New Reading

I have a stack of non-fiction books that I’ve been meaning to get to for some time. Most of my pure-pleasure reading is fiction, and I usually curl up with these just before bedtime. Today, however, during Sam’s nap, I finally started the next book on the queue: Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty.

It’s amazing. I’ve read the first chapter and a half.

AC has been an avowed philosophical anarchist and libertarian for a few years now. I’ve been slowing heading that way, as a result of discussions with him, discussions with my good friend at lowercase liberty, and other short readings. One of these days I hope to write an essay describing my political transformation: from right-wing teenager to left-wing adult to now fledgling libertarian.

And now the fledgling is reading Rothbard. For a New Liberty is compelling– both in the clarity of its prose and the clarity of its thought. The introductory chapter provides an overview of the history of libertarianism, known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as “liberalism,” whose principles were once espoused by the Democratic party (!) The subsequent chapters explain the libertarian creed and its applications.

Here are some passages that I underlined as I read:

On the classical liberalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that gave rise to the American Revolution:

“Thus, the well-known theme of ‘separation of Church and State’ was but one of many interrelated motifs that could be summed up as ‘separation of the economy from the State,’ ‘separation of speech and press from the State,’ ‘separation of land from the State,’ ‘separation of war and military affairs from the State,’ indeed, the separation of the State from virtually everything” (3).

Quoting Bernard Bailyn on radical eighteenth-century libertarianism:

“The first is the belief that power is evil, a necessity perhaps but an evil necessity; that it is infinitely corrupting; and that it must be controlled, limited, restricted in every way compatible with a minimum of civil order” (7).

Laying the foundation for the libertarian creed, Rothbard writes:

“In contrast to all other thinkers, left, right, or in-between, the libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society” (28).

“The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian, in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes” (29).

You can listen to an audio version of chapter 1 here.

And chapter 2 is here.