The Free Market 26, no. 9 (September 2005)
[Originally written as an introduction to For A New Liberty]
There are many varieties of libertarianism alive in the world today, and they owe a great debt to the work of Ludwig von Mises. His top American student was Murray N. Rothbard, and Rothbardianism remains the center of its intellectual gravity, its primary muse and conscience, its strategic and moral core, and the focal point of debate even when its name is not acknowledged. The reason is that Rothbard forged a blend between Austrian economics and natural-rights political theory of the old liberal school to create a modern libertarianism, a political-economic-ideological system that proposes a once-and-for-all escape from the trappings of left and right and their central plans for how state power should be used. Libertarianism is the radical alternative that says state power is both unworkable and immoral.
“Mr. Libertarian,” Murray N. Rothbard was called, and “The State’s Greatest Living Enemy.” He remains so. Yes, he had many predecessors from which he drew: the whole of the classical-liberal tradition, the Austrian economists, the American antiwar tradition, and the natural-rights tradition. But it was he who put all these pieces together into a unified system that seems inevitable once it has been defined and defended. The individual pieces of the system are straightforward (self-ownership, strict property rights, free markets, anti-state in every conceivable respect) but the implications are earthshaking.
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