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02/21/2022

Power and Market: Government and the Economy, by Murray N. Rothbard
Reviewed by R. A. Childs Jr.
retrieved from The Libertarian Forum VOLUME II, NOS. 22-23 NOVEMBER 15 - DECEMBER 1, 1970

Nearly nineteen years ago, a young man in his mid-twenties, not yet having received his Ph.D., set out on the task of boiling down the magnum opus of Ludwig von Mises–Human Action–into a concise volume suitable for use as a college text in economics. Over the years, the plan was changed; the task snowballed until it was finished in 1959. No longer a "boiled down" version of HUMAN ACTION, the work had become a masterpiece in its own right, more comprehensive in purely economic issues than HUMAN ACTION itself, more carefully systematic, encompassing more issues in the subject than any work before or since. The work, however, was pronounced "too long" and "too anarchistic" by its financier-publisher; most of the last third was thrown out altogether; the rest was severely condensed into the last chapter of the published work.

The book was poorly promoted. Instead of being advanced as the work to supplement or even replace Mises, as a purely economic treatise (and as being much easier to read and understand), it was publicized by the Foundation for Economic Education as merely "a graduate- level comprehensive development of the economic principles of the free market by one of the outstanding young students of von Mises". It has since gone out of print.

The work was MAN, ECONOMY, AND STATE: A Treatise on Economic Principles (2 vols., Van Nostrand, 1962). The author is Murray N. Rothbard.

Now, at last , what was to have been the third volume of that work, the literal culmination of an entire school of economic thought (Austrianism), has been published, revised and updated, by the Institute for Humane Studies. It is entitled POWER AND MARKET: Government and the Economy. In 225 closely-packed pages, it presents a comprehensive critique of the role of the state in the economic system. It now can be said of POWER AND MARKET, when taken together with MAN, ECONOMY AND STATE, which is still independent of it. What Henry Hazlitt correctly said of HUMAN ACTION when it appeared in 1949: it extends the logical unity and precision of economics beyond any other work. As Mises went beyond his teacher, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, so Murray Rothbard has gone beyond Mises.

It is important at the outset to point out precisely how and where Rothbard has gone beyond Mises, with the publication of this work. It is undeniable that Mises' contributions to the science of economics have been immense, but his philosophical framework is unfortunately Kantian. Rothbard is, on the other hand, an unblemished Aristotelian, taking note of many of the contributions to philosophy made by the Thomists.

Mises believes in the subjectivity of values, that all ethical standards are arbitrary, that concerns with justice are idle; he is a frank ethical nihilist. Rothbard, on the other hand, believes in the necessity of establishing principles to guide men's choices and actions-in a rational ethic. With such differences in philosophical frameworks, it is to be expected that Rothbard and Mises will have some differences.

In particular, Mises' value-subjectivism and anti-justice positions lead him to simply dismiss ethical questions out of hand. It also leads him to adopt many starkly anti-libertarian positions. In HUMAN ACTION he states that "he who in our age opposes armaments and conscription is an abbettor of those aiming at the enslavement of all. The maintenance of a government apparatus of courts, police officers, prisons and of armed forces requires considerable expenditure. To levy taxes for these purposes is fully compatible with the freedom the individual enjoys in a free market economy." Thus, Mises does not even consider taxation and the draft to be violations of freedom! How, with positions like these, can Mises objectively analyze these and other statist measures? The answer is that he only skims over them.

Murray N. Rothbard thus becomes the first major economist to be a ruthlessly consistent adherent to free-market principles. Mises' statist positions blinded him to many things which Rothbard treats as interventions–simply because Mises thought them "necessary." The position which Rothbard takes in POWER AND MARKET is a position which Mises should have taken more than twenty years ago. If he had, he would have saved all of us a lot of trouble arriving where we have at last arrived without him.

POWER AND MARKET is Rothbard's departure from the mistaken path Mises has taken. It consists of seven tightly integrated chapters taking up government intervention in the dealings of men, and refuting the rationalizations so often used to justify the initiation of force by the state against individuals.

In chapter one, and in the last part of his chapter on taxation (the section on "Voluntary Contributions to Government"), Rothbard takes up a great many arguments against a purely free, stateless, market, and gives summary answers to the questions of how a free market can enforce the rights of person and property against aggressors without a government. Unfortunately, he doesn't go into this practical problem enough, but his work here can easily be supplemented by such works as Morris & Linda Tannehill's, THE MARKET FOR LIBERTY, and Jarret Wollstein's SOCIETY WITHOUT COERCION (especially the 2nd edition, now in preparation). He shows brilliantly however why a government cannot conform to the libertarian rule of non-initiation of force; in this respect, Rothbard takes a radical turn away from even traditional laissez-faire economists, by repudiating the state in its entirety. Answering the charge that a government is a necessary precondition for the freemarket, Rothbard says that "It was the fallacy of the classical economists to consider goods and services in terms of large classes; instead, modern economics demonstrated that services must be considered in terms of marginal units...If we begin to treat whole classes instead of marginal units, we can discover a great myriad of necessary, indispensable goods and services, all of which might be considered as 'preconditions' of market activity. Is not land room vital or food,...or clothing, or shelter? Can a market long exist without them?...Must all these goods and services therefore be supplied by the State and the State only?" Especially interesting is his integration of ethical and economic arguments. Discussing the hotly debated question of whether or not a State can exist without initiating force, Rothbard rebuts the "limited governmentalists" in a crucial ethical-economic argument which no archist has yet succeeded in refuting.

Chapter two is a presentation of the fundamentals of intervention into peaceful social relations. Unlike Mises who treats only a relatively small class of coercive actions as "interventions" into the free market. Rothbard takes up the issue systematically. classifying as "intervention" any initiation of force in social relations. Thus it is important to note that this is not merely a work on economics in a much wider and important sense, it is an analysis of the indirect effects of the initiation of force in society. It fills in the skeleton, so to speak, of the fundamental libertarian principle of non-initiation of force, with complex theoretical analysis-showing both its direct consequences and its complex indirect consequences.

Three broad categories are treated: autistic, binary and triangular intervention. "Autistic intervention" is when the intervener commands "an individual subject to do or not to do certain things when these actions directly involve the individual's person or property alone." It occurs when the aggressor coerces a person (or many persons) but does not receive any good or service in exchange. "Binary intervention" occurs when the aggressor enforces "a exchange between the individual subject and himself, or a coerced 'gift' to himself from the subject," such as highway robbery, taxes, enslavement, and conscription. Thirdly, there is "triangular intervention," in which the aggressor compels or prohibits an exchange between a pair of subjects. Rothbard analyses the relations between intervention and conflict, the nature of democracy and voluntary actions, the relationship between individual "utility" and resistance to invasion, and several other issues.

Chapter three treats a host of interventions under the general heading of "triangular intervention". Price control, product control, licenses, standards of quality & safety, immigration laws, child labor laws, conscription, antitrust laws, conservation laws, eminent domain, and a host of other things fall before Rothbard's logic. Rothbard is here, as elsewhere, a master of the reductio ad absurdum". Thus, for example, he reduces the principle behind tariffs to smitherens, just by extending it to its logical outcome–to show that it is an attack on trade itself and thus leads inevitably to economic solipsism. If we cannot legitimately trade freely with people outside the state? or city? or, finally and absurdly, Jones' farm? Where does it suddenly become absurd to keep on extending the principle and halting trade for the benefit of incompetents? His arguments are clean, concise and ruthless.

Chapter four and five are a back-to-back treatment of two major forms of "binary interventionism": Taxation and government expenditures. He shows the distortions wrought on the free market by all forms of both. In the Chapter on government expenditures, he offers an analysis on subsidies and government ownership, showing how they distort the market, and undertakes very incisive critiques of both public ownership and democracy. He lays bare the fallacies of ever trying to conduct government on a so-called "business basis."

Murray Rothbard's chapter on taxation is the most incisive analysis in existence. While Mises, in HUMAN ACTION, devoted only six pages to the intervention of taxation, and even claims that there can be such a thing as a "neutral tax," Rothbard devotes over 65 pages to ruthlessly dissecting all economic and moral arguments for taxation. Rothbard considers the market effects of virtually every form of taxation, and virtually demolishes the notion of neutral taxation, a mythical beast which, Mises says, "would not divert the operation of the market from the lines in which it would develop in the absence of any taxation." Especially interesting is his section on the so-called "canons of justice in taxation" offering a criticism of all the traditional notions of this absurd concept. As in the rest of POWER AND MARKET, Rothbard is not content merely to refute the trivial arguments usually brought forth in all sorts of economic issues, and turns his guns on the fundamentals, such as stopping to consider why the economists consider the canons of "justice" in taxation in the first place. In this case, the quest arose from the earlier philosophical quest for the "just price" of goods in general. Eventually, in economic thought, the "just price" was simply dropped, or considered coextensive with the free market price. But why then do economists still harp on a "just tax"? Obviously because while the just price would be equated with the market price, there is simply no "market tax" for taxation to be linked with, since it cannot be voluntary. The quest for a "just tax," then, has its roots in statist apologetics–in the minds of those economists who will simply not carefully and objectively consider the nature of the state itself. As for the commonly considered notions of the "just tax," says Rothbard, all merely smuggle a fundamental presupposition in through the back door–the notion that taxation itself is somehow "just". The "justice" of a particular form of a treatment, after all, is derived from the justice of the fundamental treatment itself. And nobody has ever succeeded in justifying taxation itself. Rothbard, in point after point, succeeds in reducing taxation on economic and ethical grounds to oblivion.

Chapter six is perhaps the most innovative in the book. It is the introduction of a new task for praxeology in philosophy: the title is "Antimarket Ethics: A Praxeological Critique." It consists of a critique of over 16 different ethical positions in their objections to a free market–everything from the position of altruism to the position of the Aristotelian-Thomistic school of philosophical thought, ranging over such diverse issues as the morality of human nature, the impossibility of equality, the problem of security, the problem of "luck", charity, poverty, human rights and property rights, over-and under-development and the natures of power and coercion. This last is especially exciting. Rothbard takes up the difference between power over nature and power over man; he reduces the bogey of "economic power" to dust, showing that it is simply "the right under freedom to refuse to make an exchange." Every case of "economic power," he shows, rests solely on someone's right to refuse to make, or to continue to make, a certain exchange on the market. And more: he shows that there are only two options open to us, and that we must choose between them. This is a marvelous dissection of what he calls the "middle of the road statist." Suppose, says Rothbard, that "A refuses to make an exchange with B. What are we to say or what is the government to do if B brandishes a gun and orders A to make the exchange? This is the crucial question. There are only two positions we may take on the matter: either that B is committing violence and should be stopped at once, or that B is perfectly justified in taking this step because he is simply 'counteracting the subtle coercion' of economic power wielded by A." Whether we like it or not, in other words, we must either defend, in moral principle, A's person & property against invasion by B, or we defend B's alleged "right" to enforce an exchange. "If we choose the 'economic power' concept," says Rothbard, "we must employ violence to combat any refusal of exchange; if we reject it we employ violence to prevent any violent imposition of exchange. There is no way to escape this either-or choice." And: "What would be the consequence of adopting the 'economic-power' premise? It would be a society of slavery: for what else is prohibiting the refusal to work?"

The final chapter treats crucial questions of the nature of economics and its uses, the nature of the implicit moralizing of most economists, economics and social ethics, and the differences between the market principle and the principle of coercion. His notion of the relation between economics and ethics is especially vital: economics, he says, cannot by itself establish ethical positions, "but it does furnish existential laws which cannot be ignored by anyone framing ethical conclusions--just as no one can rationally decide whether product X is a good or bad food until its consequences on the human body are ascertained and taken into account."

POWER AND MARKET is replete with intellectual ammunition for the libertarian. In fact, no other book provides so much information which can be readily digested and used in debating crucial issues of our day, when they involve the free market. It is original and comprehensive in scope: its systematic critiques of statism are devastating on every level. This is not merely a book on economics–it is a book on the nature and forms of coercion on every level. It shows the fallacies of everything from taxation, to democracy, to government spending, and devastates such arguments as those of "economic power" and the bogey of "production vs. distribution"–merely by
pointing out, in this last case, that it is the existence of taxation and government itself which creates for the first time a separation of "distribution" from production, bringing the whole pseudo-problem into being. ln case after case, Rothbard squashes the arguments of statists of every breed, by reducing them to absurdities, by pointing out their unadmitted premises, smuggled-in ethical positions, and plain logical fallacies.

With POWER AND MARKET, libertarianism and Austrian economics move into the intellectual vanguard of economic thought. It is the best work in economics since Rothbard's own MAN, ECONOMY AND STATE, which was in turn the best work since Mises' HUMAN ACTION.

Saying that reading POWER AND MARKET is a must for any libertarian interested in presenting an intellectual case for liberty is an understatement. With works of this caliber in every field of intellectual endeavor, the foundations for a comprehensive and fully integrated libertarian ideology would be firmly established.

POWER AND MARKET does not, as some might think, belong on a shelf besides MAN, ECONOMY AND STATE, nor next to HUMAN ACTION. In more than one way, it belongs on a shelf by itself.

02/07/2022

Just like when the heroine gets taken away from the junkie, all hell breaks loose––the banksters panic when credit valuations crumble.

But unlike the rest of us, the thieves get the time and favors from the government to prepare. And the banksters are nervous, if not in panic mode. Let them run, let them squeal, let them rot in hell.

Let the entire Global Establishment come crashing down. Let Globalism die ASAP and take with it those who caused the mess we find ourselves.

Bring back FreeMarket Capitalism.

Videos

I go over 3 reasons why state intervention in healthcare fails.

If you want to get a sense of my principles and values in a succinct book, check out The Definitive Guide to Libertarian Voluntaryism over at:

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I go over 3 common misconceptions about libertarians.

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I go over why the state is unethical.

Catch behind-the-scenes posts and help choose my next video topic at:

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Sources and transcript: https://ecency.com/anarchy/@thepholosopher/why-the-state-is-unethical

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

#freemarket #voluntaryism #libertarian #pollution #environmentalism #freemarketenvironmentalism

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I go over 3 reasons why state intervention in healthcare fails.

If you want to get a sense of my principles and values in a succinct book, check out The Definitive Guide to Libertarian Voluntaryism over at:

https://amzn.to/33sDMkW

(affiliate)


Please help me continue my work over at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thepholosopher

and at Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/the-pholosopher

#healthcare #freemarket #libertarian #ancap #voluntaryist

I go over 3 common misconceptions about libertarians.

Please help me continue my work and take part in the next video topic poll over at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thepholosopher

Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/the-pholosopher

#healthcare #freemarket #libertarian #ancap #voluntaryist

I go over why the state is unethical.

Catch behind-the-scenes posts and help choose my next video topic at:

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SubscribeStar: https://www.subscribestar.com/the-pholosopher

Sources and transcript: https://ecency.com/anarchy/@thepholosopher/why-the-state-is-unethical

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

#freemarket #voluntaryism #libertarian #pollution #environmentalism #freemarketenvironmentalism

I define "pollution" and talk about how it can be dealt with via strong property rights norms. Catch behind-the-scenes posts and help choose my next video topic at:

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Posts

Berkeley Breathed - The Commercial Airline Monopoly:

https://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty/2023/01/05

#BerkeleyBreathed #Opus #AirlineMonopoly #Airlines #Monopoly #FreeMarketEconomics #FreeMarket #Economics #TooBigToFail #Bailouts #CronyCapitalism #Cronyism #Capitalism

02/21/2022

Power and Market: Government and the Economy, by Murray N. Rothbard
Reviewed by R. A. Childs Jr.
retrieved from The Libertarian Forum VOLUME II, NOS. 22-23 NOVEMBER 15 - DECEMBER 1, 1970

Nearly nineteen years ago, a young man in his mid-twenties, not yet having received his Ph.D., set out on the task of boiling down the magnum opus of Ludwig von Mises–Human Action–into a concise volume suitable for use as a college text in economics. Over the years, the plan was changed; the task snowballed until it was finished in 1959. No longer a "boiled down" version of HUMAN ACTION, the work had become a masterpiece in its own right, more comprehensive in purely economic issues than HUMAN ACTION itself, more carefully systematic, encompassing more issues in the subject than any work before or since. The work, however, was pronounced "too long" and "too anarchistic" by its financier-publisher; most of the last third was thrown out altogether; the rest was severely condensed into the last chapter of the published work.

The book was poorly promoted. Instead of being advanced as the work to supplement or even replace Mises, as a purely economic treatise (and as being much easier to read and understand), it was publicized by the Foundation for Economic Education as merely "a graduate- level comprehensive development of the economic principles of the free market by one of the outstanding young students of von Mises". It has since gone out of print.

The work was MAN, ECONOMY, AND STATE: A Treatise on Economic Principles (2 vols., Van Nostrand, 1962). The author is Murray N. Rothbard.

Now, at last , what was to have been the third volume of that work, the literal culmination of an entire school of economic thought (Austrianism), has been published, revised and updated, by the Institute for Humane Studies. It is entitled POWER AND MARKET: Government and the Economy. In 225 closely-packed pages, it presents a comprehensive critique of the role of the state in the economic system. It now can be said of POWER AND MARKET, when taken together with MAN, ECONOMY AND STATE, which is still independent of it. What Henry Hazlitt correctly said of HUMAN ACTION when it appeared in 1949: it extends the logical unity and precision of economics beyond any other work. As Mises went beyond his teacher, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, so Murray Rothbard has gone beyond Mises.

It is important at the outset to point out precisely how and where Rothbard has gone beyond Mises, with the publication of this work. It is undeniable that Mises' contributions to the science of economics have been immense, but his philosophical framework is unfortunately Kantian. Rothbard is, on the other hand, an unblemished Aristotelian, taking note of many of the contributions to philosophy made by the Thomists.

Mises believes in the subjectivity of values, that all ethical standards are arbitrary, that concerns with justice are idle; he is a frank ethical nihilist. Rothbard, on the other hand, believes in the necessity of establishing principles to guide men's choices and actions-in a rational ethic. With such differences in philosophical frameworks, it is to be expected that Rothbard and Mises will have some differences.

In particular, Mises' value-subjectivism and anti-justice positions lead him to simply dismiss ethical questions out of hand. It also leads him to adopt many starkly anti-libertarian positions. In HUMAN ACTION he states that "he who in our age opposes armaments and conscription is an abbettor of those aiming at the enslavement of all. The maintenance of a government apparatus of courts, police officers, prisons and of armed forces requires considerable expenditure. To levy taxes for these purposes is fully compatible with the freedom the individual enjoys in a free market economy." Thus, Mises does not even consider taxation and the draft to be violations of freedom! How, with positions like these, can Mises objectively analyze these and other statist measures? The answer is that he only skims over them.

Murray N. Rothbard thus becomes the first major economist to be a ruthlessly consistent adherent to free-market principles. Mises' statist positions blinded him to many things which Rothbard treats as interventions–simply because Mises thought them "necessary." The position which Rothbard takes in POWER AND MARKET is a position which Mises should have taken more than twenty years ago. If he had, he would have saved all of us a lot of trouble arriving where we have at last arrived without him.

POWER AND MARKET is Rothbard's departure from the mistaken path Mises has taken. It consists of seven tightly integrated chapters taking up government intervention in the dealings of men, and refuting the rationalizations so often used to justify the initiation of force by the state against individuals.

In chapter one, and in the last part of his chapter on taxation (the section on "Voluntary Contributions to Government"), Rothbard takes up a great many arguments against a purely free, stateless, market, and gives summary answers to the questions of how a free market can enforce the rights of person and property against aggressors without a government. Unfortunately, he doesn't go into this practical problem enough, but his work here can easily be supplemented by such works as Morris & Linda Tannehill's, THE MARKET FOR LIBERTY, and Jarret Wollstein's SOCIETY WITHOUT COERCION (especially the 2nd edition, now in preparation). He shows brilliantly however why a government cannot conform to the libertarian rule of non-initiation of force; in this respect, Rothbard takes a radical turn away from even traditional laissez-faire economists, by repudiating the state in its entirety. Answering the charge that a government is a necessary precondition for the freemarket, Rothbard says that "It was the fallacy of the classical economists to consider goods and services in terms of large classes; instead, modern economics demonstrated that services must be considered in terms of marginal units...If we begin to treat whole classes instead of marginal units, we can discover a great myriad of necessary, indispensable goods and services, all of which might be considered as 'preconditions' of market activity. Is not land room vital or food,...or clothing, or shelter? Can a market long exist without them?...Must all these goods and services therefore be supplied by the State and the State only?" Especially interesting is his integration of ethical and economic arguments. Discussing the hotly debated question of whether or not a State can exist without initiating force, Rothbard rebuts the "limited governmentalists" in a crucial ethical-economic argument which no archist has yet succeeded in refuting.

Chapter two is a presentation of the fundamentals of intervention into peaceful social relations. Unlike Mises who treats only a relatively small class of coercive actions as "interventions" into the free market. Rothbard takes up the issue systematically. classifying as "intervention" any initiation of force in social relations. Thus it is important to note that this is not merely a work on economics in a much wider and important sense, it is an analysis of the indirect effects of the initiation of force in society. It fills in the skeleton, so to speak, of the fundamental libertarian principle of non-initiation of force, with complex theoretical analysis-showing both its direct consequences and its complex indirect consequences.

Three broad categories are treated: autistic, binary and triangular intervention. "Autistic intervention" is when the intervener commands "an individual subject to do or not to do certain things when these actions directly involve the individual's person or property alone." It occurs when the aggressor coerces a person (or many persons) but does not receive any good or service in exchange. "Binary intervention" occurs when the aggressor enforces "a exchange between the individual subject and himself, or a coerced 'gift' to himself from the subject," such as highway robbery, taxes, enslavement, and conscription. Thirdly, there is "triangular intervention," in which the aggressor compels or prohibits an exchange between a pair of subjects. Rothbard analyses the relations between intervention and conflict, the nature of democracy and voluntary actions, the relationship between individual "utility" and resistance to invasion, and several other issues.

Chapter three treats a host of interventions under the general heading of "triangular intervention". Price control, product control, licenses, standards of quality & safety, immigration laws, child labor laws, conscription, antitrust laws, conservation laws, eminent domain, and a host of other things fall before Rothbard's logic. Rothbard is here, as elsewhere, a master of the reductio ad absurdum". Thus, for example, he reduces the principle behind tariffs to smitherens, just by extending it to its logical outcome–to show that it is an attack on trade itself and thus leads inevitably to economic solipsism. If we cannot legitimately trade freely with people outside the state? or city? or, finally and absurdly, Jones' farm? Where does it suddenly become absurd to keep on extending the principle and halting trade for the benefit of incompetents? His arguments are clean, concise and ruthless.

Chapter four and five are a back-to-back treatment of two major forms of "binary interventionism": Taxation and government expenditures. He shows the distortions wrought on the free market by all forms of both. In the Chapter on government expenditures, he offers an analysis on subsidies and government ownership, showing how they distort the market, and undertakes very incisive critiques of both public ownership and democracy. He lays bare the fallacies of ever trying to conduct government on a so-called "business basis."

Murray Rothbard's chapter on taxation is the most incisive analysis in existence. While Mises, in HUMAN ACTION, devoted only six pages to the intervention of taxation, and even claims that there can be such a thing as a "neutral tax," Rothbard devotes over 65 pages to ruthlessly dissecting all economic and moral arguments for taxation. Rothbard considers the market effects of virtually every form of taxation, and virtually demolishes the notion of neutral taxation, a mythical beast which, Mises says, "would not divert the operation of the market from the lines in which it would develop in the absence of any taxation." Especially interesting is his section on the so-called "canons of justice in taxation" offering a criticism of all the traditional notions of this absurd concept. As in the rest of POWER AND MARKET, Rothbard is not content merely to refute the trivial arguments usually brought forth in all sorts of economic issues, and turns his guns on the fundamentals, such as stopping to consider why the economists consider the canons of "justice" in taxation in the first place. In this case, the quest arose from the earlier philosophical quest for the "just price" of goods in general. Eventually, in economic thought, the "just price" was simply dropped, or considered coextensive with the free market price. But why then do economists still harp on a "just tax"? Obviously because while the just price would be equated with the market price, there is simply no "market tax" for taxation to be linked with, since it cannot be voluntary. The quest for a "just tax," then, has its roots in statist apologetics–in the minds of those economists who will simply not carefully and objectively consider the nature of the state itself. As for the commonly considered notions of the "just tax," says Rothbard, all merely smuggle a fundamental presupposition in through the back door–the notion that taxation itself is somehow "just". The "justice" of a particular form of a treatment, after all, is derived from the justice of the fundamental treatment itself. And nobody has ever succeeded in justifying taxation itself. Rothbard, in point after point, succeeds in reducing taxation on economic and ethical grounds to oblivion.

Chapter six is perhaps the most innovative in the book. It is the introduction of a new task for praxeology in philosophy: the title is "Antimarket Ethics: A Praxeological Critique." It consists of a critique of over 16 different ethical positions in their objections to a free market–everything from the position of altruism to the position of the Aristotelian-Thomistic school of philosophical thought, ranging over such diverse issues as the morality of human nature, the impossibility of equality, the problem of security, the problem of "luck", charity, poverty, human rights and property rights, over-and under-development and the natures of power and coercion. This last is especially exciting. Rothbard takes up the difference between power over nature and power over man; he reduces the bogey of "economic power" to dust, showing that it is simply "the right under freedom to refuse to make an exchange." Every case of "economic power," he shows, rests solely on someone's right to refuse to make, or to continue to make, a certain exchange on the market. And more: he shows that there are only two options open to us, and that we must choose between them. This is a marvelous dissection of what he calls the "middle of the road statist." Suppose, says Rothbard, that "A refuses to make an exchange with B. What are we to say or what is the government to do if B brandishes a gun and orders A to make the exchange? This is the crucial question. There are only two positions we may take on the matter: either that B is committing violence and should be stopped at once, or that B is perfectly justified in taking this step because he is simply 'counteracting the subtle coercion' of economic power wielded by A." Whether we like it or not, in other words, we must either defend, in moral principle, A's person & property against invasion by B, or we defend B's alleged "right" to enforce an exchange. "If we choose the 'economic power' concept," says Rothbard, "we must employ violence to combat any refusal of exchange; if we reject it we employ violence to prevent any violent imposition of exchange. There is no way to escape this either-or choice." And: "What would be the consequence of adopting the 'economic-power' premise? It would be a society of slavery: for what else is prohibiting the refusal to work?"

The final chapter treats crucial questions of the nature of economics and its uses, the nature of the implicit moralizing of most economists, economics and social ethics, and the differences between the market principle and the principle of coercion. His notion of the relation between economics and ethics is especially vital: economics, he says, cannot by itself establish ethical positions, "but it does furnish existential laws which cannot be ignored by anyone framing ethical conclusions--just as no one can rationally decide whether product X is a good or bad food until its consequences on the human body are ascertained and taken into account."

POWER AND MARKET is replete with intellectual ammunition for the libertarian. In fact, no other book provides so much information which can be readily digested and used in debating crucial issues of our day, when they involve the free market. It is original and comprehensive in scope: its systematic critiques of statism are devastating on every level. This is not merely a book on economics–it is a book on the nature and forms of coercion on every level. It shows the fallacies of everything from taxation, to democracy, to government spending, and devastates such arguments as those of "economic power" and the bogey of "production vs. distribution"–merely by
pointing out, in this last case, that it is the existence of taxation and government itself which creates for the first time a separation of "distribution" from production, bringing the whole pseudo-problem into being. ln case after case, Rothbard squashes the arguments of statists of every breed, by reducing them to absurdities, by pointing out their unadmitted premises, smuggled-in ethical positions, and plain logical fallacies.

With POWER AND MARKET, libertarianism and Austrian economics move into the intellectual vanguard of economic thought. It is the best work in economics since Rothbard's own MAN, ECONOMY AND STATE, which was in turn the best work since Mises' HUMAN ACTION.

Saying that reading POWER AND MARKET is a must for any libertarian interested in presenting an intellectual case for liberty is an understatement. With works of this caliber in every field of intellectual endeavor, the foundations for a comprehensive and fully integrated libertarian ideology would be firmly established.

POWER AND MARKET does not, as some might think, belong on a shelf besides MAN, ECONOMY AND STATE, nor next to HUMAN ACTION. In more than one way, it belongs on a shelf by itself.

02/07/2022

Just like when the heroine gets taken away from the junkie, all hell breaks loose––the banksters panic when credit valuations crumble.

But unlike the rest of us, the thieves get the time and favors from the government to prepare. And the banksters are nervous, if not in panic mode. Let them run, let them squeal, let them rot in hell.

Let the entire Global Establishment come crashing down. Let Globalism die ASAP and take with it those who caused the mess we find ourselves.

Bring back FreeMarket Capitalism.

Over 250 years ago - Benjamin Franklin knew what would happen when government paid people to not work. Yet, today, most people still seem completely surprised by the results.

#founders #liberty #benjaminfranklin #truth #wisdom #warning #foundingfathers #welfarestate #libertarian #economy #economics #freemarket #10thAmendment #constitution #quote