Murray Rothbard

Murray Rothbard
Rothbard c. 1994
Born	(1926-03-02)March 2, 1926 Bronx, New York, U.S.
Died	January 7, 1995(1995-01-07) (aged 68) New York City, New York, U.S.
Nationality	American
Academic career
Field	Economics, Political economy, Natural law, Anarchism, Praxeology, Numismatics, Philosophy of law, Ethics, Economic history
Institution	Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
School or tradition	Austrian School
Alma mater	Columbia University
Influences	Hayek, Locke, Mises, Ayn Rand, Spooner, Tucker, Harper
Contributions	Anarcho-capitalism, natural law theory, and historical revisionism

Murray Newton Rothbard (/ˈmɜːri ˈrɑːθˌbɑːrd/; March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American political theorist whose writings and personal influence played a seminal role in the development of modern libertarianism. An advocate and theoretician of anarcho-capitalism and historical revisionism, Rothbard became a central figure associated with the libertarian movement, writing over twenty books on anarchist theory, history, economics, and other subjects. An economist of the Austrian School, Rothbard held a Ph.D in economics from Columbia University. From 1963 to 1985, Rothbard taught at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, in Brooklyn, New York. From 1986 until his death he was the S. J. Hall Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Rothbard was a leading influence on the development of anarcho-capitalism. In the words of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, "There would be no anarcho-capitalist movement to speak of without Rothbard." He wrote that the state is "the organization of robbery systematized and writ large" and the locus of unscrupulous individuals. Rothbard asserted that all services provided by what he called the "monopoly system of the corporate state" could be provided more efficiently by the private sector. He considered central banking and fractional reserve banking under a monopoly fiat money system a form of financial fraud, antithetical to libertarian principles and ethics. Rothbard opposed military, political, and economic interventionism in the affairs of other nations.

Life and work

Rothbard with his wife, JoAnn Schumacher

Rothbard was born to Jewish parents, David and Rae Rothbard, and raised in Bronx, New York. His father, a chemist, "emigrated to the United States from a Polish shtetl in 1910, impoverished and knowing not a word of English", while his mother came from Russia. Rothbard wrote of having grown up as a "right-winger" (adherent of the "Old Right") among family, friends and neighbors who were "communists or fellow-travelers." In contrast, he recalled that "all socialism seemed to [him] monstrously coercive and abhorrent." He attended Columbia University, where received a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics in 1945 and his PhD in economics, under Joseph Dorfman, in 1956. He later stated that all of his fellow students there were extreme leftists. His thesis title was "Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics".

During the early 1950s, Rothbard attended the seminar of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises at New York University and was greatly influenced by Mises' book, Human Action. Rothbard attracted the attention of the William Volker Fund, a group that provided financial backing to promote various "right-wing" ideologies in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Volker Fund paid Rothbard to write a textbook to explain Human Action in a fashion suitable for college students; a sample chapter he wrote on money and credit won Mises’s approval. As Rothbard continued his work, he enlarged the project. The result was Rothbard's book Man, Economy, and State, published in 1962. Upon its publication, Mises praised Rothbard's work effusively and, for Mises, uncharacteristically.

From 1963 to 1985, Rothbard taught at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, in Brooklyn, New York where he was a professor with an endowed chair paid for by an admirer of his work. From 1986 until his death he was the S. J. Hall Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Rothbard founded the Center for Libertarian Studies in 1976 and the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1977. He was associated with the 1982 creation of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and was vice president of academic affairs until 1995. In 1987, he started a journal called Review of Austrian Economics, now called the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

In 1953, in New York City, he married JoAnn Schumacher (1928–1999), whom he called the "indispensable framework" for his life and work. He died in 1995 in Manhattan of a heart attack. The New York Times obituary called Rothbard "an economist and social philosopher who fiercely defended individual freedom against government intervention." His widow, JoAnn Rothbard, died four years later.

Ethical and political views

Rothbard, c. 1955

In Man, Economy, and State Rothbard divides the various kinds of state intervention in three categories: "autistic intervention", which is interference with private non-economic activities; "binary intervention", which is forced exchange between individuals and the state; and "triangular intervention", which is state-mandated exchange between individuals. According to Sanford Ikeda, Rothbard's typology "eliminates the gaps and inconsistencies that appear in Mises's original formulation."

Rothbard writes in Power and Market that the role of the economist in a free market is limited but is much larger in a government that solicits economic policy recommendations. Rothbard argues that self-interest therefore prejudices the views of many economists in favor of increased government intervention.

In the late 1940s, Rothbard questioned why, under laissez-faire economics, private police protection could not replace government protective services and in 1949 came to the conclusion it could. He was influenced by nineteenth-century American individualist anarchists, like Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker, and the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari who wrote about how such a system could work. Thus he "combined the laissez-faire economics of Mises with the absolutist views of human rights and rejection of the state" from individualist anarchists.

Rothbard parted with Mises on the issue of ethics, since Mises preferred to avoid ethical arguments and show that interventionist economic laws failed to achieve their goals. Rothbard held that interventionist laws did in fact benefit some, including even people who might be destructive, and therefore an ethical basis for the free market was necessary. His principle was "self-ownership". Applying this to contract law, he wrote that it was not ethical for people to contract themselves into slavery. Rothbard's ethical views also were influenced by classical liberalism and the anti-imperialism of the Old Right.

In 1954, Rothbard, along with several other students of Ludwig von Mises, such as George Reisman and Ralph Raico, associated with novelist Ayn Rand, the founder of Objectivism. He soon parted from her, writing, among other things, that her ideas were not as original as she proclaimed but similar to those of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Herbert Spencer. In 1958, after the publication of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, Rothbard wrote a "fan letter" to Rand, calling her book "an infinite treasure house," and "not merely the greatest novel ever written, it is one of the very greatest books ever written, fiction or nonfiction." He also wrote that "you introduced me to the whole field of natural rights and natural law philosophy," prompting him to learn "the glorious natural rights tradition." He rejoined her circle for a few months, but soon broke with Rand over various differences, including his defense of anarchism. Later, Rothbard lampooned Rand's circle in his play Mozart Was a Red and essay, "The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult."

Rothbard opposed what he considered the overspecialization of the academy and sought to fuse the disciplines of economics, history, ethics, and political science to create a "science of liberty." Rothbard described the moral basis for his anarcho-capitalist position in two of his books: For a New Liberty, published in 1973, and The Ethics of Liberty, published in 1982. In his Power and Market (1970), Rothbard describes how a stateless economy might function.

Ethics

In The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard asserts the right of absolute self-ownership as the only principle compatible with a moral code that applies to every person—a "universal ethic"—and that it is a natural law by being what is naturally best for man. He argued that, as a result, individuals owned the fruits of their labor. Accordingly, each person had the right to exchange his property with others. He also advocated for Lockean homesteading, arguing that if an individual mixes his labor with unowned land then he is the proper owner, and from that point on it is private property that may only change hands by trade or gift. Rothbard later accepted and endorsed Hans Hermann Hoppe's argumentation ethics, calling it a "dazzling breakthrough" in libertarianism.

Anarcho-capitalism

Rothbard began to consider himself a private property anarchist in the 1950s and later began to use "anarcho-capitalist". In his anarcho-capitalist model, a system of protection agencies compete in a free market and are voluntarily supported by consumers who choose to use their protective and judicial services. Anarcho-capitalism would mean the end of the state monopoly on force.

Rothbard was equally condemning of relationships he perceived between big business and big government. He cited many instances where business elites co-opted government's monopoly power so as to influence laws and regulatory policy in a manner benefiting them at the expense of their competitive rivals. According to Rothbard, one example of such cronyism included grants of monopolistic privilege the railroads derived from sponsoring conservation laws.

Noninterventionism

Believing, like Randolph Bourne, that "war is the health of the state," Rothbard opposed aggressive foreign policy. In 1964, he wrote that "deplorable American imperialism" is the "main issue of our time." Rothbard believed that stopping new wars was necessary and knowledge of how government had seduced citizens into earlier wars was important. Two essays expanded on these views "War, Peace, and the State" and "The Anatomy of the State." Rothbard used insights of the elitism theorists Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels to build a model of state personnel, goals, and ideology. In an obituary for his friend historical revisionist Harry Elmer Barnes, Rothbard explained why historical knowledge is important:

Our entry into World War II was the crucial act in foisting a permanent militarization upon the economy and society, in bringing to the country a permanent garrison state, an overweening military-industrial complex, a permanent system of conscription. It was the crucial act in creating a mixed economy run by Big Government, a system of state-monopoly capitalism run by the central government in collaboration with Big Business and Big Unionism.

Rothbard also made a distinction between "narrow" and "broad" historical revisionism. He wrote that Barnes was a "broad Revisionist" who "understood that the main problem has been war and peace, and that his main concern was not to weep over Germany, but to oppose a world-wide escalation of war."

Rothbard discussed his views on the principles of a libertarian foreign policy in a 1973 interview: "The libertarian position, generally, is minimize State power as much as possible, down to zero, and isolationism is the full expression in foreign affairs of the domestic objective of whittling down State power." He further called for "abstinence from any kind of American military intervention and political and economic intervention." In For a New Liberty he writes: "In a purely libertarian world, therefore, there would be no 'foreign policy' because there would be no States, no governments with a monopoly of coercion over particular territorial areas."

In his essay, "War Guilt in the Middle East," Rothbard accuses Israel of "aggression against Middle East Arabs," confiscatory policies, and "refusal to let these refugees return and reclaim the property taken from them." According to an essay attributed to Rothbard at lewrockwell.com, Rothbard wrote that critics of the state of Israel have to suffer "organized Anti-Anti-Semitism".

Rothbard criticized as state terrorism the actions of the United States, Israel, and any nation that "retaliates" against innocents because they cannot pinpoint actual perpetrators. He held that no retaliation that injures or kills innocent people is justified, writing that "[a]nything else is an apologia for unremitting and unending mass murder."

Children and rights

In the Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard explores in terms of self-ownership and contract several contentious issues regarding children's rights. These include support for a woman's right to abortion, condemnation of parents showing aggression towards children, and opposition to the state forcing parents to care for children, including those with severe health problems. He also holds children have the right to "run away" from parents and seek new guardians as soon as they are able to choose to do so. He suggested parents have the right to put a child out for adoption or even sell the rights to the child in a voluntary contract, which he feels is more humane than artificial governmental restriction of the number of children available to willing and often superior parents.

He also discusses how the current juvenile justice system punishes children for making "adult" choices, such as underage drinking or sex, removing children unnecessarily and against their will from parents, often putting them in uncaring and even brutal foster care or juvenile facilities, while at the same time denying to them those legal rights adults enjoy, such as trial by jury or provision of a written transcript of their court proceedings.

Anti-egalitarianism

In a 1963 article, Rothbard wrote that "the Negro Revolution has some elements that a libertarian must favor, others that he must oppose. Thus, the libertarian opposes compulsory segregation and police brutality, but also opposes compulsory integration and such absurdities as ethnic quota systems in jobs." According to Rothbard biographer Justin Raimondo, Rothbard considered Malcolm X to be a "great black leader” and Martin Luther King to be favored by whites because he “was the major restraining force on the developing Negro revolution." Rothbard also compared Lyndon B. Johnson's use of troops to crush urban riots in 1968 after King's assassination to Johnson's use of American troops in the Vietnam War.

The title essay of Rothbard's 1974 book Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays held, "Equality is not in the natural order of things, and the crusade to make everyone equal in every respect (except before the law) is certain to have disastrous consequences." In it, Rothbard wrote, "At the heart of the egalitarian left is the pathological belief that there is no structure of reality; that all the world is a tabula rasa that can be changed at any moment in any desired direction by the mere exercise of human will."

Opining on the favorable response to Charles Murray's book The Bell Curve, Rothbard wrote in 1994, during his "paleolibertarian" period, that neoconservatives and liberal statists suppressed academic research on racial difference in intelligence in order to support their goal of using the state to enforce egalitarian goals. He wrote that "while neocons and liberals want the planners and national statists to sort, subsidize, and control, for which they need scientific data such as intelligence as guides, paleos are very different. Paleos believe in Liberty; paleos believe in the rights of person and property; paleos want no government subsidizers or controllers. Paleos want Big Government off all of our backs, be we smart or dumb, black, brown or white." As a means to this end, he regarded the study of similarities and differences between different ethnic groups—what he termed "racialist science"—as "an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors."

Political activism

Rothbard at the 1983 Libertarian presidential convention in New York City.

As a young man, Rothbard considered himself part of the Old Right, an anti-statist and anti-interventionist branch of the Republican Party. In the 1948 presidential election, Rothbard, "as a Jewish student at Columbia, horrified his peers by organizing a Students for Strom Thurmond chapter, so staunchly did he believe in states’ rights." Years later, he would look back on his support for Thurmond as "naïve":

I actually believed that the States' Rights Party would continue to become a major party and destroy what was then a one-party Democratic monopoly in the South. In that way, an Old Right, Midwestern Republican coalition with States' Rights Democrats could become the majority party!

When interventionist cold warriors of the National Review, such as William F. Buckley, Jr., gained influence in the Republican Party in the 1950s, Rothbard quit the party, walking out for good when moderate Dwight Eisenhower defeated Old Right stalwart Robert A. Taft for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination. He would go on to support Democrat Adlai Stevenson in that year's election, "largely as the only way to get the Wall Street incubus off the back of the Republican Party."

By the late 1960s, Rothbard's "long and winding yet somehow consistent road had taken him from anti-New Deal and anti-interventionist Robert Taft supporter into friendship with the quasi-pacifist Nebraska Republican Congressman Howard Buffett (father of Warren Buffett) then over to the League of (Adlai) Stevensonian Democrats and, by 1968, into tentative comradeship with the anarchist factions of the New Left." Rothbard advocated an alliance with the New Left anti-war movement, on the grounds that the conservative movement had been completely subsumed by the statist establishment. However, Rothbard later criticized the New Left for supporting a "People's Republic" style draft. It was during this phase that he associated with Karl Hess and founded Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought with Leonard Liggio and George Resch, which existed from 1965 to 1968. From 1969 to 1984 he edited The Libertarian Forum, also initially with Hess (although Hess's involvement ended in 1971).

Rothbard criticized the "frenzied nihilism" of left-wing libertarians, but also criticized right-wing libertarians who were content to rely only on education to bring down the state; he believed that libertarians should adopt any non-immoral tactic available to them in order to bring about liberty.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Rothbard was active in the Libertarian Party. He was frequently involved in the party's internal politics. He was one of the founders of the Cato Institute, and "came up with the idea of naming this libertarian think tank after Cato’s Letters, a powerful series of British newspaper essays by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon which played a decisive influence upon America's Founding Fathers in fomenting the Revolution."

From 1978 to 1983, he was associated with the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus, allying himself with Justin Raimondo, Eric Garris and Williamson Evers. He opposed the "low-tax liberalism" espoused by 1980 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ed Clark and Cato Institute president Edward H Crane III. According to Charles Burris, "Rothbard and Crane became bitter rivals after disputes emerging from the 1980 LP presidential campaign of Ed Clark carried over to strategic direction and management of Cato."

Burton Blumert, Lew Rockwell, David Gordon, and Rothbard.

Rothbard split with the Radical Caucus at the 1983 national convention over cultural issues and aligned himself with what he called the "right-wing populist" wing of the party, notably Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul, who ran for President on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988. "Rothbard worked closely with Lew Rockwell (joined later by his long-time friend Burt Blumert) in nurturing the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and the publication, The Rothbard-Rockwell Report; which after Rothbard’s 1995 death evolved into the popular website, LewRockwell.com."

In 1989, Rothbard left the Libertarian Party and began building bridges to the post-Cold War anti-interventionist right, calling himself a paleolibertarian. He supported the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan in 1992, and wrote that "with Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy."

In 1992 Rothbard argued that white nationalist and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke had won a majority of the white vote in a losing gubernatorial election in Louisiana by running as a "right-wing populist", an ideology Rothbard embraced. According to Reason, Rothbard advocated right-wing populism in part because he was frustrated that mainstream thinkers were not adopting the libertarian view and suggested that Duke and former Wisconsin U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy were models for an "Outreach to the Rednecks" effort that could be used by a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition. In discussing what he called the "hysteria" against Duke, whom he noted was newly converted to Christianity, Rothbard described "right wing populism" as opposition to a "statist world dominated by a ruling elite, consisting of a coalition of Big Government, Big Business, and various influential special interest groups". Rothbard also argued that there was "nothing" in Duke's political program that "could not also be embraced by paleoconservatives or paleo-libertarians; lower taxes, dismantling the bureaucracy, slashing the welfare system, attacking affirmative action and racial set-asides, calling for equal rights for all Americans, including whites."

Like Buchanan, Rothbard opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). However, later he became disillusioned with Buchanan, believing that the latter's "commitment to protectionism was mutating into an all-round faith in economic planning and the nation state." Rothbard then shifted his interest and support to Ross Perot, who Rothbard wrote had "brought an excitement, a verve, a sense of dynamics and of open possibilities to what had threatened to be a dreary race." Rothbard ultimately supported George Bush over Bill Clinton in the 1992 election.

After Rothbard's death in 1995 Llewellyn Rockwell, President of the von Mises Institute, told the New York Times that Rothbard was "the founder of right-wing anarchism." William F. Buckley wrote a bitter obituary in the National Review criticizing Rothbard's "defective judgment" and views on the Cold War. The von Mises Institute published Murray N. Rothbard, In Memoriam which included memorials from 31 individuals, including libertarians and academics. In 1999 Murray Rothbard was ranked as number 13 in Time magazine's "Person of the Century" poll, above Bill Gates, Franklin Roosevelt and Nelson Mandela.

Economic writings

File:Rothbard-MES.jpg

Cover of the 2009 edition of Man, Economy, and State

Main article: Austrian School

Rothbard adopted von Mises' deductive method of economic thinking. He was contemptuous of John Maynard Keynes and he rejected the utilitarian principles of mainstream welfare economics. Rothbard argued that even national security and individual protection services should be offered in a private, competitive market and not supplied by government. Economist Bryan Caplan wrote that Rothbard's view of welfare economics "implausably den[ies] the coherence of the theory of public goods" and calls Rothbard's theory of choice "inadequate."

Free banking

See also Free banking, Gold standard, and Monetary reform

Rothbard believed that governments' exclusive authority over the regulation of money and credit was inherently destructive. Rothbard called the world's current monetary institutions, a "dismal monetary and banking situation," and he strongly opposed central banking, fiat money, and fractional reserve banking, which he called "legalized counterfeiting," institutionalized embezzlement and inherently fraudulent. Rothbard believed that, if there were a 100% reserve requirement and no central bank, privately issued gold-backed monies would predominate.

Historical revisionism

Rothbard embraced “historical revisionism” as an antidote to what he perceived to be the dominant influence corrupt “court intellectuals” exerted over mainstream historical narratives. These mainstream intellectuals, alleged Rothbard, distorted the historical record in favor of “the state” in exchange for “power, prestige, and loot” from the state. Rothbard characterized the revisionist task as “penetrating the fog of lies and deception of the State and its Court Intellectuals, and to present to the public the true history”.

Harry Elmer Barnes

Rothbard endorsed the revisionist work of controversial Columbia University historian Harry Elmer Barnes on World War II and the Cold War, and promoted him as an influence for revisionists. He praised Barnes for "single-handed[ly]" debunking what Rothbard considered to be myths about World War II, despite Barnes' (according to Rothbard) being virtually alone in his views, and "scorned by historians and laymen alike". Barnes also published in Rothbard's Left & Right journal, with Rothbard enthusiastically noting that "Harry ... [chose Rothbard's journal] to be his final word" on "the true story of Pearl Harbor", which Rothbard described as "the culminating synthesis of a quarter century of revisionist inquiry".

Barnes's revisionist work on World War II was known for its Holocaust Denial and its defense of Adolf Hitler's foreign policy as righting the wrongs of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. Though offering enthusiastic praise for Struggle Against the Historical Blackout and other controversial work of Barnes on World War II, Rothbard did not comment on Barnes's Holocaust Denial or his defense of Hitler's foreign policies.

Support for Confederacy in U.S. Civil War

Rothbard believed that the cause of the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War was one of only two just wars in American history. Characterizing the North as aggressors in what he called "the war for Southern Independence", he condemned the "Northern war against slavery" as borne of "fanatical" religious faith and characterized by "a cheerful willingness to uproot institutions, to commit mayhem and mass murder, to plunder and loot and destroy, all in the name of high moral principle". He also celebrated Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other prominent Confederates as heroes while condemning Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and other Union leaders for "open[ing] the Pandora's Box of genocide and the extermination of civilians" in their war against the South.

Personal life

In addition to economics, history, and philosophy, Rothbard took an intense personal interest in chess, German Baroque church architecture, and early jazz, among other subjects. Rothbard criticized the "degeneration" of jazz and popular song into bebop and rock music.

Although Rothbard's views towards religion were sympathetic, he was an atheist.

In his film reviews (printed under the pen name "Mr. First Nighter"), Rothbard criticized "slow, ponderous, boring" films which "reek of pretension and deliberate boredom," such as Juliet of the Spirits and The Piano. He generally praised films that represented "Old Culture" values which he felt were exemplified by the James Bond franchise: "marvelous plot, exciting action, hero vs. villains, spy plots, crisp dialogue and the frank enjoyment of bourgeois luxury and fascinating technological gadgets."

Rothbard enjoyed action movies such as The Fugitive and Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s, and praised Woody Allen's wit. He disliked Star Wars, "such a silly, cartoony, comic-strip movie that no one can possibly take it seriously," and 2001: A Space Odyssey, a "pretentious, mystical, boring, plotless piece of claptrap," calling for a return to science fiction films like It Came from Outer Space and "the incomparable Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

Bibliography

File:Rothbard-EconThought.jpg

Cover of the first volume of the 2006 Ludwig Von Mises Institute edition of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought

File:Rothbard-agd.jpg

Cover of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute's 2000 edition of America's Great Depression

Books

• Man, Economy, and State, D. Van Nostrand Co., 1962; Full text reprint of second edition (Scholar's Edition), Mises Institute, 2004, ISBN 0-945466-30-7
• The Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies, Columbia University Press, June 1962; Full text reprint, Mises Institute, 2004, ISBN 1-933550-08-2.
• America's Great Depression, D. Van Nostrand Co., 1973; Full text reprint, fifth edition, Mises Institute, 2005, ISBN 0-945466-05-6
• Power and Market: Government and the Economy, Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1970; Full text reprint, reattached to Man, Economy, and State, Mises Institute, 2004, ISBN 0-945466-30-7
• For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Collier Books, 1973, 1978; Full text reprint/Audio book, Mises Institute, ISBN 0-945466-47-1)
• The Essential von Mises, "Bramble Minibook", 1973; Full text reprint, Mises Institute, 1988
• Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, Libertarian Review Press, 1974; Full text reprint, Second edition, Mises Institute, 2000, ISBN 0-945466-23-4.
• Conceived in Liberty, (4 vol.), Arlington House Publishers 1975-1979; Full text collected in single volume, Mises Institute, 2012, ISBN 0-945466-26-9
• The Logic of Action (2 vol.), Edward Elgar Pub, 1997, ISBN 1-85898-015-1 and ISBN 1-85898-570-6; Full text reprint as Economic Controversies, Mises Institute, 2011
• The Ethics of Liberty, Humanities Press, 1982; New York University Press, 1998; Full text reprint/Audio Book, Mises Institute, ISBN 0-8147-7506-3
• The Mystery of Banking, Richardson and Snyder, Dutton, 1983; Full text reprint, Mises Institute, 2007, ISBN 978-1105528781
• The Case Against the Fed, Mises Institute, 1994; Full text reprint, Mises Institute, ISBN 0-945466-17-X
• An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, (2 vol.), Edward Elgar Pub, 1995, ISBN 0-945466-48-X; Full text reprints Vo1. 1 and Vol. 2, Mises Institute, 2009
• Making Economic Sense, Mises Institute, 2007, ISBN 0-945466-18-8; Full text reprint updated 7/15/2011 version
• The Betrayal of the American Right, Mises Institute publication of 1970s unpublished work, 2007, ISBN 978-1-933550-13-8, Full text reprint

Monographs

• The Case for the 100 Percent Gold Dollar, originally published in Leland B. Yeager (editor), In Search of a Monetary Constitution, Harvard University Press, 1962; published separately by Mises Institute, 1991, 2005, ISBN 0-945466-34-X; Full text reprint/Audio Book
• What Has Government Done to Our Money?, Pine Tree Press, 1963; Full text reprint, Mises Institute, 1980; Audio book, ISBN 0-945466-44-7
• Economic Depressions: Causes and Cures, Constitutional Alliance of Lansing, Michigan, 1969; Full text reprint, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007
• Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy, World Market Perspective, 1984; Center for Libertarian Studies, 1995, Mises Institute 2005; Full text reprint, Second edition, Mises Institute, 2011
• Education: Free and Compulsory, Center for Independent Education, 1972; Full text reprint, Mises Institute, 1999, ISBN 0-945466-22-6
• Individualism and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, introduction by Friedrich Hayek, Cato Institute, 1979, ISBN 0-932790-03-8

Articles/Essays

• Left and Right, Selected Essays 1954–65, (includes essays by Rothbard, Leonard Liggio, etc.), Arno Press (The New York Times Company), 1972, ISBN 0405004265; Mises Institute information page
• Richard M. Ebeling, (editor), The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle and Other Essays, (includes also essays by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Gottfried Haberler, Mises Institute, 1996, ISBN 0-945466-21-8; Full text reprint, Mises Institute, 2009

Collections

• Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., (editor), The Irrepressible Rothbard: The Rothbard-Rockwell Report Essays of Murray N. Rothbard, LewRockwell.com, 2000, ISBN 1-883959-02-0
• Joseph T. Salerno, (editor), A History of Money and Banking in the United States, ( Rothbard writings), Mises Institute, 2002, ISBN 0-945466-33-1, Full tex reprint
• Murray Rothbard, (editor), The Complete Libertarian Forum (1969–84; 2 vol.), 2006; Full text reprint at LewRockwell.com, ISBN 1-933550-02-3
• Roberta A. Modugno, Murray N. Rothbard vs. The Philosophers: Unpublished Writings on Hayek, Mises, Strauss, and Polanyi, Mises Institute, 2009, ISBN 978-1-933550-46-6; Full text reprint

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

Further reading

• Block, Walter E. (2003). "Toward a Libertarian Theory of Inalienability: A Critique of Rothbard, Barnett, Gordon, Smith, Kinsella and Epstein" (PDF). Journal of Libertarian Studies. 17 (2). SSRN 1889456. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Doherty, Brian (2007). Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. PublicAffairs. ISBN 1-58648-350-1
• Frech, H. E. (1973). "The public choice theory of Murray N. Rothbard, a modern anarchist". Public Choice. 14: 143–53. doi:10.1007/BF01718450. JSTOR 30022711.
• Hudík, Marek (2011). "Rothbardian demand: A critique". The Review of Austrian Economics. 24 (3): 311–8. doi:10.1007/s11138-011-0147-3.
• Klein, Daniel B. (2004). "Mere Libertarianism: Blending Hayek and Rothbard". Reason Papers. 27: 7–43. SSRN 473601. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Pack, Spencer J. (1998). "Murray Rothbard's Adam Smith" (PDF). The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. 1 (1): 73–9. doi:10.1007/s12113-998-1004-5.

External links

• Murray Rothbard at Mises.org Wiki
• Ludwig Von Mises YouTube page including several Rothbard videos
• Murray N. Rothbard Library and Resources
• Murray Rothbard Institute, Belgium
• Murray Rothbard at Find a Grave