From The Review of Austrian Economics Vol. 9, No. 1, 1996.

skjar Microsoft Word - 019-034 Brewster on impossibility _16-3_ Final.doc

Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was just one man with a typewriter, but he inspired a world-wide renewal in the scholarship of liberty. During 45 years of research and writing, in 25 books and thousands of articles, he battled every destructive trend in this century — socialism, statism, relativism, and scientism — and awakened a passion for freedom in thousands of scholars, journalists, and activists.

Every four years, as the November presidential election draws near, I have the same daydream: that I don’t know or care who the president of the United States is. More importantly, I don’t need to know or care. I don’t have to vote or even pay attention to debates. I can ignore all campaign commercials. There are no high stakes for my family or my country. My liberty and property are so secure that, frankly, it doesn’t matter who wins. I don’t even need to know his name.

The art of economics consists of looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

There was a watershed in the history of economic ideas in the twentieth century, particularly ideas dealing with the relationships, in the aggregate, between money wage rates, price levels, and employment. This watershed occurred not quite a third of the way through the century and was derivative from the dramatic sequence of events known as the Great Depression.

Published in Economica, May 1940.

Published in Economica, November 1938.

From Money, Method, and the Market Process.

From Money, Method, and the Market Process.