Kelefa Sanneh,  a music critic and journalist who writes for The New Yorker, has a brief discussion of Murray Rothbard in his article “Paint Bombs” http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2013/05/13/130513crat_atlarge_sanneh?currentPage=all He devotes most of the piece to the anthropologist David Graeber, an anarchist but no friend of the free market, and his influence on the Occupy Wall Street movement. James C. Scott, another anthropologist who sympathizes with anarchism, also comes in for attention. Sanneh says that the  Occupy movement is not influential in electoral politics, but he finds one anarchist “who could be considered influential in Washington.” This is none other than Murray Rothbard, who is identified as Ron Paul’s intellectual mentor. Sanneh doesn’t say much about Rothbard, but discussions of anarcho-capitalism are hardly a regular feature in The New Yorker. As Samuel Johnson said, “it is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

Julian Sanchez has carried criticism of the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) to a new level. The principle tells us not to commit aggression; but, as Matt Zwolinski and others have pointed out, you don’t know what counts as “aggression” unless you know what rights people have. You can’t judge who the aggressor is simply by seeing who uses force first. The person who does so may be responding to a violation of rights and not be an aggressor at all. The NAP cannot, then, be used as an axiom to derive the rest of libertarian theory.

Sanchez goes further. The NAP is a tautology that adds nothing of importance to moral theory. A right is, by definition, a claim that is enforceable. “But all the real action is in the definition of rights; invoking the NAP adds nothing. It is tantamount to saying ‘only enforce rights that are really rights.’ To establish your right over (say) your car just is to establish that I ought not to take or use it without your permission (perhaps barring extraordinary circumstances, the parameters of which will tend to be implicit in the argument establishing the right). It is neither necessary nor illuminating to add the additional premises that taking what you have a right to counts as ‘aggression,’ and that one ought not to aggress.”

Here Sanchez has focused on the wrong word. He says, in effect, “Of course you should only enforce an enforceable claim. What else do you propose to enforce — a non-enforceable claim?” He is certainly correct that you shouldn’t enforce a non-enforceable claim, but he has missed something. He has not paid enough attention to “claim.” If you have a moral claim, then something is owed to you. Moral claims are personal. But some moral theories don’t tie the use of force to claims.

As an example, someone might favor transfers of wealth from billionaires to the poor on the ground that this will increase utility. The person might further hold that force can properly be used to do this. In taking this view, the person need not have rights in mind at all. The argument isn’t that the poor have a right to the transfers of wealth, so that if the transfers aren’t made, the poor have been deprived of what is morally owed to them. Rather, the theory holds that transferring wealth in this circumstance is a good thing to do and that’s all you need to justify using force.

In brief, there are non-rights based moral theories. The NAP, by tying the use of force to rights-violations, rules out using force to achieve moral goals not founded on persons’ claims. It is thus not a tautology.

Sanchez might answer that the NAP adds nothing to “People have rights” or a list of these rights.  These already exclude moral theories not based on rights. This answer is also not correct.  Someone who favored the wealth transfer might say that enough of an increase in utility overrides the billionaires’ property rights; the billionaires can be forced to transfer their wealth if they don’t want to do it. Again, this isn’t to say that the poor have a right to the transfer. Some moral theories include both rights and other considerations as well that justify using force. The NAP blocks using force that doesn’t respond to a rights violation, so it does add to “People have rights.”

Sanchez is correct that the NAP doesn’t by itself block a theory that includes non-libertarian rights, but this doesn’t make it useless for libertarians. The NAP doesn’t do everything, but it does do some things.

Matt Zwolinski, a libertarian political philosopher and the founder of the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, has a surprising proposal. Libertarians, he suggests, should drop the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP). The NAP holds that “aggression against the person or property of others is always wrong, where aggression is defined narrowly in terms of the use or threat of physical violence.”

Zwolinski raises six objections to the NAP, targeted especially against the way Murray Rothbard interprets it. Supporters of the principle need not worry. The objections don’t hold up.

Zwolinski suggests that, according to Rothbard, it would be wrong to trespass on someone’s property to feed a three-year old child whom someone was starving to death. The person starving the child isn’t aggressing against him, but trespass is aggression.

That is nonsense. To starve someone who cannot leave is to murder him. You don’t have to touch somebody to kill him: there isn’t a special libertarian concept of murder, different from the ordinary one. Neither is it the case that you are free to violate people’s rights, so long as you do so on your property. Rothbardian libertarianism is not the doctrine that each person is an absolute despot over his own property.

Zwolinski finds another flaw in the NAP. If, as Rothbard thought, industrial pollution violates the NAP, then must we not prohibit the slightest bit of smoke blown onto someone’s property, if the owner objects? Further, he asks in an earlier post, what if someone objects to a few photons of light beamed at him: should so trivial a matter be treated as harm? The NAP, taken strictly, threatens to derail nearly all human activities. If Rothbard replies to this that pollution below a certain level does not count as harm, why does he get to decide the limits of harm?

I don’t think Rothbard made the absurd claim that the limits of harm were for him to decide. Rather, he recognized that setting the limits of harm is matter of convention, settled by the understanding that prevails in a society. Zwolinski here falls into a mistake that many libertarians make. They deny a role to convention in delimiting the boundaries for the application of a concept: unless “nature” settles the matter, use of a concept is an all-or-nothing affair. Zwolinski‘s objection about risk fails for the same reason. Why must a supporter of the NAP hold that either all risks of harm must be prohibited or none? Once more, that dread word “convention” must not be uttered. Or is it rather that he thinks that Rothbard rejects it? Let us leave Zwolinski to sort out his own confusions on this question.

Zwolinski is not always wrong. He rightly notes that the NAP does not tell us what property rights people have. He is also correct that “aggression” in the principle must be understood to cover violations of property rights, as well as direct physical assault. Certainly Rothbard understood the NAP this way. But why, immediately before pointing this out, does he claim that a prohibition of fraud isn’t compatible with the NAP, because fraud is not physical violence? Is it too much to expect Zwolinski to realize that his point about the meaning of aggression invalidates his own objection regarding fraud?

Zwolinski concludes by suggesting that rather than deal with his objections by adding more epicycles to the NAP, we should, in a Copernican Revolution, put aside the idea that the NAP is the center of the moral universe. Zwolinski’s analogy limps: Copernicus offered an alternative to Ptolemaic astronomy but Zwolinski confines himself to posing objections to an existing theory. By the way, Copernicus’s theory has epicycles in it as well.

Ronald Dworkin,  (1931-2013) who died yesterday, was widely regarded as America’s leading legal philosopher. He was decidedly not a libertarian, but libertarians will find much of interest and value in his work.  His defense of moral objectivity in his Justice for Hedgehogs (2011) is especially impressive. He argues that views about the nature of morality are themselves moral positions. If you say, e.g, that there is no objectively correct answer to the question whether abortion (or anything else) is morally  wrong, you are in effect saying that abortion is morally permissible. The supposed external criticism of morality–there is no such thing as moral truth— is really an internal proposal within morality. Many people will instinctively reject this “quietest” position; but if they do, they will I predict find it hard to show exactly where Dworkin goes wrong.

His famous essay “Is Wealth A Value?”, available in his collection A Matter of Principle, is a devastating criticism of Richard Posner’s wealth-maximization approach to law. Those of us who prefer a Rothbardian defense of the free market to the supposedly more scientific Chicago School view will find in Dworkin’s essay much of value. Although libertarians will find him far too egalitarian, he offers in Sovereign Virtue a strong emphasis on individual responsibility. In the same book, he offers some penetrating observations about Rawls’s Theory of Justice. My own favorite essay of his, also in A Matter of Principle, is his demolition of Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice. If you read it, you will see right away that Dworkin was a great critic.

Jason Sorens has posted a very thoughtful review of Ralph Raico’s outstanding recent book, Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School.

I admire the post and learned from it, but I’d like to differ with Sorens on two points. He suggests that methodological individualism is vulnerable to criticism. “We can know that firms try to maximize profit even if we do not have a good explanation for why each individual firm tries to maximize profit, or why individuals have chosen so to organize themselves. ” He appeals here to what Bob Nozick called a “filtering device.” The explanation, I take it, is roughly this: to the extent that firms engage in profit maximization, they will tend to supplant firms that don’t.

But this explanation is entirely consistent with methodological individualism. This doctrine does not require that social outcomes be reducible to the motives of individuals. To the contrary, appeals to “the results of human action but not of human design” are quite common among Austrian methodological individualists.  In thinking that use of “filtering devices” in Nozick’s sense, irreducible to the psychological motives of individuals, conflicts with methodological individualism, Sorens has I think wrongly taken over Nozick’s unduly restrictive account of that doctrine, in his essay “On Austrian Methodology”

Sorens also remarks:  “However, what I have heard from contemporary Austrian economists such as Peter Leeson is that Mises himself was not opposed to hypothesis testing, even using statistical methods. He was merely opposed to Popper-style falsificationism (i.e., that every element of a theory must be falsifiable), which has in any case been superseded in mainstream philosophy of science. ”

Certainly, Mises did not oppose hypothesis testing in applying economics to historical issues; but in economic theory itself he was very much an apriorist. Mises himself is a much better guide to his views on method than “contemporary Austrian economists”; and if one consults Mises, whether he was an apriorist is not a difficult question to answer.

The Politically Incorrect Guide series includes many excellent books, but unfortunately Kevin Williamson’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism  is not among them. One turns to the book with interest, as the author is a firm opponent of socialism and has read Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard.  Unfortunately, the book cannot be recommended. Williamson lacks the ability to report facts accurately and his work contains preposterous errors.

Here are some examples. Williamson writes:

“The modern experience suggests that the economist Ludwig von Mises was only partly correct when he wrote, ‘The socialistic State owns all material factors of production and thus directs it.’ That was true for the authoritarian, single-party powers of his day. In our own time, the converse is a more accurate description of the real economic arrangement: under socialism, the state directs the material factors of production as if it owned them. The state does not have to actually own factories, mines, or data centers if it has the power to dictate, in minute detail, how business is conducted within them,” (Politically Incorrect Guide,p.15)

Can Williamson be so ignorant of Mises as not to know that the point he raises against Mises was a key insight of Mises himself? Mises writes in Human Action, e.g., “The second pattern (we may call it the Hindenburg or German pattern) nominally and seemingly preserves private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary markets, prices, wages, and interest rates. There are, however, no longer entrepreneurs, but only shop managers (Betriebsfuhrer in the terminology of the Nazi legislation). These shop managers are seemingly instrumental in the conduct of the enterprises entrusted to them; they buy and sell, hire and discharge workers and remunerate their services, contract debts and pay interest and amortization. But in all their activities they are bound to obey unconditionally the orders issued by the government’s supreme office of production management. .  . This is socialism under the outward guise of the terminology of capitalism. Some labels of the capitalistic market economy are retained, but they signify something entirely different from what they mean in the market economy.” http://mises.org/humanaction/chap27sec2.asp

In another howler, Williamson writes: “The United States in the twenty-first century is not very much like nineteenth-century Prussia (Prussia today isn’t much like Prussia then, either.” (p.95) Evidently, Williamson does not know that Prussia ceased to exist in 1947.

Williamson’s ignorance is not confined to the European continent. He writes: “In India, British colonial rule came to a largely peaceful end thanks to the efforts of Mohandas K. Gandhi. . .” (p.51). In point of fact, after the 1947 partition between India and Pakistan, violent conflict between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs resulted in deaths estimated between 500,000 and 1,000,000.

Rather than presume to instruct others in history and economics, Williamson should acquire some elementary knowledge of these subjects.

Robert Wenzel would like to see more Rothbardian history.

He seems to me entirely right; it’s imperative that those who knew Murray set down their stories about him.  Here is one of mine to start things off. Murray had an incredible memory for historical  detail. One I was telling him that I had manged to stump Mel Bradford by asking him Rutherford Hayes’ middle name. Murray said, “It was Birchard, of course.”

The Circle Bastiat, which flourished from 1953-1959, was a group of Murray Rothbard’s closest friends and disciples. Ralph Raico and George Reisman, while still in high school, began to attend Ludwig von Mises’s famous seminar at New York University. There they met Murray Rothbard, then working on his doctoral dissertation at Columbia, who had been an active member of the seminar for several years.

Raico and Reisman, impressed by Rothbard’s intellect, learning, and personality, soon became fast friends with him. They met him for long conversations, which ranged widely over economics, history, politics, and philosophy, after the seminar.

They were joined within about a year by Leonard Liggio, who had worked with Raico in the Robert Taft presidential campaign, and a little later by Ronald Hamowy, who had been friends since elementary school with Reisman. Robert Hessen also became part of the group, and sometimes Raico brought his friend, the philosopher Bruce Goldberg, to the discussions. (A couple of less well-known people also participated.) The friends met regularly at Rothbard’s Manhattan apartment and called themselves the Circle Bastiat, after the great nineteenth-century French classical liberal and economist. .The Circle came to an end after Raico departed for graduate study at the University of Chicago in 1959; Reisman and Hessen had left the previous year.

The Circle was notable not only for high intellectual quality but also for the remarkable good humor and camaraderie of the members. We have decided to name this blog after the Circle, both as a tribute and to set an ideal for participants to emulate.