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.")

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

Lew Rockwell on how the good vs. evil paradigm has been applied to the Civil War

After the end of World War II, the good versus evil nations paradigm was applied to the War Between the States as well.  Before 1939, the dominant interpretation of the war stressed national reconciliation.  Historians such as Avery Craven saw the war as an unnecessary conflict brought about by errors and intransigence on both sides.  The foremost American historian of the time, Charles A, Beard, saw the war primarily in economic terms, as a conflict between the industrialized North and the agricultural South.  In the new view, by contrast. as expressed in a pioneering article, “The Causes of the Civil War” by the ardent New Dealer Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. in Partisan Review (1949), the war was seen as a Manichean struggle in which the heroic Abraham Lincoln battled the evil slave power. 

The neocons have continued the demonization of the South today, e.g., by campaigning to destroy all Confederate monuments and by rooting out any sympathy for the Confederate cause in history textbooks.  General Robert E. Lee, once a national icon, is now reviled, and Abraham Lincoln, who bears primary responsibility for a horrendous war and for the growth of the Leviathan state, is treated as a virtual demigod. 

As the great Tom DiLorenzo, the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute has pointed out, Lincoln’s motive for war on the South was not the eradication of slavery—he urged the adoption of the Corwin Amendment, which would have guaranteed non-interference with slavery in place where it then existed—but the continued collection of tariffs, the principal source of the federal government’s tax revenues, Secession, he thought, must be forcibly suppressed to secure this vital source of revenue.  As DiLorenzo says, “Lincoln then threw down the gauntlet in his first inaugural: ‘The power confided in me,’ he said, ‘will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion–no using force against, or among the people anywhere.’ 

‘We are going to make tax slaves out of you,’ Lincoln was effectively saying, ‘and if you resist, there will be an invasion.’  That was on March 4.  Five weeks later, on April 12, Fort Sumter, a tariff collection point in Charleston Harbor, was bombarded by the Confederates.  No one was hurt or killed, and Lincoln later revealed that he manipulated the Confederates into firing the first shot, which helped generate war fever in the North.”  See this. 

Mark Thornton and Robert B. Ekelund, Jr., in their excellent book Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation have also made a strong case that tariffs were the primary cause of the war.

~ Lew Rockwell, "The Myth of Good and Bad Nations," LewRockwell.com, May 20, 2024

Lew Rockwell on anarchy

Is it possible that we have likewise assumed that the state is inevitable only because we are used to it, and can hardly imagine a world without it?  Just as the menial tasks once performed by slaves are now distributed differently among free men, perhaps, as anarchists argue, the functions of the state could be distributed among voluntary agencies.

The Renaissance philosopher Thomas Hobbes thought that anarchy — the “state of nature” — would be “a war of all against all,” making human life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  His solution was the state, which would quell quarrels among men.  He didn’t foresee that the state itself might aggravate conflict and make social order far more miserable than anarchy could ever be.

Hobbes’s near-contemporary John Locke offered a more attractive alternative: the limited state, which would have the power to secure men’s natural rights but would lack the power to violate them.  But such a state has never existed for long.  Once a monopoly of power exists at all, it tends to degenerate into tyranny; anarchists argue that this decline is inevitable, because tyranny is inherent in the very nature of the state.

~ Lew Rockwell, "The Heroic Joe Sobran," LewRockwell.com, March 4, 2024

Lew Rockwell on how Ludwig von Mises was given sanctuary in Switzerland in the 1930s

This is hardly the first time statism has cast a dark shadow over civilization.  In the years following the stock market crash of 1929, various sorts of socialism battled for control.  In different countries, it had different names - Bolshevism, National Socialism, Fascism, New Dealism, Fabianism - but the essential principles were the same.  As Mussolin put it: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

In Austria, however, one prominent economist refused to go along.  His name was Ludwig von Mises, known all over the Continent for his pioneering contributions to economic theory, his personal integrity, his tenacity, his love of liberty, and his dogged opposition to all forms of despotism.

As the storm clouds gathered, he realized that Austria would fall to either the Communists or the Nazis.  Then in 1934, a letter arrived.  It was from an independent academic institute in Switzerland, offering Mises a position.  It meant a two-thirds cut in pay, but it also meant sanctuary.

He left immediately for Geneva, and for six years, until he emigrated to America, he worked very hard.  The result was the original German version of Human Action, the greatest economic treastis of the 20th century.  Even today, Human Action is a big seller, still educating students in liberty.

Meanwhile, the Nazi armies did arrive in Austria, marched to Mises's apartment, and stole everything, including all the books and papers he had not taken with him to Switzerland.  Mises.e never saw them again, but his ability to research, write, and teach had survived.

People ask, what would have become of the idea of liberty had Human Action not been written.  But another question is just as important: What would have become of Mises had that insitute not existed to provide him refuge?

When I think of the value of the Mise Institute to the world, I think of our predecessor in the 1930s.  The parallels between them and now are obvious, and chilling.

~ Lew Rockwell, November 25, 2021

Lew Rockwell on what the Mises Institute hopes to accomplish

I am often asked what the Mises Institute hopes to accomplish.  Both Mises and Rothbard were undoubtedly asked about their own hopes.  I think their answer would have been very simple: they hoped to write what is true and do what is right, and to do it with enthusiasm and vigor.  If we do nothing else, that is enough.  And yet, it is everything.

[...]

The difficult times in which we live are a reminder that our mission is far from complete.  The forces of statism are always waiting for an opportunity to rob us of the blessings of prosperity and liberty, of civilivation itself.

Mises believed that the best way to defeat the socialists was to say what is true.  Against the idea of liberty, he said, the fiercest sword of the despot is finally powerless.

~ Lew Rockwell, fundraising letter, November 25, 2021

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Lew Rockwell on the battle of ideas

Our ideas are unpopular.  We are in the minority.  Our views are not welcome by the regime.  They often fall on deaf ears of an indifferent public.  Big newspapers don't often care what we think.  In fact, they want to keep us out of their pages.  Politicians will always find us impractical at best, and threatening at worst. 

In short, we fight an uphill battle.  We must recognize this at the outset.  We are what Albert Jay Nock called the remnant, a small band of brothers who have special knowledge of theory and history and a concern for the well-being of civilization.  What we do with that knowledge and concern is up to us.  We can retreat or sell out, or we can use it as our battle cry and go forward through history to face the enemy.

~ Lew Rockwell, "The Path to Victory," The Austrian, November-December 2020

Lew Rockwell on American conservatism

The problem with American conservatism is that it hates the left more than the state, loves the past more than liberty, feels a greater attachment to nationalism than to the idea of self-determination, believes brute force is the answer to all social problems, and thinks it is better to impose truth rather than risk losing one’s soul to heresy.  It has never understood the idea of freedom as a self-ordering principle of society.  It has never seen the state as the enemy of what conservatives purport to favor.  It has always looked to presidential power as the saving grace of what is right and true about America.

~ Lew Rockwell, "The Great Conservative Hoax," Mises.org, May 4, 2006

Lew Rockwell on looting, vigilantism and private security services

Ordinary Americans cannot rely on the police to protect them. In many cases, leftwing governors and mayors have ordered to police to stand down. For them, solidarity with the rioters is more important than the lives and property of decent citizens. We have seen the absurdity of rioters being called “peaceful protestors” when videos show cities aflame. When the police do their duty and counter the violence of the thugs, they are vilified as racists, indicted, and even shot at and killed. In these circumstances, they are hardly likely to stay on the job. If the police don’t protect you, you have no legal recourse, and in some places, police won’t even investigate cases of looting... 

What then are we supposed to do? In an interview on the Tucker Carlson show September 23, Danny Coulson, a retired Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI, condemned the rioters. But he thought that there was something even worse than the burning and looting, and this was the main reason he condemned them. Their actions might lead to “vigilante justice”. People must not take the law into their own hands—that could lead to chaos. Instead, we must unify around support of the police. 

His advice is useless, and it rests on a false premise. How can we support the police, when they aren’t protecting us? His advice is like urging us to put out a fire with a hose unattached to a hydrant. The false premise is that vigilante justice is bad. Is it? Let’s look at the definition of the term: “Vigilantism is the act of enforcement, investigation or punishment of perceived offenses without legal authority... 

In other words, you are a vigilante if you exercise your basic right of self-defense, without the permission of the predatory State that support the rioters and looters. In fact, if people defended and protected themselves, the result would not be chaos, but a far better system than we have now. As the great Murray Rothbard explained, people in a free market society would defend themselves by hiring private protection agencies. The agencies would compete to provide the services customers wanted, rather than cater to the whim of a mob or promote venality and power-seeking, as officials of the State do now. As Murray again and again stressed, the free market is always better at supplying goods and services than the State, and protection and defense are no exceptions.

~ Lew Rockwell, "Self-Defense and 'Taking the Law into Your Own Hands'," LewRockwell.com, September 26, 2020

Lew Rockwell on Roth Bader Ginsburg and the right to bear arms

We should support our basic right to self-defense. This is guaranteed by the Second Amendment, but our rights don’t depend on the State and its Constitution. By the way, the recently sainted Ruth Bader Ginsburg wanted to end the individual right to keep and bear arms. Our rights come from natural law, and only the free market can enforce them and protect us.

~ Lew Rockwell, "Self-Defense and 'Taking the Law into Your Own Hands'," LewRockwell.com, September 26, 2020

Lew Rockwell on the division of labor

A libertarian is perfectly at peace with the universal phenomenon of human difference. He does not wish it away, he does not shake his fist at it, he does not pretend not to notice it. It affords him another opportunity to marvel at a miracle of the market: its ability to incorporate just about anyone into the division of labor.

Indeed the division of labor is based on human difference. Each of us finds that niche that suits our natural talents best, and by specializing in that particular thing we can most effectively serve our fellow man. Our fellow man, likewise, specializes in what he is best suited for, and we in turn benefit from the fruits of his specialized knowledge and skill.

~ Lew Rockwell, "The Menace of Egalitarianism," speech given to Fort Worth Mises Circle, October 3, 2015

Lew Rockwell on the GI Bill and its corrosive effects on higher education

The GI Bill, adopted after World War II, played a big role in lowering standards. As Tom DiLorenzo has pointed out, “The damage caused by the program was much more than fiscal. It made the centralization of education possible for the first time in American history. That in turn opened the door to the ruinous politicization of higher education that has marked the past half century.

The tool used by government was the college accrediting agency. A network of them was originally established in the late 19th century to work as private buffers between academia and government. Their purpose was to insure high standards, and prevent government subsidies from leading to government control.

After the second world war, the federal government used various college accrediting agencies to ostensibly guarantee a quality education for veterans. Only accredited schools could receive G.I. Bill funds, so the accrediting agencies quickly transformed themselves. They became the gatekeepers of the tax money and virtual adjuncts of federal power. This gatekeeper role expanded as federal funding of higher education escalated.

~ Lew Rockwell, "Are Universities Finished?," LewRockwell.com, July 23, 2020

President Roosevelt signs G.I. Bill into law on June 22, 1944

Lew Rockwell on the obsession with equality

The obsession with equality, in short, undermines every indicator of health we might look for in a civilization. It involves a madness so complete that although it flirts with the destruction of the family, it never stops to consider whether this conclusion might mean the whole line of thought may have been deranged to begin with. It leads to the destruction of standards — scholarly, cultural, and behavioral. It is based on assertion rather than evidence, and it attempts to gain ground not through rational argument but by intimidating opponents into silence. There is nothing honorable or admirable about any aspect of the egalitarian program.

~ Lew Rockwell, "The Menace of Egalitarianism," speech given to Fort Worth Mises Circle, October 3, 2015

Lew Rockwell on how Americans worship equality

A sharp Martian visiting Earth would make two observations about the United States — one true, the other only superficially so. On the basis of its ceaseless exercises in self-congratulation, the US appears to him to be a place where free thought is encouraged, and in which man makes war against all the fetters on his mind that reactionary forces had once placed there. That is the superficial truth.

The real truth, which our Martian would discover after watching how Americans actually behave, is that the range of opinions that citizens may entertain is rather more narrow than it at first appears. There are, he will soon discover, certain ideas and positions all Americans are supposed to believe in and salute. Near the top of the list is equality, an idea for which we are never given a precise definition, but to which everyone is expected to genuflect.

~ Lew Rockwell, "The Menace of Egalitarianism," speech given at Dallas-Ft. Worth Mises Circle, October 3, 2015

Lew Rockwell remembers Butler Shaffer

Butler belongs in the pantheon of genuine heroes, along with his friends Murray Rothbard and Burt Blumert. Fortunately for us, another of those heroes, Butler’s friend Ron Paul, is still here to lead us and inspire us. Wherever people value liberty, Butler Shaffer will be remembered with respect and admiration.

~ Lew Rockwell, "Butler Shaffer, R.I.P.," LewRockwell.com, December 31, 2019

Butler Shaffer
1935 - December 28, 2019

Lew Rockwell on Butler Shaffer's experience as a Goldwater conservative

We mourn the passing of our good friend Butler Shaffer, who died yesterday afternoon at the age of 84. Butler was a libertarian at a time when there were very few libertarians in the world. Like many supporters of the free market, he was first attracted to the Republican Party. He supported Barry Goldwater for President in 1964, but he soon came to realize that limited government was a chimera and that the State was by nature opposed to liberty.

As he put the issue in a letter to me in November 2014: “It was just a few months more than 50 years ago that I sat in the Cow Palace in San Francisco as part of my state’s delegation to the Republican National Convention (i.e., the Goldwater Convention)... Afterwards, I was enjoying a drink at the top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel with one of Goldwater’s advisors. I asked: “Now that Goldwater has the nomination, let us suppose that he gets elected president. What do you think he would do to begin cutting back on federal government power?” “What do you mean?” my acquaintance answered. I reminded him of Goldwater’s book, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” wherein he proposed eliminating a few government programs (federal involvement in education being one area). The other man answered: “don’t be absurd: if Goldwater gets elected president, the most we would hope to accomplish would be to slow down the rate of growth of government.”

This conversation helped to confirm the sentiments to which I was already becoming more firmly attracted. I went back home; walked away from any delusional thinking about ‘cleaning up the whorehouse’; and never looked back.

With this view of the state, Butler was naturally attracted to the anarchism of Murray Rothbard and Robert LeFevre, and he wrote from this perspective for the rest of his long life.

~ Lew Rockwell, "Butler Shaffer, R.I.P.," LewRockwell.com, December 31, 2019

Butler Shaffer and Lew Rockwell

Lew Rockwell on morality

If something is wrong for you and me, it is also wrong for the cop, the soldier, the mayor, the governor, the general, the Fed chairman, the president.  Theft does not become acceptable when they call it taxation, counterfeiting when they call it monetary policy, kidnapping when they call it the draft, mass murder when they call it foreign policy.

~ Lew Rockwell

Lew Rockwell on the exaggerated Soviet military threat

As it turns out, by the way, the Soviet threat was grossly exaggerated, as such threats always are. The wickedness of the Soviet regime was never in doubt, but its capabilities and intentions were consistently distorted and overblown.

According to Matthew Evangelista, writing in Diplomatic History, “Despite the fact that the Russian archives have yielded ample evidence of Soviet perfidy and egregious behavior in many other spheres, nothing has turned up to support the idea that the Soviet leadership at any time actually planned to start World War III and send the ‘Russian hordes’ westward.” Some people tried making similar arguments at the time, to no avail.

Pushing the preposterous narrative of a socialist basket case as an overwhelming military threat was a group of neoconservatives who became known as “Team B” (“Team A” being the analysts of the CIA, who were accused by the neocons of being willfully blind to growing Soviet military power). In 1976, CIA director George H.W. Bush gave these neoconservatives extraordinarily access to classified CIA documents as they prepared a report excoriating the agency for its alleged failure to perceive a Soviet military buildup.

Team B claimed, for example, that the Soviets had a non-acoustic antisubmarine system. There was about as much evidence of this as there was years later that Saddam Hussein had a fleet of unmanned drones. When CIA analysts protested that they could find no evidence of such a system, Team B described the lack of evidence as a further indication of just how wily and clever the Soviet adversary was.

“If you go through most of Team B’s specific allegations about weapons systems,” wrote analyst Anne Cahn, “and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong.” So in case you thought bringing ideological pressure to bear on the intelligence community began with Iraq, there you go.

~ Lew Rockwell, "Murray Rothbard Soars, Bill Buckley Evaporates," Mises,org, March 31, 2016

Lew Rockwell on Laura Tyson's admiration for Eastern European socialism

From her published writings, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Professor Tyson's ideal is Eastern European socialism, especially of the Ceausescu variety.

This does not make her an apologist for Communism.  She is just another in the lamentably long list of economists who accepted the official statistics about workers' paradises.

~ Lew Rockwell, "Mrs. Tyson's Fried Economics," National Review, February 1, 1993

Lew Rockwell on tax reform

Is there a need to reform taxes?  Most certainly.  Always and everywhere.  You can always make a strong case against all forms of taxation and all tax codes and all mechanisms by which a privileged elite attempts to extract wealth from the population.  And this is always the first step in any tax reform: get the public seething about the tax code, and do it by way of preparation for step two, which is the proposed replacement system.  Of course, this is the stage at which you need to hold onto your wallet.

~ Lew Rockwell