Murray N. Rothbard
Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was an American economist and polymath who fused Austrian economics with natural-law ethics to create anarcho-capitalism — the doctrine that all state functions, including law and defense, can and should be supplied by private competition.
System
- Ethics: self-ownership plus homesteading generates absolute property rights; taxation is theft; the state is a criminal gang writ large (The Ethics of Liberty, 1982).
- Economics: Man, Economy, and State (1962) systematized Mises; his history of economic thought attacked all non-Austrian schools as error.
- History: America's Great Depression blamed the Fed; revisionist works opposed the military-industrial state.
Strange career
Rothbard moved from Cold War rightism through anti-war alliance with the New Left (1960s), founded the Libertarian Party movement, later embraced "paleo-libertarian" strategy — allying libertarians with cultural conservatives and courting red-brown-style fusion against the managerial state. His strategy papers anticipate today's populist-right/libertarian convergences.
Critique
Anarcho-capitalism, Marxists argue, is not anarchism but the fantasy of feudalized private sovereignty — rentier enclaves with private law. It abstracts from class power entirely: contract replaces coercion only if property distribution is just, which homesteading mythology assumes away.