Murray N. Rothbard, “Rioting for Rage, Fun, and Profit” (1992)

This file is a short polemical essay/chapter from Rothbard’s Making Economic Sense, responding to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Rothbard’s main thesis is that respectable commentary used ritual denunciations of violence to excuse it, then turned riot damage into an argument for more redistribution, subsidies, and urban patronage. His opening move is linguistic: the formula of condemning violence while invoking structural causes, he argues, reverses its apparent moral judgment.

The point, of course, is precisely to condone violence, by rushing to get to the alleged "real structural causes" of riots and the violence.

The essay then shifts from rhetoric to political theory. Rothbard, despite his anti-statist commitments, defines the minimum governmental function in stark terms: if government monopolizes organized force, it must protect persons and property at the moment they are attacked. The failure he emphasizes is therefore institutional as well as moral: police and troops who arrive late or without usable authority do not perform the one function that could justify them.

Before we rush past the riots themselves, the whole point of government, of an institution with a monopoly, or preponderance, of violence, is to use it to defend persons and property against violent assault.

The middle sections attack the policy spectrum. Liberal remedies are redescribed as payoffs to violence: welfare, set-asides, affirmative action, and urban spending become not cures but incentives. Conservative proposals associated with Jack Kemp are treated as welfare under market language, while left-libertarian proposals such as repealing minimum-wage laws and licensing restrictions are called helpful but insufficient to explain why riots occurred in some poor places and not others. Rothbard’s economic framing is practical and punitive: policies are judged by whether they prevent predation, not by whether they acknowledge grievance.

And what is the result? The plight of the inner cities is clearly worse than ever: more welfare, more crime, more dysfunction, more fatherless families, fewer kids being “educated” in any sense, more despair and degradation.

Rothbard also rejects racial discrimination as the master explanation, pointing to Korean-American victims and business owners as a counterexample. His discussion of family breakdown is more receptive but still limited. The Moynihan thesis comes closest, for him, because it connects social structure to the internalization of respect for persons and property. Yet he refuses to turn that diagnosis into a state reconstruction project: remote cultural causes cannot supply an immediate remedy for riot violence.

The Moynihan thesis of the cause of the problem is closer to the mark: the famous insight of three decades ago that the black family was increasingly fatherless, and that therefore such values as respect for person and property were in danger of disappearing.

The conclusion redefines the riots against the prevailing language of rage. Rothbard’s key anecdote is the looter who takes a television because it is free; his analytic emphasis falls on opportunity, present gratification, and impunity. Rage, fun, and profit are not mutually exclusive motives. What unites them is that the expected cost of violence has collapsed.

The crucial point is that whether the motivation or the goal is rage, kicks, or loot, the rioters, with a devotion to present gratification as against future concerns, engaged in the joys of beating, robbing, and burning, and of massive theft, because they saw they could get away with it.

The essay remains relevant as a condensed statement of Rothbard’s late polemical libertarianism: anti-welfare, anti-managerial, suspicious of therapeutic social explanation, and absolutist about property rights. Its severity lies in the fusion of anti-statist economics with a hard law-and-order prescription. For Rothbard, social peace begins not with compensation for grievance but with credible punishment for violations of person and property.

Devotion to the sanctity of person and property is not part of their value-system. That’s why, in the short term, all we can do is shoot the looters and incarcerate the rioters.