Free Republic

An excerpt from a speech called "The Current State of World Affairs" by Murray Rothbard - Q & A. Recorded at the 1989 Texas State Libertarian Conference.

"The Railroading of the American People," Rothbard discusses one of the largest crony expenditures undertaken by the United States up to that point; the construction of the intercontinental railroad.

The late great Murray Rothbard gave a series of lectures in 1986 at New York Polytechnic University from his book of the same name, "The American Economy and the End of Laissez-Faire: 1870 to World War II." Fortunately for us, they were recorded by Hans Hermann-Hoppe. (audio 1:47:29)

Michael Malice comes to libertarianism more from a Randian perspective, and Tom from a Rothbardian one. Michael recently read The Betrayal of the American Right, Rothbard's part-history, part-autobiography. The resulting conversation is really excellent -- possibly my favorite Malice appearance yet.

Speech given to Freedom Fest, Las Vegas, NV Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. What I will be discussing in my talk today is the crucial role that the ideas of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard have played in the defense of liberty and Western civilization. All Americans, well read in political affairs, know of these famous thinkers. They were two of the most powerful and revolutionary intellectuals in the 20th century, contributing many valuable insights to our knowledge of philosophy, politics, and economics. As with most intellectual rebels, their major ideas about freedom and government were highly controversial. What I...

It began in the early 1940s. FDR had launched the New Deal’s collectivization of America, and a small but prescient group of libertarian and conservative intellectuals were in rebellion – such thinkers as Richard Weaver, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, John T. Flynn, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand, to be followed a decade later by the likes of Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, and Murray Rothbard. Out of their cerebral and activist efforts there began the movement to repeal the overweening statism that was infiltrating America from Europe via Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. The infamous year...

Bestselling author Tom Woods responds to radio host Mark Levin's attack on the prolific and crucially important free-market economist Murray Rothbard.

Radical Rules for Radical Libertarians: Alinsky, Rothbard, and AnarchyPosted By Lisa Richards On October 10, 2010 @ 4:00 pm In Agendas of the Left,Anti-War Movement,Big Government,Conspiracy Theories,Defining the Left,Email,Feature,Military & Defense Issues,The Feminist Hawks' Nest | 1 Comment Radical libertarians are equivalent to leftist Saul Alinskyites.  Both despise government and the Constitution, seeking to destroy America.  Alinksy wanted a community government; radical libertarians want Rothbardian uprisings to destroy government and wealth altogether for communal equalty.  To accomplish this, radical libertarians demand anarchy.These so-called conservatives (leftists in disguise) claim history proves mankind took care of itself, prevented war, rape, and pillaging without...

"Let us first ask ourselves the question: Can money be organized under the freedom principle? Can we have a free market in money as well as in other goods and services? What would be the shape of such a market? And what are the effects of various governmental controls? If we favor the free market in other directions, if we wish to eliminate government invasion of person and property, we have no more important task than to explore the ways and means of a free market in money." Murray N. Rothbard

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...

On election day, 1976, the Libertarian party presidential ticket of Roger L. MacBride for President and David P. Bergland for Vice President amassed 174,000 votes in thirty-two states throughout the country. The sober Congressional Quarterly was moved to classify the fledgling Libertarian party as the third major political party in America. The remarkable growth rate of this new party may be seen in the fact that it only began in 1971 with a handful of members gathered in a Colorado living room. The following year it fielded a presidential ticket which managed to get on the ballot in two states....

Rothbard's "Left and Right": Forty Years Later What an honor and a privilege it is for me to be delivering the Rothbard Memorial Lecture, here in the Mises Institute, the world center of Rothbardian thought. When I was first reading Murray Rothbard's Ethics of Liberty and For a New Liberty back in my college days, and arguing the merits of Rothbard's title-transfer theory of contract with my roommates (yeah, we were pretty geeky), I certainly didn't foresee that I would one day have the opportunity to pay tribute to him in such a venue. But I'm also struck, and a...

To the individualist Lao Tzu, government, with its "laws and regulations more numerous than the hairs of an ox," was a vicious oppressor of the individual, and "more to be feared than fierce tigers." Government, in sum, must be limited to the smallest possible minimum; "inaction" became the watchword for Lao Tzu, since only inaction of government can permit the individual to flourish and achieve happiness. Any intervention by government, he declared, would be counterproductive, and would lead to confusion and turmoil. The first political economist to discern the systemic effects of government intervention, Lao Tzu, after referring to the...

The Free market is a summary term for an array of exchanges that take place in society. Each exchange is undertaken as a voluntary agreement between two people or between groups of people represented by agents. These two individuals (or agents) exchange two economic goods, either tangible commodities or nontangible services. Thus, when I buy a newspaper from a news dealer for fifty cents, the news dealer and I exchange two commodities: I give up fifty cents, and the news dealer gives up the newspaper. Or if I work for a corporation, I exchange my labor services, in a mutually...

Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal by Murray N. Rothbard [Posted on Friday, June 10, 2005] [This classic piece appeared in Ramparts, VI, 4, June 15, 1968. It was the fulfillment of an ideological trend that began a few years earlier when consistent libertarians, led by Rothbard, sensed an estrangement from the American right-wing due to its support of militarism, police power, and the corporate state. Here Rothbard presents a rationale for why he and others had, by 1968, largely given up on the Right as a viable reform movement toward liberty, realized that the Right was squarely on the side...

Christopher A. Ferrara I am privileged to introduce Dr. Peter Chojnowski's article "Corporation Christendom: The True School of Salamanca," which deftly exposes how the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, Sts. Bernadine of Siena and Antonino of Florence, and the late Spanish Scholastics on just prices and wages has been misrepresented by proponents of the so-called Austrian School of economics.Dr. Chojnowski's article is an important first step in mounting a traditional Catholic response to the swelling ambitions of the Austrian school, whose two major divines, the deceased liberal Jewish thinkers Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, wrote the foundational works of...

The Case for Revisionism (and Against A Priori History) By Murray N. Rothbard [Posted June 22, 2004] The task of the libertarian intellectual is not limited to political and economic theory, as this neglected essay by Murray Rothbard argues. It extends also to understanding history, not from the point of view of the state and the ruling class, or from a priori theorizing, but from looking at the raw facts of the case. Doing so yields results different from prevailing opinion, and has hence been called revisionism by both its detractors and supporters. This essay defining revisionism and supporting its...

The State continually fails and destroys, yet it persists. You say, “Of course it persists – it has the guns.” True, but it’s not like we’re standing around with our hands up, nor is that what the State wants us to do. Its destructive interventions notwithstanding, it wants us to create as much wealth as possible so it will have an ample source of plunder. How it goes about the plundering process is critical to its success. The golden rule is: the victims must approve of it. Let’s look at how this works with its two greatest sources of loot,...

State Cons The State continually fails and destroys, yet it persists. You say, “Of course it persists – it has the guns.” True, but it’s not like we’re standing around with our hands up, nor is that what the State wants us to do. Its destructive interventions notwithstanding, it wants us to create as much wealth as possible so it will have an ample source of plunder. How it goes about the plundering process is critical to its success. The golden rule is: the victims must approve of it. Let’s look at how this works with its two greatest sources...

In 1972, a renowned and insightful libertarian economist of the Austrian School and a former associate of Ayn Rand, Dr. Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), composed a purported analysis of the “cult dynamics” of Ayn Rand’s personal associations wherein he compared the early development of Objectivism to a Soviet-like hierarchy of unquestioned subordination and an essentially religious acceptance on faith of the positions upheld by a master “guru.” While Rothbard does validly pinpoint some of the foibles which lay within even so ingenious, industrious, and intellectually colossal mind as Rand’s, his exposition should by no means be interpreted as a refutation of...