Daily Inspiration Quote by Murray Rothbard

Rothbard’s jab works because it’s a provocation aimed sideways: he’s not rehabilitating Marx so much as weaponizing him against the economists he thinks corrupted modern capitalism from within. The line flatters his own camp with a backhanded hierarchy of villains. Marx is the obvious antagonist for a libertarian Austrian economist, but Keynesians are the more immediate enemy: the respectable, policy-adjacent managers of “mixed economy” capitalism who can claim to be saving markets while steadily expanding the state.

The subtext is a charge of intellectual dishonesty. Marx, in Rothbard’s telling, is at least candid about where his premises lead: class conflict, abolition of private property, revolution. Keynes, by contrast, offers a softer rhetoric of stability and pragmatism while normalizing deficit finance, monetary manipulation, and technocratic steering. For Rothbard, that’s not moderation; it’s camouflage. The joke lands because it flips expectation: praising Marx is taboo in his milieu, so the audience is jolted into hearing the real target.

Context matters. Rothbard wrote in an era when Keynesianism dominated postwar policymaking and academia, underwriting everything from countercyclical spending to central-bank fine-tuning. By the 1970s, stagflation had already cracked Keynes’s aura, and Rothbard seized the moment to argue that the “temporary” interventions Keynesians defend become permanent machinery. The one-liner is less a quip about Marx than a thesis about how state power grows: not only through radicals who hate markets, but through managers who insist they’re merely fixing them.