Murray N. Rothbard’s “The Infant Mortality ‘Crisis’” is a short polemical chapter from Making Economic Sense, set within the welfare-policy section “The Socialism of Welfare.” Its scope is narrow but argumentative: the U.S. infant-mortality debate of the early 1990s, especially claims that comparative statistics proved a failure of American capitalism and justified expanded federal prenatal spending.
I first heard of the Infant Mortality Question last summer, when I had the misfortune to spend an evening with an obnoxious leftist who claimed that, despite any other considerations, U.S. capitalism had failed and the Soviet Union had succeeded, because of the high “infant mortality” rate here.
The essay’s structure moves from polemical provocation to statistical reframing. Rothbard first dismisses Soviet comparisons by alleging statistical manipulation, then shifts to the American time series: infant mortality fell from 100 per 1,000 live births in 1915 to 10 per 1,000 by 1988. This historical decline is central to his rejection of crisis rhetoric.
A 90% drop in the infant mortality rate since 1915 does not seem to be a record calculated to induce an orgy of breast-beating and collective guilt among the American people.
His main conceptual move is disaggregation. Rather than treating the U.S. rate as a single moral index of capitalism, he asks which populations and mechanisms produce the aggregate figure. The essay argues that international rankings obscure domestic composition and causal specificity.
As in economic statistics, it helps our understanding to disaggregate; and we then find that black infant mortality has long been far higher than white; specifically, the 1988 U.S. rate was 17.6 for blacks and 8.5 for whites.
From there Rothbard identifies low birth weight as the pivotal mediating variable, especially in explaining the racial gap. He notes that white low-birth-weight rates had remained near 7 percent, while black rates hovered substantially higher. The “crisis,” in his telling, is therefore not a generalized failure of medicine or capitalism but a narrower problem of prematurity and birth weight.
Apparently, the key to infant mortality is low birth-weight, and low birth-weight rates in the U.S. have long been far greater for black than for white infants.
The policy target is WIC and, more broadly, the welfare-state assumption that social problems are primarily resource shortages soluble by federal expenditure. Rothbard presents WIC as an expensive program built on the premise that poverty causes malnutrition, malnutrition causes low birth weight, and food subsidy therefore reduces infant mortality.
In the left liberal worldview, every social problem can be cured by federal spending, and so the government assumed that low birth-weight among black babies was due to malnutrition, which was in turn due to poverty.
The decisive turn in the chapter is causal reclassification. Citing Dr. George Graham, Rothbard distinguishes poor-country low birth weight, which he associates with malnutrition, from the U.S. case, which he attributes to premature birth. This allows him to argue that nutrition programs miss the operative cause.
Unlike Third World countries, low birth-weight, and therefore high mortality rates, in the U.S. are a problem of prematurity and not malnutrition.
The chapter’s most controversial move is to redefine the issue as behavioral rather than economic. Rothbard lists smoking, cocaine and crack use, prior abortions, and genital-tract infections associated with sexual promiscuity as causes of prematurity. In doing so, he converts a public-health disparity into an argument against federal spending and against structural explanations of poverty.
The cause of premature births, in fact, is not nutritional but behavioral, that is the behavior of the pregnant mother.
The relevance of the essay lies in its compact display of Rothbard’s libertarian method: challenge aggregate social indicators, expose incentives in public statistics, separate correlation from causation, and recast welfare programs as politically attractive but causally ineffective. Its force also depends on a confrontational rhetoric that makes the causal claim inseparable from an ideological attack on left-liberal policy reasoning.
Left-liberals might try to evade the truth by charging that this is the old conservative tack of “blaming the victim.” They’re wrong. No one is blaming the babies.
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