Classic and beautiful piece by the late, great Ralph Raico, one of the original supporters of the founding of the PFS:¹ Grow 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…]

1. Ralph Raico, R.I.P. [↩]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:41 — 10.0MB)

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 336.

From French, Rothbard as Intellectual Inspiration (Mises University, 2006):  Douglas E. French, “Rothbard as Intellectual Inspiration,” Mises Daily (08/15/2006) (from Mises University 2006; mp3; local mp3; to be podcast at PFP later)

Summary:

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…]

From the Vault: Douglas E. French, “Rothbard as Intellectual Inspiration,” Mises Daily (08/15/2006) [from Mises University 2006; mp3; podcast at PFP336 | Doug French, Rothbard as Intellectual Inspiration (Mises University, 2006)].¹. Ed. note: of course Doug was also responsible for the French Prize, for the best student²—as the schedule states:

Some very good news for those students who attend the Mises University this 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
• Douglas E. French, “Remembering Murray Rothbard: Teacher, Friend, and Inspiration,” in Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment
• Douglas E. French, “Rothbard the teacher,” Liberty (May 1995), p. 14 & 69
• Douglas E. French et al., “Memories: Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) as Mentor and Teacher,” Property and Freedom Society Annual Meeting 2015, Bodrum, Turkey (Sep. 11, 2015), available at PFP129 | Memories: Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) as Mentor and Teacher, Hoppe, DiLorenzo, French, Iglody (PFS 2015)
• French, Buckley’s Belligerent Obit
• Doug was the recipient, in 2005, of the Center for Libertarian Studies’ Murray N. Rothbard Award and, in 2012, of the Murray N. Rothbard Medal of Freedom, and also endowed the Mises Institute’s Douglas E. French Prize.
• Douglas E. French et al., “Murray Rothbard as a Teacher: The UNLV Years—A Panel with Rothbard’s Former Students,” Austrian Economics Research Conference 2023, Auburn, Alabama, Mises Institute (Oct. 7, 2017), available at Stephan Kinsella, “PFP252 | Bonus: Murray Rothbard as a Teacher: The UNLV Years—A Panel with Rothbard’s Former Students (AERC2023),” Property and Freedom Podcast (Oct. 2, 2023)
• 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, “Learning From the Master,” LewRockwell.com (Dec. 24, 2002)
• Lee Iglody, “The Man Across the Hall: My Time with Professor Rothbard,” in Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment
• Jeff Barr, “The Last Lecture,” in Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment
• Hans Hoppe, “Coming of Age with Murray,” in Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment

Rothbard as Intellectual Inspiration

1. Ed. note: I can only link to an archive.org version of Mises University 2006 because of Mises Institute website screwups, whether intentional or merely incompetent, the since ousting of Jeff Tucker in 2011, means that some old links are not merely renamed and hard to find because there is no redirect URL, but gone entirely. —SK See Kinsella, “My Years with the Mises Institute,” Property and Freedom Journal (May 2, 2026), the sections Pointless Name Changes, Website Changes, and Journal Confusion and Mises.org; Copyright and Open Publishing/Information. [↩]
2. See What Happened at the Mises University 2006, Mises Daily (8/15/2006). [↩]
3. Mises U 2006 Schedule. See also 2006 Mises University Awards; the Douglas E. French Prize is still being awarded. [↩]
4. See Kinsella, “My Years with the Mises Institute,” Kinsella, “My Years with the Mises Institute,” the section Tucker and French v. Rockwell: Behind the Scenes, 2008–2012. [↩]

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.  

Related

• Hoppe, “The Socialism of Conservatism,” in A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (Kluwer, 1989; Mises Institute reprint, 2007; Laissez Faire Books, 2013)
• Hoppe, Where the Right Goes Wrong (1997)
• Classic Hoppe on the Realistic Right vs. the Egalitarian Left
• Murray N. Rothbard, “Right Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement,” Rothbard-Rockwell Report (Jan. 1992), in Rothbard, The Irrepressible Rothbard
• 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
• Jeff Deist, “Appreciating Rothbard’s Political Genius,” Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment
• Fernando Chiocca: “Rothbardianism at Rothbard’s Centenary”—Rothbard at 100, Portugal

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…]

1.  Fernando Chiocca, “‘Rothbardianism at Rothbard’s Centenary’ — Rothbard at 100, Portugal,” Property and Freedom Society, July 2026, https://propertyandfreedom.org/2026/07/chiocca-rothbardianism-at-rothbards-centenary/. [↩]

From the vault: Murray N. Rothbard, various entries in the Reflections section, Liberty (March, 1989): 9, 11, 22.

This is issue also contains Rothbard’s article “Ronald Reagan: An Autopsy”¹ and a rebuttal to Rothbard’s earlier piece [Rothbard, Greenhouse defects (Liberty, Jan. 1989)], Daniel M. Karlan, “An Environmentalist Contra Rothbard,” Liberty (March 1989): 35–36.

Related

• Re “pomposo” remark in the McCarthy piece: re his use of “seriosos” in other contexts: Rothbard, “The December Surprise,” in The Irrepressable Rothbard (Feb. 1993); Kinsella, KOL493 | Rothbard’s Greatest Hits: A Personal Mix Tape (Porto, Portugal); Kinsella, Lawyer apology
• Rothbard, The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult (2), LewRockwell.com, September 12, 2002
• 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)
• Rothbard’s Objectivist Influences
• Objectivism Schism Form Letter; I break for Randians; Breaking, Broken, Broke: Silly Objectivist Tendencies
• Flynn, Daniel J. (2025). ”Murray Rothbard’s Lost Letters on Ayn Rand.” J. Libertarian Stud. 29, no. 2: 35–50

Here are the reflections. [continue reading…]

1. Reprinted already at Mises Daily; mentioned in Murray Rothbard and Liberty Magazine and Vance, Murray Rothbard and Liberty Magazine.  [↩]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:19 — 7.0MB)

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 335.

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 final entry:

20. Rahim Taghizadegan, “Murray N. Rothbard and the Demystification of Economics”

Note: These audio versions were prepared by Jorge Besada. A professionally-produced audio format is now also available from the Saif House.

The cloth hardcover edition of Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment was presented last month at 100 Years with Rothbard, Porto, Portugal, June 27, 2026. This and other formats are available at Amazon; Saif House also offers these versions as well as the professionally-produced audio version.

Doug French, “Buckley’s Belligerent Obit,” DouglasinVegas.com, 2023/7/19

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…]

1. William F. Buckley Jr., Murray Rothbard, RIP, National Review (Feb. 6, 1995). See also Kinsella, Disparaging Rothbard. —SK [↩]

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.

Re:

• Kinsella, Rothbard Takes Portugal: 100 Years with Rothbard: A Personal Account
• 100 Years with Rothbard (Porto, Portugal, June 27, 2026)

English transcript and summary below. And a bonus video:

[continue reading…]

From Haman Nature, Laughing at Libertarian Paradise Criticisms | Hn 255 (Jul 19, 2026), a conversation between new PFS member Adam Haman and Bob Murphy.

[continue reading…]

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…]

1. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Ultimate Justification of the Ethics of Private Property” (September 1988; also in EEPP); Symposium on Hoppe’s argumentation ethics: “Breakthrough or Buncombe?”, esp. Murray N. Rothbard, “Beyond Is And Ought” (Nov. 1988); Kinsella, “Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide,” Mises Daily (May 27, 2011); Kinsella, “A Libertarian Theory of Punishment and Rights,” “Dialogical Arguments for Libertarian Rights,” and “Defending Argumentation Ethics: Reply to Murphy & Callahan,” all in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023); “The Genesis of Estoppel: My Libertarian Rights Theory“; “Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics and Its Critics,” “Revisiting Argumentation Ethics.” [↩]

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…]

From the Vault, two pieces from Doctor Hoppe on healthcare, as timely as their publication (1993, 1997):

• Hoppe, “A Four-Step Health Care Solution,” The Free Market 11, no. 4 (April 1993)
  • republished in Mises 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
• Hoppe, “From Welfare to Health Care: Commentary on von Studnitz,” in: Gerard Radnitzky, ed., Values and the Social Order, Vol.3, Voluntary versus Coercive Orders (Aldershot: Avebury, 1997): 471–476

Related

• Hoppe, Where the Right Goes Wrong (1997) (discussing healthcare and the family)
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Limits of Numerical Probability: Frank H. Knight and Ludwig von Mises and the Frequency of Interpretation,” Q. J. Austrian Econ. 10, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 3–21 (also in The Great Fiction)
• Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Scholar’s ed. (Auburn, Ala: Mises Institute, 1998), ch. VI, §§3, 4: 3. Class Probability and
  4. Case Probability
• Mark R. Crovelli, “On the Possibility of Assigning Probabilities to Singular Cases, or: Probability Is Subjective Too!,” Libertarian Papers vol. 1, art. no. 26 (2009)
• David Howden, “Single Trial Probability Applications: Can Subjectivity Evade Frequency Limitations?,” Libertarian Papers vol. 1, art. no. 42 (2009)
• Mark R. Crovelli, “Has David Howden Vindicated Richard von Mises’s Definition of Probability?,” Libertarian Papers vol. 1, art. no. 44 (2009)
• Mark R. Crovelli, “A Challenge to Ludwig von Mises’s Theory of Probability,” Libertarian Papers vol. 2, art. no. 23 (2010)
• Mark R. Crovelli, “All Probabilistic Methods Assume a Subjective Definition of Probability,” Libertarian Papers vol. 4, art. no. 9 (2012)

A Four-Step Health Care Solution

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

The Free Market 11, no. 4 (April 1993)

1. See Kinsella, “My Years with the Mises Institute,” Property and Freedom Journal (May 2, 2026), section Pointless Name Changes, Website Changes, and Journal Confusion. [↩]

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

— Jeffrey A Tucker (@jeffreytucker) July 17, 2026

From StephanKinsella.com:

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: Saifedean Ammous: Beegarc AI watercolor rendering

Below is the video of the speech by PFS stalwart Saifedean Ammous at 100 Years with Rothbard (Porto, Portugal, June 27, 2026). See Cataláxia Editora Rothbard 100 Youtube playlist. Transcript and summary below.

Select photos (for further information and additional photos, see Kinsella, Rothbard Takes Portugal: 100 Years with Rothbard: A Personal Account). [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.

Select photos (for further information and additional photos, see Kinsella, Rothbard Takes Portugal: 100 Years with Rothbard: A Personal Account).

Portuguese translation at Obstáculos, dificuldades e surpresas no caminho para o rothbardismo: recordações pessoais. [continue reading…]

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).

Related

• Libertarianism and the Alt-Right: In Search of a Libertarian Strategy for Social Change (2017) (discussing “Liberallala-Libertarians”)
• Hoppe, “A Realistic Libertarianism,” LewRockwell.com (Sept. 30, 2013)
• Introduction to Democracy: The God That Failed (2001)
• Hoppe vs. the Alt-Right
• Kinsella, Hoppe on Covenant Communities and Advocates of Alternative Lifestyles
• Hoppe, The Property And Freedom Society—Reflections After Five Years, The Libertarian Standard (June 10, 2010); also published at VDare and as ch. 24 in The Great Fiction; video
• From Nation to Household: The Middle American Illusions of Sam Francis (and Pat Buchanan) (unpublished, 1996)
• Discussions of conservatism vs. libertarianism in Democracy: The God That Failed (Transaction, 2001)
• —and in “The Socialism of Conservatism,” in A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (Kluwer, 1989; Mises Institute reprint, 2007; Laissez Faire Books, 2013)
• Economy, Society, and History (Mises Institute, 2021)
• The Great Fiction: Property, Economy, Society, and the Politics of Decline (Laissez Faire Books, 2012; second revised edition, Mises Institute, 2021)
• A Short History of Man: Progress and Decline (Mises 2015)
• Kinsella, The Three Fusionisms: Old, New, and Cautious (Jan. 16, 2022) (on paleolibertarianism etc.)
• Rothbard on lifestyle and “modal” libertarians:
  • Rothbard, The Libertarian family and entrepreneurship and other Reflections (Liberty, July 1988)
  • Rothbard, Purity and Libertarian Politics (1990)
  • Rothbard, Libertarians In a State-Run World (Liberty, December 1987)
  • Jeff Deist, “Appreciating Rothbard’s Political Genius,” in Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment
  • On “modal” libertarians, see various mentions in Murray N. Rothbard, The Irrepressible Rothbard: The Rothbard-Rockwell Report Essays of Murray N. Rothbard (Center for Libertarian Studies, 2000)

***

WHERE THE RIGHT GOES WRONG

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

[Rothbard-Rockwell Report (April 1997): 7–14]

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…]

[Cross-posted at C4SIF]

From @Fhoer_here, “The Death of Physical Media,” Fhoer’s Substack (July 16, 2026): “The Digital Panopticon and the Attack on Property.” According to the author: The end of physical media can be blamed on IP laws…

The planned obsolescence of physical media and the forced migration to cloud storage are often celebrated as the pinnacle of modern logistical convenience. The illusion of a frictionless world is sold, where entire libraries and collections fit in the palm of your hand. However, behind this supposed logistical utopia, a profound reconfiguration of property rights is at work. The disappearance of the physical format is not merely a technological advancement, but a structural maneuver designed to make it difficult for individuals to maintain their own collections, separate from the network and beyond the reach of state-corporate scrutiny and control.

To understand the gravity of this movement, it is imperative to observe the problem through the lens of intellectual property criticism. In a natural order, the concept of property applies exclusively to scarce goods, that is, physical resources over which conflicts may arise, such as a piece of land, a printed book, or a hard drive. Information, in turn, is not scarce; thus, the act of copying a file does not deprive the original author of its ownership. [continue reading…]

Trump attempting to open the Strait of Hormuz pic.twitter.com/jzDsHOTkSl

— badger (@badger69420) July 12, 2026

From the Vault: Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Why Socialism Must Fail,” The Free Market (date unknown), in The Free Market Reader: Essays in the Economics of Liberty, Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 1988). (Date is unknown because the Mises Institute has sabotaged its website archives, either via incompetence or malice. —SK)¹

Related

• Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. “The Case Against Socialism.” Lecture presented at Mises University, Stanford University, June 21–27, 1987.
• Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. “Intellectual Cover for Socialism.” The Free Market 6, no. 2 (February 1988).
• Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. “Socialism: A Property or Knowledge Problem?” Review of Austrian Economics 9, no. 1 (1996): 143–49 (also in EEPP)

Why Socialism Must Fail

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

The Free Market (date unknown—1988 or before)

1. See Kinsella, “My Years with the Mises Institute,” Property and Freedom Journal (May 2, 2026), section Pointless Name Changes, Website Changes, and Journal Confusion. [↩]

From the vault: Murray N. Rothbard, “Taking Libertarianism Seriously,” Liberty (September 1988): 34–36. As far as I can determine, this piece has never been published separately or in any collection. Note: this piece appeared in the same issue as Hans Hoppe’s significant article “The Ultimate Justification of the Ethics of Private Property,” which inspired a symposium in the next issue and much scholarly commentary and controversy over the following 28 years, which continues to this day.¹

It’s a commentary on the institutional and scholarly respect (or lack thereof) given to libertarian and Austrian ideas in the late 1980s. Rothbard contrasts the relatively serious treatment these ideas receive in Britain—especially at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) under Arthur Seldon, which engaged Austrian economics, anarcho-capitalism, and radical free-market thought without embarrassment—with the more dismissive or superficial attitude common in American academia and establishment think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. [continue reading…]

1.  Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Ultimate Justification of the Ethics of Private Property” (September 1988; also in EEPP); Symposium on Hoppe’s argumentation ethics: “Breakthrough or Buncombe?”, esp. Murray N. Rothbard, “Beyond Is And Ought” (Nov. 1988); Kinsella, “Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide,” Mises Daily (May 27, 2011); Kinsella, “A Libertarian Theory of Punishment and Rights,” “Dialogical Arguments for Libertarian Rights,” and “Defending Argumentation Ethics: Reply to Murphy & Callahan,” all in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023); “The Genesis of Estoppel: My Libertarian Rights Theory“; “Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics and Its Critics,” “Revisiting Argumentation Ethics.” [↩]

Longtime PFS member, the late Norman Stone^†, author of the wonderful book Turkey: A Short History (Thames Hudson, 2017), had many great PFS lectures including, in particular:

• PFP055 | Norman Stone, World War I—the Eastern Front: Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and the Making of Turkey and the Modern Middle East (PFS 2010)
• PFP090 | Norman Stone, Comparative History: Turkey and Spain (PFS 2012)

These lectures include the transcripts and detailed summary. Below is a combined summary of both lectures (Grok):

[continue reading…]

Re our post Lipton Matthews, The Forgotten Sin: America’s Treatment of Germans: see PFP156 | Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof, “On the Many Fathers of World War 2” (PFS 2016), also PFP160 | Rindermann, Daniels, Schultze-Rhonhof, Stone: “Discussion—Q&A” (PFS 2016). Summary of PFS156 below; full transcript at the podcast.

See also his book, Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof, 1939 – Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte: Der lange Anlauf zum Zweiten Weltkrieg [“1939 – The War That Had Many Fathers”], 12th rev. and expanded ed. (Reinbek: Olzog, an imprint of Lau Verlag & Handel KG, 2026)

He is a retired Major General of the Bundeswehr and has published several editions of this book, with the most recent being an expanded 12th edition published in 2026.

The book argues that responsibility for the outbreak of the Second World War should not be attributed solely to Germany and Adolf Hitler. Schultze-Rhonhof contends that the diplomatic and political actions of several states—including Poland, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, Italy, and the United States—contributed to the circumstances leading to war in 1939. He bases his argument on diplomatic documents, memoirs, and government records from multiple countries.

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Jeremy R. Hammond, “How to Respond to the Zionist Hoax of a Peopleless Palestine,” jeremyrhammond.com (Jul 14, 2026). Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent journalist exposing mainstream propaganda that serves to manufacture consent for criminal government policies. Sign up for his newsletters at JeremyRHammond.com. Originally published at JeremyRHammond.com (Jul 14, 2026). Reprinted with permission.

Related

• Jeremy R. Hammond, “Iran Never Threatened to ‘Wipe Israel Off the Map’,” Property and Freedom Journal (June 3, 2025)
• PFP309 | Saifedean Ammous: Property Rights: The Root Cause of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (PFS 2025)
• Ammous, “Property Rights: The Root Cause of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict,” Property and Freedom Journal (May 7, 2026)
• Alessandro Fusillo, “The ‘Right to Exist’ of States,” Property and Freedom Journal (April 25, 2026)
• Ammous Interview with Mario Nawfal: A Misesian-Propertarian Take on the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict
• Fernando Chiocca: “Rothbardianism at Rothbard’s Centenary”—Rothbard at 100, Portugal
• Kinsella, Block conflating individual self-defense with collectivist state action

Palestinian refugees fleeing Palestine for Lebanon, October 1948 (Source: PalestineRemembered.com)