We’ve finished the chapter-by-chapter of Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty. Now I’d like to wrap things up by answering most or all of your questions about the book. Please limit yourself to questions, not statements, phrase them succinctly, and avoid compound questions.
I’ll do separate posts on my favorite questions, and try to answer the others directly in the comments. If there’s overlap, I may just answer one version, and leave the rest to your imagination.
P.S. For your convenience, I’m putting links to the whole prior discussion below the fold.
Chapter 1: The Libertarian Heritage: The American Revolution and Classical Liberalism
Chapter 2: Property and Exchange
Chapter 3: The State
Chapter 4: The Problems
Chapter 5: Involuntary Servitude
Chapter 6: Personal Liberty
Chapter 7: Education
Chapter 8: Welfare and the Welfare State
Chapter 9: Inflation and the Business Cycle: The Collapse of the Keynesian Paradigm
Chapter 10: The Public Sector, I: Government in Business
Chapter 11: The Public Sector, II: Streets and Roads
Chapter 12: The Public Sector, III: Police, Law, and the Courts
Chapter 13: Conversation, Ecology, and Growth
Chapter 14: War and Foreign Policy
Chapter 15: A Strategy for Liberty
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More general libertarian question if that's okay - any opinions on intellectual property law? It seems incompatible with libertarian views on the economy, but it's hard to imagine a functioning commercial entertainment industry without it.
A deeper issue about Rothbard would be what you think the more fundamental sources of your disagreements with him are. Personally, I don't have a problem with Rothbard's unconditional preference for the libertarian non-aggression principle, but the libertarian principle by itself doesn't tell you how to evaluate one's engagement in possible enforcement actions and how to coordinate such actions with others, nor how to integrate the libertarian principle with knowledge of particular social circumstances so that the applicable legal code can be optimized. Tackling these broader issues requires additional principles, but I don't think Rothbard was all that conscious of the need for them in order to derive a reasonably complete political philosophy, nor do I think the sort of quasi-Objectivist understanding of natural law that Rothbard favored is up to the task of furnishing such additional principles.
I get the impression that you are perhaps more bothered by Rothbard's attempt to deduce an entire ethical system (and to deduce economic theory as well) from a few starting premises in the first place--maybe you think Rothbard was just too much like Ayn Rand in that respect. Is my impression correct, and if so, in what sense do you adhere to libertariansm and how would you reframe the book's main premises to promote your understanding of liberty?