Murray Rothbard on the Constitution

Overall, it should be evident that the Constitution was a counterrevolutionary reaction to the libertarianism and decentralization embodied in the American Revolution.  The Antifederalists, supporting states’ rights and critical of a strong national government, were decisively beaten by the Federalists, who wanted such a polity under the guise of democracy in order to enhance their own interests and institute a British-style mercantilism over the country.  Most historians have taken the side of the Federalists because they support a strong national government that has the power to tax and regulate, call forth armies and invade other countries, and cripple the power of the states.  The enactment of the Constitution in 1788 drastically changed the course of American history from its natural decentralized and libertarian direction to an omnipresent leviathan that fulfilled all of the Antifederalists’ fears.  With the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the new government was now a fact and the Antifederalists would never again agitate for another constitutional convention to weaken American national power and return to a more decentralized and restrained polity.  From now on American liberals, relying on the Bill of Rights and the Tenth Amendment, would go forth and do battle for Liberty and against Power within the framework of the American Constitution as states’-righters and Constitutionalists.  Their battle would be a long and gallant one, but ultimately doomed to fail, for by accepting the Constitution, the liberals would only play with dice loaded implacably against them.  The Constitution, with its inherently broad powers and elastic clauses, would increasingly support an ever larger and more powerful central government. In the long run, the liberals, though they could and did run a gallant race, were doomed to lose—and lose indeed they did.

~ Murray Rothbard

(As quoted by Lew Rockwell, "Rothbard on the Constitution," Mises Wire, October 9, 2025.)

 

 

Murray Rothbard on consumers, voters and knowledge

Consumers also take entrepreneurial risks on the market.  Many critics of the market, while willing to concede the expertise of the capitalist-entrepreneurs, bewail the prevailing ignorance of consumers, which prevents them from gaining the utility ex post that they had expected ex ante.  Typically, Wesley C. Mitchell entitled one of his famous essays: ‘The Backward Art of Spending Money.’  Professor Mises has keenly pointed out the paradox of interventionists who insist that consumers are too ignorant or incompetent to buy products intelligently, while at the same time proclaiming the virtues of democracy, where the same people vote for or against politicians whom they do not know and on policies which they scarcely understand.  

To put it another way, the partisans of intervention assume that individuals are not competent to run their own affairs or to hire experts to advise them, but they also assume that these same individuals are competent to vote for these experts at the ballot box.  They are further assuming that the mass of supposedly incompetent consumers are competent to choose not only those who will rule over themselves, but also over the competent individuals in society.  Yet such absurd and contradictory assumptions lie at the root of every program for ‘democratic’ intervention in the affairs of the people. 

In fact, the truth is precisely the reverse of this popular ideology.  Consumers are surely not omniscient, but they have direct tests by which to acquire and check their knowledge.  They buy a certain brand of breakfast food and they do not like it; and so they do not buy it again.  They buy a certain type of automobile and like its performance; they buy another one.  And in both cases, they tell their friends of this newly won knowledge.  Other consumers patronize consumers’ research organizations, which can warn or advise them in advance.  But, in all cases, the consumers have the direct test of results to guide them.  And the firm which satisfied the consumers expands and prospers and thus gains ‘good will,’ while the firm failing to satisfy them goes out of business.  

On the other hand, voting for politicians and public policies is a completely different matter.  Here there are no direct tests of success or failure whatever, neither profits and losses nor enjoyable or unsatisfying consumption.  In order to grasp consequences, especially the indirect catallactic consequences of governmental decisions, it is necessary to comprehend complex chains of praxeological reasoning.  Very few voters have the ability or the interest to follow such reasoning, particularly, as Schumpeter points out, in political situations.  For the minute influence that any one person has on the results, as well as the seeming remoteness of the actions, keeps people from gaining interest in political problems or arguments.  Lacking the direct test of success or failure, the voter tends to turn, not to those politicians whose policies have the best chance of success, but to those who can best sell their propaganda ability.  Without grasping logical chains of deduction, the average voter will never be able to discover the errors that his ruler makes.  

George J. Schuller, in attempting to refute this argument, protested that: ‘complex chains of reasoning are required for consumers to select intelligently an automobile or television set.’  But such knowledge is not necessary; for the whole point is that the consumers have always at hand a simple and pragmatic test of success: does the product work and work well?  In public economic affairs, there is no such test, for no one can know whether a particular policy has ‘worked’ or not without knowing the a priori reasoning of economics.

~ Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State (1962)

(As quoted by Lew Rockwell in "The Greatness of Man, Economy, and State," LewRockwell.com, June 4, 2025.  See also here under "E. Utility Ex Post.")

Murray Rothbard on civilians and war

But "aggression" only makes sense on the individual Smith-Jones level, as does the very term "police action."  These terms make no sense whatever on an inter-State level.  First, we have seen that governments entering a war thereby become aggressors themselves against innocent civilians; indeed, become mass murderers.  The correct analogy to individual action would be: Smith beats up Jones, the police rush in to help Jones, and in the course of trying to apprehend Smith, the policy bomb a city block and murder thousands of people, or spray machine-gun fire into an innocent crowd.  This is a far more accurate analogy, for that is what a warring government does, and in the twentieth century it does on a monumental scale.  But any policy agency that behaves this way itself becomes a criminal aggressor, often far more so than the original Smith who began the affair.

~ Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, "War and Foreign Policy," p. 335

Murray Rothbard on how libertarians view war

Libertarians favor liberty as a natural human right, and advocate it not only for Americans but for all peoples.  In a purely libertarian world, therefore, there would be no “foreign policy” because there would be no States, no governments with a monopoly of coercion over particular territorial areas.  But since we live in a world of nation-states.  And since this system is hardly likely to disappear in the near future, what is the attitude of libertarians toward foreign policy in the current State-ridden world? 

Pending the dissolution of States, libertarians desire to limit, to whittle down, the area of governmental power in all directions and as much as possible… 

Specifically, the entire land area of the world is now parcelled out among various States, and each land area is ruled by a central government with monopoly of violence over that area.  In relations between States, then, the libertarian goal is to keep each of those States from extending their violence to other countries, so that each State’s tyranny is at least confined to its own bailiwick.  For the libertarian is interested in reducing as much as possible the area of State aggression against all private individuals.  The only way to do this, in international affairs, is for the people of each country to pressure their own State to confine its activities to the area it monopolizes and not to attack other States or aggress against their subjects.  In short, the objective of the libertarian is to confine any existing State to as small a degree of invasion of person and property as possible.  And this means the total avoidance of war.  The people under each State should pressure “their respective States not to attack one another, or, if a conflict should break out, to withdraw from it as quickly as physically possible.

~ Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, "War and Foreign Policy," pp. 331-332

1919 (published posthumously)

Murray Rothbard on modern war vs. pre-modern war

It was not always thus.  During the Middle Ages, the scope of wars was far more limited.  Before the rise of modern weapons, armaments were so limited that governments could – and often did – strictly confine their violence to the armies of the rival governments.  It is true that tax coercion increased, but at least there was no mass murder of the innocents.  Not only was firepower low enough to confine violence to the armies of the contending sides, but in the pre-modern era there was no central nation-state that spoke inevitably in the name of all inhabitants of a given land area.  If one set of kings or barons fought another, it was not felt that everyone in the area must be a dedicated partisan.  Moreover, instead of mass conscript armies enslaved to their respective rulers, armies were small bands of hired mercenaries.  Often, a favorite sport for the populace was to observe a battle from the safety of the town ramparts, and war was regarded as something of a sporting match.  But with the rise of the centralizing State and of modern weapons of mass destruction, the slaughter of civilians, as well as conscript armies, have become a vital part of inter-State warfare. 

Suppose that despite possible libertarian opposition, war has broken out.  Clearly, the libertarian position should be that, so long as the war continues, the scope of assault upon innocent civilians must be diminished as much as possible.  Old-fashioned international law had two excellent devices to accomplish this goal: the “laws of war,” and the “laws of neutrality” or “neutral’s rights”…  In short, the libertarian tries to induce the warring States to observe fully the rights of neutral citizens.  The “laws of war,” for their part, were designed to limit as much as possible the invasion by warring States of the rights of civilians in their respective countries.  As the British jurist F.J.P. Veale put it: 

The fundamental principle of this code was that hostilities between civilized peoples must be limited to the armed forces…  It drew a distinction between combatants and non-combatants by laying down that the sole business of the combatants is to fight each other and, consequently, that non-combatants must be excluded from the scope of military operations.

In the modified form of prohibiting the bombardment of all cities not in the front line, this rule held in Western European wars in recent centuries until Britain launched the strategic bombing of civilians in World War II. Now, of course, the entire concept is scarcely remembered, since the very nature of modern nuclear warfare rests upon the annihilation of civilians.

~ Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, "War and Foreign Policy," pp. 332-334

1973

Murray Rothbard on the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971

Of all the recent wars, none has come closer – though not completely so – to satisfying these three criteria for a “just war” than the Indian war of late 1971 for the liberation of Bangla Desh.  The government of Pakistan had been created as a last terrible legacy of Imperial Britain to the Indian subcontinent.  In particular, the nation of Pakistan consisted of imperial rule by the Punjabis of West Pakistan over the more numerous and productive Bengalis of East Pakistan (and also over the Pathans of the North-West Frontier).  The Bengalis had long been yearning for independence from their imperial oppressors; in early 1971, parliament was suspended as a result of Bengali victory in the elections; from then on, Punjabi troops systematically slaughtered the civilian Bengal population.  Indian entry in the conflict aided the popular Bengali resistance forces of the Mukhti Bahini.  While taxes and conscription were, of course, involved, the Indian armies did not use their weapons against Bengali civilians; on the contrary, here was a genuine revolutionary war on the Bengali public against the Punjabi occupying state.  Only Punjabi soldiers were on the receiving end of Indian bullets.

~ Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, "War and Foreign Policy," p. 336

Murray Rothbard on the protectionist scheme

As we unravel the tangled web of protectionist argument, we should keep our eye on two essential points: (1) protectionism means force in restraint of trade; and (2) the key is what happens to the consumer.  Invariably, we will find that the protectionists are out to cripple, exploit, and impose severe losses not only on foreign consumers but especially Americans.  And since each and every one of us is a consumer, this means that protectionism is out to mulct all of us for the benefit of a specially privileged, subsidized few – and an inefficient few at that: people who cannot make it in a free and unhampered market. 

~ Murray Rothbard, “Protectionism and the Destruction of Prosperity,” 1986

Murray Rothbard on how foreign aid subsidizes exports

Another crucial feature of post-World War II establishment trade policy in the name of "free trade" is to push heavy subsidies of exports.  A favorite method of subsidy has been the much beloved system of foreign aid, which, under the cover of "reconstructing Europe," "stopping Communism," or "spreading democracy," is a racket by which the American taxpayers are forced to subsidize American export firms and industries as well as foreign governments who go along with this system.  Nafta represents a continuation of this system by enlisting the U.S. government and American taxpayers in this cause.

~ Murray Rothbard, "The Nafta Myth"

(Article appeared in Making Economic Sense, p. 308.)

Murray Rothard on free trade

The major point is that genuine free trade requires no negotiations, treaties, super-power creations, or presidential jetting abroad. All it requires is for the United States to cut tariffs and quotas, as well as taxes and regulations. Period. And yes, unilaterally. No other nations or governments need get into the act.

~ Murray Rothard, "'Free Trade' in Perspective"

(Article appears in Making Economic Sense on p. 304.)

1995

Murray Rothbard on determining the aggressor in war

Just because all sides share in the ultimate State-guilt, does not mean that all sides are equally guilty. On the contrary, in virtually every war, one side is far more guilty than the other, and on one side must be pinned the basic responsibility for aggression, for a drive for conquest, etc. But in order to find out which side to any war is the more guilty, we have to inform ourselves in depth about the history of that conflict, and that takes time and thought--and it also takes the ultimate willingness to become relevant by taking sides through pinning a greater degree of guilt on one side or the other. 

~ Murray Rothbard, "War Guilt in the Middle East," 1967

Lew Rockwell on Hitler's modest plans before 1939

The neocon efforts to demonize the enemy are nothing new, and in what follows, I’m going to discuss a number of examples to show how pervasive this pattern has been in involving America in unnecessary, destructive, and costly wars. 

Let’s begin with the most salient case of all.  For the neocons, it’s always Hitler.  The Munich Conference of 1938 shows what happens when we fail to stand up against evil.  The facts don’t bear out what they say.  Hitler was indeed an evil dictator, but America had no valid reason to go to war against him.  Hitler did not aim to attack the United States, and fighting against him helped Stalin, who killed more people than Hitler did, in taking control of Eastern Europe. 

Furthermore, Hitler’s policies during the 1930s aimed at the peaceful revision of the punitive and unjust Treaty of Versailles.  A European War resulted only after the unwise and unenforceable British and French guarantee of the Western boundary of Poland.  The eastern boundary against Russia was not guaranteed, and Poland lost territory to Russia after the Russians invaded Poland on September 17, 1939. 

The great Murray Rothbard notes that Hitler’s policy before 1939 was improvised, responding to particular circumstances.  He did not have a plan for “world conquest” as the neocons continue to allege today.  “Hitler was not bent on world conquest, for which he had armed Germany to the teeth and constructed a ‘timetable.’  Hitler, in brief, (in foreign affairs) was not a uniquely evil monster or daimon, who would continue to gobble up countries diabolically until stopped by superior force.  Hitler was a rational German statesman, pursuing — with considerable intuitive insight — a traditional, post-Versailles German policy (to which we might add intimations of desires to expand eastward in an attack on Bolshevism).  But basically, Hitler has no ‘master plan’; he was a German intent, like all Germans, on revising the intolerable and stupid Versailles-diktat, and on doing so by peaceful means, and in collaboration with the British and French.  One thing is sure: Hitler had no designs, no plans, not even vague intimations, to expand westward against Britain and France (let alone the United States).”

~ Lew Rockwell, "Good vs. Bad Nations," LewRockwell.com, May 22, 2024

Hans-Hermann Hoppe on Walter Block's defense of Israel's retaliation for the October 7 Hamas attack

Grotesque.  If anything, this assessment of Block’s only indicates that he has lost any sense of measure and proportion...  [H]is call for total and unrestricted war and the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians is actually the complete and uninhibited rejection and renunciation of the non-aggression principle that constitutes one of the very cornerstones of the Rothbardian system.  To believe that Rothbard would have given serious consideration to his WSJ piece is simply ridiculous and only indicates that Block’s understanding of Rothbard is not nearly as good as he himself fancies it to be.  The Rothbard I knew would have denounced the piece in no uncertain terms as monstrous and considered it an unforgivable aberration and disgrace.

~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe, "On Open Letter to Walter E. Block," LewRockwell.com, January 31, 2024

Murray Rothbard on the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre at Hebron (1994)

The brutal massacre at Hebron in late February was as fascinating for the inappropriate responses of the Israeli and U.S. authorities as for the dramatic nature of the act itself.  The initial response of the Israeli government was the traditional reaction in matters of this sort: to blame it all on one lone, "deranged" nut, in this case Dr. Baruch Goldstein.  But this first reaction fell through quickly when it turned out that, however nutty, Dr. Goldstein was scarcely alone: that he was, in fact, the leader in Hebron of the "Kachniks," the movement founded by the notorious Brooklyn Rabbi, the late Meir Kahane, which is now split into the Kach ("the way") Party and the smaller and even more fanatic Kahane Chai ("Kahane lives.")  The loneness was further called into question when the Kackniks praised Goldstein's mass murder of Arabs while kneeling in prayer in their mosque, and mourned the "martyrdom" of Goldstein, who was beaten to death by the enraged remnant of those of his victims who managed to remain alive.  World-wide television spread the remarkable comment of Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, at the Goldstein eulogy, a comment that was repeated by various of the mourners: "One million Arab lives are not worth one Jewish fingernail!"

[...]

The Palestinians were all too aware of the emptiness of these gestures of shame and anger by Israel.  Talk is cheap; as we say in New York, that and $1.25 will get you on the subway.  Despite all the talk of moving against the Kachniks, in fact only a half-dozen have been proscribed by the government, and only one is actually in jail.  The rage of the Palestinian Arabs is unbounded; even the usually passive Arabs of Israel proper have rioted against Israel; and even the traditionally pro-Israel Bedouin Arabs are talking about resigning from the Israeli Army.  You know that matters are serious when Farouk Khadoumi, the "foreign minister" of the PLO, and a man who has always been an ultra-moderate, refused Arafat's call to meet at Tunis because he didn't want even the hint of implication in a possible resumption of peace negotiations.

~ Murray Rothbard, "The Vital Importance of Separation," Rothbard-Rockwell Report, April 1994, pp. 1, 3

Murray Rothbard on the early Zionist movement

[W]hat was world Zionism?  Before the French Revolution, the Jews of Europe had been largely encased in ghettoes, and there emerged from ghetto life a distinct Jewish cultural and ethnic (as well as religious) identity, with Yiddish as the common language (Hebrew being only the ancient language of religious ritual).  After the French Revolution, the Jews of Western Europe were emancipated from ghetto life, and they then faced a choice of where to go from there.  One group, the heirs of the Enlightenment, chose and advocated the choice of casting off narrow, parochial ghetto culture on behalf of assimilation into the culture and the environment of the Western world.  While assimilationism was clearly the rational course in America and Western Europe, this route could not easily be followed in Eastern Europe, where the ghetto walls still held.  In Eastern Europe, therefore, the Jews turned toward various movements for preservation of the Jewish ethnic and cultural identity.  Most prevalent was Bundism, the viewpoint of the Jewish Bund, which advocated Jewish national self-determination, up to and including a Jewish state in the predominantly Jewish areas of Eastern Europe.  (Thus, according to Bundism, the city of Vilna, in Eastern Europe, with a majority population of Jews, would be part of a newly-formed Jewish state.)  Another, less powerful, group of Jews, the Territorialist Movement, despairing of the future of Jews in Eastern Europe, advocated preserving the Yiddish Jewish identity by forming Jewish colonies and communities (not states) in various unpopulated, virgin areas of the world. 

Given the conditions of European Jewry in the late 19th and turn of the 20th centuries, all of these movements had a rational groundwork.  The one Jewish movement that made no sense was Zionism, a movement which began blended with Jewish Territorialism.  But while the Territorialists simply wanted to preserve Jewish-Yiddish identity in a newly developed land of their own, Zionism began to insist on a Jewish land in Palestine alone.  The fact that Palestine was not a virgin land, but already occupied by an Arab peasantry, meant nothing to the ideologues of Zionism.  Furthermore, the Zionists, far from hoping to preserve ghetto Yiddish culture, wished to bury it and to substitute a new culture and a new language based on an artificial secular expansion of ancient religious Hebrew. 

In 1903, the British offered territory in Uganda for Jewish colonization, and the rejection of this offer by the Zionists polarized the Zionist and Territorialist movements, which previously had been fused together.  From then on, the Zionists would be committed to the blood-and-soil mystique of Palestine, and Palestine alone, while the Territorialists would seek virgin land elsewhere in the world.  

Because of the Arabs resident in Palestine, Zionism had to become in practice an ideology of conquest.

~ Murray Rothbard, ""War Guilt in the Middle East," Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, Spring-Autumn 1967

The first Aliya, early Jewish immigrants to
Ottoman Palestine, 1882-1903

Murray Rothbard on the 1948 Arab-Israeli War

While the British were still in Palestine, the Zionist paramilitary forces began to crush the Palestinian Arab armed forces in a series of civil war clashes.  But, more fatefully, on April 9, 1948, the fanatical Zionist-Revisionist terrorists grouped in the organization Irgun Zvai Leumi massacred a hundred women and children in the Arab village of Deir Yassin.  By the advent of Israel’s independence on May 15 the Palestinian Arabs, demoralized, were fleeing in panic from their homes and from the threat of massacre.  The neighboring Arab states then sent in their troops.  

Historians are wont to describe the ensuing war as an invasion of Israel by the Arab states, heroically rebuffed by Israel, but since all of the fighting took place on Arab territory, this interpretation is clearly incorrect.  What happened, in fact, is that Israel managed to seize large chunks of territory assigned to the Palestinian Arabs by the partition agreement, including the Arab areas of Western Galilee, Arab west-central Palestine as "corridor" to Jerusalem, and the Arab cities of Jaffa and Beersheba.  The bulk of Jerusalem – the New City – was also seized by Israel and the UN internationalization plan discarded.  The Arab armies were hampered by their own inefficiency and disunity and by a series of UN-imposed truces broken only long enough for Israel to occupy more Arab territory.

~ Murray Rothbard, "War Guilt in the Middle East," Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, Spring-Autumn 1967

Murray Rothbard on rise of Hamas and decline of the P.L.O.

The P.L.O., child of the 1960s, was the last major organization born of the Old Islam: that is, led by secularists who were genuinely devoted to a unitary secular state in Palestine, with complete freedom to be enjoyed by all religions, Jewish and Christian, as well as Muslim.  At the same time that Israeli leaders were demonizing the P.L.O. as eager to hurl all Jews into the sea, the P.L.O. always insisted on distinctions between the aggressive "Zionist entity," which they hated, and the Jewish religion, which they had nothing against.

But that was Old Islam.  Within the last decade or so, as everyone knows, a militant New Islam has emerged, determined, "fundamentalist," and heaping only scorn on "Western" ideals such as religious freedom that had so influenced older groups like the P.L.O.  And so the upsurge of the New Islam, the "hard right" such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, hard-core Muslims who have no use for secularism or religious freedom.  And never, ever are they in a spirit to compromise, to surrender, to the hated Zionist entity.  The Palestinians of the poor, wretched Gaza Strip are almost totally devoted to Hamas, as are much of the Palestinians on the West Bank and among the remainder of the Palestinians, the P.L.O.'s only trumpcard has been the person of Yassar Arafat, beloved by rank-and-file Palestinians as the George Washington of his people.  But even that devotion began to erode a few years ago when the Muslim Arafat displayed the temerity to marry a Christian wife.

~ Murray Rothbard, "The Israel-P.L.O. Accord," Rothbard-Rockwell Report, October 1993, p. 4

September 13, 1993

Murray Rothbard on the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982

All other news, all other concerns, fade into insignificance beside the enormous horror of the massacre in Beirut.  All humanity is outraged at the wanton slaughter of hundreds of men (mainly elderly), women, and children in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.  The days of the massacre— September 16 to 18—shall truly live in infamy.

There is one ray of hope in this bloodbath: the world-wide outrage demonstrates that mankind’s sensibilities have , as some have feared, been blunted by the butcheries of the twentieth century or by watching repeated carnage on television.  Mankind is still capable of reacting to evident atrocities that are wreaked upon other human beings: be they thousands of miles away or members of a different or even alien religion, culture, or ethnic group.  When hundreds of manifest innocents are brutally and systematically slaughtered, all of us who are still fully human cry out in profound protest. 

The outrage and protest must be compounded of several elements.  First, of course, we must mourn for the poor downtrodden people of Lebanon, especially the Palestinians, who were driven out in 1948 to a reluctant exile from their homes and land.  We must mourn for the slaughtered and their remaining families.  And for the hundreds of thousands in Lebanon and in Beirut who have been killed, wounded, bombed out, and rendered homeless wanderers by the aggression of the State of Israel. 

But mourning and compassion are not enough.  As in any mass murder, the responsibility and the guilt for the crime must be pinpointed.  For the sake of justice and to try to make sure that such a holocaust—for holocaust it has been—may never happen again. 

Who, then, is guilty?  On the most immediate and direct level, of course, the uniformed thugs and murderers who committed the slaughter.  They consist of two groups of Christian Lebanese, working their will on innocent Muslims: the Christian Lebanese Forces of Major Saad Haddad, and the Christian Phalange, headed by the Gemayel family, now installed in the presidency of Lebanon. 

But equally responsible, equally guilty, are the aiders and abettors, the string-pullers, the masters of West Beirut where the slaughter took place: the State of Israel.

~ Murray Rothbard, "The Massacre," The Libertarian Forum, October 1982

Murray Rothbard on irreconcilable claims in Palestine

If we take off our blinders, it should be stunningly obvious that what we have in the entire Israeli region are two absolutely irreconcilable claims, an irreconcilability that applies equally well to Israel Proper as it does to the occupied West Bank.  On the one hand, there are the Palestinian Arabs, who have tilled the soil or otherwise used the land of Palestine for centuries; and on the other, there are a group of external fanatics, who come from all over the world, and who claim the entire land as "given" to them as a collective religion or tribe at some remote and possibly legendary time in the past.  There is no way the two claims can be resolved to the satisfaction of both parties.  There can be no genuine settlement, no true "peace" in the face of this irrepressible conflict; there can be either a war to the death, or an uneasy practical compromise which can satisfy no one.  That is the harsh reality of the Middle East.

~ Murray Rothbard, "The Vital Importance of Separation," Rothbard-Rockwell Report, April 1994, p. 4

Murray Rothbard on collective security and the Middle East crisis

We cannot fully understand the nature of the crisis in the Middle East by just following today’s and yesterday’s headlines.  There are far deeper and longer lasting factors at work than merely who commands the Strait of Tiran or who is responsible for the latest border skirmish in the Gaza Strip.  The first thing that we as Americans should be concerned about is the absurdity of the fundamental foreign policy position of the U.S. government.  This is a doctrine that the United States first adopted, to its woe, in the late 1930s and has clung to ever since: the doctrine of “collective security.”  The collective security thesis assumes that, at whatever moment of time one happens to be in, the territorial distribution of States on the world’s surface is just and proper.  Any forcible disturbances of any governmental boundary anywhere, then, automatically becomes “aggression” which must be combated either by all other nations or by the United States itself, acting as “world policeman.” 

In short, the whole thesis of collective security that has guided American policy for thirty years rests on a ridiculous analogy from private property and the function of police in defending that property.  Mr. Jones owns the property; it is then certainly not absurd to say that he has an absolute moral right to that property and that, therefore, any invasion of that property by force is immoral and unjust.  It is also not absurd, then, to say that it is just for Mr. Jones’s property to be defended by some form of police (whether public or private is not here at issue). 

But surely it is worse than absurd to leap from this concept of just private property to say that a State’s territory is equally just, proper, and sacrosanct, and that therefore any invasion of that State’s self-acclaimed territory is just as wicked as invasion of private property and deserves to be defended by some form of “police.”  All State territory, without exception in history or in any part of the world, was obtained, not by legitimate voluntary productive means such as used by Mr. Jones or his ancestors, but by coercion and violent conquest.  Therefore no one allocation of territory — certainly no allocation of territory that happens to exist at any moment of time — is ipso facto proper and just and deserving of any form of defense. If, in Year 1, Ruritania grabs part of the territory of Waldonia by force, then surely it is nonsensical for the United Sates or some other group to step in with righteous indignation when, in Year 5, Waldonia tries to grab that territory back.  Yet this is precisely what is implied in the whole theory on which the United Nations is grounded, and in the U.S. foreign policy to “guarantee the territorial integrity of all the nations in the Middle East.” 

Basic to the current crisis in the Middle East is the fact that such Israeli territory as the port of Elath, and indeed the entire Negev desert area surrounding Elath, which is now a big bone of contention between Israel and the Arab powers, was grabbed by force from the Arabs by Israel in 1948.  For the US, then, to go to war to “defend the territorial integrity” of Israel in the Negev would be, on this and on many other grounds, the height of folly.

~ Murray Rothbard, "The Middle East Crisis," 1967

(As appeared in Never a Dull Moment: A Libertarian Look at the Sixties, pp. 27-28.)

Six-Day War

Murray Rothbard on the Six-Day War

Why the wave of adulation and admiration that greeted the blitzkrieg war of conquest by Israel against the Arab countries?  That greeted the conquest, that is, in the United States; most of the rest of the world was stunned and appalled.  Has a sickness eaten its way deep into the American soul?  Do we all simply love a winner — even if he wins by means of fire-power, surprise attack, and mobile blitzkrieg tactics?  Even if he wins, as Israel did, by napalming innocent women and children in Arab villages?  Have we lost all sense of moral principle, all sense of justice? 

Two major reasons have been advanced for the acclaim heaped by American public opinion on the state of Israel.  One is that it is a “bastion of anti-Communism in the Middle East.”  This is an odd argument, since, in the first place, none of the Arab countries is Communist or anything like it; all are governed by deeply religious Moslems.  Sure, the Arabs accepted military aid from Soviet Russia, but only after they found that they could not get such aid from the U.S., which was arming Israel instead. And, furthermore, the Arab countries are certainly no more socialist than Israel: Israel has been governed, since its inception, by an avowedly socialist party (the Mapai); it has a very large proportion of its economy in government hands; and it has a fantastically strong labor union movement (the Histadrut) which, as a virtual State within a State, controls and owns a large chunk of the economy of Israel in its own right.  And, what is more, there exist in Israel the famous kibbutzim, which are communes, in which communism (in its true sense of virtual absence of private property) is practiced on a scale far more intense than in any Communist country in the world (with the exception of China).  And while membership in the kibbutzim is generally voluntary, there are also many Israeli refugees literally enslaved to the kibbutzim, and who cannot leave them until they “pay back” the Israel government the passage money from Europe to Israel.  Furthermore, since their pay in the kibbutzim is very low, it is almost impossible for them to work out their term, and so they remain, often with great reluctance, in forced labor on the Israel communes. 

The other common argument is that Israel is “little,” compared to its Arab neighbors, and therefore deserves admiration as an underdog surrounded by giants, as Davids surrounded by Goliaths.  The “littleness” here is a complete misreading of world affairs; it would be just as absurd to hail Britain when she conquered India quite easily.  Are we to consider the British Empire as the “underdog,” since India’s population outnumbered England by a huge multiple?  Certainly not: clearly the technological level and relative standards of living were so disparate, that the “smaller” nation could easily conquer and dominate the larger.  The same is true for “little” Israel.  The rulers of Israel are not Middle Eastern, like their Arab neighbors; they are largely European, and furthermore, they are financed very heavily by wealthy European and American Zionists.  These, then, were Europeans who came, on the backs of and in collusion with, the British Empire (from the end of World War I to the end of World War II), with European technology, wealth and know-how, to seize the lands and homes of Arabs, and themselves to colonize Palestine.  To think of these Zionists and Israelis as “underdogs,” in the light of the true situation, is nothing less than grotesque — as can be seen by the swift wars of conquest fought by Israel in 1948, 1956, and now today.

~ Murray Rothbard, "'Little' Israel," 1967

(As appeared in Never a Dull Moment: A Libertarian Look at the Sixties, pp. 35-36.)

Six-Day War