Never a Dull Moment: A Libertarian Look at the Sixties, by Murray N. Rothbard

Never a Dull Moment (PDF) collects the syndicated columns Murray N. Rothbard wrote between January 1967 and the summer of 1968 for the Freedom School's Pine Tree Features. Justin Raimondo edited the 2016 Mises Institute edition. He wrote its introduction, printed the columns in chronological order as written and marked his own insertions with brackets. Rothbard takes the campus revolt, Vietnam, Newark, the Six-Day War, the dollar and the 1968 election in turn. For each one he asks who is coercing whom and who gains from it. That question keeps putting him beside groups that the usual left and right labels would separate, and learning to ask it is the main reason to read the book.

The first column applies the method on a small scale. Conservatives had long attacked swollen state university bureaucracies, yet they recoiled from the students rebelling against those bureaucracies because of their clothes and hair. Much of the New Left defended Clark Kerr, the fired University of California president it had denounced for years, and protested Governor Reagan's budget cuts and proposed tuition. Rothbard argues that the cuts shrank the institution the students opposed, and that paying for their own education would give students more power over it as consumers.

The secession column, prompted by de Gaulle's call for a free Quebec, makes the book's sharpest case for decentralization. Rothbard treats existing borders as products of mostly coercive historical forces with no claim to permanence. He gives three reasons to welcome secession. When the world is split into more states, each can build up less power over its subjects and for making war. Freeing a minority from a majority's state is a net gain while states exist. And if a region has a recognized right to secede, every smaller part has the same right, down to the individual. That last step, which applies the right again at each smaller level, is the column's most useful mechanism. His own list shows its limit. In one sweep he hails Biafra, Katanga and a possible black republic and laments the South's defeat in the Civil War. The argument measures how much an existing state is weakened. Judging how each successor regime would behave needs evidence the column does not supply.

War and money come together in two other columns. Reporting on a Washington meeting of Business Executives Move for a Vietnam Peace, Rothbard separates middle-rank owners of their own firms from big businessmen tied to federal war contracts. He argues that market enterprise has supported free trade and peace, while particular capitalists turn to the state for wars that pay them. He reports Marriner Eccles, a former head of the Federal Reserve Board, telling the group that the war was enlarging the deficit, raising income taxes and pushing up the cost of living. Rothbard's sorting of the attendees describes one meeting and gives a reader an incentive hypothesis to test. In "Exchange Controls," answering Lyndon Johnson's New Year's restrictions on investment and travel abroad, he argues that inflation had overvalued the dollar at its $35 gold peg, so gold kept flowing out. If Americans spent a billion dollars less abroad, Europeans would have a billion fewer dollars for American goods, and the inflow would shrink by about as much. His remedy was a devaluation toward roughly $70 an ounce in the short run and an end to inflation in the long run. These are Rothbard's arguments at the time, and this review does not verify his balance-of-payments accounting.

The two closing essays give context and come from different dates. "Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal," from Ramparts in June 1968, explains how Rothbard went from the extreme right to the extreme left in public estimation while, he insists, holding the same views. The postwar right he joined opposed conscription, NATO and the Truman Doctrine. In his account, it later became the conservative wing of a corporate state with an expansionist foreign policy, and he proposes joining the old right and the new left against that center. "The New Libertarian Creed," reprinted from the New York Times of February 1971, was written after the columns and sets out the self-ownership and homesteading premises behind them. Raimondo calls the 1967–68 period of the columns Rothbard's "left" period, and that label is the editor's framing.

Read the collection to watch one firmly held premise sort live controversies and form new coalitions around opposition to specific coercion. Expect short polemics written for newspaper readers in 1967 and 1968. The columns examined here cite few sources, and many references will need looking up. The book gives one committed participant's argument and cannot serve as a neutral or complete history of the decade. This recommendation draws on the contents, the introduction, a selection of columns and the closing essays, and chapters it does not cover may change the emphasis.