Bryan is sounding a bit too much like Ken Burns in attacking what was a genuinely libertarian ideological orientation of the American Revolution. For his part, Murray Rothbard wrote a massive five volume history (_Conceived in Liberty_ https://mises.org/library/book/conceived-liberty ) explaining his thesis about the Revolution as being the product of a long ideological, religious, and political struggle between liberty and power in the American colonies of Britain. One can scarcely do justice to his take on the libertarian nature of the Revolution without addressing the mountain of evidence he brings up in this monumental work of his.
Moreover, Rothbard didn't characterize slavery as being the "grave anti-libertarian flaw" of the American Revolution. Rothbard was specifically talking about the enormous success that Jackson and Van Buren had achieved in reducing the size and power of the federal government in line with libertarian principles, but noting that the Democratic failure to address the slavery issue according to the same libertarian principles was a grave flaw in their program that ultimately wrecked all their political achievements. I think there is more that one could add to this story (especially Polk's turn towards imperialism and conquest of western territories, which sparked a renewed conflict over the westward expansion of slavery), but Rothbard wasn't wrong about the specific point he was making.
I don't have enough space here to argue in detail for all things that are wrong with dismissing the libertarianism of the American Revolution as an absurdity, but I can at least state a few basic points:
(1) The vast majority of Patriots who actually instigated the Revolution were neither slave-owners nor interested in making war against natives. They created an underground organization, calling themselves the "Sons of Liberty," and advocated an ideology that was unmistakably libertarian (as confirmed by highly-respected historians like Bernard Bailyn, not just by Rothbard) to justify their struggle against the imposition of a corrupt mercantilist system upon America by British Tories. In what sense was their struggle not a genuinely libertarian revolution?
(2) Slave-owning Patriots who claimed to support the Revolution on libertarian grounds were not all hypocrites. Some of them (a notable example being Thomas Jefferson) supported emancipation, but were concerned about the ability of black freedmen to function in a white society and to get along peacefully with their former masters and thus looked towards gradualist forms of abolition, often coupled to colonization proposals. Someone like Rothbard would undoubtedly scorn such gradualism as a _de facto_ subordination of libertarian principle to other values, but it doesn't necessarily imply hypocrisy by those advancing such views, nor by the non-slave-owning Patriots who embraced them as allies in the fight against the British Empire.
(3) There is nothing in libertarianism that endorses land ownership claims that aren't founded upon actual physical possession of the land. This principle is crucial when analyzing the conflicts between white settlers and natives, because in many instances nobody was in physical possession of vast tracts of wilderness when the whites first showed up. The sense of moral outrage that modern progressives (and Bryan unfortunately) try to stir up about an alleged "invasion" of native lands by whites is based on the anti-private ownership philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that romanticizes the "noble savage" as a model of virtue, not on the libertarian-oriented philosophy of John Locke. This doesn't mean that Patriots didn't commit atrocities against natives, but it does give more credence to the grievance mentioned in the Declaration about the British instigating merciless savages to slaughter Patriots, a fear that was realized two years later in massacres at Wyoming, Pennsylvania and Cherry Valley, New York.
The principle of original appropriation by actual possession (what Locke described as "mixing labor with land") is also crucial in understanding conflicts between settlers and politicians, both in the British Parliament and in the colonial legislatures, who were attempting to grant vast tracts to their favorites instead of recognizing homesteading claims by the settlers. Settlers in Vermont and neighboring areas revolted against the New York and New Hampshire governments over this issue, but almost no historians apart from Rothbard even bother to notice this phenomenon, let alone explain the libertarian struggle of Vermonters over land ownership rights that was running in parallel with the American Revolution. Other frontier struggles between settlers and quasi-feudal land grantees are likewise ignored by historians who blindly accept land rights as arbitrary political constructs and fail to appreciate (as Rothbard did) the libertarian principles at stake.
I don't consider white-red relations to be genocide. No doubt there were some whites and reds who wanted to annihilate each other, but mostly it was just ordinary war and government meddling. The first white settlers had no way of knowing their diseases had already killed 90% of the natives. They arrived, found a lot of empty land, negotiated "sales" with remaining natives, and the language and cultural problems led to confusion over what it meant to sell property. The French and British paid different tribes to fight on their side, and the winners got the spoils of war, including revenge. The Plains Indians were mostly nomads, as I understand it, and fought each other over communal rights more than they fought the Europeans, as did most peoples, including Europeans.
Still a lot of injustice, but it was not by any means mostly evil greedy whites slaughtering innocent pastural reds. It was just ordinary human greed and misunderstanding by all parties.
Your two statements are in conflict. For instance, suppose there is only one true definition of "genocide", but I am so retarded that my pitiful brain can't track even that one. Bingo! That one definition is more than I can keep track of.
Britain in Canada managed to have much fewer conflicts with our Indians. War and genocide wasn't some inevitable thing born out of human nature. US policy was much more aggressive about moving into Native land and not agreeing to treaties.
Canada was farther north, colder, and had fewer residents, settlers, invaders, and people in general who could clash. Their policies and informal arrangements naturally differed.
When it got to to the point that settlers were trying to kill off all the buffalo/bison in order to starve the natives, that went beyond ordinary war and into regarding it as impossible for the natives to continue living as they had. Still, the wars were multiple and it's hard to say all the conflict was like that.
Killing the buffalo was one way to stop the Indians from claiming the entire Great Plains as their private communal hunting grounds and forcing them to settle down in one place. The Indians were horribly inefficient at harvesting buffalo, killing far more than they ate, and it was only possible when they had the entire Great Plains to themselves. I do not believe killing the Indians was the primary goal, or any goal except for a few nutters. I'd put it in the same category as some farmer homesteading a million acres, farming only 1000 acres, and claiming the rest had to be left alone as fallow lands in recovery.
It was even LESS efficient to kill all the bison regardless of using them.
Back in 2023 I blogged about a paper on how the Russian empire responded to the threat of steppe nomads via military institutions requiring serfdom to support such garrisons: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2023/07/16/serfdom-as-a-military-institution/ Horseback Amerindians like the Sioux were the American equivalent of steppe nomads, and the point of the bison-cull was to drain the sea in which they swam.
The buffalo killers weren't trying to use the buffalo. They were trying to make it impossible for the Indians to use them so inefficiently as an excuse for laying claim to the entire Great Plains. This was not modern times. It would have been "better" to isolate buffalo to a small section and farm them like cattle, or to get the Indians to become ranchers. Neither was practical, hence the buffalo killers.
Your model makes no sense. Making more efficient use of the buffalo wouldn't reduce the amount of territory claimed by the Indians; it would just mean there were more Indians.
It makes plenty of sense if you think for a minute. You think correctly that increased efficiency increases allows more Indians to be supported by the same size buffalo herds, but fail to realize that allows the same number of Indians to be supported by smaller buffalo herds.
My thoughts exactly, Jefferson seemed to say the right things but more often than not, his revealed preferences made him a hypocrite.
On another topic though, I thought Rothbard spoke well when he was deconstructing what socialism is exactly. A 'quasi-conservative movement' that displaced libertarians on the left. I couldn't stop thinking about the Nolan chart.
The "quasi-conservative" claim wasn't totally wrong, but radical socialism really was in bitter conflict with traditional religion, and indirectly most forms of social conservatism. The Leninists rethought this after a few years of free love during the Russian Revolution.
Rothbard's reframing of socialism as a confused mix of liberal ends and conservative means stood out to me as well. And I think it makes a lot of sense in the context of contemporary politics in a lot of Western Europe, and France in particular. Unions and left-wing activists hold a lot of political power (largely due to state privileges) and are effectively conservative forces in the most literal sense of the word. As they're arms of the regime that will wreak havoc and block the streets at the mere suggestion of the mildest pro-market reform. Their main purpose is to conserve the welfare state and the whole anti-growth regulatory apparatus. Then you also have the degrowth movement, generally classified on the left, and which is straight-up reactionary in a literal sense, as they want to undo the Industrial Revolution. It feels pretty upside-down that any of these groups can get away with claiming the "progressive" label.
I don’t share Rothbard’s moral absolutism, so I don’t see marginal or gradual improvements toward liberty as failures. For that reason, I also don’t think the libertarian movement “fell” into gradualism or utilitarianism in any meaningful sense.
This ties into your question about what’s worth celebrating in the American Revolution. Even granting its deep moral failures, the fact that revolutionaries were forced to use libertarian rhetoric at all strikes me as a major turning point. Once ideas like equality and rights were institutionalized in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, slaveholders had to at least pretend to affirm principles that directly contradicted slavery. That dissonance produced all kinds of bad responses (racism foremost among them) but it was a losing strategy unless one was willing to discard the entire constitutional framework. While the rhetoric didn’t end slavery overnight, it rendered it morally incoherent in a way it hadn’t been before. As Sowell has argued, even rhetorical commitment to those principles sowed the first seeds of inevitable abolition.
I also tend to side more with Mises and McCloskey: ideas and rhetoric matter before action. Rothbard wants his whole program implemented immediately or not at all. I think it’s imperfect but unambiguously good that the Revolution set in motion a slow process toward political equality. That alone makes it worth sober celebration.
On the chapter itself, I was struck by how often Rothbard invokes “power” without defining it. Is it police, military, courts, taxation? Given how central it is to his system the lack of clarity felt like an oversight.
I was also unconvinced by his treatment of conservatism. The idea that conservatives explicitly aimed to end mass production for the masses and re-impoverish workers in service of aristocrats seems implausible. Even if Rothbard thought that was the effect, I wish he’d engaged with their own language rather than using caricature.
Relatedly, his comfort with enlightened despotism is puzzling. He criticizes demagogues and the masses when borrowing their opinions from trained specialists, yet applauds Jefferson and his goons for bypassing popular conviction to impose Rothbard's preferred outcomes. He even laments the interruption of Jefferson’s multi-decade plan for presidential succession by a politician with catchy slogans. That’s hard to square with his hostility to opinion-shaping and his insistence that means matter more than ends. The same state power he tolerates when used to shrink the state would obviously permit its expansion when wielded by others.
More broadly, Rothbard seems to downplay persuasion and rhetoric altogether, relying instead on the state somehow dismantling itself. Mises and McCloskey want to persuade people by appealing to interests and moral intuitions; Rothbard seems willing to use non-anarchist means to reach anarchist ends. That doesn’t strike me as a plausible institutional story.
His admiration for Jefferson also seems odd. Many historians contrast Jefferson’s pastoral, slaveholding, anti-industrial vision with Hamilton’s embrace of industry, upward mobility, abolitionism, and the destruction of caste. Jefferson hardly looks like the libertarian paragon Rothbard suggests.
The claim that public schooling exists primarily to indoctrinate also feels overstated. Likewise, the idea that teachers or bureaucrats can centrally reshape language at will seems implausible. Language behaves like a perfectly competitive market and resists top-down control. Rothbard simultaneously portrays the state as corrupt and incompetent yet capable of effortlessly restructuring entire languages to fool everyone.
My biggest disagreement, though, is with his dismissal of utilitarianism. In Liberalism, Mises makes a strong case that moral arguments against slavery often failed "one could even find slaves arguing passionately against manumission on moral grounds, to this abolitionists had no rebuttal" (paraphrase); what ultimately succeeded were economic arguments about efficiency and welfare. Rothbard celebrates rising consumer welfare—a plainly utilitarian criterion—while condemning utilitarianism in principle. He even portrays the villains of his narrative as those who wish to reverse rising standards of living for the masses.
Free markets, to me, are morally compelling because they work. If they increased starvation, disease, and poverty, we’d have a moral obligation to stop them. That makes outcomes the measure of success, not metaphysical purity. If following natural rights led to lower living standards, Rothbard would have to accept that — yet he condemns precisely those outcomes when produced by his ideological opponents. That makes him, functionally, a utilitarian whether he admits it or not.
He has also already alluded to natural rights as the superior alternative without ever defining them. As an agnostic lacking religious faith I'm not sure I've ever understood natural rights, and the more I try the more obtuse they seem. Do they come from God? The NAP? John Locke? Aquinas? Where do they come from and who decides what they are?
Finally, Rothbard laments the loss of revolutionary fervor among later liberals. But revolutions are bad for business. Classical liberals treated revolution as a last resort. It’s hard to champion mass prosperity while romanticizing upheaval that destroys capital, kills people, and sets societies back for decades.
It’s at least striking that in Washington’s case, decades of moral appeals from people like Hamilton and Lafayette didn’t move the needle, while the financial collapse of slavery at Mount Vernon finally did. He may not have written a treatise, but his actions suggest that cost–benefit considerations mattered more at the margin than moral argument.
One might consider the founding of the nation to be libertarian, if we forgive the fact that, in those days, our ancestors didn't consider Indians and Africans to be human, or at least fully human. Typical of tribal folks (like the founding fathers) all over the world.
These days, of course, some people have recognized that their ancestors were, in certain ways, misguided.
It is fortunate that the Declaration of Independence did not have to be ratified by three-quarters, or a majority, or even one, of the state legislatures.
I’d be curious to hear what everyone thinks about this from Rothbard in chapter 1 - “In all societies, public opinion is determined by the intellectual classes, the opinion molders of society. For most people neither originate nor disseminate ideas and concepts; on the contrary, they tend to adopt those ideas promulgated by the professional intellectual classes, the professional dealers in ideas.” Might this be changing today?
I like what Rothbard is getting at, but some of the analysis is dubious.
>To establish this new system, to create a New Order which
was a modernized, dressed-up version of the ancien régime
before the American and French revolutions, the new ruling
elites had to perform a gigantic con job on the deluded public,
a con job that continues to this day.
Sounds like a conspiracy theory. Hugo Mercier provides a lot of evidence that little in the median mind is duplicitous. Whole populations are not easy to dupe; evolutionarily, that would be maladaptive. Also, will the idea makers really all be biased in a certain direction? Why?
>In all societies, public opinion is determined by the intel-
lectual classes, the opinion moulders of society.
Many ideas are grass-roots. Ideas are very simple. Simple people can make them. Consider a lot of parenting discourse, for instance. Or narratives around the Epstein files.
Contra Rothbard's thesis, the origins of Big Government in the 20th century are not a simple conspiracy of the upper class. In fact, it's probably the opposite. It's elite types that lean libertarian and want small government. 20th century Big Governments are peasant driven. They are egalitarian and socialist. I believe this is the consequence of improvements to quality of life, which allowed common people to be more active in the political process. FDR was just a bloodless communist revolution. It's all for and by the proletariat; libertarian stands contra the proletariat.
I agree at least partially with your point about the Revolution. I also had some similar thoughts as @Follynomics. I won't rehash the arguments, especially since Follynomics made them pretty well, but here is one point I have some additional observations on.
Rothbard spends some time in this chapter explaining what ideologues other than libertarians, such as conservatives, socialists, and utilitarians believe. I usually find that annoying and no less so here, especially since the descriptions are those of a cynical opponent and not at all close to how those intellectuals would describe their own views. I don't usually defend conservatives, but there is a quote on page 12 where Rothbard tries to summarize their position, starting with "We, too, favor industrialism and a higher standard of living. But [...] ." He doesn't provide any references for me to understand how he came to favor that description of 19th century conservative thought. To see if this was representative, I glanced through some Edmund Burke essays. Here is a quote from "Reflections on the Revolution in France:"
> "I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government; with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue; with morality and religion; with the solidity of property; with peace and order; with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things too; and, without them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. "
These sentiments sound different from what Rothbard describes. It's similar with the utilitarians. They probably didn't see the application of their theory as compromises but rather as consistent with their beliefs. Maybe later Rothbard will provide better arguments if his case is that what conservatives, and other non-libertarians, actually wrote were not honest portrayals of their position. I would have been more impressed if from the start he engaged with their actual arguments, not his own projection.
All I have to say is your quip about siding with none libertarian slavers because of a dispute about minor British taxes and calling it a libertarian revolution being ridiculous is gold. It’s so deeply true, yet few people acknowledge it.
I often think about what would have happened if at least one tribe or more managed to live to create a nation state, or even just have a stronger effect on American culture in general.
The world really lost out because of the genocide of the North American natives.
It's interesting to me that he discusses conscription reasonably often. Naturally in the 70's the memory of the Vietnam draft was fresh in the reader's mind, and it's a very strong argument in favor of libertarianism. So it isn't surprising, but at the same time it doesn't resonate as much today.
On the flip side, to me the libertarian idea seems to have trouble dealing with some modern issues that maybe weren't so prevalent back then, especially around drugs, homelessness, and crime. I feel generally pro-libertarian but I don't see what the libertarian answer is to the sort of urban problems that nowadays plague coastal cities like the San Francisco area where I live.
As I said, the homeless problem was created by government expanding its meddling.
It should be damned obvious that if this is the case, then shrinking government to stop the meddling that created the problem will help alleviate the problem.
Do you know why flophouses no longer exist, which would cost $200 a month now? Government meddling. Do you know why boarding houses no longer exist? Government meddling.
Government decided that it was degrading to allow people to live in flophouses and boarding houses, so they created minimum building standards that outlawed cheap housing. Result: lots of homeless people who couldn't afford the appropriate level of government-mandated housing.
Government also decided that it was degrading to let people work for too low a wage, or to let blacks compete against whites in a government-mandated racist society by working for a lower wage. Result: No jobs for unskilled people.
Stop meddling like that and the problem will resolve itself.
My guess is that almost any U.S.-based libertarian would want to appeal to the American Founders for credibility. Back in the 80s, I remember quite mainstream people talking earnestly about "What would the Founders think about this?"
Even Clinton made a big deal about the Founders in late 1992/early 1993 if memory serves.
I can't remember any mainstream thinker caring about that in many years.
What evidence is there that the American Revolution actually led to more Native American deaths? People usually cite the Proclomation of 1763 but from what I have read that had already been chipped away by the Treaties of Hard Labor and Fort Stanwix in 1768. And even if USian settler-colonialism had been retarded the treatment of North American natives by non-USian settlers was equally brutal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache–Mexico_Wars . British settlers also engaged in similar acts of genocide elsewhere in the empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_War . This isn’t to absolve the Founders of their sin but if we’re weighing the American Revolution as a whole it seems to me like a wash on the issue of treatment of Native American (there is a much better case for the American Revolution prolonging slavery and making its abolition much more bloody)
In Canada, the Royal Mounties reached the west first, and avoided wars with natives. As a result, First Nations are a larger portion of the Canadian population.
I don't get the imperative for the national focus of political ideologies. Wasn't early America quite a bit more state-focused than after the Republicans and their war machine took over? That still leaves some 75 years open for experimentation. Weren't states more or less TRUE laboratories of democracy—at least until the feds severely constrained them, privileging the needs of national businesses and war mobilizations over states' rights? Even today, as current events in Minnesota so clearly demonstrate, state policy can differ quite substantially from that of the national government and still win the day on the ground.
So why don't we see ANY flavor of American libertarianism at the state level, strongly influencing if not controlling any state, anywhere, at any time?
Most political scientists and historians get bored by state and local politics, but there's no doubt that there's a big range of state and local policy today, and the range was bigger in the 19th century. Chat knows more.
I think the simplest answer to your question is that federalism died during the New Deal (but was certainly dying almost a 100 years earlier as morality codes found their way into the local school districts—read about Horace Mann: As the first Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education (1837–1848), he championed the "Common School Movement," arguing that universal, tax-supported, non-sectarian education was essential for a functioning democracy and social mobility.)
The United States progressively became a nation controlled by the federal government. The erosion of the Tenth Amendment—which reserves powers not delegated to the federal government to the states or the people—is a long-term shift in American governance toward greater federal authority. This process, accelerated by the New Deal, has seen the federal government’s Commerce Clause power and spending power expand to override or influence areas traditionally managed by states, such as education, health, and local safety regulations.
Originally, the federal government was limited to enumerated powers. Over time, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8) broadly, allowing Congress to regulate activities that only indirectly affect interstate commerce, thereby infringing on state police powers.
Following the Great Depression, the Supreme Court ceased using the Tenth Amendment as a major barrier against federal regulation of the economy. Programs like Social Security solidified federal authority in areas previously deemed local.
The federal government often uses conditional grants (e.g., funding for highways, schools) to incentivize states to enact federal policies, which some legal scholars argue is a form of coercion that undermines state sovereignty.
For decades, the Supreme Court viewed the Tenth Amendment as a "truism" rather than a substantive limitation on federal power, reducing it to a passive statement of constitutional structure.
Impact on Federalism
The expansion of federal policies has weakened local governance and reduced the ability of states to serve as distinct policy labs.
The late William Stuntz' in his posthumously published "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" points to the kulturkampf against polygamist Mormons as one of the earliest times federal law crushed local variation. He also referred to Prohibition as "America's good culture war" (in contrast to the War on Drugs), since we were so open about what we were doing, passed a Constitutional amendment, and then passed another amendment repealing that. I reviewed the book here: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/the-collapse-of-american-criminal-justice/
I have written elsewhere about morality codes which you can trace back to the 1830s. This was a direct response to the new wave of immigrants who came with different ideas, attitudes and beliefs (Remember: America and open door policy until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and then the Immigration Act of 1891–Ellis Island opens a year later; though most European immigrants were still admitted.
The fact that a Constitutional Amendment could take away private property rights and install a totalitarian system—prohibition—should provoke more alarm than what it appears to do.
I think LBJ anc Nixon more effectively destroyed federalism than FDR. Nixon's "revenue sharing" was devastating. But the states would eventually have been overcome by the powerful state the constitution created.
I’d like you to identify where in the U.S. Constitution it makes the federal government so powerful. As for LBJ and Nixon they couldn’t have done anything if the Supreme Court hadn’t sided with FDR’s New Deal.
That was the biggest problem, that the Supreme Court, helped by lesser courts and politicians, amended the constitution by reinterpreting it. One of my favorite examples, after all the absolute and qualified immunity nonsense (in the 1960s and 1970s, 200 years after independence!) was the open fields doctrine of 1924, saying that because "open fields" are not among the 4th Amendment's "persons, houses, papers, and effects", no search warrants are necessary, later making it a crime for property owners to remove trail cameras which police have trespassed to set up on the property.
Well-stated and consistent with my understanding of the period prior to the Civil War. Supreme Court cases leave an unmistakable trail from the explicitly plural United States to the decidedly singular USA.
My basic question remains. Libertarianism did not "take" in either These United States or The United States. That being the case was the problem more related to the seed (the ideology itself) or the fertility of the ground in which it had to root (the myriad forces arrayed against it by circumstance, antipathy, or better alternatives)?
I believe government itself, its very existence as a coercive monopoly, can't help but attract cronies who want to enrich themselves by political maneuvering rather than the hard work of satisfying customers.
I would argue that it was far easier for the states to declare their independence based on the libertarian principles of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—founded firmly on private property rights—than it was to govern based on those same principles. The explanation is complex but reduces to the corruption of power and the abuses of what became the ruling elite. Few men are able to withstand the seduction of ruling over other men or believe themselves wiser than others.
An excellent book that discusses much of this early history of the founding is America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It (2019) by C. Bradley Thompson.
Of the key founders, only Madison viewed their accomplishment with real promise and optimism near the end of his life. Both Adams and Jefferson were disillusioned by current events. Their disillusionment was due to intense political factionalism, sectional divides over slavery, and fears that the American people lacked the civic virtue necessary to maintain a lasting republic. Both feared the nation they founded was failing or destined to break apart.
Other than killing close to a million people, the worst thing about the American Civil War was that it showed that the federal government could ride roughshod over the states and the political process to solve a problem which had vexed the country for 70 years. From then on, any perceived problem skipped the states and popular campaigning and went straight to the feds -- meat inspections, railroad regulation, you name it -- get the feds involved, smother the states, git 'er done!
If one state pioneers a regulation, that can remain in that state. As long as there's federalism, it's possible for some states to avoid such regulations. That variation is what can actually permit states to act as "laboratories" and for there to be some kind of selection.
Maybe so, probably so. I know of no statistics. But that matches my comment that it's easier to push for one federal regulation than 50 state federal regulations, so why not push for one state first, claim it's proven, then push for the federal regulation? Even if they have to push it in a few more states, they'll never have to push it in all states, only enough to justify it at the federal level as the will of the people.
What I meant by the change is that before the feds abolished slavery in four years, cronies stuck to state regulations because no one thought it was a federal matter and there would have been too much opposition. I have some recollection of trying to have federal canals and railroads which were shot down as none of the federal government's business. There was a national road over the Appalachians, justified as a postal road I think (Article I, Section 8, Clause 7: The Congress shall have Power . . . To establish Post Offices and post Roads;). Then came the Civil War, and part of the justification for the transcontinental railroad was military reinforcement of the west coast and to help unify the nation.
I'm talking about the period between independence and the Civil War when the USA was more a collection of sovereign states than a modern nation. Why not state governments run on libertarian (classical liberal) principles then?
Worth pointing out that federalism had a big revival in the last decade, most obviously for Covid policy, education (K-12 and higher ed), and abortion.
You asked why we don't see more state laboratories now, and I believe it is because federal action is so much more effective. Why push hard in 20 states when your opponents are going to push hard in 20 other states, and the 10 remaining states get left alone for being too small or neutral? Better to mount one federal push than 20 state pushes. Even pushing for one state is generally useless except as a stepping stone to the federal push.
As one example, before the Civil War, private banks were state-chartered and could issue their own currency notes. The private sector handled it fine. Then the North needed cash for the war, and mandated something like any private bank issuing its own notes had to leave a 110% deposit with the feds. Naturally all those private bills dried up, and the North issued greenbacks as the only allowed legal tender. I believe the South quickly followed suit.
That kind of heavy-handed federal action was justified due to the rebellion, and naturally never returned to the old paradigm. So much for laboratories.
In the past I would have found your take on the relationship between the American Revolution & slavery to be more plausible (and I recall scoffing at the TV series Sleepy Hollow for making Ichabod Crane both an abolitionist and supporter of that revolution). But since then I've been convinced by Phillip Magness (even though he blocked me on Twitter just a couple days ago arguing about COVID https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2026/02/04/blocked-by-phillip-magness/ ) that things are more complicated than that, and that the northern states passed antislavery laws around the time they attained independence, with the two things being linked in their eyes. Slavery persisted longer in Britain's remaining colonies, such as Jamaica, than it did in those northern states, so it's harder to say independence preserved slavery.
The North beat the UK which beat the South. But it seems unlikely that the UK would have prevented the North from ending slavery early, and fairly likely that they would have pressured the South to "get with the times" by the 1830s.
That the UK would have ended slavery early (by the 1830s, say) is a popular claim. I have always wondered about its basis, other than wishful thinking.
Same here. It's easy to be noble and abolish slavery when it no longer contributes much to your empire. Would the British still have abolished slavery in 1833 if they still controlled the southern slavery-run cotton plantations? They had no qualms about continuing to buy slavery cotton after 1833, toyed with the idea of recognizing the Confederacy once the war started, and turned a blind eye to all the warships being built for the Confederacy.
The people in the North who abolished slavery on independence certainly thought the UK had been constraining them on that front, and Jefferson's Declaration blamed the Brits for bringing slavery.
Rothbard's articulation of revolutionary history and his cheer leading for libertarian philosophy is about what one might reasonably expect. I find it an interesting perspective but do not consider it dispositive,
--- just as do not consider anyone's version of history dispositive, including professional historians. Still, all accounts of classical liberalism and libertarianism must begin somewhere, and Rothbard's beginning is at least interesting.
The Founders were not angels, of course. But it does seem to me that on the whole, they were far more classically liberal than any other term one might apply.
If you're a perfect libertarian except you are pro-slavery, how libertarian are you? A bad position on one HUGE issue plausibly outweighs everything else.
The same goes to a lesser degree if you are very libertarian, but favor a devastating war (with lots of innocent victims) over minor issues. That's my take on the American Revolution.
You cannot be anything like a libertarian unless you subscribe to and practice what I call The Moral Imperative: do not compel another unjustly. Force, threat of force, and fraud are compulsion.
I agree entirely about war. War is absolutely immoral action, and it is nearly always due the immoral action of single man (and yes, almost always a man) or a small set of men who are clearly immoral actors.
In retrospect, I'm pretty happy that the American Revoution happened, but I think it was unnecessary. The USA could have been birthed without war.
Many of today’s libertarians accept collectivism, not merely the non-aggression axiom. They refuse to criticize racism or antisemitism if it is non-violent, though both of those things have extensive association with coercion. I wouldn’t repress those collectivist beliefs, but like Rand I denounce them. My libertarianism is anti-collectivist, not merely non-violent.
My libertarianism is founded on The Moral Imperative, as I call it, and the logical inferences from it. I do not have an immediate definition of collectivism, but so long as it avoids unjust compulsion, people can be moral actors practicing it. Is there an intersection of libertarians and collectivists? I cannot say.
“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage — the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.” — Ayn Rand
You have to start where you are. Did they begin as pure libertarians and move toward slavery, or begin seeped in a culture which accepted slavery, and move toward liberty?
Which of the founders regarded slavery as a positive good? My understanding is that most thought it was bad, but didn't see a good way of dealing with it now that it existed.
Pierce Butler (SC) — pushed protections for enslavers, including moves that led into the fugitive slave protection that was added.
Hugh Williamson (NC) — argued southern states “could not be members of the Union” if Congress could ban the slave trade.
Abraham Baldwin (GA) — treated slavery as “local,” warned Georgians would see federal power over the slave trade as threatening a favored prerogative.
The Convention’s late-August commercial-regulation / slave-trade bargain is described in the NPS “day-by-day” account; it highlights key roles for C. C. Pinckney, Butler, Rutledge, Spaight, Madison (with the deal delaying any federal ban on importation until 1808).
Bryan is sounding a bit too much like Ken Burns in attacking what was a genuinely libertarian ideological orientation of the American Revolution. For his part, Murray Rothbard wrote a massive five volume history (_Conceived in Liberty_ https://mises.org/library/book/conceived-liberty ) explaining his thesis about the Revolution as being the product of a long ideological, religious, and political struggle between liberty and power in the American colonies of Britain. One can scarcely do justice to his take on the libertarian nature of the Revolution without addressing the mountain of evidence he brings up in this monumental work of his.
Moreover, Rothbard didn't characterize slavery as being the "grave anti-libertarian flaw" of the American Revolution. Rothbard was specifically talking about the enormous success that Jackson and Van Buren had achieved in reducing the size and power of the federal government in line with libertarian principles, but noting that the Democratic failure to address the slavery issue according to the same libertarian principles was a grave flaw in their program that ultimately wrecked all their political achievements. I think there is more that one could add to this story (especially Polk's turn towards imperialism and conquest of western territories, which sparked a renewed conflict over the westward expansion of slavery), but Rothbard wasn't wrong about the specific point he was making.
I don't have enough space here to argue in detail for all things that are wrong with dismissing the libertarianism of the American Revolution as an absurdity, but I can at least state a few basic points:
(1) The vast majority of Patriots who actually instigated the Revolution were neither slave-owners nor interested in making war against natives. They created an underground organization, calling themselves the "Sons of Liberty," and advocated an ideology that was unmistakably libertarian (as confirmed by highly-respected historians like Bernard Bailyn, not just by Rothbard) to justify their struggle against the imposition of a corrupt mercantilist system upon America by British Tories. In what sense was their struggle not a genuinely libertarian revolution?
(2) Slave-owning Patriots who claimed to support the Revolution on libertarian grounds were not all hypocrites. Some of them (a notable example being Thomas Jefferson) supported emancipation, but were concerned about the ability of black freedmen to function in a white society and to get along peacefully with their former masters and thus looked towards gradualist forms of abolition, often coupled to colonization proposals. Someone like Rothbard would undoubtedly scorn such gradualism as a _de facto_ subordination of libertarian principle to other values, but it doesn't necessarily imply hypocrisy by those advancing such views, nor by the non-slave-owning Patriots who embraced them as allies in the fight against the British Empire.
(3) There is nothing in libertarianism that endorses land ownership claims that aren't founded upon actual physical possession of the land. This principle is crucial when analyzing the conflicts between white settlers and natives, because in many instances nobody was in physical possession of vast tracts of wilderness when the whites first showed up. The sense of moral outrage that modern progressives (and Bryan unfortunately) try to stir up about an alleged "invasion" of native lands by whites is based on the anti-private ownership philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that romanticizes the "noble savage" as a model of virtue, not on the libertarian-oriented philosophy of John Locke. This doesn't mean that Patriots didn't commit atrocities against natives, but it does give more credence to the grievance mentioned in the Declaration about the British instigating merciless savages to slaughter Patriots, a fear that was realized two years later in massacres at Wyoming, Pennsylvania and Cherry Valley, New York.
The principle of original appropriation by actual possession (what Locke described as "mixing labor with land") is also crucial in understanding conflicts between settlers and politicians, both in the British Parliament and in the colonial legislatures, who were attempting to grant vast tracts to their favorites instead of recognizing homesteading claims by the settlers. Settlers in Vermont and neighboring areas revolted against the New York and New Hampshire governments over this issue, but almost no historians apart from Rothbard even bother to notice this phenomenon, let alone explain the libertarian struggle of Vermonters over land ownership rights that was running in parallel with the American Revolution. Other frontier struggles between settlers and quasi-feudal land grantees are likewise ignored by historians who blindly accept land rights as arbitrary political constructs and fail to appreciate (as Rothbard did) the libertarian principles at stake.
I don't consider white-red relations to be genocide. No doubt there were some whites and reds who wanted to annihilate each other, but mostly it was just ordinary war and government meddling. The first white settlers had no way of knowing their diseases had already killed 90% of the natives. They arrived, found a lot of empty land, negotiated "sales" with remaining natives, and the language and cultural problems led to confusion over what it meant to sell property. The French and British paid different tribes to fight on their side, and the winners got the spoils of war, including revenge. The Plains Indians were mostly nomads, as I understand it, and fought each other over communal rights more than they fought the Europeans, as did most peoples, including Europeans.
Still a lot of injustice, but it was not by any means mostly evil greedy whites slaughtering innocent pastural reds. It was just ordinary human greed and misunderstanding by all parties.
You can still have genocide of a non-innocent people, no?
Not every war is a genocide. Carbon copy to "anti-Zionists."
There are more definitions of "genocide" than I can keep track of.
No there aren’t - you’re retarded
Your two statements are in conflict. For instance, suppose there is only one true definition of "genocide", but I am so retarded that my pitiful brain can't track even that one. Bingo! That one definition is more than I can keep track of.
Britain in Canada managed to have much fewer conflicts with our Indians. War and genocide wasn't some inevitable thing born out of human nature. US policy was much more aggressive about moving into Native land and not agreeing to treaties.
Canada was farther north, colder, and had fewer residents, settlers, invaders, and people in general who could clash. Their policies and informal arrangements naturally differed.
When it got to to the point that settlers were trying to kill off all the buffalo/bison in order to starve the natives, that went beyond ordinary war and into regarding it as impossible for the natives to continue living as they had. Still, the wars were multiple and it's hard to say all the conflict was like that.
Killing the buffalo was one way to stop the Indians from claiming the entire Great Plains as their private communal hunting grounds and forcing them to settle down in one place. The Indians were horribly inefficient at harvesting buffalo, killing far more than they ate, and it was only possible when they had the entire Great Plains to themselves. I do not believe killing the Indians was the primary goal, or any goal except for a few nutters. I'd put it in the same category as some farmer homesteading a million acres, farming only 1000 acres, and claiming the rest had to be left alone as fallow lands in recovery.
It was even LESS efficient to kill all the bison regardless of using them.
Back in 2023 I blogged about a paper on how the Russian empire responded to the threat of steppe nomads via military institutions requiring serfdom to support such garrisons: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2023/07/16/serfdom-as-a-military-institution/ Horseback Amerindians like the Sioux were the American equivalent of steppe nomads, and the point of the bison-cull was to drain the sea in which they swam.
The buffalo killers weren't trying to use the buffalo. They were trying to make it impossible for the Indians to use them so inefficiently as an excuse for laying claim to the entire Great Plains. This was not modern times. It would have been "better" to isolate buffalo to a small section and farm them like cattle, or to get the Indians to become ranchers. Neither was practical, hence the buffalo killers.
Your model makes no sense. Making more efficient use of the buffalo wouldn't reduce the amount of territory claimed by the Indians; it would just mean there were more Indians.
It makes plenty of sense if you think for a minute. You think correctly that increased efficiency increases allows more Indians to be supported by the same size buffalo herds, but fail to realize that allows the same number of Indians to be supported by smaller buffalo herds.
My thoughts exactly, Jefferson seemed to say the right things but more often than not, his revealed preferences made him a hypocrite.
On another topic though, I thought Rothbard spoke well when he was deconstructing what socialism is exactly. A 'quasi-conservative movement' that displaced libertarians on the left. I couldn't stop thinking about the Nolan chart.
The "quasi-conservative" claim wasn't totally wrong, but radical socialism really was in bitter conflict with traditional religion, and indirectly most forms of social conservatism. The Leninists rethought this after a few years of free love during the Russian Revolution.
Rothbard's reframing of socialism as a confused mix of liberal ends and conservative means stood out to me as well. And I think it makes a lot of sense in the context of contemporary politics in a lot of Western Europe, and France in particular. Unions and left-wing activists hold a lot of political power (largely due to state privileges) and are effectively conservative forces in the most literal sense of the word. As they're arms of the regime that will wreak havoc and block the streets at the mere suggestion of the mildest pro-market reform. Their main purpose is to conserve the welfare state and the whole anti-growth regulatory apparatus. Then you also have the degrowth movement, generally classified on the left, and which is straight-up reactionary in a literal sense, as they want to undo the Industrial Revolution. It feels pretty upside-down that any of these groups can get away with claiming the "progressive" label.
I don’t share Rothbard’s moral absolutism, so I don’t see marginal or gradual improvements toward liberty as failures. For that reason, I also don’t think the libertarian movement “fell” into gradualism or utilitarianism in any meaningful sense.
This ties into your question about what’s worth celebrating in the American Revolution. Even granting its deep moral failures, the fact that revolutionaries were forced to use libertarian rhetoric at all strikes me as a major turning point. Once ideas like equality and rights were institutionalized in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, slaveholders had to at least pretend to affirm principles that directly contradicted slavery. That dissonance produced all kinds of bad responses (racism foremost among them) but it was a losing strategy unless one was willing to discard the entire constitutional framework. While the rhetoric didn’t end slavery overnight, it rendered it morally incoherent in a way it hadn’t been before. As Sowell has argued, even rhetorical commitment to those principles sowed the first seeds of inevitable abolition.
I also tend to side more with Mises and McCloskey: ideas and rhetoric matter before action. Rothbard wants his whole program implemented immediately or not at all. I think it’s imperfect but unambiguously good that the Revolution set in motion a slow process toward political equality. That alone makes it worth sober celebration.
On the chapter itself, I was struck by how often Rothbard invokes “power” without defining it. Is it police, military, courts, taxation? Given how central it is to his system the lack of clarity felt like an oversight.
I was also unconvinced by his treatment of conservatism. The idea that conservatives explicitly aimed to end mass production for the masses and re-impoverish workers in service of aristocrats seems implausible. Even if Rothbard thought that was the effect, I wish he’d engaged with their own language rather than using caricature.
Relatedly, his comfort with enlightened despotism is puzzling. He criticizes demagogues and the masses when borrowing their opinions from trained specialists, yet applauds Jefferson and his goons for bypassing popular conviction to impose Rothbard's preferred outcomes. He even laments the interruption of Jefferson’s multi-decade plan for presidential succession by a politician with catchy slogans. That’s hard to square with his hostility to opinion-shaping and his insistence that means matter more than ends. The same state power he tolerates when used to shrink the state would obviously permit its expansion when wielded by others.
More broadly, Rothbard seems to downplay persuasion and rhetoric altogether, relying instead on the state somehow dismantling itself. Mises and McCloskey want to persuade people by appealing to interests and moral intuitions; Rothbard seems willing to use non-anarchist means to reach anarchist ends. That doesn’t strike me as a plausible institutional story.
His admiration for Jefferson also seems odd. Many historians contrast Jefferson’s pastoral, slaveholding, anti-industrial vision with Hamilton’s embrace of industry, upward mobility, abolitionism, and the destruction of caste. Jefferson hardly looks like the libertarian paragon Rothbard suggests.
The claim that public schooling exists primarily to indoctrinate also feels overstated. Likewise, the idea that teachers or bureaucrats can centrally reshape language at will seems implausible. Language behaves like a perfectly competitive market and resists top-down control. Rothbard simultaneously portrays the state as corrupt and incompetent yet capable of effortlessly restructuring entire languages to fool everyone.
My biggest disagreement, though, is with his dismissal of utilitarianism. In Liberalism, Mises makes a strong case that moral arguments against slavery often failed "one could even find slaves arguing passionately against manumission on moral grounds, to this abolitionists had no rebuttal" (paraphrase); what ultimately succeeded were economic arguments about efficiency and welfare. Rothbard celebrates rising consumer welfare—a plainly utilitarian criterion—while condemning utilitarianism in principle. He even portrays the villains of his narrative as those who wish to reverse rising standards of living for the masses.
Free markets, to me, are morally compelling because they work. If they increased starvation, disease, and poverty, we’d have a moral obligation to stop them. That makes outcomes the measure of success, not metaphysical purity. If following natural rights led to lower living standards, Rothbard would have to accept that — yet he condemns precisely those outcomes when produced by his ideological opponents. That makes him, functionally, a utilitarian whether he admits it or not.
He has also already alluded to natural rights as the superior alternative without ever defining them. As an agnostic lacking religious faith I'm not sure I've ever understood natural rights, and the more I try the more obtuse they seem. Do they come from God? The NAP? John Locke? Aquinas? Where do they come from and who decides what they are?
Finally, Rothbard laments the loss of revolutionary fervor among later liberals. But revolutions are bad for business. Classical liberals treated revolution as a last resort. It’s hard to champion mass prosperity while romanticizing upheaval that destroys capital, kills people, and sets societies back for decades.
Hope this wasn't too long!
Mises' *Liberalism* is great and poetic, but it was virtually the only utilitarian case for radical libertarianism for c.1880-1970.
It’s at least striking that in Washington’s case, decades of moral appeals from people like Hamilton and Lafayette didn’t move the needle, while the financial collapse of slavery at Mount Vernon finally did. He may not have written a treatise, but his actions suggest that cost–benefit considerations mattered more at the margin than moral argument.
One might consider the founding of the nation to be libertarian, if we forgive the fact that, in those days, our ancestors didn't consider Indians and Africans to be human, or at least fully human. Typical of tribal folks (like the founding fathers) all over the world.
These days, of course, some people have recognized that their ancestors were, in certain ways, misguided.
Intellectuals like Jefferson seemed to realize the humanity of outgroups. See The Declaration of Independence. But their humanity was inconvenient.
It is fortunate that the Declaration of Independence did not have to be ratified by three-quarters, or a majority, or even one, of the state legislatures.
I’d be curious to hear what everyone thinks about this from Rothbard in chapter 1 - “In all societies, public opinion is determined by the intellectual classes, the opinion molders of society. For most people neither originate nor disseminate ideas and concepts; on the contrary, they tend to adopt those ideas promulgated by the professional intellectual classes, the professional dealers in ideas.” Might this be changing today?
I like what Rothbard is getting at, but some of the analysis is dubious.
>To establish this new system, to create a New Order which
was a modernized, dressed-up version of the ancien régime
before the American and French revolutions, the new ruling
elites had to perform a gigantic con job on the deluded public,
a con job that continues to this day.
Sounds like a conspiracy theory. Hugo Mercier provides a lot of evidence that little in the median mind is duplicitous. Whole populations are not easy to dupe; evolutionarily, that would be maladaptive. Also, will the idea makers really all be biased in a certain direction? Why?
>In all societies, public opinion is determined by the intel-
lectual classes, the opinion moulders of society.
Many ideas are grass-roots. Ideas are very simple. Simple people can make them. Consider a lot of parenting discourse, for instance. Or narratives around the Epstein files.
Contra Rothbard's thesis, the origins of Big Government in the 20th century are not a simple conspiracy of the upper class. In fact, it's probably the opposite. It's elite types that lean libertarian and want small government. 20th century Big Governments are peasant driven. They are egalitarian and socialist. I believe this is the consequence of improvements to quality of life, which allowed common people to be more active in the political process. FDR was just a bloodless communist revolution. It's all for and by the proletariat; libertarian stands contra the proletariat.
I agree at least partially with your point about the Revolution. I also had some similar thoughts as @Follynomics. I won't rehash the arguments, especially since Follynomics made them pretty well, but here is one point I have some additional observations on.
Rothbard spends some time in this chapter explaining what ideologues other than libertarians, such as conservatives, socialists, and utilitarians believe. I usually find that annoying and no less so here, especially since the descriptions are those of a cynical opponent and not at all close to how those intellectuals would describe their own views. I don't usually defend conservatives, but there is a quote on page 12 where Rothbard tries to summarize their position, starting with "We, too, favor industrialism and a higher standard of living. But [...] ." He doesn't provide any references for me to understand how he came to favor that description of 19th century conservative thought. To see if this was representative, I glanced through some Edmund Burke essays. Here is a quote from "Reflections on the Revolution in France:"
> "I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government; with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue; with morality and religion; with the solidity of property; with peace and order; with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things too; and, without them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. "
These sentiments sound different from what Rothbard describes. It's similar with the utilitarians. They probably didn't see the application of their theory as compromises but rather as consistent with their beliefs. Maybe later Rothbard will provide better arguments if his case is that what conservatives, and other non-libertarians, actually wrote were not honest portrayals of their position. I would have been more impressed if from the start he engaged with their actual arguments, not his own projection.
All I have to say is your quip about siding with none libertarian slavers because of a dispute about minor British taxes and calling it a libertarian revolution being ridiculous is gold. It’s so deeply true, yet few people acknowledge it.
I often think about what would have happened if at least one tribe or more managed to live to create a nation state, or even just have a stronger effect on American culture in general.
The world really lost out because of the genocide of the North American natives.
I doubt "the world" lost much, but it was very wrong.
It's interesting to me that he discusses conscription reasonably often. Naturally in the 70's the memory of the Vietnam draft was fresh in the reader's mind, and it's a very strong argument in favor of libertarianism. So it isn't surprising, but at the same time it doesn't resonate as much today.
On the flip side, to me the libertarian idea seems to have trouble dealing with some modern issues that maybe weren't so prevalent back then, especially around drugs, homelessness, and crime. I feel generally pro-libertarian but I don't see what the libertarian answer is to the sort of urban problems that nowadays plague coastal cities like the San Francisco area where I live.
All those problems you cite were created or exacerbated by government meddling. The libertarian answer is to shrink government and stop meddling.
What is shrinking government going to do about the homeless guy who lives in a tent behind a trash pile next to Lake Merritt in Oakland?
I know what Rothbard would say: "Privatize Lake Merritt."
As I said, the homeless problem was created by government expanding its meddling.
It should be damned obvious that if this is the case, then shrinking government to stop the meddling that created the problem will help alleviate the problem.
Do you know why flophouses no longer exist, which would cost $200 a month now? Government meddling. Do you know why boarding houses no longer exist? Government meddling.
Government decided that it was degrading to allow people to live in flophouses and boarding houses, so they created minimum building standards that outlawed cheap housing. Result: lots of homeless people who couldn't afford the appropriate level of government-mandated housing.
Government also decided that it was degrading to let people work for too low a wage, or to let blacks compete against whites in a government-mandated racist society by working for a lower wage. Result: No jobs for unskilled people.
Stop meddling like that and the problem will resolve itself.
How does Rothbard's claiming of the mantle of the American revolution compare to the way 19th century individualist anarchists did it?
For example, Benjamin Tucker called himself an "unterrified Jeffersonian democrat." Likewise, Voltairine de Cleyre appealed to the American revolution in her essay "Anarchism and American Traditions." https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/voltairine-de-cleyre-anarchism-and-american-traditions
We know Rothbard's libertarianism was influenced by figures like Benjamin Tucker. Do you think this rhetorical move may have been too?
My guess is that almost any U.S.-based libertarian would want to appeal to the American Founders for credibility. Back in the 80s, I remember quite mainstream people talking earnestly about "What would the Founders think about this?"
Even Clinton made a big deal about the Founders in late 1992/early 1993 if memory serves.
I can't remember any mainstream thinker caring about that in many years.
I think Rothbard always preferred Lysander Spooner to Tucker for emphasizing "natural rights" more.
That makes sense to me. I imagine that Tucker's Stirnerite egoist period would have been unappealing to Rothbard.
What evidence is there that the American Revolution actually led to more Native American deaths? People usually cite the Proclomation of 1763 but from what I have read that had already been chipped away by the Treaties of Hard Labor and Fort Stanwix in 1768. And even if USian settler-colonialism had been retarded the treatment of North American natives by non-USian settlers was equally brutal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache–Mexico_Wars . British settlers also engaged in similar acts of genocide elsewhere in the empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_War . This isn’t to absolve the Founders of their sin but if we’re weighing the American Revolution as a whole it seems to me like a wash on the issue of treatment of Native American (there is a much better case for the American Revolution prolonging slavery and making its abolition much more bloody)
In Canada, the Royal Mounties reached the west first, and avoided wars with natives. As a result, First Nations are a larger portion of the Canadian population.
I don't get the imperative for the national focus of political ideologies. Wasn't early America quite a bit more state-focused than after the Republicans and their war machine took over? That still leaves some 75 years open for experimentation. Weren't states more or less TRUE laboratories of democracy—at least until the feds severely constrained them, privileging the needs of national businesses and war mobilizations over states' rights? Even today, as current events in Minnesota so clearly demonstrate, state policy can differ quite substantially from that of the national government and still win the day on the ground.
So why don't we see ANY flavor of American libertarianism at the state level, strongly influencing if not controlling any state, anywhere, at any time?
Most political scientists and historians get bored by state and local politics, but there's no doubt that there's a big range of state and local policy today, and the range was bigger in the 19th century. Chat knows more.
I think the simplest answer to your question is that federalism died during the New Deal (but was certainly dying almost a 100 years earlier as morality codes found their way into the local school districts—read about Horace Mann: As the first Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education (1837–1848), he championed the "Common School Movement," arguing that universal, tax-supported, non-sectarian education was essential for a functioning democracy and social mobility.)
The United States progressively became a nation controlled by the federal government. The erosion of the Tenth Amendment—which reserves powers not delegated to the federal government to the states or the people—is a long-term shift in American governance toward greater federal authority. This process, accelerated by the New Deal, has seen the federal government’s Commerce Clause power and spending power expand to override or influence areas traditionally managed by states, such as education, health, and local safety regulations.
Originally, the federal government was limited to enumerated powers. Over time, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8) broadly, allowing Congress to regulate activities that only indirectly affect interstate commerce, thereby infringing on state police powers.
Following the Great Depression, the Supreme Court ceased using the Tenth Amendment as a major barrier against federal regulation of the economy. Programs like Social Security solidified federal authority in areas previously deemed local.
The federal government often uses conditional grants (e.g., funding for highways, schools) to incentivize states to enact federal policies, which some legal scholars argue is a form of coercion that undermines state sovereignty.
For decades, the Supreme Court viewed the Tenth Amendment as a "truism" rather than a substantive limitation on federal power, reducing it to a passive statement of constitutional structure.
Impact on Federalism
The expansion of federal policies has weakened local governance and reduced the ability of states to serve as distinct policy labs.
The late William Stuntz' in his posthumously published "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" points to the kulturkampf against polygamist Mormons as one of the earliest times federal law crushed local variation. He also referred to Prohibition as "America's good culture war" (in contrast to the War on Drugs), since we were so open about what we were doing, passed a Constitutional amendment, and then passed another amendment repealing that. I reviewed the book here: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/the-collapse-of-american-criminal-justice/
I have written elsewhere about morality codes which you can trace back to the 1830s. This was a direct response to the new wave of immigrants who came with different ideas, attitudes and beliefs (Remember: America and open door policy until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and then the Immigration Act of 1891–Ellis Island opens a year later; though most European immigrants were still admitted.
The fact that a Constitutional Amendment could take away private property rights and install a totalitarian system—prohibition—should provoke more alarm than what it appears to do.
I think LBJ anc Nixon more effectively destroyed federalism than FDR. Nixon's "revenue sharing" was devastating. But the states would eventually have been overcome by the powerful state the constitution created.
I’d like you to identify where in the U.S. Constitution it makes the federal government so powerful. As for LBJ and Nixon they couldn’t have done anything if the Supreme Court hadn’t sided with FDR’s New Deal.
That was the biggest problem, that the Supreme Court, helped by lesser courts and politicians, amended the constitution by reinterpreting it. One of my favorite examples, after all the absolute and qualified immunity nonsense (in the 1960s and 1970s, 200 years after independence!) was the open fields doctrine of 1924, saying that because "open fields" are not among the 4th Amendment's "persons, houses, papers, and effects", no search warrants are necessary, later making it a crime for property owners to remove trail cameras which police have trespassed to set up on the property.
Well-stated and consistent with my understanding of the period prior to the Civil War. Supreme Court cases leave an unmistakable trail from the explicitly plural United States to the decidedly singular USA.
My basic question remains. Libertarianism did not "take" in either These United States or The United States. That being the case was the problem more related to the seed (the ideology itself) or the fertility of the ground in which it had to root (the myriad forces arrayed against it by circumstance, antipathy, or better alternatives)?
I believe government itself, its very existence as a coercive monopoly, can't help but attract cronies who want to enrich themselves by political maneuvering rather than the hard work of satisfying customers.
I would argue that it was far easier for the states to declare their independence based on the libertarian principles of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—founded firmly on private property rights—than it was to govern based on those same principles. The explanation is complex but reduces to the corruption of power and the abuses of what became the ruling elite. Few men are able to withstand the seduction of ruling over other men or believe themselves wiser than others.
An excellent book that discusses much of this early history of the founding is America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It (2019) by C. Bradley Thompson.
Of the key founders, only Madison viewed their accomplishment with real promise and optimism near the end of his life. Both Adams and Jefferson were disillusioned by current events. Their disillusionment was due to intense political factionalism, sectional divides over slavery, and fears that the American people lacked the civic virtue necessary to maintain a lasting republic. Both feared the nation they founded was failing or destined to break apart.
Other than killing close to a million people, the worst thing about the American Civil War was that it showed that the federal government could ride roughshod over the states and the political process to solve a problem which had vexed the country for 70 years. From then on, any perceived problem skipped the states and popular campaigning and went straight to the feds -- meat inspections, railroad regulation, you name it -- get the feds involved, smother the states, git 'er done!
Overstated. Most major federal regulations were pioneered by states first, no?
If one state pioneers a regulation, that can remain in that state. As long as there's federalism, it's possible for some states to avoid such regulations. That variation is what can actually permit states to act as "laboratories" and for there to be some kind of selection.
Maybe so, probably so. I know of no statistics. But that matches my comment that it's easier to push for one federal regulation than 50 state federal regulations, so why not push for one state first, claim it's proven, then push for the federal regulation? Even if they have to push it in a few more states, they'll never have to push it in all states, only enough to justify it at the federal level as the will of the people.
What I meant by the change is that before the feds abolished slavery in four years, cronies stuck to state regulations because no one thought it was a federal matter and there would have been too much opposition. I have some recollection of trying to have federal canals and railroads which were shot down as none of the federal government's business. There was a national road over the Appalachians, justified as a postal road I think (Article I, Section 8, Clause 7: The Congress shall have Power . . . To establish Post Offices and post Roads;). Then came the Civil War, and part of the justification for the transcontinental railroad was military reinforcement of the west coast and to help unify the nation.
I'm talking about the period between independence and the Civil War when the USA was more a collection of sovereign states than a modern nation. Why not state governments run on libertarian (classical liberal) principles then?
Worth pointing out that federalism had a big revival in the last decade, most obviously for Covid policy, education (K-12 and higher ed), and abortion.
We still have a federal Department of Education. Abortion was admittedly a move back to the pre-1973 order.
You asked why we don't see more state laboratories now, and I believe it is because federal action is so much more effective. Why push hard in 20 states when your opponents are going to push hard in 20 other states, and the 10 remaining states get left alone for being too small or neutral? Better to mount one federal push than 20 state pushes. Even pushing for one state is generally useless except as a stepping stone to the federal push.
As one example, before the Civil War, private banks were state-chartered and could issue their own currency notes. The private sector handled it fine. Then the North needed cash for the war, and mandated something like any private bank issuing its own notes had to leave a 110% deposit with the feds. Naturally all those private bills dried up, and the North issued greenbacks as the only allowed legal tender. I believe the South quickly followed suit.
That kind of heavy-handed federal action was justified due to the rebellion, and naturally never returned to the old paradigm. So much for laboratories.
In the past I would have found your take on the relationship between the American Revolution & slavery to be more plausible (and I recall scoffing at the TV series Sleepy Hollow for making Ichabod Crane both an abolitionist and supporter of that revolution). But since then I've been convinced by Phillip Magness (even though he blocked me on Twitter just a couple days ago arguing about COVID https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2026/02/04/blocked-by-phillip-magness/ ) that things are more complicated than that, and that the northern states passed antislavery laws around the time they attained independence, with the two things being linked in their eyes. Slavery persisted longer in Britain's remaining colonies, such as Jamaica, than it did in those northern states, so it's harder to say independence preserved slavery.
The North beat the UK which beat the South. But it seems unlikely that the UK would have prevented the North from ending slavery early, and fairly likely that they would have pressured the South to "get with the times" by the 1830s.
That the UK would have ended slavery early (by the 1830s, say) is a popular claim. I have always wondered about its basis, other than wishful thinking.
Same here. It's easy to be noble and abolish slavery when it no longer contributes much to your empire. Would the British still have abolished slavery in 1833 if they still controlled the southern slavery-run cotton plantations? They had no qualms about continuing to buy slavery cotton after 1833, toyed with the idea of recognizing the Confederacy once the war started, and turned a blind eye to all the warships being built for the Confederacy.
The people in the North who abolished slavery on independence certainly thought the UK had been constraining them on that front, and Jefferson's Declaration blamed the Brits for bringing slavery.
Rothbard's articulation of revolutionary history and his cheer leading for libertarian philosophy is about what one might reasonably expect. I find it an interesting perspective but do not consider it dispositive,
--- just as do not consider anyone's version of history dispositive, including professional historians. Still, all accounts of classical liberalism and libertarianism must begin somewhere, and Rothbard's beginning is at least interesting.
The Founders were not angels, of course. But it does seem to me that on the whole, they were far more classically liberal than any other term one might apply.
If you're a perfect libertarian except you are pro-slavery, how libertarian are you? A bad position on one HUGE issue plausibly outweighs everything else.
The same goes to a lesser degree if you are very libertarian, but favor a devastating war (with lots of innocent victims) over minor issues. That's my take on the American Revolution.
You cannot be anything like a libertarian unless you subscribe to and practice what I call The Moral Imperative: do not compel another unjustly. Force, threat of force, and fraud are compulsion.
I agree entirely about war. War is absolutely immoral action, and it is nearly always due the immoral action of single man (and yes, almost always a man) or a small set of men who are clearly immoral actors.
In retrospect, I'm pretty happy that the American Revoution happened, but I think it was unnecessary. The USA could have been birthed without war.
Many of today’s libertarians accept collectivism, not merely the non-aggression axiom. They refuse to criticize racism or antisemitism if it is non-violent, though both of those things have extensive association with coercion. I wouldn’t repress those collectivist beliefs, but like Rand I denounce them. My libertarianism is anti-collectivist, not merely non-violent.
My libertarianism is founded on The Moral Imperative, as I call it, and the logical inferences from it. I do not have an immediate definition of collectivism, but so long as it avoids unjust compulsion, people can be moral actors practicing it. Is there an intersection of libertarians and collectivists? I cannot say.
Are racists collectivists?
“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage — the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.” — Ayn Rand
You have to start where you are. Did they begin as pure libertarians and move toward slavery, or begin seeped in a culture which accepted slavery, and move toward liberty?
Which of the founders regarded slavery as a positive good? My understanding is that most thought it was bad, but didn't see a good way of dealing with it now that it existed.
ChatGPT names Charles Pinckney as the most notable Founder who intellectually defended slavery.
More Chat:
Pierce Butler (SC) — pushed protections for enslavers, including moves that led into the fugitive slave protection that was added.
Hugh Williamson (NC) — argued southern states “could not be members of the Union” if Congress could ban the slave trade.
Abraham Baldwin (GA) — treated slavery as “local,” warned Georgians would see federal power over the slave trade as threatening a favored prerogative.
The Convention’s late-August commercial-regulation / slave-trade bargain is described in the NPS “day-by-day” account; it highlights key roles for C. C. Pinckney, Butler, Rutledge, Spaight, Madison (with the deal delaying any federal ban on importation until 1808).
Pickney did indeed appear to defend slavery, but when I looked up Williamson it was said he opposed slavery but thought the Constitution should compromise so the southern states would join https://web.archive.org/web/20181120082956/http://www.archives.upenn.edu/people/1700s/williamson_hugh.html
We ignore that they were also troubled by the prospect of losing valuable property?