God, Man, Economy, and State
The following is a quick summary of the first two chapters of Murray Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty. With the natural law tradition, Rothbard rejects the modern idea that man has no fixed, given nature and he laments that “the idea of a natural law founded on reason and rational inquiry has been virtually lost” (3). …
Continue reading "What Makes Rothbard a Natural Law Ethicist"
Rothbard may not have been a Christian, but had he been, he would have been theologically orthodox. Here he is contrasting orthodox notions of alienation with the proto-Marxist account of heretics throughout the ages: The critical question of creatology is: why did God create the universe? The answer of orthodox Augustinian Christianity, and hence …
Murray Rothbard argued in favor of public debt repudiation. What would Aquinas have thought of such a measure? A lot would no doubt depend on the type of regime that was responsible for incurring the debt in question (thus, a citizenry could not repudiate a debt that had been incurred by a democratic government, but …
From Murray Rothbard's Economic Thought Before Adam Smith: In his Quaestiones, a thorough commentary on Aristotle's Ethics, Buridan continued the Aristotle-Thomas analysis of the exchange value of goods being determined by consumer need or utility. But Buridan also pressed on to point out that a house would never exchange for one garment, since the builder would have to …
In his Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, Murray Rothbard discusses the political absolutism that coincided with the theological absolutism and voluntarism of the late medieval period. One important figure in this development was Marsilius (or Marsiglio) of Padua. Rothbard writes: Along with the rise of the absolute state, theories of absolutism arose and began to …
Continue reading "Absolutism in Marsilius of Padua’s “Defensor Pacis”"
The Natural Law Libertarian 