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With all but two relatively obscure states—Rhode Island and North Carolina—having ratified the Constitution, the Confederation Congress was now ready to put the new federal government in place. As soon as New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify, Congress dutifully created a committee to get the new Constitution up and running. Only the

Doughty, courageous little Rhode Island was the last state left. It is generally assumed that—even by the most staunchly Antifederalist historians—Rhode Island could not conceivably have gone it alone as a separate nation. But such views are the consequence of a  mystique  of political frontiers, in which it is assumed that a mere change in

As the force of the New Deal reached its heights, both foreign and domestic, during World War II, a beleaguered and tiny libertarian opposition began to emerge and to formulate its total critique of prevailing trends in America. Unfortunately, the Left, almost totally committed to the cause of World War II as well as to extensions of the domestic

Of all the leading libertarian French economists of the mid- and late nineteenth centuries, the most unusual was the Belgian-born Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912). Born in Liege, the son of a Belgian physician and a baron who had been an officer in the Napoleonic army, Molinari spent most of his life in France, where he became a prolific and

[Chapter 3 of Rothbard’s newly edited and released Conceived in Liberty , vol. 5, The New Republic: 1784–1791 .] Every depression generates a clamor among many groups for special privileges at the expense of the rest of society—and the American depression that struck in 1784–1785 was no exception. If excess imports were the culprit, then voluntary

[These edited extracts, from an interview in the February 1973 issue of  Reason  magazine, first ran in the June 1999 issue of   the  Rothbard-Rockwell Report .] Q: Why, in your view, is isolationism an essential tenet of libertarian foreign policy? A: The libertarian position, generally, is to minimize state power as much as possible, down to

[Chapter 5 of Rothbard’s newly edited and released  Conceived in Liberty , vol. 5,   The New Republic: 1784–1791 .] A severe depression, bank contraction, a heavy burden of taxes to pay state debts, all this turned men’s thoughts to issuing paper money to finance government. Historians influenced by the Populist struggles of the late nineteenth

[Part II of Rothbard’s newly edited and released  Conceived in Liberty, vol. 5,  The New Republic: 1784–1791 .] The Old Northwest With the cession of the claims of Virginia and other states to the lands of the Old Northwest, and the passage of its Ordinance of 1784 (applying to  all  western lands), Congress had nationalized the public domain and

[Chapter 11 of Rothbard’s newly edited and released  Conceived in Liberty , vol. 5,   The New Republic: 1784–1791 .] Massachusetts suffered particularly from the economic aftermath of the Revolutionary War as its fisheries trade was cut off and its exports to the West Indies were sharply curtailed. Furthermore, the grandiose postwar funding of the

[Chapter 12 of Rothbard’s newly edited and released  Conceived in Liberty , vol. 5,   The New Republic: 1784–1791 .] By 1787, the nationalist forces were in a far stronger position than during the Revolutionary War to make their dreams of central power come true. Now, in addition to the reactionary ideologues and financial oligarchs, public