The Essential Rothbard - Ludwig von Mises Institute

80 The Essential Rothbard
Rothbard has little use for Downs’s various predictive hypotheses,
finding them vague or erroneous. One example must here suffice:
the flat statement is made, without qualification: “A vote
against any party is not a vote against government per se but
net disapproval of the marginal actions that party has taken.”
. . . When I [Rothbard] vote, I vote against government per se
sometimes; this action is enough to refute Downs. 220
Downs has condemned anarchists to analytical oblivion through
an arbitrary assumption.
Rothbard quickly dispatched another future winner of the
Nobel Prize in a review of Robert Fogel’s The Union Pacific Railroad.
221 Fogel argued that the Crédit Mobilier promoters were not
swindlers.
From the point of view of “social return,” the railroad was
eminently profitable and worthwhile. Fogel celebrates the
railroads and its effects; and the famous swindling of the
Crédit Mobilier promoters is dismissed as a myth, as profits
no more than justified by the “risk” to the promoters. 222
To Rothbard, Fogel’s entire line of argument rested on a fundamental
fallacy.
I am not impressed, however, with a point of view that worries
about the “entrepreneurial risk” assumed by people who
receive the largesse of government bonds, and who wonder at
what price they can resell the bonds on the market. 223
220 Ibid.
221 Robert Fogel, The Union Pacific Railroad: A Case of Premature
Enterprise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1960).
222 Letter to Kenneth Templeton, June 26, 1961.
223 Ibid.