There are useful and rich nuggets covering every aspect of Rothbard's intellectual project, starting with his bold call for the necessity of a pure and unsullied libertarian set of institutions and activists.
Hence, one is forced to conclude that the libertarian ethic not only can be justified and justified by means of a priori reasoning, but that no alternative ethic can be defended argumentatively.
Labor is a factor of production. The price the seller of labor can obtain on the market depends on the data of the market.
Whatever their motives may have been, whatever at any given moment they thought of themselves as doing, Anthony Ashley Cooper and John Locke advanced the libertarian idea, just as John Lilburne did. All three of them are part of the libertarian tradition.
"The true end of man — not that which capricious inclination prescribes for him, but that which is prescribed by eternally immutable reason — is the highest and most harmonious cultivation of his faculties into one whole. For this cultivation, freedom is the first and indispensible condition."
– Wilhelm von Humboldt
Recorded at FreedomFest, 10 July 2010. Includes an introduction by Douglas E. French.
Aristotle concedes too much to those who discriminate in favor of the purely intellectual, and he tends to denigrate the practical life.
My main message is that most of our economic problems derive from previous government intervention in the economy.
Raico provides a detailed reading of their work in all these respects and shows that one need not embrace statism, and that one can be a consistent and full-blown liberal in the classical tradition, and not come anywhere near fulfilling the stereotype that conservatives were then creating of libertarians.
Only such a spirit could succeed in building a movement, Austrian and libertarian, twice in his distinguished career.
