The archive.

Recession, downturn, slowdown, sidewise movement—the euphemisms come first, and Rothbard treats them as more than style: they shield the reigning assumption that capitalism is inherently unstable and needs expert management. Against the Keynesian physician, this pamphlet builds the Austrian case that booms and busts originate not in the free market but in monetary intervention. Any adequate depression theory, he argues, must explain three things at once—the sudden cluster of entrepreneurial errors, their recurrence, and the outsized volatility of capital-goods industries. The Mises-Hayek answer is the interest rate: central-bank-fed credit expansion pushes it below the level set by time preference and real saving, luring entrepreneurs into unsustainable roundabout projects. The cure is deliberately anti-Keynesian—stop the inflation, refuse bailouts, and let liquidation return production to consumer preferences.

It is the preceding inflation that makes the depression phase necessary.

Revolution is not the barricade—that reduction is exactly what Rothbard means to overturn. Taking up Karl Hess's description of libertarianism as revolutionary, he redefines revolution as a long, many-sided process of theorists, writers, organizers, activists, patrons, and institutions, in which street confrontation is only an episodic expression. His historical frame is the classical-liberal tradition of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, recast as "classical radical": the force that broke monarchy, feudal privilege, mercantilism, theocracy, and war, and opened modern liberty and prosperity. From La Boétie and the Levellers through Paine, Cobden, the abolitionists, Bastiat, and Molinari, he traces a continuous radical lineage—and then denies socialism the title, calling it a New Toryism that pursues liberty through statist means. The old revolution's unfinished promise, he concludes, is ours to complete.

Only libertarianism is truly radical.

A creed may hate the State and still remain alien to liberty—that boundary line drives this New Left-era intervention. Rothbard reverses the anarcho-communist story in which the State creates and guards property; for him the State is property's chief invader, and private property, free markets, profit-and-loss accounting, and material abundance stand or fall together. He grants anarcho-communism only its claimed voluntarism, then undercuts it with the Spanish anarchists' wartime confiscations and penalties for using money. The philosophical core is a defense of individuality against egalitarian communalism; the economic core is Mises's calculation argument, that once money and prices are abolished a complex economy loses the signals telling it where scarce labor and capital are most valued. Against "post-scarcity" fantasy Rothbard insists scarcity endures, closing with Ortega y Gasset on the fragility of civilization.

Civilization is not “just here,” it is not self-supporting. It is artificial.

Pollution and resource depletion are real, Rothbard concedes—but he denies that capitalism, technology, or acquisitiveness is to blame. Writing amid the first wave of 1970s environmental alarm, he insists that "the environment" be broken apart into distinct problems: aesthetic complaints about cities, fears of crowding, resource conservation, and pollution. Private ownership, he argues, already contains an automatic principle of conservation, since a mine or forest owner prices future yields into present decisions; overuse arises only where title is public, collective, or politically managed and no one can capture the value of restraint. Pollution he reframes not as an inevitable market byproduct but as an invasion of person and property, to be enjoined under common law. The remedy is juridical rather than administrative—strict property rights against polluters rather than taxpayer-funded programs.

Surely every man's private property in his own body is his most precious resource; and the fact that air pollutants injure that private property should be enough for us to obtain court injunctions preventing that pollution from taking place.

Even the laissez-faire economist, Rothbard charges, harbors a contradiction: he defends market liberty yet keeps a tax-funded monopoly over police and courts, though the state can supply protection only by violating the very property it claims to guard. Concluding the treatise—here as the German translation of Power and Market (1970)—this volume sketches competing defense agencies and private courts, then anatomizes intervention itself. Following Oppenheimer, Rothbard divides the economic means from the political means and classifies every intrusion as autistic, binary, or triangular—price controls that breed shortages and black markets, licensing and tariffs as monopoly privilege, patents that curtail rather than defend property, and a taxation that, whatever its form, can never be made neutral.

Die einzigen Menschenrechte sind, kurz gesagt, die Eigentumsrechte.

English translation: “The only human rights, in short, are property rights.”

"It is high time," Rothbard announces, that someone blew the whistle on Women's Liberation. His 1970 polemic answers Betty Friedan and NOW with Austrian economics rather than sympathy: women's lower average wages, he contends, reflect interrupted careers, childrearing, turnover costs, and marginal productivity, not irrational discrimination—which a competitive market would punish anyway, since a biased employer forfeits profit and labor to rivals. He dismisses the feminist "brainwashing" thesis as unfalsifiable, recasts domesticity as a freely chosen division of labor, and reinterprets marriage as a contract binding men to support women and children. Turning from Friedanite liberalism to the anti-family "New Feminism" of Valerie Solanis and Robin Morgan, he treats objections to women as "sex objects" as an assault on heterosexual attraction itself. The result is a combative fusion of libertarian theory and cultural backlash.

Woman as “sex objects”? Of course they are sex objects and, praise the Lord, they always will be.

Education, in Rothbard's account, is the whole lifelong forming of a person's reason, values, and knowledge, and schooling only a narrow slice of it — one that compulsion perverts into an instrument of rule. Because children differ radically in ability, pace, and temperament, he holds that individualized parental or tutorial instruction outperforms the classroom, which must impose a single curriculum on unlike minds. The historical chapters trace mandatory schooling from Luther and Calvin, who wielded it to enforce religious uniformity, to Prussia, where a militarized bureaucracy standardized language and manufactured obedient subjects. America, in his telling, is only a softer republican version of the same transfer of authority from family to state — a compulsory public press for the child's mind, breeding dependence where it claims to build citizens.

The key issue in the entire discussion is simply this: shall the parent or the State be the overseer of the child?

Freedom, inequality, and the division of labor are not separable social accidents but mutually supporting conditions of civilization, so runs the thesis of an essay first delivered to a 1970 symposium and reissued in 1991 with a combative new introduction. Because each person is a unique, non-interchangeable individual, Rothbard argues, liberty is the precondition of human development; and only a developed division of labor, rooted in the natural diversity Mises made central, gives individuality the scope to flourish. Egalitarianism, Marxist, Romantic, primitivist, he treats as a single anti-differentiating impulse, from Marx's fantasy of hunting, fishing, and criticizing at will to the lookism and quotas of what the new introduction calls political correctness. Equality taken literally means sameness; against it he defends the older liberal equality of liberty, and natural aristocracies that rise through voluntary excellence rather than force.

He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human.

Oskar Lange had been Mises's most formidable socialist antagonist; his final, posthumous treatise, Rothbard argues, quietly retreated toward the praxeology it once opposed. Reading Lange's late Political Economy, Rothbard tracks the concessions: that monetary calculation and profit-seeking made rational conduct explicit, that economic laws can be deduced from broad axioms of rational action, that Austrian utility theory is ordinal preference rather than hedonistic psychology. Each admission carries a threat Lange cannot face—if economics simply is praxeology, Marxism forfeits its claim to be the foundational science of historical economic forms. So Lange widens praxeology to swallow cybernetics, programming, and input-output analysis, grafting institutional categories onto the logic of choice. Rothbard reads the maneuver as evasion, and draws the larger point: the calculation debate was always also a contest over the foundations of economics.

In this way, Lange accepts the essential deductive Misesian methodology for economic theory: beginning with broadly general praxeological principles as axioms and from these elaborating necessary laws by logical deduction.

Borrowing Thomas Kuhn's account of scientific revolutions while refusing its relativism, this essay diagnoses modern economics as a discipline capable of forgetting its own discoveries. Lacking laboratory tests and saturated with ideology, it entrenched a false paradigm through mathematics, positivist testing, and professional prestige — burying the Austrian School in the process. Rothbard reads the eclipse of Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Mises not as refutation but as collective amnesia, sharpened by late translations and Mises's denial of a prestigious American post. Yet criticism alone topples no paradigm; it must be replaced. Mises supplies the replacement through praxeology, the deductive science of human action, from which follow the critique of cumulative interventionism, commodity money as a check on inflationary credit, and the calculation argument that an economy without private ownership has no real prices to reason with.

But the work of Ludwig von Mises furnishes that “something”; it furnishes an economics grounded not on the aping of physical science, but on the very nature of man and of individual choice.

How did a promoter of government-business cooperation acquire a reputation as the defender of laissez-faire? Murray N. Rothbard’s essay locates the answer in Hoover’s uneasy position between voluntary industrial coordination and compulsory economic planning. Reading Commerce Department activism alongside Depression-era wage agreements, farm price supports, and business lending, Rothbard argues that Hoover helped build the apparatus Roosevelt would expand. His distinctive target is not intervention alone but the use of federal authority to organize producers and restrain competition. The revealing tension comes when Hoover rejects the Swope plan for compulsory industrial organization after years of encouraging cooperation under government auspices. Readers can examine both Rothbard’s case for continuity between Hoover and the New Deal and his explanation of how resistance to further planning could obscure an interventionist record.

What could children's liberation actually mean—perhaps, Rothbard suspects, little more than a right to kick adults in the shins on a guaranteed income from long-suffering parents? Beneath the joke, his 1972 essay puts a genuine puzzle to libertarian theory: the infant is neither a full self-owner nor an owned object. His move is to shift from vague "freedom" to jurisdiction over property. Parents may set household rules as conditions of residence on their own property, but may never own the child's body; every child must therefore hold an absolute right to run away, forced return amounting to kidnapping. The parent is trustee-owner and guardian, morally bound to rear and educate yet not legally compelled to do so. Rothbard extends the logic to a market in guardianship and against compulsory schooling and child-labor law, liberating child and parent alike from the State.

Therefore, the child must always be free to run away; he then becomes a self-owner whenever he chooses to exercise his right to run-away freedom.