Murray N. Rothbard | The Libertarian Institute

War, Peace, and the State

by Murray N. Rothbard | Jul 25, 2019 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

The libertarian movement has been chided by William F. Buckley, Jr., for failing to use its "strategic intelligence" in facing the major problems of our time. We have, indeed, been too often prone to "pursue our busy little seminars on whether or not to demunicipalize the garbage collectors" (as Buckley has contemptuously written), while ignoring and failing to apply libertarian theory to the most vital problem of our time: war and peace. There is a sense in which libertarians have been utopian rather than strategic in their thinking, with a tendency to divorce the ideal system which we...

Our Anti-Imperialist Heritage

by Murray N. Rothbard | Apr 25, 2019 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Murray N. Rothbard on War These edited extracts, from an interview in the February 1973 issue of Reason magazine, first ran in the June 1999 issue of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, published by the Center for Libertarian Studies. The introduction is taken from “Murray N. Rothbard: A Legacy of Liberty,” by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. Introduction Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was just one man with a typewriter, but he inspired a world-wide renewal in the scholarship of liberty. During 45 years of research and writing, in 25 books and thousands of articles, he battled every destructive trend in...

Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy

by Murray N. Rothbard | Nov 11, 2018 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

Businessmen or manufacturers can either be genuine free enterprisers or statists; they can either make their way on the free market or seek special government favors and privileges. They choose according to their individual preferences and values. But bankers are inherently inclined toward statism. Commercial bankers, engaged as they are in unsound fractional reserve credit, are, in the free market, always teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Hence they are always reaching for government aid and bailout. Investment bankers do much of their business underwriting government bonds, in the...

Do You Hate the State?

by Murray N. Rothbard | Jul 20, 2018 | Featured Articles, Politics

I have been ruminating recently on what are the crucial questions that divide libertarians. Some that have received a lot of attention in the last few years are: anarcho-capitalism vs. limited government, abolitionism vs. gradualism, natural rights vs. utilitarianism, and war vs. peace. But I have concluded that as important as these questions are, they don't really cut to the nub of the issue, of the crucial dividing line between us. Let us take, for example, two of the leading anarcho-capitalist works of the last few years: my own For a New Liberty and David Friedman's Machinery of...

How to Look at Tariffs

by Murray N. Rothbard | Jun 26, 2018 | Economics, Featured Articles

The best way to look at tariffs or import quotas or other protectionist restraints is to forget about political boundaries. Political boundaries of nations may be important for other reasons, but they have no economic meaning whatever. Suppose, for example, that each state of the United States were a separate nation. Then we would hear a lot of protectionist bellyaching that we are now fortunately spared. Think of the howls by inefficient, high-priced New York or Rhode Island textile manufacturers who would then be complaining about the "unfair," "cheap labor" competition from various...

The Laissez-Faire Radical: A Quest for the Historical Mises

by Murray N. Rothbard | Jan 25, 2018 | Economics, Featured Articles

That Ludwig von Mises was the outstanding champion of laissez-faire and the free-market economy in this century is well known and needs no documentation. But in the course of refining and codifying his political views, Mises's followers have unwittingly distorted them and made them seem at one with the modern conservative movement in the United States. Mises is made to appear a sort of National Review intellectual concentrating on the free-market aspects of conservatism. While the image of Mises as an essential conservative is scarcely made up of the whole cloth, it totally overlooks rich...

Generalissimo Washington: How He Crushed the Spirit of Liberty

by Murray N. Rothbard | Jul 4, 2017 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

[This article is excerpted from Conceived in Liberty, Volume IV, chapters 8 and 41.] Washington Transforms the Army In June of 1775, George Washington was appointed Major General and elected by Congress to be commander in chief of the American revolutionary forces. Although he took up his tasks energetically, Washington accomplished nothing militarily for the remainder of the year and more, nor did he try. His only campaign in 1775 was internal rather than external; it was directed against the American army as he found it, and was designed to extirpate the spirit of liberty pervading this...

The Danger of “Public” Education

by Murray N. Rothbard | Jun 29, 2017 | Featured Articles, Politics

The key issue in the entire discussion is simply this: shall the parent or the State be the overseer of the child? An essential feature of human life is that, for many years, the child is relatively helpless, that his powers of providing for himself mature late. Until these powers are fully developed he cannot act completely for himself as a responsible individual. He must be under tutelage. This tutelage is a complex and difficult task. From an infancy of complete dependence and subjection to adults, the child must grow up gradually to the status of an independent adult. The question is...