In a characteristically excellent post, the Bionic Mosquito calls attention to Murray Rothbard’s ethical “absolutism”. In this view, human beings can grasp what is objectively case in ethics. If, for example, stealing is wrong, its being wrong is not just an expression of individual or group preference. Rothbard held that an adequate defense of libertarianism depends on objective values and that political freedom was not the only such objective value needed for this defense. Moreover, this position does not contradict the subjectivity of preference in Austrian economics.

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