Rothbard got a favorable mention on a National Review Online blog called The Corner. Ron Paul got a mention in the same post as well, in connection with Rothbard.
About Rothbard, John Derbyshire wrote: “Dunno about you, but the more I contemplate our federal government and its works, the better Murray Rothbard is starting to look.” He then quoted from the Wikipedia article on Rothbard: “It was in 1949 that Rothbard first concluded that the free market could provide all services, including police, courts, and defense services better than could the State.” And he concluded: “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
If Derbyshire had stopped there, I’m sure all of us would have been surprised and delighted. Of course, he didn’t: “Probably there are limits.” After repeating parenthetically a smear disguised as a joke about Rothbard’s view of how private lighthouses would be run, we find out that one of those limits might be on immigration.
Click here to read a little more. Hat tip to Liberator Online for bringing this to my attention.
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Well, you wouldn’t want to let Australians run riot, would you? I mean, there are limits! You NEED immigration controls!
The funniest thing is that the lighthouse is a faulty example of a market failure. All the lighthouse owner has to do is write up an agreement for the owner of the local port to collect fees for him. That way, the lighthouse owner makes his money and the port gets the benefit of protecting its shipping business.
It’s amazing to what extent some economists will go to try to invent market failures.
I don’t know Scott D. How does anyone know if lighthouses were even necessary? It could be like a sign that reads (or has a diagram to the essence of) ’roundabout ahead’ or ‘stop sign ahead’. I mean, if you can’t personally see the intersection coming up then maybe you shouldn’t be driving. Or then again what of blindingly obvious warning labels on products because manufacturers are afraid of getting sued? A port owner might be wise to have lighthouse placed in strategic points but what of a lighthouse in the middle of nowhere? It’s only there because some people run aground and some government agency is the only one who’d could bother to put one up? Then again since it’s the ship owner’s problem to risk running aground on a voyage so why couldn’t ship makers came up with a way to create headlights?
Thanks goodness modern technology has superceded such problems!
Sam, what you just wrote is a pretty good case against government involvement in the lighthouse business. How does anyone know that a lighthouse is necessary? Well, as we saw in a free market, it turns out that they *were* necessary because people were willing to pay for it.
When the government takes over it does things for the sake of doing them (think: going to Mars), or worse it acts as though it is meeting a real need. The only “market failure” is when a free people are overridden by a State, which by its nature can’t calculate good resource uses from bad.
How does anyone know if lighthouses were even necessary?
I’d say that it develops naturally from the desire of people to ship things from one place to another. Say that deliveries had been made previously, but only in the daytime when dangers were more apparent. If the desire for shipping becomes great enough that shipments during the night arise then the participants in trade now have an incentive to create a lighthouse.
After the first few examples of lighthouse safety and necessity, entrepreneurs will seek out places to create them (even in the so-called “middle of nowhere”) and turn profits.
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