The Analytical Conservative
SPOONER AND ROTHBARD WORSHIP - The worst hindrance to the liberty movement.
If there is just one crutch for liberty in America it is the worshiping of false idols. The most iconic such idols are Lysander Spooner and Murray Rothbard. Anarcho-capitalists, the most radical fundamentalists amongst libertarians, get their understanding of law from Spooner and economics from Rothbard. However, both Spooner and Rothbard were and are on the fringe of their disciplines.
Spooner, in reality, was not a real lawyer. He was a fraud. He never went to college, and only did three years of legal internship. At the time, people without a college education were required to do five years of internship. Spooner, in defiance, set up practice of the law, ironically, against the law. Anarchists love to say anarchy means "no rulers" and not "no rules," yet they praise Spooner's illegal practice. If this is the precedent set by anarchy, would it also be okay for one to practice as a doctor without a medical license?
Spooner's words have become an-cap talking points, despite how ridiculous they may be. He wrote, “A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.” Comparing citizenry to slavery is absurdity. (This is similar to comparing an employee to a slave, which is an anarcho-communist talking point). Analogies like this are misleading, offensive to true slaves, and push away the more reasonable people from the liberty movement.
Rothbard's credentials and track record aren't much better. Rothbard barely received his PhD. It took him eleven years post bachelor's to complete, about twice as long as it should have. Why? Here is how Lee Rockwell tells it, "He was held back for many years from actually being granted the PhD because the evil Arthur Burns, who later became chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under Eisenhower and then head of the Fed under Nixon, blocked him from getting the PhD, blocked him from being considered, even though he wasn’t even on Murray’s committee." The "evil" Arthur Burns? Hardly! Burns was a family friend of the Rothbards and knew Murray since he was a lad. Burns, as far as I can tell, generally looked out for Rothbard. Milton Friedman, another libertarian economist, said Burns was his greatest influence. Burns was also a member of the Mont Pelerin Society. He was not some evil villain. That sort of language reflects the fervent "religiosity" of an externally insecure cult. Perhaps it took Rothbard so long to finish his thesis because it wasn't any good.
Rothbard's difficulties didn't end with his thesis. He was basically shunned from the academic community, avoided working at universities, never joined the American Economic Association, and never published a peer-reviewed article. Rothbard, forced out of academia, wrote commercial books instead. Great minds are not afraid of being reviewed; propagandists circumvent critiques. Rothbard was the latter.
Much like Spooner, Rothbard wrote some disturbing things. For instance, Rothbard believed children should be able to run away from home, "Regardless of his age, we must grant to every child the absolute right to run away and to find new foster parents who will voluntarily adopt him, or to try to exist on his own. Parents may try to persuade the runaway child to return, but it is totally impermissible enslavement and an aggression upon his right of self-ownership for them to use force to compel him to return. The absolute right to run away is the child's ultimate expression of his right of self-ownership, regardless of age." This is morally indefensible. Small children don't have the capacity to understand what running away from home really means. And small children, for that matter, cannot understand many of the decisions "Rothbardians" think they should make (such as buying anti-freeze, or having sex with their parents). These positions also turn away many from the liberty movement.
These men are the two main pillars for anarcho-capitalism, yet were both outcasts in their disciplines. An-caps today filter out any law that doesn't comes from Spooner, and any economics that doesn't come from Rothbard. That way of thinking is dangerous. The liberty movement would be more attractive if it consulted cooler heads.
(JZ)
