This fabulous book of power, clarity, and near irrefutability, has left me almost numb in admiration. Rothbard starts with a section on Natural Law, which he builds up, I thought, in a similar way to Leonard Peikoff, with Ayn Rand's axioms of Objectivism. From there, once Rothbard has created his legal platform, he proceeds directly towards his ethics of liberty.
Rothbard works through, amongst many other things, interpersonal relationships, voluntary exchange, property ownership, self defence, children's rights, human rights, property rights, and contracts. It's all there. And best of all, for a man like me; it's all nice and short.
But the best part of the book is its second half; Parts III to V. Here Rothbard explains the immorality of the state, the nature of tax as theft, the inevitable active aggression of the state towards the individual, and the nature of the aristocratic parasites using the state to feed off the rest of us (virtually all Guardian readers, here in the UK).
Rothbard especially covers how the state came into being, how it maintains itself, often by co-opting these self-regarding Guardian-reading intellectuals, and best of all, how he thinks the state can be laid low. He covers this, in the last chapter of the book, Toward a Theory of Strategy for Liberty.
And it is in this chapter he resolves a difficult issue for me personally: the Invasion of The Conservatives.
I am not now, have never been, and will never be, a Conservative, if by that term you mean a rightist statist. However, I am willing to grant you that I may have occasionally strayed into what Rothbard calls the territory of Right Opportunism, a term he neatly borrows from the Marxists.
He [Rothbard] regards it as proper that libertarians should call for the immediate abolition of the state, however, to achieve this goal, temporary alliances may be necessary with other groups (conservatives, civil rights people, and so on), on specific issues, such as the reduction of taxation, or a particular state regulation. But we must never lose sight of the end game, or stray in any way, along the path towards full liberty. For instance, we should not fight for a tax cutting program by agreeing that a conservative government should switch from an income tax to a sales tax. The government should just cut the income tax, full stop, and cut its spending accordingly. Rothbard also disbars the use of collectivist methods to achieve our aims, for example, by murdering successful collectivist opponents to liberty.
Right Opportunism is where you can lose sight of your long-term libertarian goals, in a pursuit of a short-term libertarian gain.
He also describes Left Sectarianism, where some may decry any link-up with any other group, which does not also call for immediate full-scale liberty. He sees this ultra-sectarianism as non-progressive and futile.
But what I like best about Rothbard is his overwhelming optimism. This book was written in 1982, and even back then he successfully predicted the imminent collapse of aggressive worldwide socialism, which occurred at the end of the 1980s, with the fall of the Berlin wall.
All the collectivist variations have now been tried out and they've all failed, says Rothbard, so only true freedom is left as a valid option. Let's all say three big cheers to that, and then thank Mr Rothbard for this magnificent work.
Reading The Ethics of Liberty seemed a bit mad, at first, as Rothbard described a way of life without an overarching state, or even a minarchist one. But the way he describes the nature of a state's inherent evil, and its overwhelming short-termist incompetence, he has made it very hard for me to argue against him.
