Why did Europe, and not China, become the dominant power of the modern world? It is a question that has kept historians arguing for decades, and for good reason. Around 1000 CE, China was arguably the more advanced civilization, with better engineering, a more sophisticated bureaucracy, and larger cities than anything Europe had to offer. And it was not just China. Japan and Korea also had relatively high human capital levels during the pre-industrial era and by several modern measures East Asians score higher on IQ tests than Europeans do. So if raw brain power explained who ends up on top, the map of scientific and industrial achievement today would look quite different. [continue reading…]
On Sept. 17–18, 2005, Professors Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Guido Hülsmann presented a two-day 11-lecture series, “Weekend Seminar in Austrian Economics,” in Klampenborg (just north of Copenhagen, Denmark), under the auspices of the Copenhagen Institute and Liberator. Program (local, and at right). See also Copenhagen Institute hosts Hoppe and Hülsmann, Mises Economics Blog (Sept. 1, 2005).
The entire series runs for roughly 10–12 hours and are collected on a PFS Playlist1 and also embedded below, along with a bonus video collecting clips from the lectures on the nature of money. [continue reading…]
Why not feel sorry for Exxon? – To say that the oil spill has been blown up to hysterical dimensions is a grave understatement. Hysteria abounds everywhere, and everywhere the term “disaster” is freely used. Even Pat Buchanan, who of all the media commentators I thought would be most resistant to the wiles of environmentalism, used that term. The Idiotic Overstatement Award of the Year goes to Alaska Judge Kenneth Rohl, who opined about the oil spill, “We have a man-made destruction that has not been equalled, probably, since Hiroshima.” [continue reading…]
Miss Rand was going on about something or other at which point Mises told her to be quiet and that she was being very foolish. The lady who could account for all her emotions at that point burst out into tears and complained, “You are treating me like a poor, ignorant little Jewish girl!” Mr. Hazlitt, attempting to bring serenity to his table, leaned over and said: “There, there, Ayn, that isn’t at all what Ludwig was suggesting.” But this attempt at conciliation was ruined when Mises jumped up and said: “That iss eggsactly what you ahrr!” Since all three participants were Jewish, this was not a racist slur. This story was mortal to her reputation as the lady of total self-control.
From the vault: Murray N. Rothbard, “Eyeing the Top of the Pyramid: Mr. Friedman at the Apex” (pp. 33–34) and various entries in the Reflections section (pp. 7–8, 11, 12–13), Liberty (May 1989).
Rothbard’s article is a response to Jeffrey Friedman’s article “The End of Political Activism” from the previous issue (March 1989), critiquing aspects of Rothbard’s approach to libertarian strategy and ideology, and also includes R.W. Bradford’s response, “What’s Wrong with Friedman’s Pyramid” (p. 34–36). [continue reading…]
Below is the video of the speech by Professor Anxo Bastos at 100 Years with Rothbard (Porto, Portugal, June 27, 2026), “Rothbard’s Contributions to the Austrian School.” See Cataláxia Editora Rothbard 100 Youtube playlist. Transcript and summary below.
Summary of Bastos’ Talk on Murray Rothbard’s Contributions to Economic Theory
In his speech at the 100th anniversary event for Murray Rothbard organized by the Mixos Institute in Portugal, speaker Bastos highlights three major contributions by Rothbard to Austrian economics, with a fourth overarching insight as the most important. [continue reading…]
Classic and beautiful piece by the late, great Ralph Raico, one of the original supporters of the founding of the PFS:1Grow Up, Canada, LewRockwell.com (April 24, 2002)
Grow Up, Canada!
Ralph Raico
April 24, 2002
Canadian bleeding hearts are moaning and groaning because an American fighter pilot decided to drop a big bomb on Canadian troops engaged in combat exercises on the ground in Afghanistan. Four Canadian soldiers were killed and several wounded, including at least one with life-threatening injuries.
Up in the Great White North, politicians, the press, and the man in the street are all aghast. One outraged Canuck went so far as to write to a newspaper: “Pull our soldiers out now! Let those war-hungry Americans who are just trying to stimulate their own economy and satisfy the many special interests of the elite, fight their own damn war.” Can you imagine – daring to besmirch America’s holy, endless War Against Terrorism! [continue reading…]
Some very good news for those students who attend theMises Universitythis summer (and following): The student who emerges from the oral examinations (the Mündliche Prüfung) with the best record, as chosen by the examining committee, will be awarded the Douglas E. French Scholarship Prize of $2,500. The winner will be announced and the prize money given at the final barbecue.3
—but that didn’t stop him from being unceremoniously ousted by Lew Rockwell in 2012, after he was lured to Auburn to become president in 2009.4
Related
Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Papinian Press and The Saif House, 2026) and various links and resources collected there
See especially Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Stephan Kinsella, “Appendix: Rothbard’s UNLV Evaluation and Syllabus,” in Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, including “Memo from Douglas E. French to Stephan Kinsella” as well as Rothbard’s annual faculty review at UNLV by Chairman Mark A. Thayer (1991), followed by Rothbard’s draft comment in reply, and two letters from Rothbard to Doug French (Dec. 3, 1992 and Dec. 11, 1992)
Re: “Bill Bradford entitled “Why Libertarians Love to Hate”: see Douglas E. French, “Rothbard as Teacher,” Liberty (May 1995), p. 14 & 69; Liberty (March, 1995), p. 13 (offering for sale video and audiotape of “Why Libertarians Hate,” by R.W. Bradford, from the Liberty Editors’ Conference in Tacoma, Washington, 1994)
French, “Reminiscences of Murray,” LewRockwell.com (April 8, 2005), republished as “Studying Under Murray,” in I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians, Walter Block, ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute 2010) (based on a talk was delivered on the occasion of receiving the Center for Libertarian Studies’ Murray N. Rothbard Award in recognition of his dedication to the ideals of liberty in the Rothbardian tradition);
French begins by honoring entrepreneurs who quietly transform lives, using Willis Haviland Carrier—the father of modern air conditioning—as a prime example. Carrier’s innovations, starting from a small engineering firm, enabled widespread comfort in homes, stores, theaters, and even entire cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, dramatically improving quality of life without seeking much personal credit. He contrasts this with negative cultural stereotypes of businessmen as greedy exploiters, rooted in Marxist theory, and celebrates real-world figures like entrepreneur Ron Yanke. Yanke, a larger-than-life, relentlessly energetic man, built multiple successful businesses, was pivotal in founding Micron Technology, and created opportunities for thousands while remaining humble, generous, and cheerful. French notes that such entrepreneurs make the world richer and fuller through capital accumulation, job creation, and innovation.
French then draws a parallel between Yanke’s personality and that of Murray Rothbard, describing Rothbard as the other constantly cheerful, vibrant person he had known. As a UNLV graduate student in the early 1990s with no prior exposure to Austrian economics or libertarianism, French enrolled in Rothbard’s History of Economic Thought course despite warnings that the professor was a “kook.” Rothbard’s lectures were electrifying: fast-paced, narrative-driven explorations of history and ideas—good guys versus bad guys—delivered without syllabi or roll calls, packed with references, and far superior to the graphs and statistics of conventional economics classes. Students returned semester after semester because Rothbard varied the content each time. [continue reading…]
No, not that country, as U.S. Senator John Fetterman explains, but “love and devotion” for Israel. Fetterman is a leading figure of what some are calling the “genocide caucus” of the U.S. Congress.
This version of “love of country” is also apparently a litmus test for Trump administration appointees.
idem, “A Strategy for the Right,” Rothbard-Rockwell Report (March 1992), included in Rothbard, The Irrepressible Rothbard, though the book erroneously indicates Jan. 1992 (instead of March 1992) and omits the first three paragraphs of the original essay for no reason
Obvious truths are often the ones that need repetition, because we grow so accustomed to them, that we risk forgetting their importance. One such truth is this: Rothbardian cultural conservatism has nothing to do with political conservatism.
These are two very different things, hiding under the same name. This can lead, and indeed has led to, dangerous cases of idola theatri, where the usage of the same word hides the irreconcilable difference between two ideas. Hence, in order to avoid this idol, we must invest in definition.
In the “Rothbard at 100” event in Porto, Portugal, 2026, Fernando Chiocca gave a speech that can be called, without exaggeration, historic. In it, he distinguished between true and false Rothbardianism based on 6 systematically integrated points. These are the “dogmas” any Rothbardian should adhere to if they want to do more than empty talking. Of those 6 points, I want to focus on the fourth one, namely that For a Rothbardian, libertarianism is not enough for a free society, a stateless social order also requires cultural conservatism as a sociological presupposition.1 What is this “sociological presupposition”? Distilled into its essence, it is the reckoning that there is —and ever will be— a natural order of things, and that this order has been known and respected by the majority of human beings up to this point. In many ways, it is plain common sense: that men and women are different, human groups are different, and these differences are not just skin deep, excellence is a trait only a few possess, what is good and bad is not defined in a moment, but over centuries, and are ultimately eternal and absolute standards. It is to accept the rules of 99% over 1% of human history, the normal over the abnormal. [continue reading…]
Peter Schwartz, “Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty,” in Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (Meridian, 1990) and the “Libertarians” entry in The Ayn Rand Lexicon (http://aynrandlexicon.com)
The first two chapters—my “Preface” and Hans’s “Introduction”—were published the week of Rothbard’s birthday here on the Property and Freedom Podcast (PFP315 and PFP314). The other main chapters will be released sequentially weekly on Mondays. The final entry:
In her wonderful book The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, Marilyn Johnson pointed out “There are people vanishing, good people dying out there, and the obit writer’s job is to shepherd them out with dignity.”
In 1959,“Rothbard physically applauded Khrushchev in his limousine as it passed by on the street. He gave as his reason for this that, after all, Khrushchev had killed fewer people than General Eisenhower, his host,” snipped William F. Buckley in his 1995 Rothbard obituary.1[continue reading…]
From Projeto Liberin — @projetoliberin; https://www.youtube.com/@a-liberin; https://www.facebook.com/estudio92fm; Live on Rádio Estúdio 92.3 FM Cascavel (program Independência). An interview of António Xavier, one of the organizers of Rothbard 100 there, by: Emerson Bitencourt, Host, TERÇA LIBERTÁRIA on Liberin; Osmar Junior — interviewer; Priscila “Pria” Merisio (aka “Priscila do Liberin”), co-host/interviewer. The transcript below probably has some names wrong.
From the vault: Murray N. Rothbard, two Reflections: “The tall and the short of genocide” (p. 6) and “That Cato Seminar” (pp. 7–8), Liberty (November 1988). Note: this is the same issue as the Symposium discussing Hans Hoppe’s significant article “The Ultimate Justification of the Ethics of Private Property” in the previous issue, which, in addition to this symposium (including Rothbard’s significant commentary), also inspired much scholarly commentary and controversy over the following 28 years, which continues to this day.1
Here’s the piece on genocide:
The tall and the short of genocide – William Raspberry, in his syndicated column of August 31, asks why the genocidal massacre of the Hutu majority of Burundi by the Tutsi ruling elite is shrugged off with little protest by the Western world. This summer, the Tutsi, who constitute only 15 percent of the Burundi population, slaughtered over 5,000 Hutu men, women, and children, and drove nearly 40,000 others into neighboring Rwanda. And this is but a sequel to the monstrous massacre of 1972, when the Tutsi annihilated around 200,000 Hutu, including all of that tribe’s educated members, thereby ensuring a generation of continued oppression without educated tribesmen able to lead a resistance among the oppressed. [continue reading…]
When the email came asking if I’d contribute a chapter—a firsthand account of Murray Rothbard’s final semester of teaching—I sat with it longer than I expected to. Not because I didn’t want to say yes. Because I understood, reading it a second time, that I might be one of the only people left who could actually say yes. Not one of many who’d read his books. One of the few who had sat in that room.
That’s a strange kind of responsibility.
Rothbard has a vast bibliography—decades of it, footnoted within an inch of its life—and none of it can tell you what it was like to watch him teach. I could. So I said yes, and then immediately wondered if I actually could.
I remembered things, but I didn’t trust the things I remembered. Memory has a way of sanding an image smooth, rounding off the parts that don’t fit the story you’ve decided to tell about someone. I didn’t want to write a legend. I wanted to write the man.
So I went looking for something specific—something no bibliography could hand me. And I found it in the tangents. [continue reading…]
From PFS members John Leask, “We Wanted Flying Cars,” Madness of Crowds (Substack; Jul 18, 2026)
“We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.” – Peter Thiel, 2011
The science fiction genre — Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, George Lucas — created a sense of wonder between the ‘50s and the ‘70s. Robots, flying cars, interstellar travel. I grew up in the ‘90s watching the Jetsons, which featured video conferencing, smart home technology, robots, and handheld digital devices. Additionally, I watched Luke Skywalker transform from a (somewhat annoying) rural farmer on Tatooine to a space-traveling heroic Jedi. And finally, The 6th Day starring Arnold Schwarzenegger featured self-driving cars! So where is all that technology that science fiction creatives have been obsessing over for decades? Why did Elon Musk buy Twitter and rename it to X, when he could be working on some real technological advancements? Well, while it’s still unknown to many, it looks like the technology is here. Apparently Elon has engaged in numerous simultaneous science projects. And so have others. [continue reading…]
republished inMises Daily, Aug. 14, 2009; archived comments (the original PDF of The Free Market now nowhere to be found lost because the Mises Institute has sabotaged its website archives, either via incompetence or malice, and the old comments are now inexplicably lost as well. —SK)1
It’s true that the U.S. health care system is a mess, but this demonstrates not market but government failure. To cure the problem requires not different or more government regulations and bureaucracies, as self-serving politicians want us to believe, but the elimination of all existing government controls. [continue reading…]
Re: Louise Perry, “How Did We Come to Bash the Dead?“, Wall Street Journal (July 15, 2026): “In a polarized society, speaking ill is an act of symbolic banishment, casting the decedent out.”
WF Buckley’s obituaries were notoriously vicious. I’ve wondered if he rejected this supposed tradition on grounds that it is not actually a Christian one. My own feelings on this point are mixed. https://t.co/eP0IE6WrvB
Most of us principled, anti-state libertarians are deed admirers of Rothbard. Hoppe has written glowingly of Rothbard’s singular genius, assessment I share. As Hoppe has written,
And there was a certain amount of, I would say, jealousy, because, I mean, Rothbard was enormously bright. I’ve met bright people in my life, but the only person I’ve met whom I would consider to be a genius was Rothbard. He could tell you the the content of every book in his library. And that wasan enormous library. Whenever you would ask him about any strange subject, he could give you some suggestions on what to read. You felt like a little, urn, uneducated person if you talked to him. So jealousy played a big role in explaining why it was that he was not treated like a genius, as he should have been treated. [continue reading…]
Rothbard Porto: Hoppe: Beegarc AI watercolor rendering
Below is the video of the speech by Professor Hoppe at 100 Years with Rothbard (Porto, Portugal, June 27, 2026). See Cataláxia Editora Rothbard 100 Youtube playlist. Transcript and summary below.
From the Vault: Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Where the Right Goes Wrong,” Rothbard-Rockwell Report(April 1997): 7–14. This piece critiques traditionalist conservatives (e.g., Pat Buchanan-style) for wanting to preserve the welfare state (Social Security, Medicare, protectionism, etc.) while complaining about cultural/moral decay. Hoppe argues this is impossible—you cannot have the welfare state and traditional families/norms, because the welfare state itself subsidizes and accelerates family breakdown, illegitimacy, irresponsibility, etc. Related issues also discussed in Hoppe, A Four-Step Health Care Solution and From Welfare to Health Care: Commentary on von Studnitz (forthcoming).
The American right is generally divided into three camps: the global hawks,the traditionalists, and the libertarians. Let’s set aside the global hawks as hopeless allies of the imperial world state who look fondly upon international war and military government. It’s not clear why they should be considered on the right at all. That leaves us the traditionalists or traditional conservatives, and the libertarians, who like free markets but most often want to toss out tradition in favor of a social and cultural free-for-all. [continue reading…]
As noted here, the 2026 Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society will be held from Thursday, September 17, 2026 to Tuesday, September 22, 2026.
Rothbard at 100 is in production! As you can see, the books are printed in premium hardcover with gold foil stamping, and then they will be covered with a dust jacket. Also available as an audiobook and eBook. Preorder your copy now: https://t.co/iaEh0bk5G0pic.twitter.com/bapPGmhFHb
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“Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.” — FrédéricBastiat
“Because the concept of property, for instance, is so basic that everyone seems to have some immediate understanding of it, most people never think about it carefully and can, as a consequence, produce at best a very vague definition. But starting from imprecisely stated or assumed definitions and building a complex network of thought upon them can lead only to intellectual disaster. For the original imprecisions and loopholes will then pervade and distort everything derived from them. To avoid this, the concept of property must first be clarified.” —Hans-Hermann Hoppe, TSC, ch. 2
The Property and Freedom Society (PFS; Facebook) stands for an uncompromising intellectual radicalism: for justly acquired private property, freedom of contract, freedom of association—which logically implies the right to not associate with, or to discriminate against—anyone in one's personal and business relations—and unconditional free trade. It condemns imperialism and militarism and their fomenters, and champions peace. It rejects positivism, relativism, and egalitarianism in any form, whether of "outcome" or "opportunity," and it has an outspoken distaste for politics and politicians. As such it seeks to avoid any association with the policies and proponents of interventionism, which Ludwig von Mises identified in 1946 as the fatal flaw in the plan of the many earlier and contemporary attempts by intellectuals alarmed by the rising tide of socialism and totalitarianism to found an anti-socialist ideological movement. Mises wrote: "What these frightened intellectuals did not comprehend was that all those measures of government interference with business which they advocated are abortive. ... There is no middle way. Either the consumers are supreme or the government."
(A more complete statement of our Principles can be found here.)
Classic and beautiful piece by the late, great Ralph Raico, one of the original supporters of the founding of the PFS:
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