Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

[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...

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Not many are aware that one of the greatest works against the encroachment of the state originates from a German thinker. As early as the late eighteenth century, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) raised the question of the general limits of state activity. Humboldt wrote his Ideas for an Attempt to Determine the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State in 1792. While individual sections of it appeared in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, the complete...

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President Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appointees have an affinity for returning to an earlier era’s antitrust enforcement, sometimes summarized as a “big is bad” or “neo-Brandeisian” approach. The most famous (or notorious) current example is the FTC’s opposition to the proposed merger between Microsoft and Activision. In their words, the merger would give Microsoft “both the means and motive to harm competition.” How could that...

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It's difficult to say what most Americans commemorate or celebrate on Independence Day nowadays. Many appear to focus on some vague notion of "America." Others even take to jingoism equating the United States government with the very notion of "freedom."  Lost in all of this is the fact that the Declaration of Independence — the document we're supposed to remember today — is a document that promotes secession, rebellion, and...

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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...

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When the Soviet Union began its collapse in 1989, the world witnessed decentralization and secession on a broad scale. Over the next several years, puppet regimes and states that were independent in name only broke away from Soviet domination and formed sovereign states. Some states which had completely ceased to exist—such as the Baltic states—declared independence and became states in their own right. In its heyday, the Soviet Union had been...

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When we think of “solar power,” we picture a field or a roof full of glass panels churning out electricity. However, this is just a more recent development in channeling the sun’s energy. Most histories of solar power will begin with stories regarding the use of magnifying glasses and mirrors to make fire. From the first to fourth centuries, the Romans began including large south-facing windows in their famous bathhouses, optimizing the heat energy...

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