Murray N. Rothbard, The Politics of Political Economists: Comment (November 1960)

Rothbard’s journal comment responds to George Stigler’s account of economists’ political outlooks. Without settling the precise meaning of Mises’ position, which Stigler challenges, Rothbard disputes the suggestion that empirical familiarity with economic complexity restrains interventionist politics. His central argument is that statistics and government planning reinforce one another: intervention requires aggregate information, while the production of that information creates new opportunities for intervention.

The opening establishes a contrast between entrepreneurial and bureaucratic knowledge. Rothbard argues that firms chiefly need their own prices and costs, whereas governments attempting to manage an economy require extensive statistical collection.

Statistics are the bureaucrat’s only form of economic knowledge, replacing the intuitive, “qualitative” knowledge of the entrepreneur, guided only by the quantitative profit-and-loss test.

The distinction is not simply between numbers and their absence: entrepreneurial judgment is itself tested quantitatively through profit and loss. Rather, Rothbard contrasts knowledge used within decentralized market activity with the aggregated knowledge needed for administrative direction. Statistics become politically consequential because they furnish an informational infrastructure for planning.

The substantial historical middle of the comment supports this claim through examples from Britain, continental Europe, and the United States. Rothbard connects British social surveys and Fabian empirical research with pressure for reform; the German Historical School and its American followers with opposition to laissez-faire; and statisticians such as Ernst Engel, Carroll D. Wright, and Henry Carter Adams with expanding regulatory ambitions. Wesley C. Mitchell’s pursuit of improved economic data illustrates the aspiration to make statistical inquiry a basis for social control. Federal accounts of statistical expansion likewise connect information gathering with responsibility for economic management.

Rothbard then moves beyond the intentions of researchers to the uses made possible by their techniques.

But the relationship works also in reverse: the growth of statistics, often developed originally for its own sake, ends by multiplying the avenues of government intervention and planning.

This qualification is central: his argument does not require every statistician to begin with a political program. Input-output analysis exemplifies the proposed mechanism. Originating as an effort to give empirical content to general-equilibrium theory, it subsequently supplied tools for industrial mobilization. On Rothbard’s account, even independently motivated research can enlarge the practical reach of government.

The final section shifts from institutional history to methodological disposition. Rothbard contends that distrust of abstract theory encourages piecemeal policy judgments. Empiricists need not become socialists to favor intervention; they may instead approach each perceived social deficiency as a separate occasion for corrective action. Against that pragmatic search for “problem areas,” he assigns deductive economics a disciplining function:

Only hard-headed, deductive, a prioristic, economic theory can teach him about ends and means, allocation of resources, opportunity cost, and the other rigors of the economic discipline.

The claim makes explicit the methodological stakes of the comment. For Rothbard, documenting deprivation does not establish the suitability of a proposed remedy. Theory supplies constraints concerning scarcity, means, and forgone alternatives that problem-driven research may neglect. His approving account of Congressman Frank Keefe’s suspicion of expanding statistical appropriations translates this concern into a political objection to the growth of administrative capacity.

The conclusion clarifies that the disagreement with Stigler also turns on the definition of conservatism:

To me, a nonconservative is someone who advocates intervention rather than laissez faire.

If conservatism means opposition to socialism or communism, economists may appear overwhelmingly conservative; if it means adherence to laissez-faire, pragmatic interventionists fall outside that category. Rothbard nevertheless accepts Stigler’s broader observation that economics tends to place its practitioners politically to the right of other academic fields. The comment’s distinctive contribution is therefore a qualified challenge: economic training may restrain interventionist beliefs overall, while empirical methods and statistical institutions can simultaneously encourage intervention within the profession and expand its possibilities within government.