The archive.

All economics unfolds from a single axiom: that human action is purposeful behavior. Building deductively from that Misesian starting point, the first volume of Rothbard's treatise—here in the German translation of the 1962 English original—derives the whole architecture of the market: marginal utility and the ordinal value scale, the emergence of money from barter through Mises's regression theorem, time preference and the pure rate of interest, and the evenly rotating economy as a mental tool for isolating market tendencies. Rothbard insists throughout that costs of production are at the mercy of the final price, not the reverse, and that capital goods are intermediate stations reducible to land, labor, and time rather than an independent source of value. Praxeology, not psychology or mathematics, supplies the method.

Jede Handlung ist ein Versuch, einen weniger befriedigenden Zustand gegen einen befriedigenderen zu tauschen.

English translation: “Every action is an attempt to exchange a less satisfactory state for a more satisfactory one.”

No account of law, rights, or the state can pretend to be value-neutral: to speak of what people may do to one another is already to take an ethical stand. From that opening Rothbard builds the moral foundation his earlier economics deliberately withheld — a natural-law theory holding that liberty is not merely efficient but required by human nature. Rights reduce to self-ownership and to homesteading, the mixing of labor with unowned resources; a contract binds only where it transfers title to alienable property; and taxation is recast as institutionalized aggression against rightful owners. Reviving natural law as a radical standard rather than a conservative inheritance, he indicts the minimal state as fiercely as the total one, and answers Nozick, Hayek, Berlin, and Mises in turn. The result is a complete anarcho-capitalist ethics of person and property.

Taxation is theft, purely and simply, even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match.

Borrowing the prestige of physics to study human beings is, for Rothbard, not science but scientism—the uncritical transfer of methods fit for stones to creatures who choose. Reprinted from Scientism and Values, this essay grounds a science of man in the axiom of volition: because people possess consciousness and free will, praxeology, psychology, technology, and ethics are intelligible where mechanistic determinism would render them absurd. Rothbard dismantles two families of false analogy—the mechanical, which reduces persons to servomechanisms, equations, and equilibria, and the organismic, which inflates "society" and "the public" into living wholes with purposes of their own. Against Weberian Wertfreiheit he charges that claimed neutrality often smuggles in majority values, and defends an axiomatic-deductive method over positivist experiment.

Scientism is the profoundly unscientific attempt to transfer uncritically the methodology of the physical sciences to the study of human action.

National-income statistics fold government spending into "national product" as if a dollar taxed and spent were a dollar of output that consumers had chosen—and that sleight of hand is Rothbard's target. Market productivity, he argues, is validated only by voluntary purchase under scarcity; a million unwanted buggies are not "product" in the sense that chosen automobiles are. Government, funded by coercive confiscation and measured merely by its expenditures, cannot be run like a business and feeds parasitically on the private economy. He proposes subtracting state outlays from national product rather than adding them, answers Galbraith's complaint that public wants are starved by noting that the failing schools and streets cited already lie under government control, and rejects external-benefit defenses of public provision.

But in the public sector, the government's "productivity" is measured—mirabile dictu—by how much it spends!

Liberty belongs on the revolutionary Left, not with conservatism—this is the wager that organizes Rothbard's sweeping reconstruction of the political spectrum. Classical liberalism, he argues, was originally radical, anti-feudal, and internationalist, the force that overthrew the Old Order of caste, theocracy, and militarism; it decayed only when natural rights gave way to utilitarian compromise. Socialism enters as a confused heir, chasing liberal ends through the conservative means of state power. Following Gabriel Kolko, Rothbard reads American Progressivism and the New Deal not as socialist ruptures but as state monopoly capitalism, in which business secured through regulation the privilege it could not win in competition. Mid-century libertarians erred by mistaking conservatives for allies; the corrective, he insists, is a movement that recovers its antiwar, anti-privilege inheritance and trades short-run despair for long-run confidence.

It was, and still is, middle-of-the-road because it tries to achieve liberal ends by the use of conservative means.

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.

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.

"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.