A very common criticism of the libertarian position runs as follows: Of course we do not like violence, and libertarians perform a useful service in stressing its dangers. But you are very simpliste because you ignore the other significant forms of coercion exercised in society—private coercive power, apart from the violence wielded by the State or the criminal. The government should stand ready to employ its coercion to check or offset this private coercion.
In the first place, this seeming difficulty for libertarian doctrine may quickly be removed by limiting the concept of coercion to the use of violence. This narrowing would have the further merit of strictly confining the legalized violence of the police and the judiciary to the sphere of its competence: combatting violence. But we

[This article is featured in chapter 79 of Making Economic Sense by Murray Rothbard and originally appeared in the September, 1985 edition of The Free Market] 
It was a scene familiar to any nostalgia buff: all-night lines waiting for the banks (first in Ohio, then in Maryland) to open; pompous but mendacious assurances by the bankers that all is well and that the people should go home; a stubborn insistence by depositors to get their money out; and the consequent closing of the banks by government, while at the same time the banks were permitted to stay in existence and collect the debts due them by their borrowers.
In other words, instead of government protecting private property and enforcing voluntary contracts, it deliberately violated the property of the depositors by barring them

[This article is excerpted from volume 2, chapter 10 of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995).
 
Another important reason for Marx’s failure to publish was his candid depiction of the communist society in the essay "Private Property and Communism." In addition to its being philosophic and not economic, he portrayed a horrifying but allegedly necessary stage of society immediately after the necessary violent world revolution of the proletariat, and before ultimate communism is to be finally achieved. Marx’s postrevolutionary society, that of "unthinking" or "raw" communism, was not such as to spur the revolutionary energies of the Marxian faithful.
For Marx took to heart two bitter critiques of communism that had become prominent in Europe. One was by the French

Of all the leading libertarian French economists of the mid- and late nineteenth centuries, the most unusual was the Belgian-born Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912). Born in Liege, the son of a Belgian physician and a baron who had been an officer in the Napoleonic army, Molinari spent most of his life in France, where he became a prolific and indefatigable author and editor in lifelong support of pure laissez-faire, of international peace, and in determined and intrasigent opposition to all forms of statism, governmental control and militarism. In contrast to British soft-core utilitarianism on public policy, Molinari was an unflinching champion of freedom and natural law.
Coming to Paris, the cultural and political centre of the French-speaking world, at the age of 21 in 1840, Molinari

[Excerpted from chapter 6 "Antimarket Ethics: A Praxeological Critique" of Power and Market.]
One of the most common charges levelled against the free market (even by many of its friends) is that it reflects and encourages unbridled “selfish materialism.” Even if the free market—unhampered capitalism—best furthers man’s “material” ends, critics argue, it distracts man from higher ideals. It leads man away from spiritual or intellectual values and atrophies any spirit of altruism.
In the first place, there is no such thing as an “economic end.” Economy is simply a process of applying means to whatever ends a person may adopt. An individual can aim at any ends he pleases, “selfish” or “altruistic.” Other psychic factors being equal, it is to everyone’s self-interest to maximize his monetary

[Excerpt from chapter 7 of Power and Market in Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 1308–12.]
Probably the most common ethical criticism of the market economy is that it fails to achieve the goal of equality. Equality has been championed on various “economic” grounds, such as minimum social sacrifice or the diminishing marginal utility of money (see the chapter on taxation above). But in recent years economists have recognized that they cannot justify egalitarianism by economics, that they ultimately need an ethical basis for equality.
Economics or praxeology cannot establish the validity of ethical ideals, but even ethical goals must be framed meaningfully. They must therefore pass muster before praxeology as being internally consistent and conceptually possible. The

[An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995)]
 
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) began as a devoted Smithian but more consistently attached to laissez-faire. During his relatively brief span of interest in economics, he became more and more statist. His intensified statism was merely one aspect of his major — and highly unfortunate — contribution to economics: his consistent philosophical utilitarianism. This contribution, which opens a broad sluice-gate for state despotism, still remains as Bentham’s legacy to contemporary neoclassical economics.
Bentham was born in London the son of a wealthy lawyer, whiled away his youth at Oxford, and was admitted to the bar in 1772. But it soon became clear that Bentham was not interested in a career as an attorney. Rather, he settled

[In this chapter from Man, Economy, and State, Murray Rothbard explains how government employees consume productive resources, while both taxes and government spending distort the economy.]
For years, writers on public finance have been searching for the “neutral tax,” i.e., for that system of taxes which would keep the free market intact. The object of this search is altogether chimerical. For example, economists have often sought uniformity of taxes, so that each person, or at least each person in the same income bracket, pays the same amount of tax. But this is inherently impossible, as we have already seen from Calhoun’s demonstration that the community is inevitably divided into taxpayers and tax-consumers, who, of course, cannot be said to pay taxes at all. To repeat the keen

Where did this thing called the Fed come from? Murray Rothbard has the answer here — in phenomenal detail that will make your head spin. In one extended essay, one that reads like a detective story, he has put together the most comprehensive and fascinating account based on a century’s accumulation of scholarship.
The conclusion is that the Fed did not originate as a policy response to national need. It wasn’t erected for any of its stated purposes. It was founded by two groups of elites: government officials and large financial and banking interests. Rothbard adds a third critical element: economists hired to give the scheme a scientific patina.
This excerpted chapter from Rothbard’s History of Money and Banking is as scholarly as it is hair raising. This is one economic historian who

For most people, economics has ever been the “dismal science,” to be passed over quickly for more amusing sport. And yet, a glance at the world today will show that we pass over economics at our peril.

[This article was published in in The Irrepressible Rothbard, available in the Mises Store.]
Upon the collapse of centralizing totalitarian Communism in Eastern Europe and even the Soviet Union, long suppressed ethnic and nationality questions and conflicts have come rapidly to the fore. The crack-up of central control has revealed the hidden but still vibrant "deep structures" of ethnicity and nationality.
To those of us who glory in ethnic diversity and yearn for national justice, all this is a wondrous development of what has previously lived only in fantasy or longing: it is a chance in Europe at long last, to begin to reverse the monstrous twin injustices of Sarajevo and Versailles. It is like being back in 1914 or 1919 again, with a chance for the map of Europe and near Asia to be

One of the most notable economists and social philosophers of the twentieth century, Ludwig von Mises, in the course of a long and highly productive life, developed an integrated, deductive science of economics based on the fundamental axiom that individual human beings act purposively to achieve desired goals.

During the French and Indian War (1754–1763), Americans continued the great tradition of trading with the enemy, and even more readily than before. As in King George’s War, Newport took the lead; other vital centers were New York and Philadelphia.

During the 1920s, the emerging individualists and libertarians — the Menckens, the Nocks, the Villards, and their followers — were generally considered Men of the Left; like the Left generally, they bitterly opposed the emergence of Big Government in twentieth-century America, a government allied with Big Business in a network of special privilege, a government dictating the personal drinking habits of the citizenry and repressing civil liberties, a government that had enlisted as a junior partner to British imperialism to push around nations across the globe.

Editor’s Note: Interest rates and inflation are certainly connected to efforts on the parts of central banks to loosen and tighten the money supply. These relationships, however, are much more complex than many people suppose. As we’ve seen in recent weeks, with constant talk about what the Fed will do next, expectations are an important factor in how markets respond to central bank actions.

[Editor’s note: Two interviews from August 1992, given by Murray Rothbard to the Swedish student publication Svensk Linje (continuously published since 1942) were recently discovered in the Rothbard Archives and translated by Sven Thommesen for the first time.

It was a bloodless coup d’état against an unresisting Confederation Congress. The original structure of the new Constitution was now complete. The Federalists, by use of propaganda, chicanery, fraud, malapportionment of delegates, blackmail threats of secession, and even coercive laws, had managed to sustain enough delegates to defy the wishes of the majority of the American people and create a new Constitution.

The Constitution had been ratified and was going into effect, and the next great question before the country was the spate of amendments which the Federalists had reluctantly agreed to recommend at the state conventions. Would they, as Madison and the other Federalists wanted, be quietly forgotten?

As the force of the New Deal reached its heights, both foreign and domestic, during World War II, a beleaguered and tiny libertarian opposition began to emerge and to formulate its total critique of prevailing trends in America.

Doughty, courageous little Rhode Island was the last state left. It is generally assumed that—even by the most staunchly Antifederalist historians—Rhode Island could not conceivably have gone it alone as a separate nation.

The most important battle of the August days of the Constitutional Convention was waged, as had been the battle over the three-fifths clause, between the North and South and had at its heart the institution of slavery.

From the very beginning of the great emerging struggle over the Constitution the Antifederalist forces suffered from a grave and debilitating problem of leadership. The problem was that the liberal leadership was so conservatized that most of them agreed that centralizing revisions of the Articles were necessary—as can be seen from the impost and congressional regulation of commerce debates during the 1780s.

By 1787, the nationalist forces were in a far stronger position than during the Revolutionary War to make their dreams of central power come true. Now, in addition to the reactionary ideologues and financial oligarchs, public creditors, and disgruntled ex-army officers, other groups, some recruited by the depression of the mid-1780s, were ready to be mobilized into an ultra-conservative constituency.

Q: Why, in your view, is isolationism an essential tenet of libertarian foreign policy? A: The libertarian position, generally, is to minimize state power as much as possible, down to zero, and isolationism is the full expression in foreign affairs of the domestic objective of whittling down state power. In other words, interventionism is the opposite of isolationism, and of course it goes on up to war, as the aggrandizement of state power crosses national boundaries into other states, pushing other people around etc. So this is the foreign counterpart of the domestic aggression against the internal population. I see the two as united.

Every depression generates a clamor among many groups for special privileges at the expense of the rest of society—and the American depression that struck in 1784–1785 was no exception. If excess imports were the culprit, then voluntary economizing could help matters, and the press was filled with silly fulminations against ladies wearing imported finery.

It has been alleged—from that day to this—that the depression which hit the United States, especially the commercial cities, was caused by “excessive” imports by Americans beginning in 1783.

Once a State has been established, the problem of the ruling group or “caste” is how to maintain their rule.1 While force is their modus operandi, their basic and long-run problem is ideological. For in order to continue in office, any government (not simply a “democratic” government) must have the support of the majority of its subjects.

[An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995)]
James Mill (1771–1836) was surely one of the most fascinating figures in the history of economic thought. And yet he is among the most neglected. Mill was perhaps one of the first persons in modern times who might be considered a true "cadre man," someone who in the Leninist movement of the next century would have been hailed as a "real Bolshevik." Indeed, he was the Lenin of the radicals, creating and forging philosophical radical theory and the entire philosophical radical movement.
A brilliant and creative but an insistently Number 2 man, Mill began as a Lenin seeking his Marx. In fact, he simultaneously found two "Marxes," Jeremy Bentham and David Ricardo. He met both at about the same time, at the age of 35, Bentham

[A selection from Education: Free and Compulsory.] The Reverend George Harris described the effects of compulsory education in imposing uniformity and enforced equality (soon after the establishment of compulsion).

One problem that any laissez-faire liberal thinker must face is: Granted that government interference should be minimal, what form should that government take? Who shall govern?

[This article first appeared in the Libertarian Forum, January 1, 1970.]
Now that the New Left has abandoned its earlier loose, flexible non-ideological stance, two ideologies have been adopted as guiding theoretical positions by New Leftists: Marxism-Stalinism, and anarcho-communism.
Marxism-Stalinism has unfortunately conquered SDS, but anarcho-communism has attracted many leftists who are looking for a way out of the bureaucratic and statist tyranny that has marked the Stalinist road.
And many libertarians, who are looking for forms of action and for allies in such actions, have become attracted by an anarchist creed which seemingly exalts the voluntary way and calls for the abolition of the coercive State.
It is fatal, however, to abandon and lose sight of one’s own principles in the

The Great Society is the lineal descendant and the intensification of those other pretentiously named policies of twentieth-century America: the Square Deal, the New Freedom, the New Era, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the New Frontier. All of these assorted Deals constituted a basic and fundamental shift in American life—a shift from a relatively laissez-faire economy and minimal state to a society in which the state is unquestionably king.

We shall concentrate on the capitalist-entrepreneurs, economically the more important type of entrepreneur. These are the men who invest in “capital” (land and/or capital goods) used in the productive process….

In the conservative and libertarian movements there have been two major forms of surrender, of abandonment of the cause. The most common and most glaringly obvious form is one we are all too familiar with: the sellout. The young libertarian or conservative arrives in Washington, at some think-tank or in Congress or as an administrative aide, ready and eager to do battle, to roll back the State in service to his cherished radical cause.

[From Power and Market, Chapter 3.] Instead of making the product prohibition absolute, the government may prohibit production and sale except by a certain firm or firms. These firms are then specially privileged by the government to engage in a line of production, and therefore this type of prohibition is a grant of special privilege. If the grant is to one person or firm, it is a monopoly grant; if to several persons or firms, it is a quasi-monopoly or oligopoly grant.

It should be no news by this time that intellectuals are fully as subject to the vagaries of fashion as are the hemlines of women’s skirts. Apparently, intellectuals tend to be victims of a herd mentality. Thus, when John Kenneth Galbraith published his best-selling The Affluent Society in 1958, every intellectual and his brother was denouncing America as suffering from undue and excessive affluence; yet, only two or three years later, the fashion suddenly changed, and the very same intellectuals were complaining that America was rife with poverty.

[This article is excerpted from volume 2, chapter 11 of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995).] Hegel’s death in 1831 inevitably ushered in a new and very different era in the history of Hegelianism. Hegel was supposed to bring about the end of history, but now Hegel was dead, and history continued to march on. So if Hegel himself was not the final culmination of history, then perhaps the Prussian state of Friedrich Wilhelm III was not the final stage of history either.