ABSTRACT
Among the most notable of Murray Rothbard's many contributions to the literature of modern Austrian economics is surely the major paper on utility and welfare theory that he wrote for the 1956 Mises Festschrift (Rothbard 1956). This writer can personally attest to the excitement engendered by the lucid manner in which this paper deployed Austrian insights to illuminate fundamental theoretical issues (concerning which contemporary economics was floundering) and by the characteristic erudition which Rothbard poured into that single essay. Whether or not one fully accepted Rothbard's conclusions, it was impossible not to glimpse the power of consistent Misesian thinking which that paper so excellently exemplified. The present chapter, written thirty years later, seeks to re-examine a small part of the terrain covered by Rothbard's essay. In offering a modern Austrian perspective on welfare economics we shall be emphasizing some of the same basic Austrian tenets that Rothbard so rightly insisted on thirty years ago. While our perspective may not entirely dovetail with some of Rothbard's conclusions, we venture to hope that our observations concerning welfare economics be judged to be in the same subjectivist, methodologically individualistic tradition that Rothbard's work has so valuably carried forward for so many years.
