The archive.

Wartime regulation is often pictured as government imposing discipline on business. In this essay, Murray N. Rothbard reverses that picture: industrial leaders helped design and administer controls that, he argues, protected profits and curtailed competition. Steel price agreements, food licensing, and railroad guarantees make his case concrete, exposing the coercive powers behind ostensibly voluntary cooperation. His central concern is what survived demobilization—not simply agencies, but personnel, techniques, and an ideal of government-backed industrial coordination. Tracing these connections into Hoover’s associationism and the New Deal, Rothbard challenges the distinction between public planning and private privilege. The essay offers readers a pointed account of how emergency economic arrangements can become models for peacetime policy, and why businesses might welcome rather than resist federal intervention.

Conservatives, Rothbard charges, have long ceded the moral high ground to the Left, objecting to egalitarian programs only as impractical—a fatal concession, since ideals move the status quo. His 1973 essay therefore attacks the ideal itself. Equality, he argues, is intelligible only with respect to a specific attribute; taken literally it collapses into identity, and identity would demand coercive leveling of beauty, intelligence, and strength—the dystopias of Hartley's Facial Justice and Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron." Grounding human difference in biology as well as culture, he assails egalitarian readings of sex roles, youth quotas, and intelligence, then widens the charge from anthropology to ontology: utopian socialism from Fourier to Lenin becomes a revolt against the very structure of nature. Egalitarianism, he concludes, is not a humane ideal impeded by circumstance but something anti-human at its root.

The egalitarian world would necessarily be a world of horror fiction—a world of faceless and identical creatures, devoid of all individuality, variety, or special creativity.

Everything follows from a single axiom: no one may initiate physical violence against another person or their property. From that nonaggression principle Rothbard builds an uncompromising system that asks not for smaller government but for none at all, with privatized courts and police, homesteaded property, and the abolition of conscription, welfare, and the central bank. He grounds self-ownership in natural law rather than utilitarian calculation, derives civil liberties from control of material resources rather than treating them as a separate class of human rights, and reads the State as an organized criminal band living by taxation and war. Ranging across schooling, inflation, ecology, victimless crime, foreign policy, and stateless medieval Ireland, this manifesto casts libertarianism as the true heir of America's revolutionary radicalism.

In fact, there are no human rights that are separable from property rights.

Economics went astray when it took physics for its model and positivism for its badge of legitimacy—chasing controlled experiments where no variable stays fixed and where predictions alter the conditions they forecast. Rothbard's alternative is praxeology, the science that begins from the axiom that human beings act purposively toward chosen ends and deduces qualitative, if-then laws rather than numerical constants. He recovers a neglected lineage running through Jean-Baptiste Say, Cairnes, Senior, and the Austrians, and anchors it in methodological individualism: collectives such as 'society' and 'the state' are but shorthand for patterns of individual action. Forecasting, he insists, is an interpretive art akin to history rather than laboratory prediction, and econometrics a misplaced search for constants in human affairs.

Only an individual has a mind; only an individual can feel, see, sense, and perceive; only an individual can adopt values or make choices; only an individual can act.

Between Keynesian fiscal management and monetarist money-supply tinkering, Rothbard insists, almost no one considers a third path: removing government from money and the economy altogether. This compact 1973 introduction presents Ludwig von Mises as that neglected alternative, tracing his thought across nine chapters from the Menger–Böhm-Bawerk roots of marginal utility and time preference through the regression theorem, the integration of money into price theory, and the Austrian theory of the business cycle, where credit expansion breeds the malinvestment later liquidated in depression. It follows Mises's calculation argument against socialism, his praxeological method against positivism, the achievement of Human Action, and his marginalized years of exile at New York University. Rothbard reads stagflation and monetary disorder as vindication, offering Mises as both economic theorist and remedy for a civilization in crisis.

Human Action is IT; it is economics whole, developed from sound praxeological axioms, based squarely on analysis of acting man, the purposive individual as he acts in the real world.

A physician may prescribe because he and his patient share a premise—that health and life are good; the policy economist, by contrast, stands on no such common moral ground. Economics may remain a value-free causal science, Rothbard concedes, but the moment it enters policy it smuggles in ethics under neutral-sounding terms. He turns this charge on Pareto optimality, the unanimity and compensation principles, Coase-Demsetz property analysis, externality internalization, price-level stabilization, and national-income accounting, showing each to rest on unstated moral premises. Because utility is subjective and ordinal, no one can scientifically weigh one person's gain against another's loss; a stolen-watch sale, or the question of compensating slaveholders or slaves, turns on justice, not technique. Economists must defend their value judgments openly or quit policy altogether.

But “utility” is a purely subjective and unmeasurable concept, and being purely psychic, it cannot be measured, either conceptually or in practice.

A market transaction is not the transport of goods but the transfer of a title; free-market economists, Rothbard insists, therefore cannot defend voluntary exchange without also defending the justice of the ownership behind it. His 1974 essay presses this against the utilitarians Coase and Demsetz, whose deference to whatever government defines as property collapses, he argues, into legal positivism—ready to endorse arbitrary redistribution or even slavery so long as it is legal. Against them he builds a natural-rights theory from two principles: self-ownership of one's body, and the homesteading of unused nature through labor, from which exchange, wages, saving, and bequest follow. Applied to real titles it cuts both ways, condemning holdings rooted in conquest or state grant, as with coercive Latin American landlords, while validating many others—making it as anti-conservative as it is anti-socialist.

Whichever way he decides, the economist cannot escape a judgment, a theory of justice in the ownership of property.

The rioting and near civil war in Northern Ireland gives Rothbard the occasion to argue that anti-statism need not mean indifference to peoples under occupation. Libertarians who scorn national liberation as merely the manufacture of new nation-states become, he warns, the objective defenders of today's bloated empires—as the Russian anarchists did in 1918 when they opposed Ukrainian and White Russian independence. His decisive distinction separates aggressive nationalism, which rationalizes conquest, from liberatory nationalism, which resists it, and he treats "collective security" as a swindle that sanctifies borders first drawn by aggression. Applying a property-and-aggression analysis to political geography, he proposes that the Catholic-majority districts of Northern Ireland—Western Derry, Tyrone, Fermanagh, southern Armagh and Down—revert to the South.

Nationalism is not a unitary, monolithic phenomenon. If it is aggressive, we should oppose it; if liberatory, we should favor it.

Liberty against Power, social power against state power, that antithesis drives this sweeping narrative history of colonial America, running from the first seventeenth-century settlements through the Revolution and the Articles of Confederation. Rothbard rejects class conflict as the engine of events, reserving it for cases where groups seize government privilege, and applies a Lockean test of legitimate ownership by labor and first use against feudal grants, quitrents, and mercantilist monopoly. Puritan theocracy, Bacon's Rebellion, the persecution of Quakers, the Dominion of New England, and the market forces that dissolved wage-and-price controls all become episodes in one drama. Detailed narrative, long abandoned by textbook surveys, is restored here as the very substance of history.

The cleansing acid of profit was to dissolve incipient feudalism and land monopoly.

Delivered as an address in Brussels in 1974, this brief tribute remembers Ludwig von Mises less through doctrine than through bearing—the teacher who, in his New York seminar, still urged students to read German and who carried, for younger admirers, a last breath of the noble atmosphere of pre-1914 Vienna. Rothbard's estimate of the achievement is exact: Mises built an integrated structure of economics, methodology, philosophy, and history at a time when such architectonic systems had grown unfashionable, and it was precisely that scale the narrowing academy could not recognize. Neglect, on this reading, indicts the age rather than the man. From intellectual scale Rothbard turns to moral character—the courage to keep producing unfashionable truth without trimming principle for status—and closes by observing that Mises's influence was accelerating among younger scholars even after his death.

Every person is in some sense unique and irreplaceable, but I think it is fair to say that Ludwig von Mises was uniquely unique.

A one-year moratorium is all Rothbard asks for in this comic New Year's reprimand to the libertarian movement: no more survivalists urging flight to the hills with stockpiles of dried beans, no more escapist schemes to found liberty on offshore platforms and islands like Minerva, Abaco, or Atlantis, no more therapeutic chatter about open relationships and getting in touch with one's feelings, and, for good measure, a year without science fiction. Behind the satire runs a serious demand: liberty is won by disciplined engagement with actual institutions, not by fantasies of purity, withdrawal, or self-expression. Rothbard writes as an irritated insider who prefers a crippled market and urban comfort to any private Eden, insisting the movement come back and fight for freedom at home.

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

Should national currencies float freely against one another like any other market price? Milton Friedman and the Chicago School said yes; Rothbard's answer is that the question rests on a false analogy. A market makes sense between different goods, not between different units of the same good, and the dollar, pound, and franc were once merely names for definite weights of gold. Written after the collapse of Bretton Woods, this essay recasts the classical gold standard not as arbitrary price-fixing but as a monetary order in which exchange rates follow from fixed definitions, the way pounds and ounces do. Fluctuating fiat money, Rothbard argues, fractures the unit of account, works like a hidden tariff, invites inflation and exchange controls, and drifts back toward barter.

It is virtually a law of politics that government will use the power that it is given.