Murray N. Rothbard's Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, and Other Essays questions the ideals used to judge political and economic arrangements. In the title essay, he imagines preachers urging people to fly by flapping their arms. Critics who praised the goal and called it impractical would leave everyone judged against an impossible standard. Rothbard argues that the goal itself needs examination.
The Mises Institute's 2000 second edition retains the original editor's 1974 foreword and Rothbard's original introduction, alongside a new introduction by David Gordon. The collection is available as Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature at the Mises Institute.
Rothbard defines equality as identity in a given attribute. On that definition, two persons can be fully equal in one way alone, by being identical in every attribute. A consistently egalitarian world would therefore be "a world of faceless and identical creatures." He is attacking equality of condition pursued as a social goal, the effort to make people uniform, and equality before the law falls outside that attack. A moral ideal, he argues, has to be achievable by beings who differ in interests and abilities. An ideal that contradicts those differences sets a standard that every society fails and that every enforcer can invoke. His supporting biological claims belong to the 1970s essay; they are his empirical assertions, distinct from the premise that persons differ in their interests and abilities.
The essay on justice and property rights applies the same test to free-market economists who endorse voluntary exchange while claiming to stay value-free. Rothbard imagines himself about to buy a hula hoop for a dollar. To endorse that trade is already to say that he owns the dollar and the retailer owns the hoop. If word arrives that the retailer stole the hoop from someone else, no economist will approve the sale, however voluntary it is between buyer and thief. A sale passes on only the title the seller already holds, so a defense of markets needs a theory of justice in property. Rothbard bases his theory on self-ownership and on the claim of whoever first finds an unused resource and occupies or transforms it with his own energy. Because that standard stands outside the legal register, it can condemn existing official titles, and current legal ownership gets no automatic endorsement from it.
The essay on the public sector turns to measurement. Customers value a private firm's output by what they choose to pay for it. Rothbard argues that, because government collects few voluntary payments, national product accounting substitutes government spending for a demonstrated valuation of its output. Rothbard mocks the result: productivity came to be measured by its expenditure, so hiring more bureaucrats raises the recorded figure. Rising spending therefore offers no evidence that anyone values what the bureau produces. He goes further and holds that the public sector lives off the private economy as a parasite, and that any shift of activity from public to private hands is a net gain. Those conclusions are his own, and his accounting critique applies to the conventions he examined. He dismisses the external-benefits argument with a string quartet. Three neighbors who would enjoy a quartet have no right to force a fourth neighbor, at bayonet point, to learn the viola. The pleasure the neighbors would gain gives them no claim on the person they would conscript.
The closing essay, "Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor," brings these themes together. Rothbard starts from Smith's dictum that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. He describes development as a process that reinforces itself: a wider market permits finer specialization, which extends the market further, while a physicist or computer engineer has no place on a primitive island. Specialization in turn depends on human diversity, since uniform and interchangeable persons would have nothing to divide. It also gives each person room to focus his powers on one field and develop them. On this account, an interdependent economy is what makes individual development possible, and the self-sufficient all-round producer could never develop his abilities to the full.
The 1991 postscript revises the essay's debt to Smith. Rothbard writes that he had given Smith too much weight. Smith's pin factory dwelt on the division of labor inside a single firm and neglected the division among industries and occupations, and his Book 5 condemned the specialization that Book 1 had praised. Rothbard's larger complaint is that Smith dropped the Scholastic account of exchange, in which each party trades expecting to gain, and put an innate propensity to barter in its place. Following Edwin Cannan, Rothbard traces this to Smith's belief that people are born uniform. On that belief, the division of labor produces differences in occupation. Drawing on Joseph Salerno, Rothbard credits Mises with treating the division of labor as "a conscious choice of mutual gain" rooted in the diversity of people and nature.