Murray N. Rothbard vs. the Philosophers - Ludwig von Mises Institute

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD VS. THE PHILOSPHERS: UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS
62 ON HAYEK, MISES, STRAUSS, AND POLYANI
admits . . .” Hayek is the philosophic counterpart. The only
tenable conclusion is that any Volker Fund or any other support
for this book will be self-destructive in the highest
degree.
In my letter of October 23, 1956, I criticized Hayek’s
Claremont lectures, which summarized this book, and reference
to the letter would be helpful. However, there I wrote
that Hayek is a “composite of brilliant things, and very
wrong things . . . a mosaic of confusion.” In the full-fledged
book, the picture and impact change greatly; for the brilliant
things fade dismally into the background, and all of
Hayek’s care and elaboration go into the terribly wrong
things. Indeed, this book is a fusion of bad tendencies in his
previous books, but which there had been only minor flaws
in the product; here the flaws are magnified and raised to
the status of a philosophic system. In all the 400 pages, I
found only chapters 1 and 10 as agreeable chapters, and all
the rest a veritable morass of error and evasion, with almost
nothing to relieve the tragedy.
Hayek begins very well by defining freedom as absence of
interpersonal coercion and rejecting other definitions. But,
in chapter 2, he begins to define coercion, and the descent
into the abyss begins. For instead of defining coercion as
physical violence or the threat thereof, as we would, he
defines it to mean specific acts of one person with the intent
of harming another. He says, for example, that the reason
why A is firing B, in the free market, is not coercion is
because A fires him not because he dislikes B, but because
keeping him on is uneconomic. The implication is very
strong that if A fired B because he hated him, then this
would be coercion, and the government would have a very
strong case for stopping this.
Further, Hayek explicitly states that if a government act
is laid down as a general rule in advance, so that the subject
can predict its coming, then, whatever it is, it is not coercion.
He explicitly applies this to the draft: since everyone
knows in advance that he will be drafted, it is not coercion!
Dr. Harper mentioned this in his comments, but didn’t