That’s how libertarian author Jim Powell described the American President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt in his book Bully Boy. Trump flew to North Dakota today to participate in the celebration of Teddy’s new presidential library. Teddy was a New Yorker, so of course it makes complete sense that his presidential library is in North Dakota. (You probably thought I was referring to Trump in the title of this blog entry, didn’t you?). One thing we know for certain about this is that the library will tell you nothing about the real Teddy Roosevelt.
Below is the text of the speech by PFS member Fernando Chiocca of Instituto Rothbard (Brazil/Brasil) at 100 Years with Rothbard (Porto, Portugal, June 27, 2026).1 We will add a link to the video when it is eventually posted. See also Chiocca’s Prezi presentation. [continue reading…]
Below is the text of the speech by Professor Adriano Paranaiba at 100 Years with Rothbard (Porto, Portugal, June 27, 2026). We will add a link to the video when it is eventually posted. PDF of presentation.
Related:
- 100 Years with Rothbard (Porto, Portugal, June 27, 2026)
- Kinsella, The Three Fusionisms: Old, New, and Cautious (Jan. 16, 2022)
- Adriano Paranaiba
Re the recent US Supreme Court decision affirming birthright citizenship:
- Trump v. Barbara (2026)
- Trump v. Barbara, SCOTUSblog
- Breaking down the birthright-citizenship decision
- Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship
Excerpted from Murray N. Rothbard, “Nations by Consent: Decomposing the Nation-State,” J. Libertarian Stud. 11:1 (Fall 1994; pdf): 1-10, also in Rothbard, Secession, State, and Liberty.
Citizenship and Voting Rights
One vexing current problem centers on who becomes the citizen of a given country, since citizenship confers voting rights.
The Anglo-American model, in which every baby born in the country’s land area automatically becomes a citizen, clearly invites welfare immigration by expectant parents. In the U.S., for example, a current problem is illegal immigrants whose babies, if born on American soil, automatically become citizens and therefore entitle themselves and their parents to permanent welfare payments and free medical care. Clearly the French system, in which one has to be born to a citizen to become an automatic citizen, is far closer to the idea of a nation-by-consent. [continue reading…]
Americans are supposedly celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (aka Declaration of Secession from the British Empire) this week. However, most of the merchandise being sold by American retailers regarding “The Fourth of July” celebrates the state’s flag, the military, and the empire (that replaced the British empire) and makes no mention of independence and certainly not of secession. The 1776 Declaration of Independence is one of three famous American declarations regarding independence; two are in favor, and one against.
As an aside, you may recall that one of the slogans of the American Revolution was opposition to “taxation without representation.” My friend the late Walter Williams once told me that a British friend, Eamon Butler, once asked him, “So how do you like taxation with representation?” Walter said he had no response!
In this year of the United States Semiquincentennial—the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, based on the Resolution for Independence approved by Second Continental Congress on July 2, 1776—and also the 100th year of Rothbard’s birth,1 Rothbard’s comments on the American Revolution are worth considering. The following excerpt, “Was the American Revolution Radical?”, is excerpted from ch. 80 of Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, vol. 4, The Revolutionary War, 1775–1784 (2011 [1979]).
Some caveats to Rothbard’s views on the American founding. [continue reading…]
- Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Papinian Press and The Saif House, 2026). [↩]
Doug French, “European Pols Demand People Suffer for the Planet,” DouglasinVegas.com, 2023/6/27
Europe’s heatwave has its collective masses suffering under the sweltering conditions. The Wall Street Journal editorialized, “But this makes it all the stranger that governments prefer that their citizens sweat it out rather than use the modern invention known as air conditioning.”
The French government believes AC is only appropriate for the sick and elderly. Everybody should, “Wet your body (at least your face and forearms) several times a day.” Wear a hat outside. Drink more water and try cold soups and other “water-rich foods to help you stay hydrated.” [continue reading…]
Justice Clarence Thomas has cited Murray Rothbard in a concurring opinion in Monsanto Co. v. Durnell (on June 25, 2026); Court rules for Roundup maker in dispute over cancer warnings on pesticide labels (SCOTUSblog). The decision addressed whether the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) expressly preempts state-law failure-to-warn claims about pesticide labeling (specifically, Roundup/glyphosate and cancer warnings). The Court (Kavanaugh opinion, joined by Thomas among others) held that it does in relevant respects and reversed the lower court. Jackson dissented (joined by Gorsuch).
Thomas joined the majority but wrote a concurrence flagging broader constitutional concerns with FIFRA itself (Commerce Clause limits on regulating intrastate manufacturing/use, nondelegation to the EPA, and administrative preemption issues under the Supremacy Clause). In a footnote discussing how broad regulatory delegations often benefit large incumbents (creating barriers to entry via onerous requirements that smaller competitors can’t meet), he cited:
Such delegations of broad regulatory authority often benefit large incumbent companies at the expense of smaller competitors and consumers. Incumbent companies “exercise considerable sway over agency rules,” which they use to lobby for more “favorable regulations” that “protect the existing regulated firms from threats arising from new firms.” Those regulations often enable a “profitable alliance” between corporations and government, as the corporations look “for government to cartelize their industry after private efforts for cartels and monopoly ha[ve] failed.” M. Rothbard, The Progressive Era 318 (2017). This scheme is a perfect example.
That would be John C. Calhoun, who Murray quoted frequently, especially regarding Calhoun’s version of libertarian class analysis. He called Calhoun’s Disquisition on Government “one of the most brilliant essays on political philosophy ever written.”
The deluxe hardcover cloth print version of Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Papinian Press and The Saif House, 2026) was presented and released yesterday at delivered at “100 Years with Rothbard,” Porto, Portugal, June 27, 2026. The Brazilian Portuguese translation,
100 Anos de Rothbard: Uma Homenagem e Apreciação (Instituto Rothbard, 2026), is also now available.
Tradução: Fernando Fiori Chiocca
Revisão gramatical: João Theodoro
Diagramação: Fernando Fiori Chiocca
Capa: Fernando Fiori Chiocca
pdf and epub versions are available here.
Related
From KOL493 | Rothbard’s Greatest Hits: A Personal Mix Tape (Porto, Portugal):
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 493.
This is my talk “Rothbard’s Greatest Hits: A Personal Mix Tape,” delivered at “100 Years with Rothbard,” Porto, Portugal, June 27, 2026. (From my iPhone audio; professional video and audio will be uploaded at a later date.) [continue reading…]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:33 — 7.7MB)
Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 332.
AI-assisted audio narration of the main chapters of Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment (Papinian Press and The Saif House, 2026) is available at this PFS Youtube Playlist; the mp3 files may also be downloaded in this zip file.
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 next in the queue:
17. David Howden, “Privatizing Entry, Dissolving State Borders: Immigration Policy as the Apex of Rothbardian Libertarianism”
Note: These audio versions were prepared by Jorge Besada. As noted in Rothbard at 100 Available to Pre-Order Now, Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment will be presented later this month at 100 Years with Rothbard, Porto, Portugal, June 27, 2026 and is available now for pre-order from The Saif House in hardcover and in professionally-produced audio formats.
Related
100 Years with Rothbard was held yesterday in beautiful Porto, Portugal (June 27, 2026), featuring and attended by a number of PFS members, including Professor Hoppe and Gülçin Imre Hoppe, Stephan Kinsella, Saifedean Ammous, Thomas Jacob, Gregory and Joy Morin, and Alessandro and Domitia Fusillo. Hoppe, Kinsella, and Ammous spoke at the conference. It was a wonderful event, attended by hundreds from Portugal and many other countries. A full report will be published presently. In the meantime here is an outside commentary. [continue reading…]
In recent years, a highly conspicuous phenomenon has emerged at the summit of the power structures in Silicon Valley and Wall Street: the executive suites of American tech giants like Microsoft, Alphabet, and Adobe have been captured one after another by Indian elites. Conversely, the presence of Chinese individuals in the upper echelons of Corporate America remains disproportionately scarce. This begs a compelling question: why is it that while China vastly outpaces India in terms of comprehensive national strength and economic growth, Chinese individuals lag behind their Indian counterparts on a personal level within Corporate America circles?
The reason Indian elites have been able to sprint ahead within the American corporate system lies in their successful fusion of both Western and Asian advantages, effectively playing the role of near-perfect “cultural amphibians”. The essence of upper management is rarely a battle of hard technical skills; rather, it hinges on the mastery of “politics, storytelling, and trust.” [continue reading…]
Ammous Interview with Mario Nawfal: A Misesian-Propertarian Take on the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict
Tweet from Saifedean Ammous:
In this interview with Mario Nawfal, I discuss my Misesian case against Israel, arguing the Palestinian/Israeli conflict can only be understood as the result of the denial of property rights for Palestinians based purely on their not belonging to the ruling ethnoreligious group.
Tweet:
In this interview with Mario Nawfal, I discuss my Misesian case against Israel, arguing the Palestinian/Israeli conflict can only be understood as the result of the denial of property rights for Palestinians based purely on their not belonging to the ruling ethnoreligious group. pic.twitter.com/r30ddnKn69
— Saifedean Ammous (@saifedean) June 23, 2026
Related
- PFS posts on Israel
- Ammous, Property Rights: The Root Cause of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
- Hoppe, Judeo-Christian tradition affirmed by new law: Death penalty for thee (Goy) but not for me (Jew)
- Kinsella, Block on Israel, Self-Defense, Pacifism
- Kinsella, Ammous vs. Block on Israel
- Van De Haar and Besada on Hayek, Mises, Rothbard on Zionism
- Hoppe, An Open Letter to Walter E. Block
Former federal reserve chair Alan Greenspan (March 6, 1926–June 22, 2026) has died at the age of 100.1 He was born just 4 days after Murray Rothbard (March 2, 1926–Jan. 7, 1995), who died at age 68. Ah, would that Rothbard had lived to 100 instead.
Greenspan was, at least at one point, a libertarian, or at least Objectivist, and he and Rothbard knew each other as Greenspan was associated with Ayn Rand from the 1950s to her death in 1982—Rand nicknamed him “The Undertaker”2 —overlapping with Rothbard’s interaction with Rand and her crowd in the late 1950s. Greenspan wrote two good essays, favoring the gold standard and opposing antitrust law, in Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.3
But he was no Austrian. As Doug French writes, [continue reading…]
- “Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan Dies at 100,” Breitbart News (Jun. 2026). [↩]
- Douglas French, “Greenspan the Undertaker and His Countless Victims,” Fee.org (Jan. 25, 2017; republished at DouglasinVegas.com, Feb. 7, 2017). [↩]
- Alan Greenspan, “Antitrust” and “Gold and Economic Freedom,” in Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1966). His essay “The Assault on Integrity,” about regulation of business, was also included in this collection. [↩]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:21 — 10.8MB)
Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 329.
AI-assisted audio narration of the main chapters of Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment (Papinian Press and The Saif House, 2026) is available at this PFS Youtube Playlist; the mp3 files may also be downloaded in this zip file.
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 next in the queue:
16. Sean Gabb, “Rothbard: An Appreciation from England”
Note: These audio versions were prepared by Jorge Besada. As noted in Rothbard at 100 Available to Pre-Order Now, Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment will be presented later this month at 100 Years with Rothbard, Porto, Portugal, June 27, 2026 and is available now for pre-order from The Saif House in hardcover and in professionally-produced audio formats.
From the Vault. By PFS member Doug French. From “Mama, Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Barbers,” LewRockwell.com (Jan. 12, 2004)
Gene Epstein recently penned an article entitled “Tomorrow’s Jobs” that appeared in the January 5th edition of the financial weekly Barrons. The main thrust of Epstein’s piece is that the demand for “knowledge workers” will increase in the years to come while the demand for manufacturing, agricultural and clerical jobs as well as for butchers and barbers will decline.
It’s easy to follow Epstein’s argument that healthcare workers, computer programmers, and financial planners will be in great demand due to the aging of the population. As Epstein points out, “within 10 years, the number of folks 55 and older will begin a growth trajectory that outstrips that of the younger segment nearly fourfold. The number of U.S. residents 55 and older will rise from 63 million today to 83.7 million by 2014, and 101.4 million by 2024”. [continue reading…]
Some libertarians smugly “correct” people who think Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the US. Not so, they point out; this was a wartime order that did not free slaves in Union territory and only a applied to the CSA states where the order had no power. It took the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, to really free the slaves, they say.
But Thirteenth Amendment did not end slavery. It states:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
In other words you can still enslave people as long as you make up a crime with legislation. For example, the “crime” of tax evasion, selling drugs, or refusing to be conscripted can get you imprisoned and enslaved. Prison is slavery. Ever heard of prison labor?
This is because the state can use legislation—what Hoppe calls “democratic law making”—to create punishable offenses, statutes that are malum prohibitum (conduct that happens to be prohibited) instead of malum in se (things wrong in and of themselves—violations of natural rights, i.e. aggression).
(This is of course yet another problem with patent and copyright law: they are not based on natural rights, not evolved common law principles, but purely creatures of statute and legislation. Like fiat money, they are fiat law. The Problem with Intellectual Property, Part III.D.)
Related
- The Universal Principles of Liberty
- Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society
- Another Problem with Legislation: James Carter v. the Field Codes
- Rockwell on Hoppe on the Constitution as Expansion of Government Power
- Spooner on Knaves, Dupes, and the Constitution; and the Highwayman vs. The State
- A Tale of Two Legal Systems: Common Law and Statutory Law
- The Problem with Intellectual Property
From the vault. Originally published at Mises Wire.
Stakeholder Capitalism and the Corporate KPI Cult
Mises Wire,
In private business “[t]here is no need to limit the discretion of subordinates by any rules or regulations other than that underlying all business activities, namely, to render their operations profitable.”—Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy, p. 46
In this quote from his classic 1944 book Bureaucracy, Mises explains why private, for-profit businesses need not, and should not, be bureaucratic and entangled in rules and regulations mandated from the top of an administrative hierarchy. Instead, they should, make the best use of decentralized “knowledge of time and place” to do their jobs. Mises’ admonition that the focus of capitalist enterprises is and should be to “make a profit” later became, in the hands of Chicago School economists, “maximize shareholder value.” This view is most widely associated with Milton Friedman and was accepted by American corporate management, for the most part, for many years.
[continue reading…]
From the Vault. By PFS member David Dürr. Translated from David Dürr, “Bürgerlicher Anarchismus: Das Abendland schwimmt koedukativ,” eigentümlich frei (05 März 2017). Eigentümlich frei (“peculiarly free”) is a German magazine edited by André F. Lichtschlag. Other Dürr articles at eigentümlich frei.
Bourgeois Anarchism: Minimal States and Pickpockets—Even Petty Criminals Are Criminals
by David Dürr
Are you a minimal statist? Are you a convinced libertarian who grants the state not a single bit more than looking after the protection of people from mutual violations of life, body, and property, and absolutely nothing else? Not even traffic rules on the road, and certainly no social programs for the poor and weak? This is, of course, not because you do not care about chaos on the streets or the plight of poor and weak fellow human beings, but because you know that order and prosperity establish themselves much better without state intervention. So, are you someone who knows exactly that the state is not the solution but the problem, and therefore must be reduced to an absolute minimum—a minimal statist, in fact? [continue reading…]
Doug Casey on Swap Lines, Secret Bailouts, and the Weaponization of the Dollar
by Doug Casey • June 17, 2026
From PFS member Andreas Tögel, a translation of Original Commentary
Property, Right to Self-Defense, and Perpetrator Protection:
A Debate on Private Property and Self-Protection
By Andreas Tögel
Self-Defense: Conflict over Property Defense
A pending court case in Salzburg is currently sparking fierce debates about how far a person is allowed to go to protect their life and property. After a burglar was caught in the act by the burglary victim and shot dead, the shooter stood before the jury court on charges of murder. On the afternoon of May 11, after hours of deliberation by the eight jurors, the verdict was delivered: Acquittal. It was therefore self-defense—not murder. [continue reading…]
“Just Subsidize, Baby: The Raiders, A’s, and Las Vegas’s Taxpayer Sellout Schemes,” Haman Nature (Jun 17, 2026), by PFS member Adam Haman.
Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, published digitally online on March 2, 2026, on Murray Rothbard’s 100th birthday, will be presented in 10 days at 100 Years with Rothbard, Porto, Portugal, June 27, 2026. The deluxe cloth hardcover will be presented at that event; our host for the event, PFS member Manuel Ogando, has just received boxes of the first printing from the printer; photos below.
The book is available now for pre-order from The Saif House in hardcover and other formats. See:
Alessandro Fusillo
Andreas Tögel
David Dürr
Doug French
Fernando Chiocca
Greg Morin
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Jay Baykal
Juan Fernando Carpio
León Isidoro
Martin Cabrera
Oscar Grau
Peter Wong
PFS
Saifedean Ammous
Sean Gabb
Sean Ring
Stephan Kinsella
Stéphane Geyres
Thomas Jacob
Tom DiLorenzo
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