Comments Elsewhere

@Gary Chartier:

I agree that Rothbard gets Tucker’s stance on land wrong here. I think the stuff on money is even worse, though. Apparently he imagines that Tucker and Spooner want the universal use of personal fiat currencies backed by nothing (?!) and the Mutual Bank as a credit vouchsafing clearing-house, and an issuer of secured credit, doesn’t so much as make an appearance. As far as I can tell, he seems to have gotten to the suggestion that interest rates would be radically lower, stopped reading there before he could get to any of the details about how that might actually work in the absence of government money monopoly, and gone on a tear instead about how he doesn’t like 20th century inflationist economics. Which he’s right not to like; but heaven only knows what it has to do with Tucker. Or Spooner.

@Dave Martin:

“Rothbard was referring specifically to undeveloped nations, where the state essentially owns everything and doles out some of it to the politically connected.”

You mean “undeveloped nations” like the city of Las Vegas? (http://radgeek.com/gt/2009/04/04/the_state/)

Rothbard asserts in a couple of places, without any real argument, that land is not politically allocated in the U.S. the way it was in, e.g., the formation of Latin American latifundias. But I think a quick glimpse at reality (whether the way that land titles and “real estate development” constantly work in the West, or the slavery-and-politics land grant jobbery of the Old South, or the mass displacement, ethnic cleansing, and government “Development” giveaways of “Urban Renewal” [sic]) should show that this is, to put it mildly, a lapse in his application of principles.