Murray Rothbard

Murray Newton Rothbard was born in New York City in 1926, the son of Jewish immigrants; his father was a chemist. He studied mathematics and then economics at Columbia University, which granted him a doctorate in 1956. After reading Mises's Human Action in 1949 he joined Mises's seminar in New York, and his treatise Man, Economy, and State (1962) began as a textbook explaining Mises's system. America's Great Depression (1963) blamed the slump on government and central-bank policy rather than on the market. Rothbard went further than Mises: in For a New Liberty (1973) and The Ethics of Liberty (1982) he argued that even police, courts, and defense should be provided privately, a view called anarcho-capitalism. He opposed central banking and foreign military intervention. He taught at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute from 1966 and at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, from 1986, and in 1982 helped found the Mises Institute. His later alliances with paleoconservatives and right-wing populists, and friendships with Holocaust deniers, drew sharp criticism, including from other libertarians. He died in New York in 1995.

Faith: Raised in a secular Jewish family, he was not religious and described himself as part agnostic, part Reform Jew; he criticized libertarian hostility to religion, and friends expected him to become a Catholic late in life, but he never did. Source: Wikipedia

See also: Ludwig von Mises · Carl Menger · Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk · Friedrich A. Hayek · Milton Friedman