Proof That Murray Rothbard Would Have Supported Trump?

JL emails:

Proof that Rothbard would have been a Trump supporter.

Read Rothbard's short essay "In Defense of Demagogues" on page 32 of the David Gordon edited collection of Rothbard's essays, Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard 

 RW response:

While Rothbard does write in favor of demagogues, he also writes in the essay:

Any demagogy, any disruption of the apple cart would almost certainly come from the individualist tradition....individualist demagogues would be more dangerous than ever, because they could now be equipped with rational arguments to refute the socialist cliches.

Trump does not fall into this model at all.

Trump in no way represents an individualist tradition. He is a lover of the state, police and the military. Further, he is an economic nationalist in the worst sense of the term.

His foreign policy toward North Korea is horrific. His seeming siding with Israel in the Middle East makes no sense from an America First perspective.

And there is no way that Trump could enunciate a rational argument against socialist cliches, even if his ownership of Mar-a-Lago depended on it.

On a tangential note, I had dinner this weekend with the co-chairman of a top corporate global consulting firm. He has also launched a couple of Silicon Vallet startups, but most significant for the discussion here, he also happens to be one of the individuals who regularly attended the early gatherings in New York City on the Upper West Side in Murray Rothbard's living room.

I asked him if he thought Rothbard would have been a Trump supporter.

His quick response was "I hope not," but as we discussed it further neither of us thought that there was anything in Trump's policy moves that Rothbard would have found appealing.

-RW