Politics & Power Quote by Murray Rothbard

Rothbard’s line is built like a trapdoor: it sounds like a moral absolute, but it’s really a jurisdictional one. “Government wars” narrows the target to wars waged by states as states - monopolies on force, taxation, and legitimacy - and then condemns the whole category in a single stroke. The rhetorical intent is to deny the state its favorite costume: the idea that when violence is organized at scale, it can be laundered into “defense,” “security,” or “humanitarian intervention.” Rothbard doesn’t argue about this war or that war; he attacks the institution that makes war routine.

The subtext is classic libertarian suspicion of concentrated power. War is not just tragedy, it’s incentive: it expands executive authority, normalizes surveillance, enriches connected contractors, and trains the public to accept coercion as civic duty. By insisting the wars are “unjust” by definition, Rothbard sidesteps the emotional tug of patriotic exceptional cases and reframes them as marketing problems. If the state can always rename its aggression as virtue, then the only consistent defense is to deny it the moral franchise altogether.

Context matters: Rothbard wrote in a 20th century shaped by total war, Cold War brinkmanship, and a permanent national security apparatus. For him, the drift from limited government to war state isn’t an accident; it’s the system revealing its core logic. The provocation isn’t pacifism in the soft sense. It’s a demand to treat war as a predictable output of state power, not an occasional deviation from it.