Murry Rothbard on why libertarians should oppose war

Many libertarians are uncomfortable with foreign policy and prefer to spend their energies either on fundamental questions of libertarian theory or on such "domestic" concerns as the free market or privatizing postal service or garbage disposal.  Yet an attack on war or a warlike foreign policy is of crucial importance to libertarians.  There are two important reasons.  One has become a cliché, but is all too true nevertheless: the overriding importance of preventing a nuclear holocaust.  To all the long-standing reasons, moral and economic, against an interventionist foreign policy has now been added the imminent, ever-present threat of world destruction...

The other reason is that, apart from the nuclear menace, war, in the words of the libertarian Randolph Bourne, "is the health of the State."  War has always been the occasion of a great - and usually permanent - acceleration and intensification of State power over society.  War is the great excuse for mobilizing all the energies and resources of the nation, in the name of patriotic rhetoric, under the aegis and dictation of the State apparatus.  It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.  Society becomes a herd, seeking to kill its alleged enemies, rooting out and suppressing all dissent from the official war effort, happily betraying truth for the supposed public interest.  Society becomes an armed camp, with the values and the morals - as the libertarian Albert Jay Nock once phrased it - of an "army on the march."

~ Murry Rothbard, For A New Liberty, pp. 347-348

1973