RE: http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?art...385&theme=home&loc=f

This is an excellent and fair article about Rothbard. Paul Gottfried is correct to praise Rothbard’s work on the Great Depression (one only wished Rothbard had gone on to do in FDR), as important in revision as DiLorenzo is on Lincoln (and soon on Hamilton). We still need the great revisionist work on Woodrow the Worst, though Richard Gamble and Thomas J. Fleming, and Jim Powell have made a start. Gottfried is also quite correct on Rothbard’s central error: to ignore Aristotle’s correct observation that man is a social animal made for the polis.

In agreeing with Rothbard on the modern Social Welfare State, Paul Gottfriend doesn’t go far enough in attacking The State in general. Statists and especially central Statists – be they Whig/Hamiltonian or Socialist/Social Democrat – would have us believe that The State be a natural condition and have always existed. No, The State is an invention of Machiavelli and got its first really systematic formulation in Hobbes. That means that the Greeks, the Romans, the Medievals, and the Renaissance had no State, The State first emerging with Baroque Absolutism. All the French Revolution did was remove the head. At the basis of this misunderstanding is the failure to recognize the distinction between government, which we have always had, and The State; Americans particularly make this error. Rothbard and his fellow libertarians make this mistake too. The State, in fact, seems to be doomed, and certainly is in decline, brought downward by overspending, identity politics, and 4th Generation War.

Paul Gottfried’s other error is to call Rothbard a man of the “Right”. He was no such thing. I have remonstrated with Paul Gottfried elsewhere that political ideologies are not on a line going from “Left” to “Right” – a metaphor that needs to be dumped. It is also a dangerous metaphor, letting Social Democrats think they are “closer” to Communists and Tory Conservatives think they are “closer” to Whigs or Fascists – the “useful idiot” syndrome. Rothbardianism is neither Left or Right, if by the former we mean Marxism and the latter Fascism and extremist Nationalism. Nor are “Left” or “Right” The Greens, the Tory and Royalist Conservatives, Christian Democrats and Catholic social teaching, or the Whigs/ “Neoconservatives”. If one wants a metaphor, rather than a line, try a Chinese Checkers board.