It’s unfortunately not available online, but anyone with access to Culture Wars magazine should look at Thomas J. Herron’s twenty-page review of Justin Raimondo’s book on Murray Rothbard in the July-August 2003 issue. (Thanks to Fr. James Sadowsky for pointing it out to me.) It defies belief. I can’t summarize the thing on the blog, so I’ll confine myself to a few points.

The antistatist ideas of people who agree with Rothbard and Rockwell are here described as “atheistic” and “unchristian,” with no attempt to justify this claim. (This despite the fact that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, where we saw the real flowering of Christendom, occurred at a time when the state as we know it did not exist.) Lew Rockwell’s views on not criminalizing all vices are said to “oppose the traditional Catholic teaching on the subject,” when in fact this was precisely St. Thomas’ view. This is about the level of this article.

The attack on me takes up half a page. I’m religiously heterodox, apparently, because I think labor unions have a detrimental effect on labor as a whole. No matter that I can prove this from both theory and practice; this writer seems to think that if churchmen have endorsed labor unions, I’m obligated to follow suit no matter what reason and my senses tell me, even if I share the same goals (e.g., higher wages) that they do. I do not belong to the obscurantist cult that this person has confused with Catholicism.Herron takes me to task for suggesting “that the Spanish Scholastics got it right, and that the Church, influenced by people like Pesch and Msgr. John A. Ryan, should stop all this unscientific talk about the duty of employers to pay their workers a living wage because it goes against economic laws.” Well, we saw what Msgr. Ryan’s policies did, beginning with Hoover and continuing with FDR. As he says in his autobiography, Msgr. Ryan supported the entire New Deal, high “living wages” and all. The result? An average of 18% unemployment throughout the 1930s. But I’m morally obtuse — “unchristian” even — for opposing these policies.

I’m not sure if it’s worth bothering with his line about “the sweatshops of early laissez-faire capitalism”; Herron (if that isn’t a pen name) seems to believe the politicians saved us from low wages and long hours, and that if it hadn’t been for them we’d all be working 80 hours a week and children would still be working in mines. I’d refer him to my article in the June 2003 Ideas on Liberty called “Why Wages Used to Be So Low,” but I hesitate to soil the poor fellow’s mind with all of my atheistic ideas.

I’m sorely tempted to write a piece for LRC — and will if there is sufficient interest — going after some of the claims about capitalism coming from certain sectors of the Catholic right. Enough is enough already. (The head of a press that publishes books on Catholic social teaching, and who presumes to tell Catholics which economists they’re allowed to follow, stated in an online debate with me that unlike Catholic opponents of socialism, Murray Rothbard opposed socialism simply because it was less efficient than capitalism. How can you even debate such a person?)

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