Murray Rothbard Quotes
Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the State is profoundly and inherently anticapitalist.
Rothbard, Murray N. "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty." Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, vol. 1, no. 1, 1965, p. 13.
After the Truman defeat of Republican candidate Thomas Dewey in 1948, Republicans were searching for ways to overcome the poor image that they had with many Americans, and one of the then preeminent advertising companies was assigned the task of analyzing the 1948 failure and making recommendations. This quotation comes from that report. This recommendation defined the Republican approach for the next decades.
The first part of this quotation has defined the attitude of most Americans towards private enterprise and government since then. The second part of the quotation—the undesirability of public ownership of railroads has given way to the modern problem that no passenger railroad can be operated profitably by anyone—private or public. So Roosevelt’s “far-reaching disaster” was finally complete with the Federal Government taking over responsibility for Amtrack.
There were a number of hyper conservatives at the time who actually believed this. They either tend to ignore for ideological reasons, the incredible role that local, state, and the Federal government has played in many of the great innovations in our nation. It was a Federal Contract that allowed Eli Whitney to develop the technique of manufacturing with interchangeable parts. The Erie Canal, the greatest and most innovative engineering project in the world at the time was built by the New York State government with State money, It was a Abraham Lincoln Federal contract that produced the research to make the telegraph feasible. Under Theodore Roosevelt, a Federal Government grant made it possible to control Yellow Fever. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the Army and the Treasure Department fund and operate the Manhattan project which not only developed the atomic bomb but also innovated the tools and methods for nuclear energy production. Most of the early computer programs in America were written by Government employees or by people who were working under government contracts. It was the Army that not only financed but also provided key staff in DARPA which produced the Internet. The Decoding of the Human Genome was the joint innovation of a private group and a Research Laboratory of the National Institutes of Health, and the majority of medical innovations (including pharmaceuticals) in the last 50 years were produced by Government Scientists or Financed by Government Agencies. There are literally thousands of others, a;; of which must be ignored to claim that Government curtails innovation. There has also been a great deal of important innovation that has occurred by independent individuals and private companies without the help of government. The great innovative success of America has been because both the private and public sectors, sometimes working independently and sometimes together has produced a steady production of important innovations that are the envey of the world.
Murray Newton Rothbard was an American heterodox economist of the Austrian School, economic historian and political theorist. Rothbard was the founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism, a staunch advocate of historical revisionism and a central figure in the 20th-century American libertarian movement. He wrote over twenty books on political theory, revisionist history, economics, and other subjects.
