David Friedman on Rothbard

Miscellaneous General
1

I found this post on David Friedman’s blog to be interesting:

A correspondent points me at an old piece by Murray Rothbard criticizing me for my failure to hate the state, and asks for comment.

Rothbard’s basic point is correct. I do not regard support for government as an act of willful evil but as an intellectual mistake; my arguments (and his) could be wrong, and some sort of government might be the least bad alternative among available human institutions. And even if we are correct, it is not unreasonable for other people to think we are not, as lots of intelligent people I know do.

The flip side of that is that I think one consequence of his attitude was to make him willing to be deliberately dishonest in his arguments—all being fair in war. That included being dishonest in the arguments he made to fellow libertarians.

My standard example was an exchange long ago, after a talk of his in which he claimed that Reagan did not really cut government and offered as evidence the increase in the nominal federal budget. I pointed out that, while his conclusion might for all I knew be true, his evidence combined whatever growth had occurred in the real size of the federal government with the effect of inflation over the period.

His response was that that was all right; because Reagan was responsible for the inflation, it was appropriate to use it to make his performance look worse. Think that through and he was saying that it was all right to misrepresent the evidence to his fellow libertarians as long as the result was to make them think badly of someone they should think badly of, to lead them to the correct conclusion for the wrong reason. I don’t regard that as a desirable approach to political (or other discussion). Or, for that matter, a libertarian one—we are generally opposed to fraud as well as force.

I’ve written at some length online in the past on what I consider Rothbard’s dishonesty with regard to economic history, in particular his misrepresentation of Smith (unfavorable) and his French contemporaries (favorable); see this old post for examples and further links. And there have been other examples. Murray was bright, articulate, and could be charming, but I don’t think he could be trusted.

Labels: Friedman Rothbard anarchy Smith

Thoughts?

2

Why does it matter how the government grew? Even if Reagan himself would have admitted that he wasn’t factoring in inflation when he claimed to be cutting back the government, it’s still a lie to say that the government is being cut back when it isn’t. If inflation wipes out the effect of the tax cuts, it’s lying BS to claim that they mean anything. Why should one accept false parameters for judging whether or not government has grown?

Rothbard wasn’t being deceptive, the state was being deceptive, and Friedman is being deceptive if he is implying that perpetual inflation is just an elegant inevitability of life and not a malevolent feature of the government fiat system, which he obviously doesn’t believe.

Hard as it may be for Professor Friedman to accept, a slave who doesn’t hate his bondage is more untrustworthy vis-a-vis his fellow slaves than one who does.

3

Rothbard’s hate yer state position is kind of…just a belief or taste. Either he has to demonstrate that hating the state is the objectively correct value to hold or he has to show why hating the state is beneficial to the libertarian position. But what he ends up doing is asserting over and over again that people should hate the state, without ever explaining why.

I don’t know if Friedman’s anecdote about the Reagan conversation is all true or mostly true, but either way it falls in line with how Rothbard presents himself in his own article: it is more important to hate the state than to be right.

4

“Don’t trust Rothbard because Rothbard doesn’t trust the government saying that they cut the government.”

Does he really believe Rothbard irrationally hated the state and was making up things to make the state look worse than it is? He really thinks we need to make up things to make the state look evil?

5

Rothbard makes sooooooooo many cases against the State. To say that he was irrational in that belief is absurd. Anyone have a copy of ‘Egalitarianism as a revolt against nature’? The nature of the state is to dominate, it is prefectly rational to not want to be dominated in all of the ways that the state has the power to do.

David Friedman is an apologist and a fake anarchist. He does what Milton and glenn beck do and that is obfuscate a principled position on the matter.

Can we call Milton Friedman a libertarian? No. Libertarians, in PRINCIPLE, would never, when working in the War Dept. of the Treasury, scheme ways to take larger amounts of taxes so the government can build the a-bomb while trying to hide the true amount of money being taken through withholding.

6

Lol.

Ok, let’s stop pissing in the wind and have a look at who has moved more books, who is famous, who is a libertarian icon and who is an anticlimactic nothing by comparison, whose name is a legend, and whose name is confused with a much more famous monetarist hack.

Do you think anyone wants to hear the argument, “Sure, we’re slaves, and it is kinda silly, but our masters really do want what’s best for us, and I bet if we ask them really nicely…”

How many libertarians would there be today if it had all been up to Professor David Friedman’s gutless sophistries?

I don’t want to be mean, but he is throwing sour grapes at a dead man, after all.

7

He throws sour grapes at a dead man because he has no class.

“Let’s all stand here and call Jefferson a racist! That’s all he ever thought about was how to rape and enslave, right?”

Rothbard is a personal hero of mine. Along with Ron Paul and Thomas Jefferson.

8

Cool. Rothbard is more popular and is more appealing to the general libertarian populace than David Friedman. And Milton Friedman is more famous than Rothbard.

Who’s position is that?

Friedman’s response to Rothbard’s criticism isn’t that we should love the state or work with it, but that the hate yer state attitude that Rothbard promoted was promoted to the extent that it was primary over other values like honesty or good science.

9

Jacob and James,

David Friedman, in addition to being a brilliant mind and an important anarcho-libertarian theorist (whatever the disposition of his “gut” or his propensity toward hatred may be), is a helpful and informative member of the Mises Community forums. So tone it down.

10

awww i don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.

11

I’m sure Professor Friedman isn’t going to be perturbed by what silly young students like us think about him. If he is nothing compared to Rothbard, we are much less than nothing. :slight_smile:

You may have to read beyond that blog post to get an idea of his theories, but he has this ridiculous idea that government can be incrementally rolled back using only perfect scientific arguments-from-effect. You know, as if the guys running the show haven’t realised that they’re our owners, and that slave-owners don’t typically give a damn about slavery being an inherently inefficient system based on a utilitarian cost-benefit analyses from the POV of society at large.

I can’t help but feel that he can’t tell the difference between a human being and a physical object, and that he cannot accept that the state is not merely an inefficient imperfection, but that it is conceptually and fundamentally evil by design.

12

He’s right. Rothbard was the same way about Israel.

Bottom line, there is no Santa Claus.

Read Rothbard for what he has to offer, ignore the dross, watch your back.

[Waits for storm to begin].

13

To be honest, I haven’t read much of anything from Friedman but I don’t see the problem in the view you’ve presented. There is nothing inherently ridiculous in advocating piece-meal reform over abolition, especially if it is unclear if the abolitionist effort would yield the results that they desire.

Plus, your analogy of government to slave holders is too simplistic. If it can be demonstrated to the average man that liberal policies will benefit him, then its reasonable to turn the politician and say “your constituants want you to liberalize x, it will help your political career if you do so.” Slave holders aren’t subject to electoral politics.

Also, if an appeal to cause-and-effect analyses and utilitarianism -is- unable to convince either the state leaders or the people who elect state leaders to adopt anarcho-capitalism, what reason is there to believe that calling them immoral will do the task?

14

He didn’t say it was an irrational belief. Nielsio brought in the word irrational when restating Friedman’s opinion of Rothbard, but Friedman himself did not say that.

I guess this whole ‘honesty’ thing is hard to get.

He is a scientist. And what does a “fake anarchist” even mean?

Is it “obfuscating a principle” or trying to remain honest and precise in one’s arguments? His point is that Rothbard’s “principles” led Rothbard to be less than truthful and manipulate his audience, because the ends justify the means (a principle Rothbard nominally rejected).

15

I’m with Daniel James Sanchez on this. Friedman is definitely one of the good guys and his work stands on its own merit. He’s contributed many original ideas and methods of thinking to the debate over the State. And, at the end of the day, he is frankly anti-state… he just merely disagrees with Rothbard on how viscerally the case against the State should be made. That said, I am with Rothbard on this particular point - the State is not just a bad idea, it is evil and digusting. I think the difference between Rothbard’s visceral anti-statism and Friedman’s clinical anti-statism is one of personal experience and empathy. Anyone who has been drug through the machinery of the State cannot but help hating it. Almost all of the people who are victimized by the churning gears of the State apparatus cannot formulate what is wrong with the State (dual morality, monopoly on law/security, coercive collection of revenues) but they know that what they have experienced is an encounter with evil, in the same sense that being mugged is an encounter with evil. Those who have never experienced the under-belly of the State or don’t have any friends or family who have, or who simply are not interested in the empathic aspect of the case against the State will, like David Friedman, take a more clinical approach. However “evil” the State may be, it is an outworking of human action and the best approach - in this view - is not to let yourself take it personally and end up incidentally discrediting yourself in a moment of passion. While I take the visceral approach, I can see redeeming value in both approaches.

I’m actually dismayed by the disagreement between Rothbard and Friedman. When I read Rothbard, I see that he was honest and viscerally anti-state. I find it dismaying that Friedman suggests Rothbard was dishonest. Perhaps Rothbard was too sweeping or not rigorous enough because of his gut hatred of the State. Perhaps. But he was definitely not characteristically dishonest. And Rothbard’s questioning of Friedman’s sincerity was also definitely unnecessary. Friedman has been following the same lines of research for decades into the economic and legal arguments against the State through his research on alternative law systems, and so on. So Friedman doesn’t feel it in his gut (or, at least, he doesn’t tell us that he does)? He’s still one of the good guys and I just find the whole Rothbard/Friedman disagreement dismaying. I’m like the child of divorced parents… I love them both and I just wish they could have loved each other.

Clayton -

16

Rothbard is a genius, but he is arrogant, I like David Friedman more. You simply can’t be as arrogant as to think everyone who doesn’t think like you is a evil or stupid. A state is a realistic option, and as long as we don’t try anarchy we wouldn’t know if state is trully a worse option.

17

@Eugene: Actually, I think the case for the State will be viewed centuries from now as worse than the case for a Universal Religion (State church), which we laugh at today. I think there’s a great deal in common between the superstitious conviction that we need a church in order to “find salvation” and the superstitious conviction that we need a State in order to “be orderly and safe.”

Clayton -

18

Excellent point Clayton. You’re a genius:)

19

Either you are right, or you are wrong, and the state is a necessary evil. Socialists also thought capitalist will be viewed as stupid and evil as state church, but they were wrong. So who can really tell? We need to have some humility.

20

You mean the formation of a new state even worse than the last? Abolition of the state is only possible when a large majority of people no longer believe in the state as a useful, morally neutral or appropriate mechanism for implementing the ‘public will’.

By contrast, imagine that they merely believe that the state is inefficient and unnecessary, and don’t have strong opinions one way or the other about its moral nature as an institution. Unlike an ethical judgement, which every non-sociopathic person can make for themselves, the majority of people have to take something like that on faith from the expert economists, because they do not feel qualified to make a complex judgement about the macroeconomy for themselves. If they aren’t happy with the political situation four years down the line, it’s really easy for them to come to believe that what that expert economist told them was bogus, because economists usually talk nonsense as far as they’re concerned, and now some new politician is saying they can get all sorts of wonderful things by expanding the state’s power in such-and-such a fashion. After all, that one economist was just incorrect, as most economists end up being about their predictions. Turns out there’s nothing wrong with making the state bigger, and hey, all sorts of good things are going to be done by expanding the state.

If people no longer believe in the state, I’m inclined to wonder why they’d bother voting to do away with it.

Electoral politics is a bit of a charade and a ritual in real life, though, isn’t it?

They do, however, need the consent of the governed, as the governed vastly outnumber them. Every government, democratic in style or not, needs the consent of the governed for this reason. It doesn’t mean it isn’t slavery - just that the slaveowners are vastly outnumbered by their slaves, such that they must employ more than just brute force to keep control.

What is it that they employ in addition to brute force? It’s the social conditioning, or whatever you want to call it, that when they tax, it isn’t stealing, when they kill it isn’t murder etc. Everyone who is a part of society hates those crimes, unless the state casts its spell over them.

Obviously you aren’t going to convince the slaveowners that they’re evil, or bother trying, but if you convince all the billions of slaves that they are, what do you think is going to happen? Do you think the government, which requires the consent of the governed, is going to last very long?

Convince people to withhold consent. They will do so if they think the state is evil - not merely a particular government or administration, but the state as an institution and a concept generally. If some economist tells them its merely inefficient, they can’t really “know” for themselves unless they’re also an economist who happens to be from the same school of economics. :stuck_out_tongue:

Obviously economists, and concerned scholars generally, need to know that the economy works just fine without a state, but people who are not economists need something more than the faith of these experts to go on. Otherwise they will change their minds when things don’t go their way, for whatever reason, and consent to be governed by expansionists instead.

If you leave the idea alive that people can ethically use this thing called the government to do whatever they desire, don’t think that they won’t use it just because you’ve got an economic theorem on a blackboard that you say proves them foolish.