Murray Rothbard

Murray Rothbard was an American economist and historian associated with the Austrian school of economics. He took his doctorate at Columbia University in 1956, taught at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, wrote across economic theory, monetary history, American colonial history and political philosophy, and served as Academic Vice-President of the Mises Institute from its founding in 1982 until his death in 1995. He died before the internet became a mass medium; his continuing presence in American political argument is documented here through the Congressional Record and through the institute that publishes his work without charge.

Education and Academic Posts

Rothbard was born on 2 March 1926. He studied mathematics and economics at Columbia University, where, by the account of the Mises Institute’s biography of him, he received no instruction in Austrian economics. Contact with the Foundation for Economic Education, which had published a pamphlet on rent control by George Stigler and Milton Friedman, led to a meeting with Ludwig von Mises; Rothbard became an active member of Mises’s seminar at New York University after Mises’s Human Action appeared in 1949. He completed his Columbia PhD in 1956 under the economic historian Joseph Dorfman, with a thesis on the Panic of 1819.

He taught at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, and from 1986 until his death on 7 January 1995 held the S.J. Hall Distinguished Professorship of Economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The Library of Congress name authority record for him records the same birth and death dates and lists his occupations as economist, social scientist and college teacher.

Published Work

His principal books include Man, Economy, and State (1962); America’s Great Depression (1963), which argued that the 1929 downturn followed from Federal Reserve monetary expansion in the 1920s rather than from unregulated markets; the pamphlet What Has Government Done to Our Money? (1964); Power and Market (1972), originally written as the closing part of Man, Economy, and State; For A New Liberty (1973); the four-volume colonial history Conceived in Liberty (1975-1979); The Ethics of Liberty (1982); and The Mystery of Banking (1983). Economic Thought Before Adam Smith and Classical Economics, a two-volume history of economic theory, appeared in 1995 after his death, as did the collections The Logic of Action (1997), A History of Money and Banking in the United States (1999) and The Irrepressible Rothbard (2000).

On money he argued for a classical gold standard and 100% reserve banking, on the ground that credit expansion produces the boom and bust cycle described by Mises and Friedrich Hayek. He was an early contributor to William F. Buckley’s National Review but broke with its editors over Cold War foreign policy, holding, in Randolph Bourne’s phrase, that “war is the health of the state”.

Journals and Institutions

Rothbard founded or co-founded several periodicals: Left and Right, published from 1965 to 1968 with Leonard Liggio and with the help of H. George Resch; The Libertarian Forum, which carried his topical commentary from 1969 to 1984; the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1977; and the Review of Austrian Economics in 1987, renamed the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics after 1997. In Ron Paul’s account entered into the Congressional Record, the coin dealer Burton Blumert “helped Murray establish the Center for Libertarian Studies” and served as its president from 1975 until his death, and later published the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, described there as a newsletter written by Rothbard and Mises Institute president Lew Rockwell.

Rothbard was associated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute from its founding in Auburn, Alabama in 1982 by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., and served as its Academic Vice-President. The institute continues to publish his books, articles and recordings free of charge on its own site, and describes its mission as research in the Austrian School “in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard”.

In the Congressional Record

The phrase “Murray Rothbard” appears in ten items in the online Congressional Record, the earliest dated 1 April 1998 and the most recent 12 February 2024. Most were entered by Representative Ron Paul of Texas.

On 1 April 1998, in House debate on the Credit Union Membership Access Act, Paul argued that governmental credit allocation causes malinvestment and an artificial boom and bust cycle, citing Mises’s The Theory of Money and Credit and adding that “Nobel laureate Frederick A. Hayek and Murray Rothbard expounded on this idea”. Paul’s later extensions of remarks describe Rothbard directly: a tribute to Burton Blumert on 2 April 2009 calls him “one of Mises’ top American students”; tributes to Ronald Hamowy on 16 November 2012 and to George Resch on 21 December 2012 both describe him as “Mises’ heir and founder of the modern libertarian movement” and place him at the centre of the “Circle Bastiat”, a group of scholars formed around Mises’s New York seminar in the late 1940s and 1950s.

The name also appears from outside that circle. On 7 May 2012 Representative Dennis Kucinich entered a Wall Street Journal op-ed into the Record that invoked “Mises protege Murray Rothbard” on monetary inflation as a form of counterfeiting. On 31 December 2012 Representative Barney Frank entered a Washington Post article reporting that a FreedomWorks funder had attended seminars featuring Ayn Rand and Rothbard in the 1960s. On 12 February 2024, during an extended Senate floor speech against H.R. 815, Senator Rand Paul described a postwar split “a little bit between Buckley and Murray Rothbard”, said that Rothbard and others “were worried that if you had a big military state, the amount of money that went into it would cause us to lose our freedoms”, and added: “That argument still goes on.”

What Is Not Established Here

This page previously carried an entire section, “Digital Posthumous Revival”, asserting that Rothbard’s writings were featured in YouTube content by Austrian economics creators in the late 2000s, spread through Reddit communities and online forums during the Ron Paul campaign era, sustained online reading groups, and became widely shared during the 2008 financial crisis. None of it was sourced and none of it could be sourced in this audit; all of it has been removed. The related claims that Rothbard’s ideas “significantly influenced Ron Paul’s political platform” on monetary policy, the Federal Reserve and foreign policy, and that his arguments “reached new readers” through the 2007-2012 Paul campaigns, have been replaced by what the Congressional Record actually shows: Ron Paul citing and describing him, in dated items that are quoted above.

The Cato Institute affiliation and the frontmatter link to it were removed. Nothing was found in this audit — on Cato’s own site or in any first-party record — that documents Rothbard as a founder of or office-holder at that organisation. Cato’s own “About” page names no founders at all.

The founding year 1976 for the Center for Libertarian Studies was removed. The only record found is Ron Paul’s tribute to Burton Blumert, which says Blumert helped Rothbard establish it and served as its president “from 1975”, and does not give a founding date. The Mises Institute biography does not mention the centre at all.

The claim that Rothbard “co-founded the Mises Institute in 1982” was softened. The institute’s own account names Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. as founder and lists Rothbard among those who gave “blessing and aid”; the biography it publishes says he was “closely associated with” the institute from its founding and served as Academic Vice-President. The connection now says that.

Also removed: the unsupported generalisation that his work “influenced generations of activists and political figures” and “provided theoretical foundations adopted by various political movements in the United States”. Where the record shows specific people invoking him, they are named above.

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