Simon Franek brings us another piece of buried treasure from the FEE archive. This time it is Murray Rothbard’s article “Laissez-Faire Rides Again” from the February 1973 edition of Intellectual Discourse. Click the image below for the PDF.
Murray Rothbard depicted as a dragon slayer in the April 18th, 1993 edition of the Las Vegas Review-Journal
After reading about this image in Joseph Becker’s article, “Memories of Rothbard at UNLV“, I really wanted to see it. First I looked for it on search engines, but it was nowhere to be found. After that I tried to find a copy of the newspaper that Becker cited in online databases, but all I found was the text of the articles. Frustrated, I checked the LVRJ website, which said to look for copies in the Clark County Library. Their website referred me to another online database that I could not access remotely.
Fortunately, a friend came to the rescue. She volunteered to go to Nevada and manually search through the library’s microfiche archive. She found the original newspaper images and sent them along. Thanks to her, now ancaps everywhere can enjoy this piece of anarcho-capitalist history.
The full text of the related article is below. Continue reading
Murray Rothbard was a prolific writer. Thanks to the Mises Institute, much of his work can be found online, but there are still many articles that anarcho-capitalists have never read because only physical copies exist. For one such article, that changes today.
Simon Franek sends along this article that he found in the FEE archive. It is from the May 1973 edition of New Libertarian Notes. Click the image below for the PDF.
Murray Rothbard gives a witty discussion of the history of socialism, and how it displaced the positive movement of classical liberalism in the 18th century.
This amusing video gives a taste of Murray Rothbard’s humor as he explains economics and the deleterious effects of government housing programs.
In his book, A Spontaneous Order: The Capitalist Case for a Stateless Society, Chase Rachels does an excellent job conveying insights from both libertarianism and economics. He uses clear explanations of basic concepts and persuasive examples for applications. He relentlessly identifies aggression as the root cause of society’s problems, and the state as the primary source of aggression. Most importantly, the book is permeated by a Rothbardian hatred of the state, which will make it an enjoyable read for any ancap.
Rachels makes frequent use of long passages quoted from other works. Thankfully these are drawn from some of the best sources on libertarianism and economics: Continue reading
In this video from 1981, David D. Friedman lists some unresolved problems with libertarianism and also tells some funny stories about Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Ayn Rand. In general, he thinks that libertarians are too confident in their ability to answer all real world problems given the current state of libertarian ethical theory. For anyone interested in the fundamentals of libertarianism, this video will be a lot of fun.
TL;DW: First, he is concerned that there is no pre-defined rule for quantifying the kind and quantity of punishment and restitution that is appropriate in response to crimes. Continue reading
