Enemy Of The State: Murray Rothbard

Murray Rothbard died before he could write the third volume of his famous History of Economic Thought, which would cover the birth and development of the Austrian School, through the Keynesian Revolution and Chicago School. With this six-lecture course, however, the History of Economic Thought is complete. 3. The Pre Austrians Richard Cantillon was quite Misesian before Mises. He wrote of utility theory and the entrepreneur’s uncertainty in the 1970s. Cantillon was a great money practitioner. He became a bank and banker to the Jacobite Stuart line and to John Law who launched paper money inflation. Turgot became finance minister in 1774, but laissez-faire ideas failed. Turgot was Rothbard’s favorite character in the history of thought. He wrote well under time pressure. He wrote of wealth and capital theory and even of Austrian time preference theory and the law of diminishing returns. Cantillon and Turgot preceded Adam Smith, but were not mentioned by Smith. Smith made waste and rubbish of 2,000 years o