benefit; thus, any exchange not agreed upon by means of violence or coercion violates the libertarian creed, so the state is the eternally superior and most organized aggressor of all persons and property. It's rulers and operators are held above moral law where criminal activity is cloaked by rhetoric. For centuries murder has been called war, and slavery has been called conscription, and theft has been called taxation.
Every problem of society inscribes the failure of government, for every application of the libertarian creed would bring increased social and economic cooperation, and each solution is as important as the next, but there were some standouts. The chapter on inflation and the business cycle is the crowning jewel of the book, for without the power to inflate the money supply, government is powerless if expenditures are not expanding particularly by war. Honorable mention goes to the chapters on war and foreign policy along with police protection, the law and courts.
For A New Liberty naturally stimulates discussion for the prospect of absolute freedom and the abolition of government. Rothbard unequivocally postulates logical and rational arguments supplemented by an plethora of examples. For A New Liberty describes an alternative means how individuals could interact in an completely non aggression society. Lastly, Rothbard was known as the "State’s Greatest Living Enemy,” for this manifesto leaves no doubt as to why. -
Had been debating a foray into this book for a while, as I have saturated myself thoroughly with Libertarian reading the past few years and really wondered if I wasn't going to just rehash ideas I am well familiar with. That being said I was floored by this book. While I was certainly part of the choir being preached to, Rothbard has an incredible ability to make you reanalyze seemingly mundane standards and precedents and recognize now-glaring inconsistencies in logic/philosophy. His rhetoric is among the best I have read in recent times, and his arguments all come packed with preemptive counterarguments and relevant history. Rothbard is extremely unique, and indeed prophetic in many elements highlighting the issues in this country. One could read through this book and disagree with his entire philosophy the whole way, but if you didn't learn anything that made you question the value of the status quo, you didn't actually read it (particularly when you note the further decline since the writing of this book and his key criticisms of the US's direction). While this book is often recommended as a first step in exploring Libertarian philosophy, I would recommend reading some of the previous thought leaders & economists and then reaching this book (as I did). You will appreciate just how unique it shines from others, while admiring how it synthesizes the key elements that bind a highly diverse political philosophy
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Though I was familiar with some of the libertarian views before starting the book, I had doubts about the feasibility of others... doubts which this book managed to address, and much more than that. The author describes in a rigorous and logical way a world which is even more amazing than I could imagine. I was very very impressed by this book. I also liked that the focus was not on complaining on how twisted our present state is, but on presenting the solution... and a fantastic one at that. One of individual freedom, social peace and prosperity.
I must admit I'm often tempted to the more utilitarian side of the argument, but I can't help but wholly admire and be drawn to the authors more principled view, who puts freedom and right of personal ownership way above any other social principles... and yet manages to prove that a world like that would be beneficial to us all and not the anarchic dangerous wild west that many imagine. We need more people like this!
For myself I must admit I often am amazed at how blessed we are to be living in a world in which the utilitarian and principled/moral views lead to the same optimal solution. It didn't have to be like that (and indeed many tragedies in history have been caused by reasonable hypothesizing that it isn't)... and yet it is! What an amazing world we live in! -
This is a MUST-READ! This book explains the only way to have a TRULY free society without the contradictions and hypocrisy of both the right and the left. I've said for years that the only real difference between the Republicans and Democrats is WHICH big corporations they are in bed with and WHICH of our liberties they want to strip from us. This book details the reasons for this.
The book was written in the late '70's, so some of the examples area dated, but the concepts still hold true. The only real problem was his prediction that T.V. would become better once we had choices in channels. . . -
El libro es bastante introductorio. Hay muchas pegas que se le pueden poner a ciertos aspectos (aborto, coeficiente del 100%, etc). Sin embargo, es una buena guía para gente que se introduzca en el tema del libertarismo.
Lo que más me ha impactado es la dura crítica que dirige Rothbard a EEUU sobre su política exterior expansionista (a la que él denomina explícitamente “imperialista”) y el halago que dirige a la política exterior de Stalin, no expansionista. Casi parece que habla bien de él, me ha hecho verle con (medio) buenos ojos por primera vez en mi vida jajajajjajaja. Intuyo que ese será el capítulo que más crispe a los yankees.
Hay un error que lleva a confusión en esta traducción. No recuerdo en qué página es exactamente, pero en el capítulo sobre medioambiente (13, si no me equivoco), la traducción dice explícitamente que puede haber propiedad sobre el aire. Sin embargo, en la versión en inglés queda más claro que lo que dice Rothbard es que se puede tener propiedad sobre tus pulmones y de ahí que la contaminación aérea sea un daño punible, pero NO dice que se pueda poseer el aire. -
Typical Libertarian manifesto. Though in the solutions sections he never really did tell us how libertarians will take over the government and make it into what he thinks government should be.
A couple of problems with some of his more interesting proposals.
The police officers and the streets would be a disaster if people were allowed to each own their own street and their own police and their own courts and their own bridges...I'm a republican and happy that we have government to handle things like that. I don't think it's plausible.
Another problem I have with libertarian doctrine is that he says the poor are poor because they are forced by the gov't to be poor. While many of the social programs do do this, that's not the ONLY reason that they are poor. In a libertarian society, the poor wouldn't be able to own their own houses either. That's why they are poor!!!!!!! They don't have any money for a reason!!! God forbid Gov't tries to help them out.
The society proposed in this book would be highly unpredictable and unsustainable. He says that communism is way different than libertarians and that only communism is impossible. Yet, he doesn't see that a libertarian society, a different utopian society, is as impossible as communism.
That being the case, I gave him two stars for effort, because most libertarians couldn't even imagine their own ideal society and do in fact often confuse it with communism. -
Interesting Quotes:
"The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of
the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian, in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes . . . The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the 'democratic' State has no clothes; that all governments subsist by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse of objective necessity."
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
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"Take, for example, the liberal socialist who advocates government ownership of all the 'means of production' while upholding the 'human' right of freedom of speech or press. How is this “human” right to be exercised if the individuals constituting the public are denied their right to ownership of property? If, for example, the government owns all the newsprint and all the printing shops, how is the right to a free press to be exercised? If the government owns all the newsprint, it then necessarily has the right and the power to allocate that newsprint, and someone’s 'right to a free press' becomes a mockery if the government decides not to allocate newsprint in his direction. And since the government must allocate scarce newsprint in some way, the right to a free press of, say, minorities or 'subversive' antisocialists will get short shrift indeed. The same is true for the 'right to free speech' if the government owns all the assembly halls, and therefore allocates those halls as it sees fit. Or, for example, if the government of Soviet Russia, being atheistic, decides not to allocate many scarce resources to the production of matzohs, for Orthodox Jews the 'freedom of religion' becomes a mockery; but again, the Soviet government can always rebut that Orthodox Jews are a small minority and that capital equipment should not be diverted to matzoh production . . .
"Property rights *are* human rights, and are essential to the human rights which liberals attempt to maintain. The human right of a free press depends upon the human right of private property in newsprint."
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
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"It is true that, in the United States, at least, we have a constitution that imposes strict limits on some powers of government. But, as we have discovered in the past century, no constitution can interpret or enforce itself; it must be interpreted by men. And if the ultimate power to interpret a constitution is given to the government’s own Supreme Court, then the inevitable tendency is for the Court to continue to place its imprimatur on ever-broader powers for its own government"
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
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"The law of libel, of course, discriminates in this way against the poor, since a person with few financial resources is scarcely as ready to carry on a costly libel suit as a person of affluent means. Furthermore, wealthy people can now use the libel laws as a club against poorer persons, restricting perfectly legitimate charges and utterances under the threat of sueing their poorer enemies for libel. Paradoxically, then, a person of limited resources is more apt to suffer from libel—and to have his own speech restricted—in the present system than he would in a world without any laws against libel or defamation."
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
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"Every station is grievously restricted, and forced to fashion its programming to the dictates of the Federal Communications Commission. So every station must have 'balanced' programming, broadcast a certain amount of “public service” announcements, grant equal time to every political candidate for the same office and to expressions of political opinion, censor 'controversial' lyrics in the records it plays, etc. For many years, no station was allowed to broadcast any editorial opinion at all; now, every opinion must be balanced by 'responsible' editorial rebuttals . . .
"The public has only put up with this situation because it has existed since the beginning of large-scale commercial radio. But what would we think, for example, if all newspapers were licensed, the licenses to be renewable by a Federal Press Commission, and with newspapers losing their licenses if they dare express an 'unfair' editorial opinion, or if they don’t give full weight to public service announcements? Would not this be an intolerable, not to say unconstitutional, destruction of the right to a free press? Or consider if all book publishers had to be licensed, and their licenses were not renewable if their book lists failed to suit a Federal Book Commission? Yet what we would all consider intolerable and totalitarian for the press and the book publishers is taken for granted in a medium which is now the most popular vehicle for expression and education: radio and television. Yet the principles in both cases are exactly the same."
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
[Note: The Supreme Court upheld the fairness doctrine in 1969, but it was administratively repealed in 1987 and is no longer in effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness...]
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"The irony, of course, is that by forcing men to be 'moral'—i.e., to act morally—the conservative or liberal jailkeepers would in reality deprive men of the very possibility of being moral. The concept of 'morality' makes no sense unless the moral act is freely chosen. Suppose, for example, that someone is a devout Muslim who is anxious to have as many people as possible bow to Mecca three times a day; to him let us suppose this is the highest moral act. But if he wields coercion to force everyone to bow to Mecca, he is thereby depriving everyone of the opportunity to be moral—to choose freely to bow to Mecca. Coercion deprives a man of the freedom to choose and, therefore, of the possibility of choosing morally. The libertarian, in contrast to so many conservatives and liberals, does not want to place man in any cage. What he wants for everyone is freedom, the freedom to act morally or immorally, as each man shall decide."
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
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"Violent acts such as rape, of course, are to be classed as crimes in the same way as any other act of violence against persons. Oddly enough, while voluntary sexual activities have often been rendered illegal and prosecuted by the State, accused rapists have been treated far more gently by the authorities than accused perpetrators of other forms of bodily assault. In many instances, in fact, the rape victim has been virtually treated as the guilty party by the law enforcement agencies—an attitude which is almost never taken toward victims of other crimes. Clearly, an impermissible sexual double standard has been at work . . .
"The double standard imposed by government can be remedied by removing rape as a special category of legal and judicial treatment, and of subsuming it under the general law of bodily assault. Whatever standards are used for judges’ instructions to the jury, or for the admissibility of evidence, should be applied similarly in all these cases."
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
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"There is no right more personal, no freedom more precious, than for any woman to decide to have, or not to have, a baby, and it is totalitarian in the extreme for any government to presume to deny her that right."
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
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"There are few laws more absurd and iniquitous than the laws against gambling. In the first place, the law, in its broadest sense, is clearly unenforceable. If every time Jim and Jack made a quiet bet on a football game, or on an election, or on virtually anything else, this were illegal, an enormous multimillion-man gestapo would be required to enforce such a law and to spy on everyone and ferret out every bet. Another large super-espionage force would then be needed to spy on the spies to make sure that they have not been bought off. Conservatives like to retort to such arguments—used against laws outlawing sexual practices, pornography, drugs, etc.—that the prohibition against murder is not fully enforceable either, but this is no argument for repeal of that law. This argument, however, ignores a crucial point: the mass of the public, making an instinctive libertarian distinction, abhors and condemns murder and does not engage in it; hence, the prohibition becomes broadly enforceable. But the mass of the public is not as convinced of the criminality of gambling, hence continues to engage in it, and the law—properly—becomes unenforceable."
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
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"The most ambitious attempt by the public school partisans to maximize their control over the nation’s children came in Oregon during the early 1920s. The state of Oregon, unhappy even with allowing private schools certified by the state, passed a law on November 7,1922, outlawing private schools and compelling all children to attend public school. Here was the culmination of the educationists’ dream. At last, all children were to be forced into the 'democratizing' mould of uniform education by the state authorities. The law, happily, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1925 (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, June 1, 1925). The Supreme Court declared that 'the child is not the mere creature of the State,' and asserted that the Oregon law clashed with the 'fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose.'
"The public school fanatics never tried to go that far again. But it is instructive to realize what the forces were that attempted to outlaw all competing private education in the state of Oregon. For the spearheads of the law were not, as we might expect, liberal or progressive educators or intellectuals; the spearhead was the Ku Klux Klan, then strong in the northern states, which was eager to crush the Catholic parochial school system, and to force all Catholic and immigrant children into the neo-Protestantizing and 'Americanizing' force of the public school. The Klan, it is interesting to note, opined that such a law was necessary for the 'preservation of free institutions.' It is well to ponder that the much-vaunted 'progressive' and 'democratic' public school system had its most ardent supporters in the most bigoted byways of American life, among people anxious to stamp out diversity and variety in America."
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
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"There is, in short, a break-even point of the price of a house beyond which a new family in a new house will more than pay for its children’s education in its property taxes. Families in homes below that cost level will not pay enough in property taxes to finance their children’s education and hence will throw a greater tax burden on the existing population of the suburb. Realizing this, suburbs have generally adopted rigorous zoning laws which prohibit the erection of housing below a minimum cost level—and thereby freeze out any inflow of poorer citizens. Since the proportion of Negro poor is far greater than white poor, this effectively also bars Negroes from joining the move to the suburbs. And since in recent years there has been an increasing shift of jobs and industry from the central city to the suburbs as well, the result is an increasing pressure of unemployment on the Negroes—a pressure which is bound to intensify as the job shift accelerates. The abolition of the public schools, and therefore of the school burden–property tax linkage, would go a long way toward removing zoning restrictions and ending the suburb as an upper middle-class-white preserve."
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
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"New York City, for example, has suffered periodically from a water 'shortage.' Here is a situation where, for many years, the city government has had a compulsory monopoly of the supply of water to its citizens. Failing to supply enough water, and failing to price that water in such a way as to clear the market, to equate supply and demand (which private enterprise does automatically), New York’s response to water shortages has always been to blame not itself, but the consumer, whose sin has been to use 'too much' water. The city administration could only react by outlawing the sprinkling of lawns, restricting use of water, and demanding that people drink less water. In this way, government transfers its own failings to the scapegoat user, who is threatened and bludgeoned instead of being served well and efficiently . . .
"In short, while the long-held motto of private enterprise is that 'the customer is always right,' the implicit maxim of government operation is that the customer is always to be blamed."
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
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"In England before the eighteenth century, for example, roads, invariably owned and operated by local governments, were badly constructed and even more badly maintained. These public roads could never have supported the mighty Industrial Revolution that England experienced in the eighteenth century, the 'revolution' that ushered in the modern age. The vital task of improving the almost impassable English roads was performed by private turnpike companies, which, beginning in 1706, organized and established the great network of roads which made England the envy of the world. The owners of these private turnpike companies were generally landowners, merchants, and industrialists in the area being served by the road, and they recouped their costs by charging tolls at selected tollgates. Often the collection of tolls was leased out for a year or more to individuals selected by competitive bids at auction. It was these private roads that developed an internal market in England, and that greatly lowered the costs of transport of coal and other bulky material. And since it was mutually beneficial for them to do so, the turnpike companies linked up with each other to form an interconnected road network throughout the land—all a result of private enterprise in action.
"As in England, so in the United States a little later in time. Faced again with virtually impassable roads built by local governmental units, private companies built and financed a great turnpike network throughout the northeastern states, from approximately 1800 to 1830. Once again, private enterprise proved superior in road building and ownership to the backward operations of government. The roads were built and operated by private turnpike corporations, and tolls were charged to the users. Again, the turnpike companies were largely financed by merchants and property owners along the routes, and they voluntarily linked themselves into an interconnected network of roads. And these turnpikes constituted the first really good roads in the United States."
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
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"[T]he entire law merchant was developed, not by the State or in State courts, but by private merchant courts. It was only much later that government took over mercantile law from its development in merchants’ courts. The same occurred with admiralty law, the entire structure of the law of the sea, shipping, salvages, etc. Here again, the State was not interested, and its jurisdiction did not apply to the high seas; so the shippers themselves took on the task of not only applying, but working out the whole structure of admiralty law in their own private courts. Again, it was only later that the government appropriated admiralty law into its own courts."
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
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"It is particularly ironic that conservatives, at least in rhetoric supporters of a free-market economy, should be so complacent and even admiring of our vast military-industrial complex. There is no greater single distortion of the free market in present-day America. The bulk of our scientists and engineers has been diverted from basic research for civilian ends, from increasing productivity and the standard of living of consumers, into wasteful, inefficient, and nonproductive military and space boondoggles. These boondoggles are every bit as wasteful but infinitely more destructive than the vast pyramid building of the Pharaoh."
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
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"The idea of a strictly limited constitutional State was a noble experiment that failed, even under the most favorable and propitious circumstances. If it failed then, why should a similar experiment fare any better now? No, it is the conservative laissez-fairist, the man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, 'Limit yourself'; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian."
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
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"I am convinced that the dark night of tyranny is ending, and that a new dawn of liberty is now at hand."
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
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"Perhaps the best sign of all, the most favorable indication of the break-down down of the mystique of the American State, of its moral groundwork, was the Watergate exposures of 1973–1974. It is Watergate that gives us the greatest single hope for the short-run victory of liberty in America. For Watergate, as politicians have been warning us ever since, destroyed the public’s 'faith in government'—and it was high time, too. Watergate engendered a radical shift in the deep-seated attitudes of everyone—regardless of their explicit ideology—toward government itself. For in the first place, Watergate awakened everyone to the invasions of personal liberty and private property by government—to its bugging, drugging, wiretapping, mail covering, agents provocateurs—even assassinations. Watergate at last desanctified our previously sacrosanct FBI and CIA and caused them to be looked at clearly and coolly. But more important, by bringing about the impeachment of the President, Watergate permanently desanctified an office that had come to be virtually considered as sovereign by the American public. No longer will the President be considered above the law; no longer will the President be able to do no wrong."
-Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty -
For a New Liberty, Murray Rothbard's classic anarcho-capitalist "manifesto," is an undeniable classic of libertarian literature. The broad vision Rothbard offers - of a society built on voluntary association and exchange, free from the coercion and violence of the state - doesn't need to be recapitulated here, since it can be found in the hundreds of online reviews this book has received, and in the thousands of posts in the libertarian blogosphere that reference it. I would, therefore, like to simply point out a few areas of agreement and disagreement that I had with Rothbard as I read the book.
To me, the strongest part of the book is Rothbard's discussion of the basis of individual rights and the extent to which states violate such rights. Rothbard's explanation that the libertarian concern with the individual and his rights is not, as some have claimed, a call for the "atomization" of the individual, is a welcome clarification. Also excellent is Rothbard's treatment of how the free market (or, more simply, people voluntarily interacting with each other) could handle the issues relating to education, the environment and public works (like roads). While Rothbard takes a definitely libertarian perspective on these issues, the net effect of the procedures he would prefer - such as using property rights to protect the environment - would be considerably more favorable to the preservation of traditional society than what has actually taken place under state control. In fact, reading Rothbard's recommendations on how to deal with environmental issues brought to my mind similar arguments made by Roger Scruton, who Gerard Casey has called "the philosopher of conservatism."
Rothbard's explanation of how courts, military defense and police services could exist within a purely free market (and without the state), while interesting, is less convincing to me, not because his ideas could obviously not work, but because the questions regarding them aren't as easily answered as Rothbard seems to think, and would likely need to be modified by trial and error. Rothbard references traditional Irish society - based on clans that could accede to or secede from a multiplicity of federations, and in which property rights, common law, and voluntary associations provided police and court services - as a case study for how all of these services could exist on a purely free market. And while this is an interesting topic, it seems obvious that this system of government was based on cultural norms and traditions, not on pure rationality, and that there are therefore essential cultural aspects to any society that prioritizes liberty and systematizes its protection. This is an angle that Rothbard doesn't explore, but that I think would be critical to the actual attainment of the political system he desires.
Rothbard is at his weakest, in my opinion, when invoking history to support his theories. The problem is not that the historical examples Rothbard uses don't support his positions at all, it's that they don't support them as clearly and conclusively as he lets on. For instance, Rothbard bases his case for the possibility of developing a radically libertarian society in America on the claim that the American Revolution was itself radically libertarian, nearly to the point of anarcho-capitalism, as was American government in the antebellum period. Again, the problem here is not that Rothbard is entirely wrong - certainly there were classical liberal, or libertarian, influences on the American Revolution and, as Jeffrey Rogers Hummel showed in
Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War, there was more political freedom for most (but, obviously, not all) American citizens before the Civil War than there has been after it. But there were also obviously conservative aspects to the American Revolution, as M Stanton Evans showed in
The Theme is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition, that relied more on traditional freedoms under the English common law than on Enlightenment rationality. The idea of an anarcho-capitalist society was simply not under consideration by either the American Revolutionaries or their descendants.
A similar problem appears in Rothbard's attempts to show why non-interventionism is the proper basis for American foreign policy. While I agree with Rothbard on this point, his argumentation in support of it is sometimes suspect, if not specious. For instance, in attempting to show that American foreign policy has been essentially imperialistic since the turn of the 20th century (which it generally has), Rothbard attempts to show that the United States has been "the single most warlike, most interventionist, most imperialist government [in the world]," a claim that, in order to be accepted, would need considerably more evidence than Rothbard provides.
To prove this point, Rothbard claims that the Soviet Union had been, over that same time, comparatively peaceful and conservative in its foreign policy. To reach this conclusion, he glosses over Soviet aggression in Poland and Finland at the start of World War II (when Stalin was allied with Hitler) as simply the Russians attempting to regain territory that they had previously lost after World War I. This, beyond being a considerable oversimplification of that history, is not obviously peaceful, non-imperialistic, or consonant with libertarian theory, and therefore not definitively supportive of Rothbard's claim. Similarly, Rothbard claims that the Soviets were content to let the communist revolution happen organically in capitalist countries, but this ignores the extent to which communist parties, often directed by Soviet agents, trained their members to infiltrate the intelligentsia and governments of Western countries (including the U.S.) with the explicit goal of fomenting insurrection and influencing policies.
Some of this is understandable in the context of the 1970s, when Rothbard was writing the book. To make the case for non-interventionism at that time required dealing with the claimed threat of Russian aggression in the then-ongoing Cold War. That Rothbard attempted to deal with this issue is not the problem. Rather, it's that his argumentation resorts to oversimplifying history and the realities of the period. Rothbard finds great significance in the Soviet Union's failure to extend its empire after World War II, though he does not mention that the Soviets showed little reluctance to extend the empire during the war, and in fact demanded territorial concessions from the Allies during wartime conferences at Tehran and Yalta. Nor does Rothbard cosider that its failure to continue on the same path after the war could have been the result of the United States and Western Europe posing enough of a military threat to curtail further advances. Rothbard even excuses the Soviet Union's violent suppression of Hungarian and Czechoslovakian independence movements as essentially defensive, which will seem odd to anyone familiar with his opinion of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.
I have seen another reviewer of this book cite Frederic Bastiat's statement that "the worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skillfully attacked, but ineptly defended." I wouldn't go so far as to charge Rothbard with ineptitude, but his arguments along these lines seem much too forceful for the evidence he offers in their support. This is not to say that the non-interventionist case is invalidated by the facts (quite the opposite, I believe), and Rothbard brings forward many good arguments against an interventionist foreign policy. But, overall, I didn't find Rothbard's analysis as convincing as it could have been. In some cases, resorting to dogmatic lines of argumentation serves an argument less well than dealing carefully with the nuances involved.
Ultimately, a person's opinion of this book is likely to be determined not only by how much he agrees with Rothbard's opinions. How much he accepts Rothbard's historical analysis and the extent to which he thinks that society, even political society, can be rationally planned, irrespective of culture, are also likely to play a role. Even though I have great sympathy for Rothbard's perspective on a great many issues, his method of argumentation detracts from the book, in my opinion. For a New Liberty is, in many ways, a very good book, but its mingling of theory with highly-selective history (without acknowledgment of such) reduces its usefulness outside of the libertarian movement. -
For my hundredth review on this website, I wanted to pick a special book. What better one than the one that transformed my entire way of thinking? It is not so much that I still follow Rothbard a hundred percent; I have moved away from him in some ways, but I have never abandoned him. I am still an anarchocapitalist, just one who is now also influenced by Thomism, Christianity, and reactionary and conservative thought generally. I don't fully subscribe to Rothbardianism anymore, but I still deeply love it and think that if it became predominant, the world would be a better place to live.
The first one hundred pages of this are just Rothbard laying out his ethical philosophy. It's a simple philosophy, based around very few principles, like self-ownership, non-aggression, and the homesteading principle, all firmly ontologically grounded, very easy to grasp, sometimes challenging but never arbitrary in their application. Like every good system of ethics, the Rothbardian one is a guide of conduct for your own private life, not just a blueprint for a perfect society. Where they don't apply, they leave space for other life philosophies. An anarchocapitalist can be egoistic or altruistic, religious or atheistic, and socially liberal or conservative, and he can be all these things from the bottom of his heart, without succumbing to moral relativism. All that's required is that you disavow force as the means to persuade others that your way of life is the only true one. Instead, persuade them with words or good deeds.
The far bigger part of the book is the application of Rothbards principles to such topics as national defense, monetary policy, and crime and punishment. Rothbard shows both how to apply his principles and what the effects of a consistent application would be, and why these would be superior than anything you could achieve with compulsion. Rothbard leaves most of his competition in the field of political philosophy behind by virtue of being not just a philosopher, but also an economist, historian, and generally very well versed in all the social sciences. Rothbard was not a dreamer, he is a man who combines academic rigor and moral idealism with a deepseated realism. Hence, the charge that he is a utopian is completely unfounded. Rothbard never compromised on his principles, but strategy was a different matter. Despite his optimism and jolly attitude, his expectations never became unrealistically high, as proven by his never succumbing to despair even in his old age.
If this book doesn't fully satisfy you, or if you want to deepen your knowledge of anarchocapitalism for any other reason, there is plenty of literature to pick up on.
The Machinery of Freedom provides a somewhat different, and very vivid perspective on how anarchocapitalism could work in practice.
The Problem of Political Authority deals with all the same topics from a different angle.
The Myth of National Defense has a lot more to say on the topic of military defense, both from an ethical and pragmatic perspective,
Chaos Theory talks about military defense and the criminal system and is very short and to the point.
Human Action and
Man, Economy, and State teach you the economic theories that Rothbard subscribed to,
Choice does the same if you want a much shorter (but still complete) book. If you want to read about even more specialized topics, there are works like
The Privatization of Roads and Highways or
Against Intellectual Property. And, lastly, if you want to learn more about Rothbards philosophy, try his
The Ethics of Liberty, an even better book that goes deeper and deals with some competing perspectives. It is written from a more academic perspective, but is still quite easily understandable. I could go on with the recommendations, but I have to stop myself somewhere.
If you want to learn political philosophy, read this book. That, or jump straight to
The Ethics of Liberty, but I suggest you read both. Your professor - if you have one - will probably not know who Rothbard is, but an increasing number of people does, and why jump on the bandwagon so late? Furthermore, no one before ever took liberty as far as he did, and no one after him surpassed him. These are two good reasons to give Rothbard a chance. The most important reason, of course, is that his theories are a work of genius. So don't miss out on For a New Liberty. -
Mais um excelente livro de Rothbard. O livro resume os ideais libertários, passando por uma breve história da liberdade nos EUA e sua decadência.
Rothbard desenvolve bem e de forma simples o credo libertário e seus princípios, baseado no direito de propriedade, e seu antagonismo com a existência do estado.
Neste livro gostei da abordagem um pouco diferente do padrão ao mostrar as aplicações libertárias aos variados problemas existentes hoje fruto da própria existência do estado, refutando ainda críticas de não libertários a essas propostas.
Dá uma pincelada em economia mostrando a teoria dos ciclos econômicos (a Ricardiana e a Misesiana) e os malefícios do intervencionismo do governo na moeda.
A parte que mais gostei se refere ao esclarecimento das dúvidas de libertários iniciantes (ou do resto da população) à privatização de polícia, ruas, leis e mieo ambiente.
Traz fatos que mostram o perigo do imperialismo norte-americano, e como ele pode por diversas vezes ser pior do que qualquer país socialista no que tange à política externa.
Rothbard finaliza esboçando uma estratégia para se alcançar a liberdade, composta por ações como o envolvimento na Academia, publicação de livros, dentre outras formas de educar os outros. Não se furtando de combater os erros na medida em que esses aparecerem. No final, a verdade política aparecerá. -
A solid and coherent criticism of statism and government in the XX century followed by actual concrete libertarian solution for each issue mentioned. The book is perfectly aligned with its own title. It is a manifesto. And as each manifesto it puts most of the effort into showcasing the best parts of the described subject and revealing the flaws of opposing regime. That means that some rough spots like the possibility of government restoration by a group of statists striving for power in the libertarian society or connection between XX century technical progress and its centralized governments and economies that competed with each other militarily joining much more resources than any corporation in libertarian world could are omitted. I doubt that libertarian society will be reached in the closest future but it is a right direction for the modern world and this manifesto is a great starting point for consideration of freedom and minimal government both left and right.
-
I use this book for my Adult level online Socratic Seminar. It's very useful for introducing people to the fundamental problems face by this country, what the libertarian response is, and how to go about achieving it. Our final lesson discusses how libertarianism is a philosophy that takes into the corrupt and distorted nature of society. It doesn't rely on illusions of the goodness of man to function. It's interesting to me that libertarians are accused of being utopian - maybe this comes from Robert Nozick's unfortunate take - regardless, libertarianism doesn't purport to be utopian by any stretch of the imagination. This is ironic given that those who levy this charge tend to be enticed by some form of authoritarianism, which - especially in the case of socialism - does indeed to claim to be the means of achieving utopia. For a New Liberty is a primer in a political philosophy that understands humans aren't perfect, and never will be.
-
If you're interested in Libertarianism, or in Libertarian thought, you do yourself a disservice by not reading this. While I don't agree with every word uttered by Rothbard, he makes a compelling and incisive argument against big government.
For me, this book gave me a lot to think on and evaluate within my own views. He paints a picture of a purely Libertarian society, which allows the reader to understand the virtues and challenges it would face. The passion which he feels for liberty is tangible on every page, and makes this book (which could have been a very, very boring treatise) come alive.
If you are interested in reading this, do it. There is also an audiobook version by the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, which can be found for free in Podcast form, if sitting down and reading this seems like too much of a commitment. -
Now this is quite the interesting book amongst political treatises out there. Rothbard's Libertarian Manifesto - occasionally referred to as the so-called "AnCap Bible." I'll confess to having been interested in it myself for a few years now. Mainly out of wonder for what it's like, compared to his now rather cultish ideological descendants. But I find it hard to actually review it, even if I have a great deal passing around in my mind around it. I've come to a very strange position, of concurrently dismissing and admiring it as to it's status.
Let's get the good part out of my way first. I have to praise Rothbard's clarity and relatively generalized approach to each of his matters. And his thoughts regarding the importance of liberty, though at times kind-of fuzzy in regards to practice, is again relatively sound. A particular surprise to my eye, was his immense concern with how the state (or rather, simply America c.1973/1978) deals with environmental matters. A position which seems to almost vanished on that side of politics these days. It's almost prophetic, I'd say, that he goes on about how it's a game based upon laziness and negligence. If only he knew greed and pandering would be added to that in time. Of course, his belief in non-interventionism is quite typical for those against the Vietnam War in those days, but still perfectly fine. Really, besides his arguments on education - which I found to be paranoid ramblings about indoctrination, despite it's omnipresence regardless if in the schoolroom or at home - most of it is just fine. Not perfect, but passable by my standards.
But then there's the elephant in the room. And this is something dozens of others have summarized and critiqued before, and personally much better than I ever could. So I need only to lay out the basics, if you want a thorough analysis:
Ben's review is a good place to start. But said in short: his ideas that are laid out, as a whole, are simply unfeasible. In fact, these days I'd regard it as simply a dead cause. Rothbard's idea of what the basic premise of a perfect society would be like, comes off as too idealistic for it's own good. So much so, that it's last strand of realism came in saying: "a decent bit of liberty is an alright thing and an essential to any healthy society."
And even then, it strikes me as imperfect even amongst it's own cause. Especially to policing and economics. His ideas regarding the existence of a police force, or really any defense force, are a slap in it's own face. Theoretically speaking to his own basis: the people should be a force in of itself. Leaving it to a particular set who may or may not know what to do, defeats the point. Added into what he considers the fundamental axiom of libertarianism, the NAP, and it just forms an auroboros of an ideology. As to the economic side, it's laughably childish. But nothing I've never seen or heard before. As a fact, it was no different in it's voodoo machinations than what was told to me by the many AnCaps I've met over the last few years. And I'd imagine this would remain mostly true still, in his more proper economic treatises. Just stretched out to a 1000 pages instead of 1/4 of a 400 page book.
However, regarding his historicism, this I don't criticize quite as wildly. Which you may think is surprising on first glance, but give me a minute. I will say immediately, that it isn't because his examples are sound or even remotely sensible. It mostly translates to 3-parts cherry picking, 3-parts ideological infusions (especially in his belief of the American Revolution being effectively to the AnCaps, as the Russian Revolution was for communists), and 4-parts wishful thinking on the reader. To be frank, though, this is hardly a new practice. And I do think the singling out Rothbard and his comrades get, from this, is quite silly given it's very general and generic use by almost every writer of any particular creed to some extent. By-and-large, this is not an aspect of his treatise I am particularly critical of, nor as to it's use overall. I'm apathetic to the matter.
So what does it all come to? As said, idealism over realism. Or rather a half-baked system that starts good, evolves into something reasonably sound and occasionally efficient, but then goes off the rails into a opium dream of divine perfectionism à la Kubla Khan. Put more simply: it's just impractical ideals based upon a somewhat unsteady moralism that, though with good intentions, overrules what will as opposed to what should. It's hardly a new thing with libertarian/anarchistic creeds though. From the start, this has been their greatest undoing and their greatest vice. And now with the advances of technology having gotten as far as they have at present, I do believe in my statement from earlier, in it being a lost cause these days. Only with it's downfall can it see some hope of being viable to a degree again, in a considerable manner.
That said, I still say his appraisal of liberty as an important force in society, is valid. Even if from simply the standpoint of an amoral pragmatism, rather than Rothbard's strong deontological basis. I guess both lead to the same conclusions: it's fairly vital for making sure society has some sense of stability. But how Rothbard imagines it should lead into, I find in the end futile and effectively useless in our modern world. -
This book is mind-blowing. It’s like reading something completely, refreshingly new and yet innately familiar and comfortable. Rothbard is an expansively knowledgeable historian, a clear and concise economist, and a hopeful yet practical political philosopher. As I read, I was conflicted because half of me wanted to read slowly and savor each page, but the other half wanted to rush through and devour all the exciting information. This is one of those rare books you come across that just might change your life, or at least the way you think about it.
Quotes:
“The book is still regarded as dangerous precisely because, once the exposure to Rothbardianism takes place, no other book on politics, economics, or sociology can be read the same way again.” Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
The new federal government formed by the Articles of Confederation was not permitted to levy any taxes upon the public; and any fundamental extension of its powers required unanimous consent by every state government.
America, above all countries, was born in an explicitly libertarian revolution, a revolution against empire; against taxation, trade monopoly, and regulation; and against militarism and executive power.
Socialism was a confused and hybrid movement because it tried to achieve the liberal goals of freedom, peace, and industrial harmony and growth—goals which can only be achieved through liberty and the separation of government from virtually everything—by imposing the old conservative means of statism, collectivism, and hierarchical privilege. It was a movement which could only fail, which indeed did fail miserably in those numerous countries where it attained power in the twentieth century, by bringing to the masses only unprecedented despotism, starvation, and grinding impoverishment.
Whatever services the government actually performs could be supplied far more efficiently and far more morally by private and cooperative enterprise.
The task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to accept State rule, and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded subjects.
Either the land belongs to the first user, the man who first brings it into production; or it belongs to a group of others; or it belongs to the world as a whole, with every individual owning a quotal part of every acre of land.
There is no existing entity called “society”; there are only interacting individuals.
Service to the State is supposed to excuse all actions that would be considered immoral or criminal if committed by “private” citizens.
Only the government, in society, is empowered to aggress against the property rights of its subjects, whether to extract revenue, to impose its moral code, or to kill those with whom it disagrees.
The government does not in any accurate sense “represent” the majority of the people, but even if it did, even if 90 percent of the people decided to murder or enslave the other 10 percent, this would still be murder and slavery, and would not be voluntary suicide or enslavement on the part of the oppressed minority.
There is nothing sacrosanct about the majority; the lynch mob, too, is the majority in its own domain.
Since the early origins of the State, its rulers have always turned, as a necessary bolster to their rule, to an alliance with society’s class of intellectuals.
In the modern era, when theocratic arguments have lost much of their luster among the public, the intellectuals have posed as the scientific cadre of “experts” and have been busy informing the hapless public that political affairs, foreign and domestic, are much too complex for the average person to bother his head about.
A thief who presumed to justify his theft by saying that he was really helping his victims by his spending, thus giving retail trade a needed boost, would be hooted down without delay. But when this same theory is clothed in Keynesian mathematical equations and impressive references to the “multiplier effect,” it carries far more conviction with a bamboozled public.
In a profound sense, the idea of binding down power with the chains of a written constitution has proved to be a noble experiment that failed.
The earliest compulsory schooling in America was established by the Calvinist Puritans in Massachusetts Bay, those men who were so eager to plant an absolutist Calvinist theocracy in the New World.
Thus, from the beginning of American history, the desire to mould, instruct, and render obedient the mass of the population was the major impetus behind the drive toward public schooling.
Having no need to make profits and sheltered from the possibility of suffering losses, the bureaucrat can and does disregard the desires and demands of his consumer-customers.
The “right” to schooling, to a job, three meals, etc., is then not embedded in the nature of man, but requires for its fulfillment the existence of a group of exploited people who are coerced into providing such a “right.”
There is in fact increasing evidence that a vast amount of current schooling is not needed for productive employment.
How much of the burgeoning of mass public schooling is a means by which employers foist the cost of training their workers upon the taxpayers at large?
If there seems to be a shortage of supply to meet an evident demand, then look to government as the cause of the problem.
It is the rich who provide a proportionately greater amount of saving, investment capital, entrepreneurial foresight, and financing of technological innovation that has brought the United States to by far the highest standard of living—for the mass of the people—of any country in history. Soaking the rich would not only be profoundly immoral, it would drastically penalize the very virtues: thrift, business foresight, and investment, that have brought about our remarkable standard of living.
Surely it is no accident that the current renaissance of Austrian economics has coincided with the phenomenon of stagflation and its consequent shattering of the Keynesian paradigm for all to see.
For now the rulers of the State can simply create their own money and spend it or lend it out to their favorite allies.
Just as the State arrogates to itself a monopoly power over legalized kidnapping and calls it conscription; just as it has acquired a monopoly over legalized robbery and calls it taxation; so, too, it has acquired the monopoly power to counterfeit and calls it increasing the supply of dollars
After a great deal of economic finagling and political arm-twisting to induce foreign governments not to exercise their right to redeem dollars in gold, the United States, in August 1971, declared national bankruptcy by repudiating its solemn contractual obligations and “closing the gold window.” It is no coincidence that this tossing off of the last vestige of gold restraint upon the governments of the world was followed by the double-digit inflation of 1973–1974, and by similar inflation in the rest of the world.
So identified has the State become in the public mind with the provision of these services that an attack on State financing appears to many people as an attack on the service itself.
There is no profit-and-loss mechanism in government to induce investment in efficient operations and to penalize and drive the inefficient or obsolete ones out of business. There are no profits or losses in government operations inducing either expansion or contraction of operations.
The railroads had to consolidate; and in 1883 they agreed to consolidate the existing 54 time zones across the country into the four which we have today.
The highways grant gross subsidies to the users and have played the major role in killing railroads as a viable enterprise.
Being voluntary, furthermore, the rules of arbitration can be decided rapidly by the parties themselves, without the need for a ponderous, complex legal framework applicable to all citizens.
For a thousand years, then, ancient Celtic Ireland had no State or anything like it. As the leading authority on ancient Irish law has written: “There was no legislature, no bailiffs, no police, no public enforcement of justice. ... There was no trace of State-administered justice.”
At best there are only two parties, each one close to the other in ideology and personnel, often colluding, and the actual day-to-day business of government headed by a civil service bureaucracy that cannot be displaced by the voters. Contrast to these mythical checks and balances the real checks and balances provided by the free-market economy!
Guerrilla warfare has proved to be an irresistible force precisely because it stems, not from a dictatorial central government, but from the people themselves, fighting for their liberty and independence against a foreign State.
In Europe, where private ownership of forests is far more common, there is little complaint of destruction of timber resources. For wherever private property is allowed in the forest itself, it is to the benefit of the owner to preserve and restore tree growth while he is cutting timber, so as to avoid depletion of the forest’s capital value.
With respect to the ocean, however, we are still in the primitive, unproductive hunting and gathering stage. Anyone can capture fish in the ocean, or extract its resources, but only on the run, only as hunters and gatherers. No one can farm the ocean, no one can engage in aquaculture. In this way we are deprived of the use of the immense fish and mineral resources of the seas… If private property in parts of the ocean were permitted, a vast flowering of aquaculture would create and multiply ocean resources in numerous ways we cannot now even foresee.
The argument that such an injunctive prohibition against pollution would add to the costs of industrial production is as reprehensible as the pre-Civil War argument that the abolition of slavery would add to the costs of growing cotton, and that therefore abolition, however morally correct, was “impractical.”
In the field of strategic thinking, it behooves libertarians to heed the lessons of the Marxists, because they have been thinking about strategy for radical social change longer than any other group.
The idea of a strictly limited constitutional State was a noble experiment that failed, even under the most favorable and propitious circumstances. If it failed then, why should a similar experiment fare any better now? No, it is the conservative laissez-fairist, the man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, “Limit yourself”; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian.
Ever since the acceleration of statism at the turn of the twentieth century, big businessmen have been using the great powers of State contracts, subsidies and cartelization to carve out privileges for themselves at the expense of the rest of the society.
Only liberty can achieve man’s prosperity, fulfillment, and happiness. In short, libertarianism will win because it is true, because it is the correct policy for mankind, and truth will eventually win out.
Lord Keynes once scoffed at criticisms by free-market economists that his inflationist policies would be ruinous in the long run; in his famous reply, he chortled that “in the long run we are all dead.” But now Keynes is dead and we are alive, living in his long run. The statist chickens have come home to roost.
Libertarians are squarely in the great classical-liberal tradition that built the United States and bestowed on us the American heritage of individual liberty, a peaceful foreign policy, minimal government, and a free-market economy. Libertarians are the only genuine current heirs of Jefferson, Paine, Jackson, and the abolitionists.
All other theories and systems have clearly failed: socialism is in retreat everywhere, and notably in Eastern Europe; liberalism has bogged us down in a host of insoluble problems; conservatism has nothing to offer but sterile defense of the status quo. Liberty has never been fully tried in the modern world; libertarians now propose to fulfill the American dream and the world dream of liberty and prosperity for all mankind. -
Актуальная нынче книга, т.к. Ротбард считает войну - массовым убийством, а мобилизацию и службу по призыву - насильственным похищением. А также, налогообложение - воровством, государственную собственность - захватом, сертификаты и лицензии - рэкетом, наказания за преступления без потерпевшего - произволом. И т д.
Это достаточно длинная, но последовательная книга, которая не вдается в философские дебри, а по пунктам и на простых примерах показывает преимущества либертарианства, которое Ротбард считает единственным перспективным общественно-экономическим строем. Т.к. оно основано на рыночной экономике, частной собственности (любые вопросы рассматриваются с ее точки зрения). А только так и возможна индивидуальная свобода.
В первой части книги Ротбард убедительно критикует существующее положение, экономически объясняя причины кризисов. Во второй - предлагает пути их преодоления и неповторения в либертарианском обществе. В эпилоге - набрасывает возможные варианты прихода либертарианцев к власти.
Ротбард был оптимистом. И видя кризисы начала 80-х как в либеральных режимах Запада, так и в соц блоке, рассчитывал, что это дает шанс третьей либертарианской силе. Не ожидая, что падение одной, не только окрылит другую, но и позволит перенимать опыт как бывших соперников, так и идеи самого Ротбарда, которые он придумывал, чтобы сделать людей менее зависимыми от государства. Государство же сделало их новыми методами контроля. О мусульманском мире или Китае Ротбард не упоминает вообще.
Но книга все-равно до сих пор бьет по больным местам государства, которое не просто порабощает людей, но, в первую очередь, постоянно ведет экономически провальную и хищническую политику, за которую расплачиваются в итоге люди. И в этом Ротбард на удивление близок с социалистами. Но в о��личие от них, он не смотрит назад, а предлагает попробовать что-то совершенно новое. И это подкупает.
Он сознает определенный идеализм в абсолютном стремлении к свободе. Но справедливо замечает, что без идеала либертарианцы не выдержат никакой конкуренции. Он приводит в пример марксистов, у которых есть идеал равенства, которого пусть и не получается никогда добиться, но стремление к нему объединяет людей. Ротбард же в равенство не верит - он предлагает объединиться ради свободы.
Лично для меня есть два слабых места в либертарианском манифесте:
1) Отрицание леволиберальной концепции естественных прав.
Ротбард считает, что рыночная экономика сама расставит все права по своим местам. Как бы это ни было тяжело, но это нужно для стабильной работы экономики. Люди - существа эмоциональные, религиозные, моральные - очень не проста будет борьба свободы с равенством. Я не уверен, что готов принять ее на все 100%, хотя и признаю экономическую логику ее. Надо воспитывать новых людей? Но сам же Ротбард отрицает возможность воспитания социалистами других людей.2) Либертарианство во внешней политике.
Очевидно, что если мир будет либертарианским, то эта проблема отпадет сама собой. Или если либертарианскими будут хотя бы все крупные игроки и ядерные державы. Но Ротбард рассматривает пример либертарианских США и нападающего на него СССР. И отделывается
словами, что скорее всего СССР не нападут, а если и нападут, то слишком сложно будет захватить миллионы индивидов, а не конкретное правительство. Сам себя не убедив, он говорит, что единственное, что мы можем потерять - это свободу, а ее у нас и так нет.Учитывая, что он сам подробно рассказывает о том, как США стали самой милитаристской и интервенциональной страной в мире, думаю крайне важно, чтобы, в первую очередь, либертарианство победило именно в США.
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"نحو حرية جديدة، مانيفستو الليبرتارية، أو البيان التحرري"
يقول هانز هيرمان هوبه، بأنه لولا "موراي روثبورد" لما كان هنالك "أناركية رأسمالية" أو "لاسلطوية رأسمالية"
أفكار روثبورد كانت مؤثرة وعميقة الأثر على المدرسة الرأسمالية التحررية ككل، واليمينية منها على الأخص
لم يتم تبني الكثير من أفكاره المنبثقة بالضرورة عن مدرسته الاقتصادية، كالأفكار التي استعرضتها في المراجعة المبدئية لكتاب "ماذا فعلت الحكومة بأموالنا"
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
ولكن كان لأفكاره المعادية لما تبقى من سلطة الحكومة، عظيم الأثر في لفت أنظارنا لبعض فساد النظام المالي الحالي، وعقم البنوك المركزية
الكتاب يعتبر الشارح الأعظم لفكر "موراي روثبورد" التحرري بالكامل، وأتمنى إني ألاقي له وقت للقراءة وسط جدولي المزدحم
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This is the closest book I have read which provides a clear framework on how a society organised around libertarian principles would function.
There is no scope for force/violence against innocent people as a means to keep society stable in peaceful existence.
There is a concise description of how classical liberal societies and their advocates have been subverted through out history -
Rothbard was a prolific writer and master of concision. For A New Liberty feels a little dated, yet it was prescient. He laid intellectual groundwork for the liberal-society thought experiment.
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Muy buen libro, lleno de citas científicas y complejo como ninguno. Deja ver que el mundo no es tan simple como parece.
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I wanna say I wish I had read this sooner, but I truly wasn't ready for it until now. Another one of those books that entered my life at precisely the right time. Hard to disagree with anything written in it. A much more thorough libertarian manifesto than Matt Kibbe's.
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Some interesting paragraphs I found:
The rapid growth of the libertarian movement and the Libertarian party in the 1970s is firmly rooted in what Bernard Bailyn called this powerful "permanent legacy" of the American Revolution. But if this legacy is so vital to the American tradition, what went wrong? Why the need now for a new libertarian movement to arise to reclaim the American dream?
American liberalism, for at least one long generation, has lived off a collection of ideas put together before World War I. The wellspring for one set of its ideas is Louis Brandeis; for the other, Herbert Croly. Since these men wrote, little new has been added to American liberal ideology. The Croly liberal stresses the role of government in regulating big organizations and strengthening small men. The Brandeis liberal gears his hopes to the magical role of the small businessman.
Classical liberalism constituted a profound threat to the political and economic interests the ruling classes-who benefited from the Old Order: the kings, the nobles and landed aristocrats, the privileged merchants, the military machines, the State bureaucracies. Despite three major violent revolutions precipitated by the liberals-the English of the seventeenth century and the American and French of the eighteenth-victories in Europe were only partial. Resistance was stiff and managed to successfully maintain landed monopolies, religious establishments, and warlike foreign and military policies, and for a time to keep the suffrage restricted to the wealthy elite. The liberals had to concentrate on widening the suffrage, because it was clear to both sides that the objective economic and political interests of the mass of the public lay in individual liberty.
It is interesting to note that, by the early nineteenth century, the laissez-faire forces were known as "liberals" and "radicals" (for the purer and more consistent among them), and the opposition that wished to preserve or go back to the Old Order were broadly known as "conservatives."
By the middle of and certainly by the end of the nineteenth century, conservatives began to realize that their cause was inevitably doomed if they persisted in clinging to the call for outright repeal of the Industrial Revolution and of its enormous rise in the living standards of the mass of the public, and also if they persisted in opposing the widening of the suffrage, thereby frankly setting themselves in opposition to the interests of that public. Hence, the "right wing" (a label based on an accident of geography by which the spokesmen for the Old Order sat on the right of the assembly hall during the French Revolution) decided to shift their gears and to update their statist creed by jettisoning outright opposition to industrialism and democratic suffrage. For the old conservatism's frank hatred and contempt for the mass of the public, the new conservatives substituted duplicity and demagogy. The new conservatives wooed the masses with the following line: "We, too, favor industrialism and a higher standard of living. But, to accomplish such ends, we must regulate industry for the public good; we must substitute organized cooperation for the dog-eat-dog of the free and competitive marketplace; and, above all, we must substitute for the nation-destroying liberal tenets of peace and free trade the nation-glorifying measures of war, protectionism, empire, and military prowess." For all of these changes, of course, Big Government rather than minimal government was required.
And so, in the late nineteenth century, statism and Big Government returned, but this time displaying a proindustrial and pro-general welfare face. The Old Order returned, but this time the beneficiaries were shuffled a bit; they were not so much the nobility, the feudal landlords, the army, the bureaucracy, and privileged merchants as they were the army, the bureaucracy, the weakened feudal landlords, and especially the privileged manufacturers. Led by Bismarck in Prussia, the New Right fashioned a right-wing collectivism based on war, militarism, protectionism, and the compulsory cartelization of business and industry a giant network of controls, regulations, subsidies, and privileges which forged a great partnership of Big Government with certain favored elements in big business and industry.
Something had to be done, too, about the new phenomenon of a mas sive number of industrial wage workers the "proletariat." During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, indeed until the late nineteenth century, the mass of workers favored laissez-faire and the free competitive market as best for their wages and working conditions as workers, and for a cheap and widening range of consumer goods as consumers. Even the early trade unions, e.g., in Great Britain, were staunch believers in laissez faire. New conservatives, spearheaded by Bismarck in Germany and Disraeli in Britain, weakened the libertarian will of the workers by shedding crocodile tears about the condition of the industrial labor force, and cartelizing and regulating industry, not accidentally hobbling efficient competition. Finally, in the early twentieth century, the new conservative "corporate state" then and now the dominant political system in the Western world-incorporated "responsible" and corporatist trade unions as junior partners to Big Government and favored big businesses in the new statist and corporatist decision-making system.
To establish this new system, to create a New Order which was a modernized, dressed-up version of the ancien régime before the American and French revolutions, the new ruling elites had to perform a gigantic con job on the deluded public, a con job that continues to this day. Whereas the existence of every government from absolute monarchy to military dictatorship rests on the consent of the majority of the public, a democratic government must engineer such consent on a more immediate, day-by-day basis. And to do so, the new conservative ruling elites had to gull the public in many crucial and fundamental ways. For the masses now had to be convinced that tyranny was better than liberty, that a cartelized and privileged industrial feudalism was better for the consumers than a freely competitive market, that a cartelized monopoly was to be imposed in the name of antimonopoly, and that war and military aggrandizement for the benefit of the ruling elites was really in the interests of the conscripted, taxed, and often slaughtered public. How was this to be done?
In all societies, public opinion is determined by the intellectual classes, the opinion moulders of society. For most people neither originate nor disseminate ideas and concepts; on the contrary, they tend to adopt those ideas promulgated by the professional intellectual classes, the professional dealers in ideas. Now, throughout history, as we shall see further below, despots and ruling elites of States have had far more need of the services of intellectuals than have peaceful citizens in a free society.
To establish their new statist order, their neomercantilist corporate State, the new conservatives therefore had to forge a new alliance between intellectual and State. In an increasingly secular age, this meant with secular intellectuals rather than with divines: specifically, with the new breed of professors, Ph.D.'s, historians, teachers, and techno cratic economists, social workers, sociologists, physicians, and engineers. This reforged alliance came in two parts. In the early nineteenth century, the conservatives, conceding reason to their liberal enemies, relied heavily on the alleged virtues of irrationality, romanticism, tradition, the ocracy. By stressing the virtue of tradition and of irrational symbols, the conservatives could gull the public into continuing privileged hierarchical rule, and to continue to worship the nation-state and its war-making machine. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the new conservatism adopted the trappings of reason and of "science." Now it was science that allegedly required rule of the economy and of society by technocratic "experts." In exchange for spreading this message to the public, the new breed of intellectuals was rewarded with jobs and prestige as apologists for the New Order and as planners and regulators of the newly cartelized economy and society.
One of the ways that the new statist intellectuals did their work was to change the meaning of old labels, and therefore to manipulate in the minds of the public the emotional connotations attached to such labels. For example, the laissez- faire libertarians had long been known as "liberals,” and the purest and most militant of them as "radicals"; they had also been known as "progressives" because they were the ones in tune with industrial progress, the spread of liberty, and the rise in living standards of consumers. The new breed of statist academics and intellectuals appropriated to themselves the words "liberal" and "progressive," and successfully managed to tar their laissez-faire opponents with the charge of being old-fashioned, "Neanderthal," and "reactionary." Even the name "conservative" was pinned on the classical liberals. And, as we have seen, the new statists were able to appropriate the concept of "reason" as well.
If the laissez-faire liberals were confused by the new recrudescence of statism and mercantilism as "progressive" corporate statism, another reason for the decay of classical liberalism by the end of the nineteenth century was the growth of a peculiar new movement: socialism. Socialism began in the 1830s and expanded greatly after the 1880s. The peculiar thing about socialism was that it was a confused, hybrid movement, influenced by both the two great preexisting polar ideologies, liberalism and conservatism. From the classical liberals the socialists took a frank acceptance of industrialism and the Industrial Revolution, an early glori fication of "science" and "reason," and at least a rhetorical devotion to such classical liberal ideals as peace, individual freedom, and a rising standard of living. Indeed, the socialists, long before the much later corporatists, pioneered in a co-opting of science, reason, and industrialism. And the socialists not only adopted the classical liberal adherence to democracy, but topped it by calling for an "expanded democracy," in which "the people" would run the economy and each other.
Socialism was a confused and hybrid movement because it tried to achieve the liberal goals of freedom, peace, and industrial harmony and growth goals which can only be achieved through liberty and the sepa ration of government from virtually everything by imposing the old conservative means of statism, collectivism, and hierarchical privilege. It was a movement which could only fail, which indeed did fail miserably in those numerous countries where it attained power in the twentieth century, by bringing to the masses only unprecedented despotism, starvation, and grinding impoverishment.
But the worst thing about the rise of the socialist movement was that it was able to outflank the classical liberals "on the Left": that is, as the party of hope, of radicalism, of revolution in the Western World. For, just as the defenders of the ancien régime took their place on the right side of the hall during the French Revolution, so the liberals and radicals sat on the left; from then on until the rise of socialism, the libertarian classical liberals were "the Left," even the "extreme Left," on the ideological spectrum. As late as 1848, such militant laissez-faire French liberals as Frederic Bastiat sat on the left in the national assembly. The classical liberals had begun as the radical, revolutionary party in the West, as the party of hope and of change on behalf of liberty, peace, and progress. To allow themselves to be outflanked, to allow the socialists to pose as the "party of the Left," was a bad strategic error, allowing the liberals to be put falsely into a confused middle-of-the-road position with socialism and conservatism as the polar opposites. Since libertarianism is nothing if not a party of change and of progress toward liberty, abandonment of that role meant the abandonment of much of their reason for existence either in reality or in the minds of the public.
But after achieving impressive partial victories against statism, the classical liberals began to lose their radicalism, their dogged insistence on carrying the battle against conservative statism to the point of final victory. Instead of using partial victories as a stepping-stone for evermore pressure, the classical liberals began to lose their fervor for change and for purity of principle. They began to rest content with trying to safeguard their existing victories, and thus turned themselves from a radical into a conservative movement-"conservative" in the sense of being content to preserve the status quo. In short, the liberals left the field wide open for socialism to become the party of hope and of radicalism, and even for the later corporatists to pose as "liberals" and "progressives" as against the "extreme right wing" and "conservative" libertarian classical liberals, since the latter allowed themselves to be boxed into a position of hoping for nothing more than stasis, than absence of change. Such a strategy is foolish and untenable in a changing world.
But the degeneration of liberalism was not merely one of stance and strategy, but one of principle as well. For the liberals became content to leave the war-making power in the hands of the State, to leave the education power in its hands, to leave the power over money and banking, and over roads, in the hands of the State-in short, to concede to State dominion over all the crucial levers of power in society. In contrast to the eighteenth-century liberals' total hostility to the executive and to bureaucracy, the nineteenth-century liberals tolerated and even welcomed the buildup of executive power and of an entrenched oligarchic civil service bureaucracy.
There were two critically important changes in the philosophy and ideology of classical liberalism which both exemplified and contributed to its decay as a vital, progressive, and radical force in the Western world. The first, and most important, occurring in the early to mid-nineteenth century, was the abandonment of the philosophy of natural rights, and its replacement by technocratic utilitarianism. Instead of liberty grounded on the imperative morality of each individual's right to person and property, that is, instead of liberty being sought primarily on the basis of right and justice, utilitarianism preferred liberty as generally the best way to achieve a vaguely defined general welfare or common good. There were two grave consequences of this shift from natural rights to utilitarianism. First, the purity of the goal, the consistency of the principle, was inevitably shattered. For whereas the natural-rights libertarian seeking morality and justice cleaves militantly to pure principle, the utilitarian only values liberty as an ad hoc expedient. And since expediency can and does shift with the wind, it will become easy for the utilitarian in his cool calculus of cost and benefit to plump for statism in ad hoc case after case, and thus to give principle away. Indeed, this is precisely what happened to the Benthamite utilitarians in England: beginning with ad hoc libertarianism and laissez-faire, they found it ever easier to slide further and further into statism. An example was the drive for an "efficient" and therefore strong civil service and executive power, an efficiency that took precedence, indeed replaced, any concept of justice or right.
This utilitarian crippling of libertarianism is still with us. Thus, in the early days of economic thought, utilitarianism captured free-market economics with the influence of Bentham and Ricardo, and this influence is today fully as strong as ever. Current free-market economics is all too rife with appeals to gradualism; with scorn for ethics, justice, and consistent principle; and with a willingness to abandon free-market prin ciples at the drop of a cost-benefit hat. Hence, current free-market eco nomics is generally envisioned by intellectuals as merely apologetics for a slightly modified status quo, and all too often such charges are correct.
A second, reinforcing change in the ideology of classical liberals came during the late nineteenth century, when, at least for a few decades, they adopted the doctrines of social evolutionism, often called "social Darwinism." Generally, statist historians have smeared such social Dar winist laissez-faire liberals as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner as cruel champions of the extermination, or at least of the disap pearance, of the socially "unfit." Much of this was simply the dressing up of sound economic and sociological free-market doctrine in the then fashionable trappings of evolutionism. But the really important and crip pling aspect of their social Darwinism was the illegitimate carrying-over to the social sphere of the view that species (or later, genes) change very, very slowly, after millennia of time. The social Darwinist liberal came, then, to abandon the very idea of revolution or radical change in favor of sitting back and waiting for the inevitable tiny evolutionary changes over eons of time.
But if utilitarianism, bolstered by social Darwinism, was the main agent of philosophical and ideological decay in the liberal movement, the single most important, and even cataclysmic, reason for its demise was its abandonment of formerly stringent principles against war, empire, and militarism. In country after country, it was the siren song of nation-state and empire that destroyed classical liberalism. In England, the liberals, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, abandoned the antiwar, antiimperialist "Little Englandism" of Cobden, Bright, and the Manchester School.
In current terminology again, the libertarian position on property and economics would be called "extreme right wing." But the libertarian sees no inconsistency in being "leftist" on some issues and "rightist" on others. On the contrary, he sees his own position as virtually the only consistent one, consistent on behalf of the liberty of every individual. For how can the leftist be opposed to the violence of war and conscription while at the same time supporting the violence of taxation and government control? -
In this book, Murray Rothbard successfully busts the common myths about the legitimacy and necessity of the State. However, there are some points where I find that his extreme stances are weakly supported by logic.
He attempts to define all human relationships based on a single axiom: voluntary, non-violent interaction. While in the general case that's perfectly valid, Rothbard is sometimes taking this to unhealthy extremes. For example, when discussing abortion, he puts the relationship between a mother and her unborn child on the same grounds as the relationship between two adults, which is absolutely contrary to nature's laws. A fetus, a minor, a mentally ill or disabled person is simply not the same thing as a healthy adult human being, and therefore treating them in the same way, with the same set of rights and obligations, is wrong.
I'm not saying that we need government oversight to understand and enforce that difference. I just think that we, as human beings, instinctively know right from wrong, and while most of our values and beliefs are relative, some are absolute.
That's the peril of trying to derive society based on one made-up axiom, instead of looking at the actual natural laws that govern us. That would be just as fictional as statist arguments like the "social contract" theory (I don't remember signing anything!)
The book also does not elaborate much on the sustainability of Rothbard's ideal free, libertarian world. How would such a society protect itself from the reemergence of a coercive state? For example, excessive concentration of scarce property within the hands of a small group of people might easily give rise to an unfree regime where everyone else is discriminated against. It may be argued that a truly free market would not allow such concentrations to appear at all; but instead of proposing this argument and elaborating on it, the issue is simply ignored in the book -- Rothbard seems to be OK with the risk that an ideal libertarian society could easily dismantle itself and revert to an unfree state of tyranny.
The problem of information assymetries is similarly ignored by Rothbard. To properly exercise his or her free will, a human being should be able to form an informed opinion first -- and distorted information damages this process. Nevertheless, under Rothbard's paradigm, actions that willfully generate and abuse such distorted information -- for example fraud, deception, libel, insider trading, etc. -- should not be considered crimes at all (at least the book leaves this impression).
And finally, some unresolved issues are left by his claim that in the ideal case, libertarians should press for immediate abolition of any state involvement in private matters, and that plans for gradual and "controlled" dismantling of the State are completely undesirable. The problem is that if the State were to suddenly withdraw and disappear tomorrow, it would not leave behind a level playing field -- instead, some people would gain unfair initial advantage and privilege, having accumulated wealth and influence due to their courtship with state power.
Free market institutions, like any other institution, don't spring up overnight. They take time to develop and sudden, uncontrolled withdrawal of the state from an area of public life can potntially have devastating effects. Take the concrete example of pollution -- Rothbard claims that it is a problem of poorly defined and protected property rights, and I fully agree. This lack of protected rights is partially compensated by inefficient government regulations and limits on pollution, and however imperfect they may be, they are a better case than if we had complete, unchecked rights to pollute without any protection for the victims whatsoever. That means that a fair solution would be first to introduce the libertarian institutions that protect people's property and person from the aggression of pollution, and only then repeal the inefficient substitutes provided by the State. Doing that in the reverse order would inevitably lead to disaster. An analogical argument could be provided for many other issues.
Despite these and some other points that I find unconvincing, I would recommend this book as a good way to challenge and overcome many preconceived myths that have been fed into our heads from an early age. And since this is a fundamental book in 20th century free market anarchist thought, I'm sure that there's other similar literature that follows it, and manages to elaborate and develop the few weak points of Rothbard's arguments. -
Rothbard's arguments in favor of abortion aren't acceptable to me but outside of that - this book absolutely nails down the rules that should lay the foundation for a pluralistic and civil society.
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A consistent, logical, and thorough argument for libertarian thought and applied political philosophy, full of originality and thought-provoking ideas, which are sure to stir convictions and emotions from most of the readers.
