Murray Rothbard-Types Should Totally Believe in God
On the bizarreness of libertarian atheism
Murray Rothbard is having a comeback.
In 2022, the radical, Rothbard-inspired Mises Caucus took over the U.S. Libertarian Party. Javier Milei, the new President of Argentina, cites Rothbard—as well as his student, Walter Block—among his intellectual influences. (Milei even named one of his dogs, Murray, after the libertarian economist).
Rothbard—and libertarians of his ilk—are notorious for holding two beliefs:
The Non-Aggression Principle: “no one may threaten or commit violence (‘aggress’) against another man’s person or property”1. According to the NAP, people have indefeasible and absolute property rights in their bodies and in justly acquired capital. Accordingly, government taxation is morally off-limits: forcibly taxing your income, even to save a starving orphan, is an illegitimate form of theft.
Free-Market Purism: in almost every instance, the more government recedes from the economy, the more human society will flourish. The optimal economic set-up for human flourishing is anarcho-capitalism (or minarchism), where all taxation is abolished.
Incredibly, many Rothbardians are atheists. (Murray Rothbard was an atheist, Robert Nozick was an atheist, and Walter Block self-describes as a “devout atheist”.) To me, this is astonishing. I’m not a libertarian—or anything close—but I care enough about libertarians that I want them to have coherent worldviews. That in mind, here is why libertarians of a Rothbardian/NAP-style-persuasion should obviously believe in God.
Rothbardians believe in what seems to be a most incredible coincidence. They think, on the one hand, that our natural rights require anarcho-capitalism2, and maintain, on the other, that this set-up just so happens to be the ideal economic system for human flourishing.
Walter Block, for instance, writes that:
To an anarcho-capitalist, efficiency issues are not entirely irrelevant. The perspective emanating from this quarter is that if libertarian deontology is undertaken, then prosperity will ensue.
But there’s nothing metaphysically necessary about this correlation. The psychological laws governing human behaviour could conceivably have been such that anarcho-capitalism—despite being the only system that can protect our rights—was not the optimal system for promoting human flourishing.
On the hypothesis that Reality is blind, pitiless, and indifferent to human affairs, it’s unbelievably surprising that the optimal system of political organisation just so happens to be one that’s seemingly tailor-made to respect our rights.
On the hypothesis that a perfect God exists, however, this is far less surprising. There’s a plausible story of why God—being perfectly loving—wouldn’t annoyingly design us such that the only way to optimise our flourishing would require the widespread violation of our fundamental rights.
Thus, the surprising, near-perfect harmony between our moral rights and optimific social structure is strong evidence for theism over naturalism (supposing, counterfactually, that this near-perfect harmony exists.)
I’m not the first to notice an argument lurking in these quarters. In Money, Greed, and God, free-market Christian Jay Richard suggests that spontaneous market order “makes a lot more sense in a providential—a purposeful—universe”.3
If I’m right, Richard is underselling his case: not only might Hayekian spontaneous order be evidence for design; it’s confluence with our rights is too.
(Alternatively, the fact that libertarians have reasoned themselves into this miraculous coincidence is evidence of some miraculously motivated reasoning. I’ll let the reader decide.)4
Rothbard, Murray. [1974] (2000). Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays. Second Edition. Alabama: The Ludwig von Mises Institute: p. 116.
I’m know many libertarians are minarchists, but I didn’t want to say ‘anarcho-capitalism or minarchism’ every other line. Forgive me.
Richards, Jay. (2009). Money, Greed, and God. New York: HarperOne: p. 224.
I like this idea! I'm in print suggesting (in an aside) that deontological libertarians who also think laissez faire leads to good consequences have grounds to suspect they've been guilty of motivated reasoning on the grounds that, as you say here, they believe in a surprising coincidence. (It comes up in this paper, where I'm interested in those sorts of coincidences more generally: https://academic.oup.com/book/39559/chapter-abstract/339427886?redirectedFrom=fulltext ) There I contrasted deontological libertarians with consequentialist libertarians, who I suggested have less reason to worry they've been guilty of motivated reasoning.
But I sort of presupposed that the natural revision would be to rethink the empirical beliefs about the consequences of libertarian policy. It didn't occur to me they could revise the belief that it's a coincidence, but now that you say it that seems exactly right.
Clever piece. One could make a similar, but weaker, argument to show that people who take it for granted that climate change is bad should also be religious believers. If change is bad that means we started with an optimal climate — could that be an accident?
Starting with a benevolent deity, you are left with the problem of why he permitted climate change — but that can be handled, like with the more general problem of pain and evil, as a result of free will.
Getting back to your point, I think some libertarians who believe in the NAP see it as deduced in some way from the nature of what is good for humans, just as Ayn Rand thought she had deduced her version from facts of reality.