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[This article is excerpted from chapter 16 of The Ethics of Liberty . Listen to this article in MP3 , read by Jeff Riggenbach. The entire book is being prepared for podcast and download .] Our theory of property rights can be used to unravel a tangled skein of complex problems revolving around questions of knowledge, true and false, and the

As in the case of blackmail , bribery has received a uniformly bad press, and it is generally assumed that bribery should be outlawed. But is this necessarily true? Let us examine a typical bribe contract. Suppose that Black wants to sell materials to the XYZ Company. In order to gain the sale, he pays a bribe to Green, the purchasing agent of the

[This article is taken from chapter 18 of The Ethics of Liberty .] A boycott is an attempt to persuade other people to have nothing to do with some particular person or firm — either socially or in agreeing not to purchase the firm’s product. Morally a boycott may be used for absurd, reprehensible, laudatory, or neutral goals. It may be used, for

[This article is taken from chapter 19 of The Ethics of Liberty . The full audiobook is available for download .] The right of property implies the right to make contracts about that property: to give it away or to exchange titles of ownership for the property of another person. Unfortunately, many libertarians, devoted to the right to make

[This article is taken from chapter 21 of The Ethics of Liberty . Listen to this article in MP3 , read by Jeff Riggenbach. The entire book is being prepared for podcast and download .] It has lately become a growing fashion to extend the concept of rights from human beings to animals, and to assert that since animals have the full rights of

The Nature of the State So far in this book, we have developed a theory of liberty and property rights, and have outlined the legal code that would be necessary to defend those rights. What of government, the State? What is its proper role, if any? Most people, including most political theorists, believe that once one concedes the importance, or

[This essay was published in Essays on Liberty , VIII (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1961), pp.255–261, and in The Freeman , June 1961, pp. 40–44.) It was republished in The Logic of Action Two (Edward Elgar, 1997, pp. 180 184). Rothbard had developed a similar argument in “The Politics of Political Economists:

Revisionism as applied to World War II and its origins (as also for previous wars) has the general function of bringing historical truth to an American and a world public that had been drugged by wartime lies and propaganda. This, in itself, is a virtue. But some truths of history, of course, may be largely of antiquarian interest, with little

[This article is excerpted from Murray Rothbard’s introduction to “ Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty ,” by Lysander Spooner. It is also available in PDF along with the full Spooner essay.] We are all indebted to Carl Watner for uncovering an unknown work by the great Lysander Spooner, one that managed to escape the editor of

[This essay is based on a paper presented at the April 1979 national meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Chicago. The theme of the meeting was “Conservatism and Libertarianism.”] Libertarianism is the fastest growing political creed in America today. Before judging and evaluating libertarianism, it is vitally important to find out precisely