A few random unqualified thoughts…
Premise: Choice is a process of self discovery increasing self awareness of satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
Premise: Human action is the pursuit of satisfaction and avoidance of dissatisfaction.
Conclusion: Human beings ought to pursue actions that do not threaten choice.
edit: My gut feeling indicates I ought to include a premise defining satisfaction or dissatisfaction as a finite or infinite to enhance the conclusion.
“I don’t see how your Rothbard quote even touches on Hazlitt’s discussion above.”
Well that’s a shame.
“Rothbard has substituted his own “instant jurisprudence” for the market process of legal adjudication.” "It appears that Rothbard had full faith in the market in everything but the production of law."
No he hasn’t. Again, nothing but baseless assertions. Can you actually quote some stuff & directly point out where he is wrong instead sweeping statements? It’s not particularly scholarly.
“For the production of law, the market cannot be trusted and only “reason”, that is, the central planning of academics such as Rothbard himself, will suffice.”
What a complete crock of… Do you have any kind of valid arguments?
"The role of freely competitive judiciaries has, in fact, been far more important in the history of the West than is often recognized. The law merchant, admiralty law, and much of the common law began to be developed by privately competitive judges, who were sought out by litigants for their expertise in understanding the legal areas involved.[2] The fairs of Champagne and the great marts of international trade in the Middle Ages enjoyed freely competitive courts, and people could patronize those that they deemed most accurate and efficient.
Let us, then, examine in a little more detail what a free-market defense system might look like. It is, we must realize, impossible to blueprint the exact institutional conditions of any market in advance, just as it would have been impossible 50 years ago to predict the exact structure of the television industry today. However, we can postulate some of the workings of a freely competitive, marketable system of police and judicial services. Most likely, such services would be sold on an advance subscription basis, with premiums paid regularly and services to be supplied on call. Many competitors would undoubtedly arise, each attempting, by earning a reputation for efficiency and probity, to win a consumer market for its services." - Rothbard, http://mises.org/daily/2511
And this makes it even clearer:
"Leoni (1961) provides a theoretical framework on which we can build an answer to this question. We offer a sketch of his theory. In a market, economic operators regard prices to be ultimate data upon which they base their calculations and actions, fully realizing that these are flexible to some extent, but quite fixed for a particular transaction. By analogy, Leoni suggests that legal operators regard legal norms to be the ultimate data upon which they base their actions, fully realizing these are flexible to some extent, but fixed for a particular adjudication. Extending the analogy, Leoni notes that the economist does not regard prices to be fixed at all, but subject to immutable rules of distribution acting on contingent facts. Likewise, the proper legal theorist does not regard legal norms to be fixed, but subject to immutable rules of argumentation acting on contingent facts of cases within particular cultural contexts. Indeed, the direction of causation of these social elements is often misapprehended. It is the offers to buy and sell in the market that causes prices (the norms of the market) to settle into relative fixity; they are not fixed before agents enter the market, though it appears that way to most economic agents. Likewise, it is the advancing of legal claims in an adjudicative setting and hearing the arguments on both sides that determines the outcomes of proceedings; and the outcomes of many proceedings thereby establish legal norms. It is not the case that legal norms are fixed before legal agents advance their arguments, although it appears that way to lawyers who learn legal norms in law school and then apply them to cases to guess how judges will rule on cases.
But does this mean that legal norms could be anything at all? No, and a number of libertarian theorists have explained why.
As Hoppe pointed out, by rationally advancing your claim against another, you are implicitly claiming that your claim is rationally defensible to a greater extent than your opponent’s: “…any ethical proposal, as well as any other proposition, must be assumed to claim that it is capable of being validated by propositional or argumentative means.” (Hoppe 1993, Ch. 10) All who make claims; or who criticize torts, crimes, legislation, laws, and judicial decisions—in short, all who debate legal norms—implicitly hold that there is a standard against which these decisions are to be measured…" - The Role of Subscription-Based Patrol and Restitution in the Future of Liberty, Gil Guillory
Umm… you do realise the non aggression principle (i.e self ownership) etc is what makes the market possible right? Where has Rothbard ever gone beyond that?
“Ethics - the validity of the principle of self-ownership and original appropriation - is demonstrably not dependent and contingent upon agreement or contract; and the universality claim connected with Rothbard’s libertarianism is not affected in the slightest by the circumstance that moral discussants may or may not always come to an agreement or contract. Ethics is the logical-praxeological presupposition - in Kantian terminology: die Bedingung der Moeglichkeit - rather than the result of agreement or contract. The principles of self-ownership and original appropriation make agreement and contract - including that of not agreeing and contracting - possible. Set in motion and stimulated by the universal experience of conflict, moral discussion and argument can discover, reconstruct, explicate, and formulate the principles of self-ownership and original appropriation, but their validity in no way depends on whether or not this is the case, and if so whether or not these formulations then find universal assent.” - Hoppe, Intro to TEOL.
Please back up tyour claim that Rothbard is a central planner.
"How, then, would the courts operate in the libertarian society? In particular, how could they enforce their decisions? In all their
operations, furthermore, they must observe the critical libertarian rule that no physical force may be used against anyone who has not been convicted as a criminal-otherwise, the users of such force, whether police or courts, would be themselves liable to be convicted as aggressors if it turned out that the person they had used force against was innocent of crime. ~ Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty (rev’d ed., 1978), p. 229.