Rothbard on Weld

David Gordon


William Weld, a former Governor of Massachusetts, has recently announced his intention to run for Vice-President on the Libertarian Party ticket, in concert with Gary Johnson.  Weld has been since the 1990s greatly in favor at the Cato Institute, but Murray Rothbard viewed him with disdain. He often referred to Weld in the pages of The Rothbard Rockwell Report, and his remarks had a constant focus. To Rothbard, Weld exemplified a disturbing trend among professed libertarians.

For Rothbard, the issue at stake was fundamental. Individuals have rights, not groups.  Writing in November 1994, he deplored “an infection of [movement] libertarians’ views by their deep-seated egalitarianism. Scratch an egalitarian, and you will inevitably find a statist. How does the libertarians’ burgeoning and pervasive egalitarianism square with their supposed belief in individualism. . .The resolution of this problem is much the same as other, more common versions of Political Correctness. {Movement] libertarians are firmly committed to the notion that, while each individual might not be ‘equal’ to every other, that every conceivable group, ethnic contingent, race, gender, or, in some cases, species are in fact and must be made ‘equal, ’ that each one has ‘rights’ that must not be subject to curtailment by any form of ‘discrimination.’ And so, flying in the face of their former supposed devotion to the absolute rights of private property, the libertarian movement has embraced almost every phony and left-wing ‘right’ that has been manufactured in recent decades.” .......“Weld’s ‘libertarianism,’ in the minds of himself and his Left-libertarian admirers, consists almost completely in his passionate devotion to ‘gay rights’. . .To round out the picture, I should mention that Weld is also a fanatical adherent of environmentalism, and its despotic crippling of the living standards of the human race.”.........To Read More.....