Summary: My New Year’s Wish For The Movement

Rothbard’s New Year’s essay is a compressed, comic reprimand to the libertarian movement. Framed as an impossible seasonal wish, it asks for a temporary end to several habits he regards as evasions of serious political work: survivalism, “new country” schemes, therapeutic jargon, inactive fault-finding, and subcultural escapism. The piece is satirical, but its organizing distinction is serious: libertarianism must be a disciplined engagement with actual social conditions, not a refuge in fantasies of purity, withdrawal, or self-expression.

“I know it's a hopeless fantasy, but I can dream, can't I?”

The joke establishes Rothbard’s stance as an irritated insider rather than an outside critic. His complaints are aimed at people who share the libertarian cause but, in his view, displace it into lifestyle performance. Survivalists imagine themselves escaping collapse through private stockpiles and rural self-sufficiency; Rothbard answers with a deliberately anti-romantic loyalty to cities, commerce, and ordinary market dependence.

“I will stick to the market, crippled though it may be”

This preference is more than personal taste. It expresses the essay’s recurring defense of imperfect reality against purist retreat. Rothbard does not deny crisis or state damage to social life, but he refuses to treat withdrawal from civilization as a libertarian strategy. Even a compromised market order remains, for him, the setting in which liberty must be defended.

His mockery of libertarian “new country” projects extends the same criticism from individual survivalism to collective utopianism. Islands, platforms, and remote enclaves appear as attempts to solve political conflict by geography. Rothbard’s objection is strategic: liberty cannot be secured by pretending to step outside history. The movement must confront the institutions and publics already before it.

“to come back to the real world and fight for liberty at home.”

This sentence supplies the essay’s positive program. The repeated appeal to “the real world” is not merely a temperamental preference for practicality; it is Rothbard’s standard of political seriousness. Libertarians should study, persuade, organize, and act within existing society rather than preserve their innocence through plans that avoid ordinary political and intellectual struggle.

The attack on psychobabble makes the same demand at the level of language. Rothbard treats therapeutic and countercultural formulas as substitutes for analysis, reducing freedom to emotional expression or personal authenticity. Against that narrowing, he names the forms of knowledge a liberty movement requires.

“history, current affairs, economics, political philosophy — in short, the real world”

The phrase clarifies why the essay is more than a list of pet peeves. Rothbard’s desired movement is intellectually equipped, historically conscious, and publicly serious. His impatience with inactive critics follows from the same premise: criticism is necessary only when joined to constructive labor. Otherwise purity becomes a way of remaining untouched while others make mistakes in the course of real work.

The final complaint, about science fiction’s cultic status among libertarians, is lighter but continuous with the rest. Rothbard is not condemning imagination itself; he is warning against a subculture in which speculative escape displaces attention to institutions, economics, and political conflict. The essay’s significance lies in this compact portrait of 1970s libertarian tensions: activism versus withdrawal, scholarship versus therapeutic language, strategy versus fantasy. Its humor serves a coherent demand that libertarians stop fleeing into private worlds and do the work of liberty where history is actually unfolding.