—“But What Did Rothbard Innovate?”—

—“BUT WHAT DID ROTHBARD INNOVATE?”—

1 – (Respectfully) I always think that’s a rather ridiculous question since of empiricism (Aristotle), Self Improvement(Zeno), Moral Literature (Plato), and Rational Mythology (Augustine), it’s easy to state that all of philosophy is merely footnotes stated in current vocabulary.

2 – My reading of rothbard, particularly “for a new liberty” was that he was (a) trying to restated jewish borderland (ukrainian) low trust ethics, in anglo-jeffersonian high trust terms, and (b) trying to reduce social science to an informal logic. Did he or did Hoppe?

3 – My reading (because I learned it from him) is that Hoppe completed that program, unfortunately, using Kantian > Marxist rationalism, rather than anglo empiricism (law). I just converted it to scientific rather than justificationary prose.

4 – Every thinker is only partly right. My beef with rothbard is that he conflated low trust ethics with high trust ethics, and conducted an pseudoscientific war on the commons as marx did on private property. The only one who was right was Hayek: it’s all just reducible to law.