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.
We are certainly as far from capitalism in its pure form as we are from any system of central planning. The world of today is just interventionist chaos.
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.
However one may turn the matter, one cannot discover any reason why an ideological distortion of truth should be more useful to the bourgeoisie than a correct theory.
Rothbard sees much of economic history as a product of government interventions in the market.
So the basic strategy of trying to convert the king led inexorably to at least a broadly utilitarian approach to the problems of freedom and government intervention.
Only such a spirit could succeed in building a movement, Austrian and libertarian, twice in his distinguished career.
Explains the contributions of Mises and Rothbard to the development of modern economic thought.
It is no accident that Germany, the country that inaugurated the social-security system, was the cradle of both varieties of modern disparagement of democracy, the Marxian as well as the non-Marxian.
