Murray N. Rothbard

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...

Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal

by Murray N. Rothbard | Apr 21, 2017 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

[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 of power, and thereby developed an alternative intellectual historiography. The relevance...

Privatize the Police

by Murray N. Rothbard | Apr 13, 2017 | Featured Articles, Justice

Abolition of the public sector means, of course, that all pieces of land, all land areas, including streets and roads, would be owned privately, by individuals, corporations, cooperatives, or any other voluntary groupings of individuals and capital. The fact that all streets and land areas would be private would by itself solve many of the seemingly insoluble problems of private operation. What we need to do is to reorient our thinking to consider a world in which all land areas are privately owned. Let us take, for example, police protection. How would police protection be furnished in a...

Review of The Origins of the Second World War

by Murray N. Rothbard | Mar 15, 2017 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

[From a memo to Mr. Kenneth Templeton at the William Volker Fund, April 18, 1962.] It is not often that one is privileged to review a book of monumental import, a truly significant “breakthrough” from obscurantism to historical knowledge and insight. But such a book is the magnificent work by A.J .P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961 — now New York: Athenaeum, 1962). As Taylor points out and explains at the beginning of this book, Revisionism of World War II, in every country of the world, has been virtually non-existent. In the United States, Pearl...

Ten Great Economic Myths

by Murray N. Rothbard | Feb 23, 2017 | Economics, Featured Articles

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...

Anatomy of the State

by Murray N. Rothbard | Nov 20, 2016 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

What the State Is Not The State is almost universally considered an institution of social service. Some theorists venerate the State as the apotheosis of society; others regard it as an amiable, though often inefficient, organization for achieving social ends; but almost all regard it as a necessary means for achieving the goals of mankind, a means to be ranged against the "private sector" and often winning in this competition of resources. With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which...

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Murray N. Rothbard made major contributions to economics, history, political philosophy, and legal theory. He combined Austrian economics with a fervent commitment to individual liberty.