Presented at "Libertython" at New York University on September 20, 1980, sponsored by the NYU chapter of Students for a Libertarian Society. For Rothbard, there was nothing more important than the issue of war and peace.
While searching through my apartment after a tragic fire, under soot and ash, I found these “lost” Rothbard lectures, recorded at NYU in 1979 and 1980.
Presented at New York University on December 4, 1979, the central theme of Rothbard’s lecture is the conflict between “Liberty” and “Power” throughout history.
The Puritan impulse for social reform produced social control that has been secularized, centralized, and has achieved a kind of permanence within government bureaucracy.
The resurgent claim that the modern economy was built on slavery is yet another attempt to attack capitalism while also claiming "we are all to blame" for slavery. The slave owners of old tried a very similar tactic.
Rising property values are nice for those who own property, but they raise the barriers to home ownership and business startups for everybody else.
If violence is the key to creating wealth, as Desmond insinuates, then the communist nations would have created fabulous amounts of wealth given the brutality of 20th-century Stalinism.
Defenders of slavery so vehemently opposed free labor, they claimed the "wage slavery" system was even worse than slave labor. The idea being that slavery is morally superior to wage labor.
The resurgent claim that the modern economy was built on slavery is yet another attempt to attack capitalism while also claiming "we are all to blame" for slavery. The slave owners of old tried a very similar tactic.
Slavery was a monstrously unfair and immoral institution. It was also inefficient, compared to a system based on free labor.
