The Essential Rothbard - Ludwig von Mises Institute

94 The Essential Rothbard
Against Rothbard, Nozick deploys an argument that at first
sight seems devastating. Grant Rothbard his private market anarchism,
Nozick suggests. Then, in a way entirely consistent with
Rothbard’s system, a monopoly agency will spring up. Rothbard’s
system defeats itself.
Rising to the challenge, Rothbard locates a crucial weakness in
Nozick’s argument. Nozick concerns himself greatly with cases in
which protection agencies clash over the appropriate procedure to
use in trials of criminals. One outcome that Nozick canvasses is an
agreement among the agencies to establish an appeals court.
So far Nozick is on the right lines, and Rothbard himself lays
great stress on the need for agreements of exactly this kind. But,
according to Nozick, agencies that thus come to agreement have
coalesced into a single agency. Rothbard finds this step in Nozick’s
argument unreasonable: do disputing companies that agree to
arbitration constitute by that agreement a single firm? Nozick has
“refuted” Rothbard through the use of an arbitrary definition.
POLITICS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
Rothbard modified the famous dictum of Marx: he wished
both to understand and change the world. He endeavored
to apply the ideas he had developed in his theoretical work
to current politics and to bring libertarian views to the attention
of the general public. One issue for him stood foremost. Like
Randolph Bourne, he maintained that “war is the health of the
state”; he accordingly opposed an aggressive foreign policy.
His support for nonintervention in foreign policy led him to
champion the Old Right. John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett and other
pre-World War II “isolationists” shared Rothbard’s belief in the
close connection between state power and bellicose foreign policy.
The situation was quite otherwise with postwar American conservatism.
Although Rothbard was an early contributor to William