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Probably the most common question that has been hurled at me—in some exasperation—over the years is: “Why don’t you stick to economics?” For different reasons, this question has been thrown at me  by fellow economists and by political thinkers and activists of many different persuasions: Conservatives, Liberals, and Libertarians who have disagreed

An audio version of this Mises Wire is available here . The key issue in the entire discussion is simply this: shall the parent or the State be the overseer of the child? An essential feature of human life is that, for many years, the child is relatively helpless, that his powers of providing for himself mature late. Until these powers are fully

Everyone will agree that the American tax system is a mess. Taxes are far too high, and the patchwork system is so complicated that even IRS officials don’t understand it. Hence the evident need for some sort of dramatic, even drastic, reform. As often happens, a group of dedicated and determined reformers has arisen to satisfy that need. But

Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 18, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 487–561 Editor’s Foreword This present work is an unpublished chapter of Murray N. Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State (hereafter MES) (2009 [1962]). Titled “Chapter 5: Producer’s Activity,” it was meant to be the fifth chapter of the book and the first on production theory. In it,

[Reprinted from The Free Market (September 1985). Included in The Rothbard Reader .] It was a scene familiar to any nostalgia buff: all-night lines waiting for the banks (first in Ohio, then in Maryland) to open; pompous but mendacious assurances by the bankers that all is well and that the people should go home; a stubborn insistence by

[Excerpt from The Origins of the Federal Reserve , reprinted in  The Rothbard Reader ] The Federal Reserve Act of December 23, 1913, was part and parcel of the wave of Progressive legislation, on local, state, and federal levels of government, that began about 1900. Progressivism was a bipartisan movement which, in the course of the first two

The Review of Austrian Economics , Volume 6, Number 1 (1992)

The Review of Austrian Economics , Volume 2, Number 1 (1989)

Originally published in Inquiry , July 1982.   With every passing year, as memories of the Vietnam War fade from our nation’s historical consciousness, the calls for America to reassert itself in the world arena grow more insistent. A proliferation of national-security think tanks and conservative publicists issue daily proclamations that all the

November 11 (Veteran’s Day) in the US was once known as Armistice Day, the day set aside to celebrate the end of the modern era’s bloodiest war (up to that time). In his essay “ World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals,” Murray Rothbard discusses the war as the triumph of several Progressive intellectual strains from the late 19th