This is the Cato Daily podcast for Wednesday, January 29, 2025.

I'm Caleb Brown.

There are different ways that libertarians arrive at their views, but does a single starting

point give us everything we need to flesh out a coherent worldview in the libertarian tradition?

Matt Zolinski, co-author of The Individualists, suggests no.

Libertarianism is often cast as neither right nor left, but there are strains of libertarianism

that are very much right and very much left and have much more

affinity, common ground, would be more considered to be fellow travelers on the right or left.

Where do you put Murray Rothbard?

I think Murray Rothbard falls at every point on that spectrum.

At different times, though, right?

What particular year you're talking about.

So, Murray Rothbard had a phase in the 1960s where he was pretty strongly on the radical left,

aligning himself with the students for a democratic society and the Black Panthers.

He had a phase in the 1980s and 1990s where he was in this paleo-libertarian phase,

where he was aligning himself with the likes of David Duke and Pat Buchanan.

So from one extreme to the other,

in the 1970s,

you know,

when he wrote his most popular book for a new liberty,

that in a way seems to be his,

almost his purest libertarian moment.

...