[This article is adapted from “Bureaucracy and the Civil Service in the United States.”]Bureaucracy is necessarily hierarchical, first because of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and secondly because bureaucracy grows by adding more subordinate layers. Since, lacking a market, there is no genuine test of “merit” in government’s service to consumers, in a rule-bound bureaucracy seniority is often blithely adopted as a proxy for merit. Increasing seniority, then, leads to promotion to higher ranks, while expanding budgets take the form of multiplying the levels of ranks under you, and expanding your income and power. Bureaucratic growth occurs, then, by multiplying levels of bureaucracy.The theory of hierarchical government bureaucracy is that information is collected in the lowest ranks of the

[This article is excerpted from Economic Controversies, chapter 21, “The Fallacy of the ‘Public Sector’” (2011). It originally appeared in the New Individualist Review (Summer, 1961): 3–7. Editor’s note: Various media outlets are reporting that the Trump administration has cut more than 100,000 federal jobs in recent days. The total may even be greater than 200,000. Naturally, the regime’s defenders repeatedly tell us that this all means a great and awful loss to …. something. Rothbard reminds us below that, however, that nothing has been lost. The employees of the so-called “public sector” are funded and sustained entirely by skimming from the hard work and productivity of the workers of the private sector. They provide no net addition to the “national product.” In fact, by removing

[Editor’s note: In this article, originally published in October 1984, Murray Rothbard critiques a problem with the economics of Republicans and conservatives. Namely, its proponents think they can have it both ways by cutting tax rates and increasing government spending, while somehow not running up huge deficits. Much of this is based on the so-called Laffer curve idea, which Rothbard regards with skepticism. Moreover, Rothbard notes that when most conservatives speak of “the gold standard” they mean a government regulated standard which is an ersatz version of the real thing. At the core of it all is a refusal to do anything at all about the enormous American welfare state. At the time, this sort of thing was called “supply-side economics.” Unfortunately, we find that today’s MAGA

[This article is adapted from Murray Rothbard’s 1977 keynote address to the Libertarian Party.]I used to think that adopting the victory of liberty as the overriding goal must be almost self-evident to all libertarians — until I began to find those who turned pale and fled when the word “victory” was mentioned. For there are all too many libertarians who apparently believe that the point of the whole enterprise is not triumph in the real world, but all sorts of other motivations, ranging from contemplating the beautiful intellectual edifice of the libertarian system to selling each other dried beans to bearing moral witness to the rightness or righteousness of the libertarian worldview.There is, I suppose, a certain satisfaction in knowing, or even proclaiming, that we are right and that

[Editor’s note:  The article below is adapted from a lengthy 1954 memo by Rothbard which is written largely as a review of George B. DeHuszar and Thomas Hulbert Stevenson’s A History of the American Republic. The memo was republished in 2010 by the Mises Institute as part of Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard, edited by David Gordon. Rothbard here provides a concise and razor-sharp analysis of how the Mexican-American war and westward expansion laid the foundation for the American Civil War. Rothbard notes that the vast new territories in the West animated new and aggressive efforts by both pro-slavery and anti-slavery interest groups who sought to dominate the new territories. Rothbard blames, among other factors, the “aggressive, expansionist aims

This first appeared in The Libertarian Forum, Vol VI, NO.6-7, June-July,1972, following the attempted assassination of Presidential candidate George Wallace.John F. Kennedy; Malcolm X; Martin Luther King; Robert F. Kennedy; and now George Corley Wallace: the litany of political assassinations and attempts in the last decade rolls on.

ForewordWe do not need a technocratic elite to manage the supply of money. In these three short articles, Murray N. Rothbard removes the Federal Reserve’s veil of scientific mystique to reveal a wholly unnecessary and malignant system. Rothbard contrasts the instability and unjust redistribution inherent in our current central banking system with the integrity of sound money and honest banking practices.Since the articles were published in 1995, the Fed has continued to generate boom-bust cycles and expropriate real wealth from the public for the benefit of the government, its cronies and their favored financial institutions. Since the financial crisis of 2007–8, the Fed has expanded to leviathan proportions in size and scope. The 2020 crisis was only the latest explosion in money

[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995), volume 2, chapter 9: “Roots of Marxism: Messianic Communism,” section 3, “The Conspiracy of the Equals.” Inspired by the works of Mably and especially Morelly, a young journalist from Picardy decided, amidst the turmoil of the French Revolution, to found a conspiratorial revolutionary organization to establish communism. Strategically, this was an advance on the two founders, who had had no idea but simple education of how to achieve their goal. François Noël (”Caius Gracchus”) Babeuf (1764–1797), a journalist and commissioner of land deeds in Picardy, came to Paris in 1790, and imbibed the heady revolutionary atmosphere. By 1793, Babeuf was committed to economic equality and communism. Two

New York was the toughest nut for the Federalists to crack. For here was one state where not only was the population overwhelmingly opposed to the Constitution, but the opposition was also in firm and determined control of the state government and the state political machinery. Here was a powerful governor, George Clinton, who would not, like Hancock and Randolph in the other critical states, yield to a sellout under pressure. Clinton had been a highly popular governor since the formation of the state, had a strong political machinery based on the mass of upstate yeomanry, and was determined to organize and defeat the Constitution.Still, their final organization was sluggish. It was only in February 1788 that the Albany Antifederalists, guided by Clinton, formed a committee to organize the

Originally published September 1977 in Libertarian Review.In any debate between a socialist and a free-market capitalist, all too often the socialist quickly puts the free-market advocate on the defensive, and the entire time is consumed by the free-market person fending off attacks on the ability of the market to prevent inequality, or business cycles, or even the ravages of affluence and “materialism.”

[A selection from Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, Spring-Autumn 1967.]
The chronic Middle East crisis goes back – as do many crises – to World War I. The British, in return for mobilizing the Arab peoples against their oppressors of imperial Turkey, promised the Arabs their independence when the war was over. But, at the same time, the British government, with characteristic double-dealing, was promising Arab Palestine as a “National Home” for organized Zionism. These promises were not on the same moral plane: for in the former case, the Arabs were being promised their own land freed from Turkish domination; and in the latter, world Zionism was being promised a land most emphatically not its own. When World War I was over, the British unhesitatingly chose to keep the

[A selection from Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, Spring-Autumn 1967.]The chronic Middle East crisis goes back – as do many crises – to World War I. The British, in return for mobilizing the Arab peoples against their oppressors of imperial Turkey, promised the Arabs their independence when the war was over. But, at the same time, the British government, with characteristic double-dealing, was promising Arab Palestine as a “National Home” for organized Zionism. These promises were not on the same moral plane: for in the former case, the Arabs were being promised their own land freed from Turkish domination; and in the latter, world Zionism was being promised a land most emphatically not its own. When World War I was over, the British unhesitatingly chose to keep the wrong

One prominent person rarely associated by scholars with the Bastiat-Ferrara laissez-faire school was the eminent sociologist and economic theorist, Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto (1848-1923). Pareto was born in Paris into a noble Genoan family. His father, the Marchese Raffaelle Pareto, a hydraulic engineer, had fled Italy as a republican and supporter of Mazzini. The senior Pareto returned to Italy in the mid-1850s and gained a high rank in the Italian civil service. The young Pareto studied at the Turin Polytechnic where he earned a graduate engineering degree in 1869; his graduate thesis was on the fundamental principle of equilibrium in solid bodies. As we shall see in a later volume, Pareto’s thesis led him to the idea that equilibrium in mechanics is the proper paradigm for

To save our economy from destruction and from the eventual holocaust of runaway inflation, we the people must take the money-supply function back from the government. Money is far too important to be left in the hands of bankers and of Establishment economists and financiers. To accomplish this goal, money must be returned to the market economy, with all monetary functions performed within the structure of the rights of private property and of the free-market economy.
It might be thought that the mix of government and money is too far gone, too pervasive in the economic system, too inextricably bound up in the economy, to be eliminated without economic destruction. Conservatives are accustomed to denouncing the “terrible simplifiers” who wreck everything by imposing simplistic and

We have already described one part of the contemporary flight from sound, free market money to statized and inflated money: the abolition of the gold standard by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, and the substitution of fiat paper tickets by the Federal Reserve as our “monetary standard.” Another crucial part of this process was the federal cartelization of the nation’s banks through the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913.
Banking is a particularly arcane part of the economic system; one of the problems is that the word “bank” covers many different activities, with very different implications. During the Renaissance era, the Medicis in Italy and the Fuggers in Germany, were “bankers”; their banking, however, was not only private but also began at least as a legitimate,

Money is a crucial command post of any economy, and therefore of any society. Society rests upon a network of voluntary exchanges, also known as the “free-market economy”; these exchanges imply a division of labor in society, in which producers of eggs, nails, horses, lumber, and immaterial services such as teaching, medical care, and concerts, exchange their goods for the goods of others. At each step of the way, every participant in exchange benefits immeasurably, for if everyone were forced to be self-sufficient, those few who managed to survive would be reduced to a pitiful standard of living.
Direct exchange of goods and services, also known as “barter,” is hopelessly unproductive beyond the most primitive level, and indeed every “primitive” tribe soon found its way to the discovery

[Chapter 1 of Rothbard’s newly edited and released Conceived in Liberty, vol. 5: The New Republic: 1784–1791.]
After peace came in 1783, the new republic faced a two-fold economic adjustment: to peacetime from the artificial production and trade patterns during the war, and to a far different trading picture than had existed before the war. The largest change between the two eras of peace was the shift in trading patterns resulting from independence. Most importantly, while Americans were freed from the shackles of British mercantilism and could trade freely with the rest of the world, the United States was now a foreign country that could no longer freely enjoy a market within the British Empire.
While the bulk of America’s trade remained with the British Empire, the pressure of New World

On a bus from Boston to New York, a reporter learns a lot from voters. On NBC Evening News for Monday, November 4, 1974, Tom Pettit talks with voters in the northeast about the upcoming elections.
"I voted a long time ago, but I learned later on that it was useless."[embedded content]

Rothbard responded in The Libertarian Forum in November 1974.
On the night before election, and again on the Today show on election morn. I appeared on nationwide NBC-TV, denouncing politics and declaring that I never vote. Despite the fact that the interview was a pure fluke, taken while minding my own business on a New Haven bus, that it was severely edited and truncated on TV to fit the anti-politics theme of mass sentiment as picked up by the reporters, I was immediately besieged by phone calls from

This article was originally published in Libertarian Outlook (vol. 1, no 1, August 1985). This was the only issue of the magazine that was ever published. Permission was granted by Eric Garris, one of the original coeditors, to reprint this article on mises.org.
Libertarians have devoted so much time and energy to the important cause of repealing laws against victimless “crimes” that we have tended to neglect an equally important social problem: crimes with victims, i.e., genuine crime. Our neglect has scarcely been matched by that of the American people, who have rightly put concern and horror at “street crime” near the top of their political agenda. It is also beside the point for Ralph Nadar and his colleagues to wail about the public’s relative indifference toward “white-collar

[Philosopher] Eric Mack [in his article "Permissible Defense"] uses a device employed by all too many libertarians—of holding the ideal free-market anarchist system or a limited government as virtually equivalent to the current State-ridden system. Thus, he points out quite correctly that isolationism makes no sense as a principle for a free-market protective agency; he leaps from there to the conclusion that, at least for an anarchist, it cannot be a binding principle for the State either. But for an anarchist, the existing State is not a benign if a bit overly cumbersome surrogate for a free-market protection agency. The State is organized crime, murder, theft, and enslavement incarnate. And even for laissez-faire liberals the existing State should be tarred with the same dire labels.

Our country is beset by a large number of economic myths that distort public thinking on important problems and lead us to accept unsound and dangerous government policies. Here are ten of the most dangerous of these myths and an analysis of what is wrong with them.
Myth #1
Deficits are the cause of inflation; deficits have nothing to do with inflation.
In recent decades we always have had federal deficits. The invariable response of the party out of power, whichever it may be, is to denounce those deficits as being the cause of our chronic inflation. And the invariable response of whatever party is in power has been to claim that deficits have nothing to do with inflation. Both opposing statements are myths.
Deficits mean that the federal government is spending more than it is taking in

[A selection from For a New Liberty.]
If, as libertarians believe, every individual has the right to own his person and property, it then follows that he has the right to employ violence to defend himself against the violence of criminal aggressors. But for some odd reason, liberals have systematically tried to deprive innocent persons of the means for defending themselves against aggression. Despite the fact that the Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," the government has systematically eroded much of this right. Thus, in New York State, as in most other states, the Sullivan Law prohibits the carrying of "concealed weapons" without a license issued by the authorities. Not only has the carrying of guns

Study of business cycles must be based upon a satisfactory cycle theory. Gazing at sheaves of statistics without "pre-judgment" is futile. A cycle takes place in the economic world, and therefore a usable cycle theory must be integrated with general economic theory. And yet, remarkably, such integration, even attempted integration, is the exception, not the rule. Economics, in the last two decades, has fissured badly into a host of airtight compartments—each sphere hardly related to the others. Only in the theories of Schumpeter and Mises has cycle theory been integrated into general economics.1
The bulk of cycle specialists, who spurn any systematic integration as impossibly deductive and overly simplified, are thereby (wittingly or unwittingly) rejecting economics itself. For if one may

Even Marx must dimly recognize that not "material productive forces," not even "classes," act in the real world, but only individual consciousness and individual choice. Even in the Marxian analysis, each class, or the individuals within it, must become conscious of its "true" class interests in order to act upon pursuing or achieving them. To Marx, each individual’s thinking, his values and theories, are all determined, not by his personal self-interest, but by the interest of the class to which he supposedly belongs. This is the first fatal flaw in the argument; why in the world should each individual ever hold his class higher than himself? Second, according to Marx, this class interest determines his thoughts and viewpoints, and must do so, because each person is only capable of

Mercantilism has had a "good press" in recent decades, in contrast to 19th-century opinion. In the days of Adam Smith and the classical economists, mercantilism was properly regarded as a blend of economic fallacy and state creation of special privilege. But in our century, the general view of mercantilism has changed drastically: Keynesians hail mercantilists as prefiguring their own economic insights; Marxists, constitutionally unable to distinguish between free enterprise and special privilege, hail mercantilism as a "progressive" step in the historical development of capitalism; socialists and interventionists salute mercantilism as anticipating modern state building and central planning.
Mercantilism, which reached its height in the Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries, was a system

[This article is excerpted from a 30,000-word memo to the Volker Fund, 1961. The full memo is available in Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard edited by David Gordon.]
The Road to Civil War
The road to Civil War must be divided into two parts:
the causes of the controversy over slavery leading to secession, andthe immediate causes of the war itself.The reason for such split is that secession need not have led to Civil War, despite the assumption to the contrary by most historians.
The basic root of the controversy over slavery to secession, in my opinion, was the aggressive, expansionist aims of the Southern "slavocracy." Very few Northerners proposed to abolish slavery in the Southern states by aggressive war; the objection – and certainly a proper

Historians have long debated the precise causes of the American Revolution: Were they constitutional, economic, political, or ideological? We now realize that, being libertarians, the revolutionaries saw no conflict between moral and political rights on the one hand and economic freedom on the other. On the contrary, they perceived civil and moral liberty, political independence, and the freedom to trade and produce as all part of one unblemished system, what Adam Smith was to call, in the same year that the Declaration of Independence was written, the "obvious and simple system of natural liberty."
The libertarian creed emerged from the "classical liberal" movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Western world, specifically, from the English Revolution of the

The Free Market 12, no. 9 (September 1994)

In recent years, Americans have been subjected to a concerted assault upon their national symbols, holidays, and anniversaries. Washington’s Birthday has been forgotten, and Christopher Columbus has been denigrated as an evil Euro-White male, while new and obscure anniversary celebrations have been foisted upon us. New heroes have been manufactured to represent "oppressed groups" and paraded before us for our titillation.
There is nothing wrong, however, with the process of uncovering important and buried facts about our past. In particular, there is one widespread group of the oppressed that are still and increasingly denigrated and scorned: the hapless American taxpayer.
This year is the bicentenary of an important American event: the rising up

One of the reasons that most economists of the 1920s did not recognize the existence of an inflationary problem was the widespread adoption of a stable price level as the goal and criterion for monetary policy. The extent to which the Federal Reserve authorities were guided by a desire to keep the price level stable has been a matter of considerable controversy. Far less controversial is the fact that more and more economists came to consider a stable price level as the major goal of monetary policy. The fact that general prices were more or less stable during the 1920s told most economists that there was no inflationary threat, and therefore the events of the Great Depression caught them completely unaware.
Actually, bank-credit expansion creates its mischievous effects by distorting

Money is a crucial command post of any economy, and therefore of any society. Society rests upon a network of voluntary exchanges, also known as the “free-market economy”; these exchanges imply a division of labor in society, in which producers of eggs, nails, horses, lumber, and immaterial services such as teaching, medical care, and concerts, exchange their goods for the goods of others. At each step of the way, every participant in exchange benefits immeasurably, for if everyone were forced to be self-sufficient, those few who managed to survive would be reduced to a pitiful standard of living.
Direct exchange of goods and services, also known as “barter,” is hopelessly unproductive beyond the most primitive level, and indeed every “primitive” tribe soon found its way to the discovery

[This article is excerpted from Conceived in Liberty, volume 1, chapter 6, "The Social Structure of Virginia: Bondservants and Slaves". An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Floy Lilley, is available for download.]
Until the 1670s, the bulk of forced labor in Virginia was indentured service (largely white, but some Negro); Negro slavery was negligible. In 1683 there were 12,000 indentured servants in Virginia and only 3,000 slaves of a total population of 44,000. Masters generally preferred bondservants for two reasons. First, they could exploit the bondservants more ruthlessly because they did not own them permanently, as they did their slaves; on the other hand, the slaves were completely their owners’ capital and hence the masters were economically compelled to try to preserve

[Originally from Joseph R. Peden and Fred R. Glahe, eds., The American Family and the State (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 1986).]
While the "Progressive Era" used to be narrowly designated as the period 1900–1914, historians now realize that the period is really much broader, stretching from the latter decades of the nineteenth century into the early 1920s. The broader period marks an era in which the entire American polity—from economics to urban planning to medicine to social work to the licensing of professions to the ideology of intellectuals—was transformed from a roughly laissez-faire system based on individual rights to one of state planning and control. In the sphere of public policy issues closely related to the life of the family, most of the change took place, or

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

These short columns—usually no more than two typewritten pages each—appeared in the Freedom Newspapers. Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968, addressing the campus revolt; the massive antiwar demonstrations; the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab powers; the Newark riots; the Vietnam war; the persecution of H. Rap Brown, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the abdication of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the rise of Richard Nixon — in those two crucial years there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Read the text version here. Narrated by Jim Vann.
Download the complete audiobook (63 MP3 files) in one ZIP file here. This audiobook is also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and via RSS.​

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

Everyone will agree that the American tax system is a mess. Taxes are far too high, and the patchwork system is so complicated that even IRS officials don’t understand it. Hence the evident need for some sort of dramatic, even drastic, reform. As often happens, a group of dedicated and determined reformers has arisen to satisfy that need. But before we embrace this new gospel, we should heed the old maxim about jumping from the frying pan into the fire, and also remember the warning of the great H.L. Mencken, who defined “reform” as “Mainly a conspiracy of prehensile charlatans to mulct the American taxpayer.” And we should also bear in mind that all acts of government, however wor­thy they may seem, have a way of winding up solving no problems and only making matters worse.
Working within

[From chapter 23 of The Case Against the Fed.]
Having examined the nature of fractional reserve and of central banking, and having seen how the questionable blessings of Central Banking were fastened upon America, it is time to see precisely how the Fed, as presently constituted, carries out its systemic inflation and its control of the American monetary system.
Pursuant to its essence as a post-Peel Act Central Bank, the Federal Reserve enjoys a monopoly of the issue of all bank notes. The US Treasury, which issued paper money as Greenbacks during the Civil War, continued to issue one-dollar "Silver Certificates" redeemable in silver bullion or coin at the Treasury until August 16, 1968. The Treasury has now abandoned any note issue, leaving all the country’s paper notes, or "cash," to be

Seventeenth-century French kings and their minions did not impose an accelerating burden of absolutism without provoking grave, deep, and continuing opposition. Indeed, there were repeated rebellions by groups of peasants and nobles in France from the 1630s to the 1670s. Generally, the focus of discontent and uprising was rising taxes, as well as the losses of rights and privileges. There were also similar rebellions in Spain in mid-century, and in autocratic Russia throughout the seventeenth century.
Consider, for example, the remonstrances of the peasants in the first great French rebellion of the seventeenth century, the croquants’ (literally, "crunchers") revolt in 1636 in south-western France. The croquants’ rebellion was precipitated by a sudden near-doubling of direct taxes upon the

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.