The Essential Rothbard - Ludwig von Mises Institute

78 The Essential Rothbard
what basis do they assume that perfect competition and equality
are “good things”?
Rothbard notes an anomalous feature of the egalitarian policy
favored by these authors and common elsewhere:
And they have even the further colossal gall to denounce
“price discrimination” (e.g., doctors charging more to the
rich than to the poor ) because it is, for some reason, terribly
unethical for private people to engage in their own strictly
voluntary redistribution of wealth . . . it is only legitimate for
the government to effect this redistribution by coercion. This
ethical nonsense they don’t feel they have to defend. . . . It is
this kind of slipshod, unphilosophic sophomoric “ethics” that
is again typical of the Chicago School in action. 213
Rothbard obviously found maddening this casual attitude to
conceptual rigor; and on one occasion he directly confronted
Buchanan over it. He was “appalled” by the use of a “fixeddemand”
curve. He devised a counterexample to show the absurdity
of the concept.
The authors said that a fixed, vertical demand curve is illustrated
by the government’s demand for soldiers, and that if
not enough people volunteer, the government will draft the
rest . . . the analysis is nonsense, since if say the government
wants 100,000 men in the army but if so many people are 4-F
or exempt that only 60,000 can possibly be hired or drafted,
we then have a vertical supply and vertical demand curve
which can never intersect. On the authors’ own premises,
then, no one would be in the army, which is clearly absurd. 214
Much to Rothbard’s dismay, Buchanan conceded his point. In a
letter that Rothbard quotes, he replied: “You [Rothbard] are quite
right in saying that the solution . . . under your assumptions is
213 Ibid.; emphasis in the original.
214 Ibid.; emphasis in the original.