Reckoning with Rothbard

摘要

Murray Rothbard was no land economist. He carefully sniffed the Georgist literature, detected a faint aroma of socialism, felt the presence of The State, with whose stench he was already thoroughly familiar, and without bothering to root out the minor socialist aspect of traditional Georgism or to consider Chodorov's suggested decentralized implementation, threw the baby out with the bathwater. His views on the land question were intellectually consistent, but entirely flawed, and reminiscent of the complexly interwoven, delusional alternate realities dreamed up by clever paranoid-schizophrenics. He had an answer to everything, and all of his answers were wrong. His "alternate reality" was based on a failure to understand a) the positive spatial externalities attaching to land use, b) that the contributions of these to the value of individual parcels of land could be separately assessed, c) the vicious cycle nature of purely private land ownership, and d) that any system that permits all land to be privately appropriated in a fashion that excludes some, is, to the excluded, inherently coercive, depriving them of basic rights. Rothbard wrote that great thinkers, "however great they may have been, . . . can slip into error and inconsistency, and even write gibberish on occasion." As we have seen, he himself was not immune, but this should not lead us to disparage his immense contribution to the reawakening of the spirit of liberty in the latter half of the twentieth century, much as Henry George provided in the final twenty years of the previous one, and beyond.