The archive.

Could the New Left’s demand for participatory democracy lead toward free markets rather than centralized planning? In this 1965 essay, Murray N. Rothbard finds potential allies among civil rights organizers, antiwar students, and rebels against bureaucratic universities. His interest lies in what they do: organize Freedom Schools, resist conscription, and build institutions outside established channels of authority. Against both the Old Left’s reliance on government and the Right’s support for militarism, he reads these experiments as forms of libertarian resistance. Yet his sympathy is also an attempt at persuasion: the market society he proposes is his destination, not an agreed New Left objective. The essay exposes both the practical grounds for cooperation and the unresolved economic disagreements within this proposed alliance.

Strip away the civic pieties and the State stands revealed, in this 1965 essay, as something other than society organized for the common good. Rothbard opposes the comfortable equation of government with "we the people," insisting that taxation, conscription, and imprisonment are impositions by one organized group upon another. Borrowing Franz Oppenheimer's distinction between the "economic means" of production and exchange and the "political means" of seizure, he casts the State as the institutionalized political means—born of conquest and tribute, not social contract. Because rulers are always a minority, they enlist intellectuals to manufacture legitimacy; because constitutions are interpreted by the very power they would bind, limits become licenses. War, feared alongside revolution, is the great engine of expansion. History itself becomes a race between social power and State power, cooperation against predation.

It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale.

Rothbard's method here is selective inheritance: keep Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker's stateless politics, discard their economics. He honors the pair for carrying individualist anarchism from anti-state protest into a positive model of voluntary society—Spooner's likening of taxation to a highwayman's threat crystallizes the shared premise—yet parts from them on two political points and one economic core. Ad hoc jury-made law, he insists, must yield to an objective libertarian legal code; occupancy-and-use land tenure must yield to Lockean acquisition and free transfer. The heart of the critique is monetary: their mutualism, inheriting the labor theory of value, wrongly treats rent, interest, and profit as exploitation. Drawing on time preference, Rothbard argues that interest would persist even in barter, and that genuine free banking would yield harder money rather than endless credit.

The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: “Your money or your life.”

What can sustain a lifelong, costly alienation from the status quo when victory seems distant? Rothbard dismisses the thin answers—liberty as intellectual amusement, or as a route to private profit—and rejects even utilitarian forecasts of abundance as too weak to command sacrifice. The durable ground, he insists, is a passion for justice, and his central move is to distinguish injustice from misfortune: poverty yields only slowly to capital and time, but injustice is an action men inflict on other men and can therefore cease at once. English rule in Ireland, wage and price controls, chattel slavery—each could be ended by will. Invoking Leonard Read's button and William Lloyd Garrison's demand for immediate emancipation, Rothbard casts the true libertarian as a radical abolitionist who states the end without dilution.

In framing principle, it is of the utmost importance not to mix in strategic estimates with the forging of desired goals.

Historical circumstances can explain an economist’s changing views—but can they establish whether those views were sound? This distinction animates Murray N. Rothbard’s review of Melvin M. Leiman’s study of the Charleston editor Jacob N. Cardozo. Rothbard welcomes Leiman’s attention to both economic analysis and policy, while resisting his tendency to treat Cardozo’s shifts in banking theory as appropriate responses to institutional change. The disagreement becomes concrete over specie redemption: Rothbard challenges the description of banks’ exemption from contractual obligations as “laissez faire.” His brief review offers a pointed encounter between historical explanation and theoretical judgment, alongside glimpses of Cardozo’s distinction between monetary and real returns and Rothbard’s questions about the publicly borne costs omitted from calculations of slavery’s profitability.

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?