clay feet and a jerky knee

If you search this site for the string "Rothbard" you'll find hundreds of hits.

They are all admiration for my hero.

But some of what he had to say is pretty embarrassing to me.

Minor stuff includes Rothbard's unfortunate opinions about music. Using the language of apodictic certainty without evident irony on questions of aesthetic taste does not strike me as charming. I think it hurts one's credibility on topics where we can talk about a priori truths. (I consider this point independent of the fact that Rothbard disliked bebop, while Dizzy and Miles are two of my favorite musicians.)

Today's podcast from Mises.org provides a less minor disappointment. It is a great summary of everything wrong with the Clintons and the Clintonians, but it's not unreasonable to come away from the talk with the impression that Rothbard supported police brutality and opposed voluntary contracts with Dr. Kevorkian.

I don't know how to account for it. The paleo alliance is not enough of an explanation, since it was only ever supposed to be about playing up points of agreement between plumbline libertarianism and the post-Cold War version of the Old Right, not about playing along with their law-and-order nonsense or being soft in any other way on paleoconservative statism.

In general, I don't think Rothbard was guilty of what Roderick Long calls "libertarians' costly inheritance from their long alliance with conservatives against the genuine menace of state socialism," but I guess by the 1990s his knee did occasionally jerk to the right.