In his seminal essay “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty“, Professor Rothbard delineated a libertarian interpretation of history, an interpretation which saw the larger part of humanity’s existence on earth before the 18th Century as dominated by a distinctive “Old Order”. Whether in the form of the primitive tribe, Oriental despotism or feudalism, the Old Order was a “society of status” distinguished by tyranny, fixed class or caste, exploitation, stagnation and hopelessness.

Volume 1, Number 3 (1977)

What this essay will attempt to show is that while, during the 19th century, the prohibition of sexual immorality played a comparatively unimportant role in American criminal law, the medical profession arrogated to itself the task of dealing with moral questions. Psychological medicine particularly, by substituting “treatment” of disease for legal punishment of moral transgression, placed itself in the position of enforcer of virtuous conduct.

There are two views of monopoly within what might be called the broad Austrian camp. According to the Mises-Kirzner view, monopoly price can exist on the free market, and a necessary part of its definition is a purposeful withholding of resources on the part of the monopolist. Rothbard, however, defines monopoly as an exclusive government grant of trading privileges, and, as such, finds it incompatible with market freedom.

Bankruptcy law is a system of interventionary legislation which interferes with the ability of individuals freely to establish the terms of loan contracts. It benefits the less prudent and less scrupulous borrowers -indeed may encourage their conduct -while making loans costlier for the honest and conscientious. Bankruptcy is defined as “that system of laws by which an insolvent debtor surrenders his property to a court which distributes the proceeds proportionately among his creditors and usually declares the debts discharged”.

In his monumental work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith captured the spirit of the new industrial and commercial system and presented its theoretical defense . in a form which dominated the thought of the most influential writers of political economy for the greater part of the next century. In fact, the principles which Smith formulated retained their hegemony until the Jevonian, marginalist revolution of the 1870s.

Volume 1, Number 4 (1977)

The 403 issues of Liberty which appeared have been reprinted and made available by the Greenwood Reprinting Corporation. They are a great source of information both to the historian and to the philosopher. Here we can analyze the history of the individualist anarchist movement, its reaction to contemporary events of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as view the actual ideological content and doctrinal changes occurring in the movement.

Volume 1, Number 4 (1977)

Volume 1, Number 4 (1977)

New York’s current financial woes have a precedent, and perhaps a solution, in the pages of the distant past. Well back in its history, in the late 1830s, New York State was spending and lending money lavishly. By the early 1840s, the rapidly mounting debt had occasioned a severe financial crisis. To avert the imminent possibility of bankruptcy and default, the state legislature in 1842 passed what was known as “the stop and tax law”, a levy of one mill on each dollar of taxable property.

Establishment economics is in a much deserved state of disarray. While the natural sciences have made remarkable progress in the 20th century, the mainstream social sciences remain impotent to solve the real and worsening political/ economic problems of our time. Emphasis on fundamental methodological issues has been conspicuously missing from the economic journals for a generation and the cost of this neglect has become clear.

While many minimal state theorists, such as Ayn Rand, have found in anarchism an unacceptable vehicle for the conveyance of natural rights libertarianism, Nozick, with Locke, does not dispute the logical compatibility of anarchism and natural rights theory. Instead, having conceded to the anarchists that advocacy of no government is not inconsistent with the espousal of natural rights libertarianism, Nozick purports to have demonstrated that (a) a state-like entity will emerge naturally from anarchy, and (b) that its emergence is both morally necessary and proper.

Robert Nozick’s widely hailed Anarchy, State, and Utopia has been analyzed primarily in terms of the arguments he engages in with his fellow “public philosopher”, John Rawls. Yet perhaps the most unusual line of thinking introduced by Nozick is his “invisible hand” explanation for the origin of the state (pp. 78 ff.). This is not meant to be a genuinely historical account. It is clear that no state ever emerged in the way described by Professor Nozick.