Rothbard’s Objectivist Influences

by Stephan Kinsella on November 4, 2025

Mises and Rand (and Rothbard)

Objectivists have long been bitter that libertarians accept most of Objectivism’s politics without accepting the rest of her philosophy: mainly, its metaphysics (objective reality), epistemology (reason), and ethics (self-interest), although most individualist-leaning libertarians more or less do happen to accept these three broad views. Objectivists somewhat crankishly refer to their politics as “capitalism,” just as some anarchist libertarians sometimes use the term anarcho-capitalism. ¹ Objectivism’s capitalism is virtually the same as minarchist libertarianism, ² a term Rand petulantly rejected, even though Objectivism’s “capitalism” is virtually the same as libertarian minarchism; in fact she is one of the main figures behind the modern libertarian movement. ³

Objectivists seem to want libertarians to be Objectivists, but only if they adopt the entirety of the rest of the philosophy. And because of their insane, nearly-Galombosian-level crazy IP views, ⁴ they are upset when anyone uses what they think of as Rand’s ideas without proper attribution and obeisance.

This is true also for Rothbard, who for a time was involved in Ayn Rand circles, but his refusal to go along with their cultish ways led to an inevitable split and to Rothbard’s mockery and criticism of the “Ayn Rand cult.” ⁵

In any case, Objectivists have been bitter at Rothbard ever since for “taking” Rand’s ideas and not giving proper attribution to Rand—even though attribution would also not satisfy them, since he rejects too much of their philosophy (e.g., he’s an anarcho-capitalist instead of Randian minarchist). ⁶ For example, Daniel J. Flynn, “Murray Rothbard’s Lost Letters on Ayn Rand,” notes:

“Murray Rothbard never cites Ayn Rand once in any of his works in which he defends Aristotle, in which he defends natural rights, or free will—ideas he clearly got from Ayn Rand without giving her a single citation,” Objectivist writer James Valliant claimed on a 2021 podcast. His interlocutor, Jonathan Hoenig, a Fox News Channel talking head, speculated that Rothbard “largely fictionalized” his accusations against Rand. “It’s a load of bullshit, basically, just designed to denigrate Ayn Rand because he was called out plagiarizing her,” he said to Valliant. “Am I summing it up?” Valliant maintained during the podcast that Rothbard “got Aristotle and natural rights straight from Ayn Rand.” ⁷

In response to charges that he “plagiarized” Rand without giving her proper attribution for ideas he “got” from her—again, even though this would not mollify our IP-crazed cultish Objectivists—Rothbard responded by citing earlier progenitors of the ideas Rand claimed to have pioneered, which only angered them further. (See also Rothbard’s Lost Letters on Ayn Rand, a discussion between Ryan McMaken and Daniel Flynn. From a friend: “they purport to refute the claim that Rothbard took ideas from Rand by citing recently discovered letters he wrote to Frank Meyer. But they seem more narrowly focused on the claim that he got natural law and Aristotelianism from her and don’t address these other points.”

)

I have always been bemused by this tactic of Rothbard’s. I understand why Rothbard was reluctant to footnote or give credit to jerks who had been so unfair to him and his wife; yet I would not have done it. I have given credit for example to the late George Smith even after we had had a nasty personal/legal squabble. ⁸ I do not think Rothbard did anything wrong and in fact find it kind of amusing that he bent over backwards to cite older variants of ideas Rand later propounded, or simply refused to cite her works where relevant to the point he is making. I have seen this in lots of libertarian books by non-professional scholars, ⁹ but it is somewhat surprising to see this in a truly towering figure like Rothbard. ¹⁰

In any case, I have myself read a large amount of Objectivist literature and also Rothbard, and I noticed many times an argument or point made by Rothbard that seemed like one he probably got from the Randians. I didn’t start cataloguing them but have created this post to do so when they occur to me from time to time. Just to start, more later:

Free will: Rothbard’s argument is similar to that of Rand’s—and similarly flawed IMO; more on this later. See KOL293 | Faith and Free Will, with Steve Mendelsohn; KOL478 | Haman Nature Hn 185: The Universal Principles of Liberty

Apriori reasoning/axiomatics: Mises and Rand (and Rothbard): apriori reasoning like Rand’s

Referring to the Non-Aggression Principle as the non-aggression axiom

On defending the rights of Americans in socialist countries: Rand somewhere argued that if you go to the USSR, you take your chances and the US has no obligation to defend you. Rothbard argued similarly. See Block on Israel, Self-Defense, Pacifism: Rothbard writes, in War, Peace, and the State: “if an inhabitant of country A should move to or invest in country B, the libertarian must argue that he thereby takes his chances with the State-monopolist of country B, and it would be immoral and criminal for State A to tax people in country A and kill numerous innocents in country B in order to defend the property of the traveler or investor.8“

My comment there: “This is yet another example of one of Rothbard’s views influenced by Ayn Rand, where he does not cite or give Rand credit. She said, IIRC, in response to some question perhaps, that if an American citizen travels to a despotic regime which then jails or harms him, the US government has no obligation to intervene because the citizen assumed the risk by traveling to such a regime”

See also:

Q&A after her 1970 Ford Hall Forum lecture “The Anti-Industrial Revolution”: “If you had a completely free government and free society, I wouldn’t venture to say should the government or should it not impose embargos on dictatorships. That is a very technical question. I would say this: if embargos are necessary, if a certain dictatorship like Cuba is quite a threat to this country simply as a base for Soviet Russia, then if there is a demonstrable danger of war or physical attacks then the government of a free country would have the right to impose an embargo on that country, therefore forbidding businessmen to deal with it. But you know what is much better and what actually did happen in the nineteenth century? The government wouldn’t have to forbid a businessman to deal with the bad countries of the time, like a South American dictatorship which has changed every few months. It wasn’t forbidden, only the government would not protect or help citizens who dealt with unstable regimes of that kind. Therefore, the attitude of the government was ‘If you want to deal with dictatorships, do so at your own peril,’ and the dictatorship took care of the peril.”

37:39:

Tom Woods: … one of the arguments that that’s going on is is this that let’s say let’s say there were oil facilities in the United States and somebody simply stole them like just simply took them over by force. Well, the law enforcement would go in and reverse that and it would be returned to the rightful owner.

Now if an American company goes and develops oil resources and the oil infrastructure in another country and then that other country nationalizes the properties well if this were you know Murray Rothbard’s ancapistan maybe the oil companies would have their own private defense agency that could resolve that for them. But in this day and age all they have is the US government. And so what I’ve heard I’ve heard the argument that well the US government should go in or at least should not feel morally conflicted about going in and restoring the rightful uh owner to his property.

And what I have tried to say in response to that is that of course it’s a terrible shame when American companies or any company is expropriated by a foreign government. But unfortunately, under the conditions in which we live, that just has to be a risk of doing business in these countries because if they’re going to be able to appeal to the US government to come in and make them whole—the way they would if this were a mere case of of domestic stealing—you know, the FBI would come in and help them and and our tax dollars would go for that. Why shouldn’t our tax dollars go abroad to help these companies? The answer in part is that the military-industrial complex in our in our country is constantly looking for an excuse to mobilize, is constantly looking for an excuse for intervention.

Yeah, we would be h have we would be involved in 80 different places and 38 of them we couldn’t get out of would be the problem. So unfortunately, I’m sorry you were expropriated, but you knew that it was risky to do that.

See also my discussion of international law as it applies to the issue of the use of force by one state to protect or recover the expropriated investments/property of one of its nationals, in Using International Law to Protect Property Rights and International Investment.

Animal rights: I recall Leonard Peikoff once said that mosquitoes can have rights when they petition for them. See Rothbard, Man, Economy, and Liberty (1 March 1986), where Rothbard comments and responds to the speakers and papers presented at the “Man, Economy and Liberty” colloquium hosted by the Mises Institute; backup Youtube, which concerned Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard, Walter Block and Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., eds. (Mises Institute, 1988). Here he he says:

[23:00] also David Gordon mentioned about animal rights and his comments and answering a question and well I share M.E. Grenander’s view, animals should not be tortured unnecessarily or whatever. I still affirm that there are no animal rights. I think my standard quip on that which I still which I think is really true is animals get their rights when they petition for them and until they petition for them they don’t deserve it.

I have for many years tried to avoid the term anarcho-capitalism, since capitalism is just one aspect of the economic system of a free society, and not necessarily the only one. I tend to prefer the term anarcho-libertarian, anarchist libertarian, or libertarian anarchy. See The new libertarianism: anti-capitalist and socialist; or: I prefer Hazlitt’s “Cooperatism”’; Gerard Casey, Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012). [↩]
The new libertarianism: anti-capitalist and socialist; or: I prefer Hazlitt’s “Cooperatism”’; The Origin of “Libertarianism”; Rothbard on Leonard Read and the Origins of “Libertarianism”. [↩]
Kinsella, “Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned?”, in Legal Foundations of a Free Society. [↩]
“Around this time I met the Galambosian.” [↩]
Rothbard, The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult; Rothbard, Mozart Was a Red. See also Kameralized, “Push back against “Rothbard is an Objectivist”“, Anarcho-Objectivist Forum (Dec. 25, 2025). See also Daniel J. Flynn, “Murray Rothbard’s Lost Letters on Ayn Rand,” J. Libertarian Stud. 29, no. 2 (2025): 35–50: “The story of Murray Rothbard’s close encounters of the Rand kind, first told by Rothbard to a mass audience in 1972, the year of Frank Meyer’s death, has been retold in the Rothbard biography An Enemy of the State (Raimondo 2000, 109–35), in the Rand biographies Goddess of the Market (Burns 2009, 182–84), Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Heller 2009, 295–301), My Years with Ayn Rand (N. Branden 1999, 229–31), and The Ayn Rand Cult (Walker 1999, 28, 33–34), and in countless articles, speeches, and podcasts.” [↩]
His criticisms of Nozick’s arguments for minarchism apply more less to Objectivist arguments for the state. See Rothbard, “Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State,” in Ethics of Liberty; David Kelley on the Necessity of Government. [↩]
Flynn, “Murray Rothbard’s Lost Letters on Ayn Rand.” [↩]
See Kinsella, “Inalienability and Punishment: A Reply to George Smith,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society. [↩]
See, e..g, Kinsella, The Greatest Libertarian Books, listing books such as Vin Armani, Self Ownership: The Foundation of Property and Morality (2017), Chase Rachels, A Spontaneous Order, Stefan Molyneux, Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics (2007), Jack Lloyd, The Definitive Guide to Libertarian Voluntaryism (2022), Adam Kokesh, FREEDOM! (2014; PDF). [↩]
See Tom Woods, “Interview with Hans Hoppe,” Tom Woods Elite Letter Issue #18 (Summer 2025): “And there was a certain amount of, I would say, jealousy, because, I mean, Rothbard was enormously bright. I’ve met bright people in my life, but the only person I’ve met whom I would consider to be a genius was Rothbard. He could tell you the the content of every book in his library. And that was an enormous library. Whenever you would ask him about any strange subject, he could give you some suggestions on what to read. You felt like a little, um, uneducated person if you talked to him. So jealousy played a big role in explaining why it was that he was not treated like a genius, as he should have been treated.” And Tom Woods, “The Hans Hoppe Interview Concluded,” Tom Woods Elite Letter Issue #19 (August 2025): “There are certain purely theoretical points, like the foundation of private property rights and so forth, where I think I did make some breakthroughs, which Murray endorsed. I’m very proud of that. But since I’m now 75, if I had to assess my general impact that I had on the world, I think it would make me most proud if people would say Hoppe is, in a way, the most important successor of Rothbard in the present age. It would make me enormously proud if that became the general view, even though I admit I’m not in the same league as Mises and Rothbard. Those two were geniuses. I’m a pretty bright guy. I contributed quite a bit to libertarian thought. But I would never, ever put myself in the same league as them. But since there is nobody in sight who is in the same league as they are for the time being, I’m a pretty good substitute for these two giants.” [↩]