All Readings

Session 1: “Action, Choice, and Value”
Rothbard, Rothbard Reader, pp. 89-96

Session 2: “The Division of Labor”
Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, pp. 95-102

Americans are taught that the Constitution completed the Revolution. The Articles of Confederation were weak, disorder reigned, Shays’s Rebellion terrified the countryside, and sober statesmen in Philadelphia heroically designed a “more perfect Union,” as the story goes. The Constitution thus appears as the Revolution’s crowning achievement.

But, as Rothbard showed, the Constitution was not the fulfillment of 1776, but rather its undoing.

The US president’s new global trade tariffs went into effect at a 10 percent level at midnight on Tuesday, February 23, after a Supreme Court ruling struck down his so-called “reciprocal” tariffs, arguing that using emergency economic powers to impose widespread surcharges on countries around the world is illegal.

Few figures in modern intellectual history carried an idea to its logical conclusion as relentlessly as Murray Rothbard. Building upon the formidable theoretical structure developed by Ludwig von Mises, Rothbard accomplished a remarkable synthesis in economic and political thought. Where Mises constructed a rigorous scientific explanation of how economies function, Rothbard extended that framework into a comprehensive philosophy of social order.

Your dollar bought less at the grocery store this year than last. The Federal Reserve added trillions to the money supply. These facts are connected, but understanding how requires grasping one of economics’ deepest puzzles: why does money have value at all when it cannot directly satisfy our needs?

You hand a bill to a merchant in exchange for bread. This simple act, repeated billions of times daily, reveals a profound mystery. The paper in your wallet feeds no one, yet everyone accepts it. Why?

What’s going on here? What’s going on is an immoral, unconstitutional and illegal war of choice.

The US has lost nearly $2 billion worth of military equipment amid its military operations against Iran since Saturday, according to estimates and data compiled by Anadolu.

“CENTCOM has requested additional military intelligence officers to support operations against Iran for at least 100 days and possibly through September.”

Rising oil prices are “forcing reevaluations of previous assumptions about US inflation and the Federal Reserve’s path for interest rates.”