Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard

by Walter Block (Editor), Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. (Editor)

In 1986, a remarkable party was held for Murray Rothbard's 60th birthday, and a Festschrift containing papers (both scholarly and humorous) written in his honor was presented to him. Two, years later, these wonderful essays were released under the title Man, Economy, and Liberty.

Sections on Rothbard's influence on the fields of economics, philosophy, political science, and history, and on the lives of those around him contain essays by Dominick T. Armentano, Roger A. Arnold, Walter Block, Gregory Christiansen, Roger W. Garrison, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Israel Kirzner, Gary North, E.C. Pasour Jr., Ron Paul, Ellen Paul, Leland B. Yeager, Den Uyl, David Gordon, Tibor Machan, Jeffrey Paul, Randall G. Holcombe, David Osterfeld, Arthur A. Ekirch Jr., Ralph Raico, Sheldon Richman, Justus D. Doenecke, Robert Kephart and Dyanne Petersen, Neil McCaffre, JoAnn Rothbard, and Margit von Mises (yes, she was there!).

The scholarly pieces will be very useful for economics students, while the charming personal section will be of interest to those interested in a more intimate view of the great economist. Lew Rockwell and Walter Block provide a biographical introduction.

To search for Mises Institute titles, enter a keyword and LvMI (short for Ludwig von Mises Institute); e.g., Depression LvMI

Genres: Economics

450 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 8, 1988

About the author

Walter Block earned his PhD in Economics at Columbia University. He is an author, editor, and co-editor of many books which include Defending the Undefendable; Lexicon of Economic Thought, Economic Freedom of the World 1975-1995; Rent Control: Myths and Realities; Discrimination, Affirmative Action, and Equal Opportunity; Theology, Third Word Development and Economic Justice; Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard; Religion, Econonomics, and Social Thought; and Economic Freedom: Toward a Theory of Measurement.

Dr. Block has written more than 500 articles for various non-refereed journals, magazines and newspapers, and is a contributor to such journals as The Review of Austrian Economics, Journal of Libertarian Studies, The Journal of Labor Economics, Cultural Dynamics, and the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. He is currently a professor and chair of economics, college of business administration, at Loyola University.

Reviews

[Mathias · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very long review, because it deals with a lot of essays that are in this big volume. I have skipped some essays, but only very few because they were bad or meaningless. It also has to do that I didn’t yet make notes at the time I was reading this book, so I don’t recollect every essay. Actually, I started taking notes toward the end of the volume. But being not very experienced with it, I have some notes that I can’t make sense of anymore or connect to the proper essay: “Rule Of Extremism”, “Shackle’s Ultra-Subjectivity”, “Anticommunists vs. Antisocialists”

Gold and the Constitution: Retrospect and Prospect by Gregory B. Christainsen is probably one of the best contributions to this essay collection. It’s a chilling read that helped change my view of how power in Western democracies really works. He details how the change in the relationship between gold and the dollar in the USA during the mid-war period was likely caused by a conspiration that involved the Supreme Court of the United States. “On April 5 1933 the President issued an executive order forbidding the hoarding of gold. It demanded that all gold coins, bullion, and certificates be turned into Federal Reserve banks by May 1 at the legal price of $20.67 per fine ounce of gold.” There were only small exceptions to this, for example for the industry who needed gold for making their products. On June 5, 1933 Congress passed a resolution “which abrogated all gold clauses in contracts, both public and private”. Gold clauses were introduced into contracts to make the payment according to the gold price, so as to protect against a sudden demise in dollar value.

Christainsen shows how the Supreme Court in 1935, to judge on the constitutionality of these measures, selected cases that had serious flaws in them, i.e. the plaintiffs in the gold clause cases were “noticeably incompetent in pleading their cases”. The Court could have easily selected cases that were much better presented. Three cases were selected: Norman v. Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Co. , Nortz v. United States, and Perry v. Unites States. In the case of Nortz, Chief Justice Hughes replied in a truly ridiculous manner: He held that Nortz had no right to resort to the value of gold coins in a free market, because that market no longer existed, as gold has been nationwide seized. So instead of deciding whether the seizure was constitutional or not, he simply presupposed constitutionality. This could have been a joke in a screwball comedy from that era. I find this very unnerving, because in my understanding, it’s usually in totalitarian States that they make ironic judgements like that. Likewise in the Perry case, the Court simply assumed that the seizure of gold was constitutional.

Professor Rothbard and the Theory of Interest by Roger W. Garrison criticizes modern textbook writers for using models where value productivity and physical productivity are indistinct. In such models, “productivity is modelled as the rate of increase in the quantity of the good” and changes in the rate of interest do not arise. He mentions that Rothbard is often reminding us that “the rate of interest is a ratio of values, not of quantities”. Therefore the modelling technique “conflates growth rates with interest rates”.

In From the Economics of Laissez Faire to The Ethics of Libertarianism by Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that “any unsolicited transformation of the physical characteristics of economic goods is an “unjustifiable action”. I find this to be too harsh and absolutely impossible to put in practice. Only of disruptive changes can be said to constitute unjustifiable action. Almost every action affects the physical characteristics of someone else’s goods in a matter that is usually not even noticed. Otherwise, the essay provides a good treatment of his argumentation ethics, although it’s very similar to what he wrote in his books.

Why Murray Rothbard Will Never Win the Nobel Prize! by Gary North informs us about the academic landscape that was in power when Rothbard entered the scene. He quotes Walter Heller with: “In political economics, the day of the Neanderthal Man — indeed, the day of the pre-Keynesian Man— is dead.” The day of the “doctrinaire” economists (that is, those who work with a scientific epistemology!) was over. He makes a point that has also been made by the archaeologist (or metamorphologist) Robert Bednarik: Those scientists who changed their academic discipline, who were responsible for a paradigm change came oftentimes from outside the academic establishment. Think of Albert Einstein, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Alexander Marshack, Eran Zahavi, Sigmund Freud, etc.

In Freedom and Virtue Revisited by Douglas J. Den Uyl, the author states that lust, greed, selfishness, materialism “seem to be increasing as society’s commitment to the free market is decreasing”. Because if an individual has to bear the costs of these vices him or herself (without the help of a guaranteed income or tax supported detoxification centers) there is little encouragement for such “short-sighted hedonic pursuits”.
He also talks about the “fallacy of advocacy”, that is “when one assumes that there is a necessary connection between what people say is, will be, or ought to be the case and what actually is, will be, or ought be the case”. For example, a lot of people assume, that if a political doctrine has no provision for state supported welfare, then believers in those doctrine have no concern for the poor. When in reality exactly the opposite might be the case, as people might be drawn to such a liberal doctrine, exactly because they understand it will help the poor. It’s a fallacy I encounter in my personal life all the time, so it’s great to have a name for it.
He argues that since the antiquity (Platon, Aristotle) “ethics is essentially a theoretical investigation of the principles of self-improvement and only secondarily and derivatively an investigation of interpersonal relations”. But as modern states couldn’t control self-improvement effectively, as it was not observable, state or statist philosopher’s started to focus more and more on interpersonal relations. This lead to a debate about the degree to which states should control these relations. Liberalism’s answer was “to a small degree”, while statism answered with “to a high degree”. But nobody “challenged the proposition that morality is essentially concerned with interpersonal relations”. I find this to be a very interesting perspective that was certainly new to me.

Particular Liberties Against the General Will by Antony Flew is an interesting essay on Rousseau. He shows that Rousseau thought that someone who experiences riches must have taken them away from someone else. A fallacy that is common to most forms of socialism. He also reasonably speculates that it was Rousseau’s vagabond life that led him to say that the worst that can happen to someone is to be at the discretion of some else. It was better to be at the discretion of the state.

Caste and Class: The Rothbardian View of Governments and Markets by David Osterfeld extensively examines Rothbard’s class theory. He reminds us that Franz Oppenheimer pointed out that production necessarily precedes robbery and that a “society, by use of economic means, must have obtained a certain level of economic development before the emergence of the state was possible”.
He goes on to say that in the USA, although more open than the Soviet Union, acquiring elite positions can “hardly be said to be equally accessible to all”. He references the political scientists Kenneth Prewitt and Alan Stone who have concluded that “the wealthiest 20% of families in the this country [USA] supply about 90% of the ruling elite. Of the remaining 10% about 9% is drawn from families in the second 20% with the remaining 1% scattered among the bottom 60%. He declares that the ruling elite is composed of white, well-educated, wealthy, native-born, Protestant, middle-aged, males, and this since, as noted by Dye and Zeigler, 1789.
He references Donald Wittman’s model that states that the goal of a party is to maximize its utility. Therefore it adopts policies in accord with the preferences of its members. Winning elections is a necessary means to the goal, but not the goal itself. The party will adopt a strategy that will “maximize its chances of winning the election while still retaining as many benefits for itself as possible”. Information level and number of parties are key factors in the choice of a strategy. In the case of totally uninformed voters, each party would have an equal chance of winning the elections. Therefore a strategy that would provide 100% of the benefits for itself would rationally be chosen. The more the voters are educated, the more have the parties to share the benefits with them. Wittman argues further that if the number of parties is sufficiently small, “collusion rather than competition may be the optimal strategy”. Interestingly, the better informed the electorate, the greater the incentive for collusion. This is because, as just noted, with informed voters, parties have to share with them. It is therefore more yielding for the parties to collude by denying the voters a choice on fundamental issues. Because of collusion, the benefits wont flow from the parties to voters, instead they can be shared among the parties themselves.
He mentions Alfred Cuzan who argued that politicians gain nothing by taxing well-organized, well-informed, high-income groups and spending them on unorganized low-income people who might not even realize that they’re getting something. Political profit is made by doing exactly the opposite, that is taxing the unorganized and uninformed and spending it on the organized and informed. The former tend to be poor and the latter rich. Cuzan calls this the iron law of political redistribution.

With A Utopia for Liberty: Individual Freedom in Austin Tappan Wright’s islandia by Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr. I was not satisfied. The author constantly confuses isolationism with protectionism. I have not read Islandia, but from what I get from this review, it seems to be garbage and possibly racist and economically uninformed. In the end, the hero settles with his wife on a farm. He explains to her that their children will succeed them at the farm. They will know it better than their parents and therefore it will be for them a “larger and richer world in itself”. The author doesn’t even seem to conjecture that there might be a problem if they decide to have more than two children. And what with the next generation? Or what if the children have other plans? This is laughable stupid. I have no idea how this essay made it into this volume.

John Prince Smith and the German Free-Trade Movement by Ralph Raico was especially interesting to me as a German speaking person. To be quite frank, I have never even heard of John Prince Smith before, which is very sad. He should be far better known. He quotes Becker (can’t find the position where it says who that was) who maintained that German liberals and free-traders were in fact very little identical. The South-German liberals were in favour of protective tariff systems, while the conservative farmers of the north and east were the chief supporters of the free trade party.
In an article, Prince Smith wrote that “Liberalism only recognizes one task which the State can perform, namely, the production of security.”
Prince also coined or popularized the phrase “golden law of wages”. With this he meant that the wages for workers in a liberal society would necessarily rise.

In Commentator on our Times: A Quest for the Historical Rothbard by Sheldon L. Richman I learned a neat expression: “Fu Manchu myth”: “the view that a foreign leader or country is not as bad but irredeemably evil and malicious, and will conquer the world unless faced down by the Good Guys. This assumption, invariably used by national leaders for propaganda, leads to warmongering.” I think this is a useful expression to battle warmongering but it should not be used to promote moral relativism. There are important differences between different countries and leaders. Christian minister Richard Wurmbrand has branded the Marxian influenced communistic States as satanic while he called Western democratic States “only” evil. This seems to me an important distinction and those who do not understand it are invited to read his notes on the inhumane torture he was exposed to.

Very interesting were the essays that dealt with the private person Rothbard. There’s an essay about his love for movies (that I share with him) and one on his musical taste (which I’m exploring currently). There’s a very welcoming text from Margit Von Mises, where she speaks very highly of Rothbard. This surprised me a little, as he is only very briefly mentioned in her or his (have forgotten which one) memoirs.