The Essential Rothbard - Ludwig von Mises Institute

The Essential Rothbard 97
appeared in an important scholarly journal, Left and Right, which
he established. This contained major essays on revisionist history
and foreign policy, but unfortunately lasted only from 1965–1968.
The key essay just mentioned is available in the collection Egalitarianism
as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, which contains
some of Rothbard’s most important work on political theory.
In the book’s initial essay, whose title has been adopted for the
whole book, he raises a basic challenge to the schools of economics
and politics that dominate current opinion. 253 Almost everyone
assumes that equality is a “good thing”; even proponents of the
free market like Milton Friedman join this consensus. The dispute
between conservatives and radicals centers on the terms of trade
between equality and efficiency.
Rothbard utterly rejects the assumption on which this argument
turns. Why assume that equality is desirable? It is not
enough, he contends, to advocate it as a mere aesthetic preference,
in the style of Frank Knight. Quite the contrary, egalitarians, like
everyone else, need rationally to justify their ethical mandates.
To Rothbard, as we have seen in the discussion of The Ethics of
Liberty, ethical justification requires attention to the requirements of
human nature. Judged by this standard, the results are devastating
for the egalitarian view. Everywhere in nature we find inequality.
Attempts to remake human beings so that everyone fits into the
same mold lead inevitably to tyranny.
The great fact of individual difference and variability (that is,
inequality) is evident from the long record of human experience;
hence, the general recognition of the antihuman nature
of a world of coerced uniformity. 254
253 The essay first appeared in Modern Age in 1973; Robert Nozick
made exactly the same point in his article “Distributive Justice,” which
appeared in the same year, and in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which
appeared in the year following.
254 Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 8. The pursuit of
absolute equality, it will be recalled, Rothbard has shown in Power and
Market to be conceptually impossible.