"Rothbard is NOT respected, nor has most of his work been substantiated by any other research."
I'm not an academic and I know nothing about how academics rate his views. I do know that when I was in school there was a couple of revered books out by J.K Galbraith (The Affluent Society and the New Industrial State) that were wrong in almost all their predictions. Public and academic alcolades are fleeting and temporal.
At least we all know where we stand. I'm convinced that Austrian economic thought is analyzing our present situation properly, you think the Chicago School does. It's like we are all on different islands wathing a couple of large ships under sail. From one island it looks like they are going to collide, on another they look like they are proceeding in a safe manner. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
I didn't say the Chicago school analyzes the everything correctly.
You might be surprised to learn that I debated Uncle Miltie on a boat going down the Danube about the benefits of government control of any money supply---I was opposed. I do say that Friedman had the 1920s pretty well pegged, but should be modified by Barry Eichengreen's analysis of the weaknesses of the gold standard and Wanniski's study of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff.
The same scholars you mildly denigrate, though, are the VERY people who exposed Galbraith and blasted them out of the water. What is interesting about these scholars is that they generally agree on the Great Depression, yet they come from a pretty diverse ideological and political background. My more important point, though, is that if the Rothbardian/Austrian notions are sound, they could be presented and debated and, more important, proven by scholarship. Economics, ultimately, can be reduced to numbers. What should concern you is that these people don't even get in the arena. There is a "Journal of Austrian Economics," but there is also a "Journal of Marxist Economics" (or some such title). The Marxists cannot debate with evidence their positions, thus they create their own little sandbox. That is what I'm afraid the Austrians have done.