Murray Rothbard called the state organised robbery and built anarcho-capitalism
Murray Rothbard, an economist of the Austrian School, argued that every service the state provides, including armies, police and courts, could be delivered more efficiently by private firms. He founded and led the theory of anarcho-capitalism, denounced central banking, and helped launch both the Cato Institute and the Mises Institute.
Born on March 2, 1926, to Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, he grew up in New York as a self-described Old Right conservative among communist neighbours. His father, a chemist who managed an oil refinery, admired minimal government. Rothbard earned a mathematics degree from Columbia in 1945 and an economics doctorate in 1956, delayed partly because Arthur Burns rejected his dissertation. As a student in 1948 he organised a campus chapter backing the segregationist Strom Thurmond's presidential run.
Reading Ludwig von Mises's Human Action in 1949 changed his course, and he attended Mises's informal seminar at New York University. The William Volker Fund paid him to write a textbook explaining Mises, which grew into Man, Economy, and State in 1962, a book Mises praised warmly. Going beyond his mentor, who saw security as the state's justification, Rothbard argued for private markets in military, police and judicial services. His 1963 book America's Great Depression blamed government policy for the slump.
He taught part-time at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute from 1966 and later held an endowed post at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. With the oil billionaire Charles Koch he co-founded the Cato Institute in the 1970s, then broke with Koch and in 1982 helped establish the Mises Institute in Alabama with Lew Rockwell and Burton Blumert. He denounced fractional-reserve banking as fraud and opposed every kind of foreign intervention.
His record is deeply contested. He criticised Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand and Adam Smith, opposed egalitarianism and the civil rights movement, and befriended the Holocaust denier Harry Elmer Barnes. Late in life he pushed an alliance with paleoconservatives and held up David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as strategic models, and in the 2010s he drew renewed attention as an influence on the alt-right. He died on January 7, 1995.
Source: Murray Rothbard
