[This excerpt from Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market is an explanation and elaboration of points first made in Ludwig von Mises’s Bureaucracy —and provides an excellent example of how Murray Rothbard’s treatise built on Mises’s to employ and extend the core analytical framework. The footnotes have been shortened. The excerpt is from
[Should the state back science or even plan its progress? In this excerpt from a longer and previously unpublished study written in 1959—two years after Russia’s launch of Sputnik and two years before the first manned space flight—Murray Rothbard (1926–95) argues that socially beneficial scientific innovation comes from independent thinkers
[From Chapter 8 of Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State .] We shall concentrate on the capitalist-entrepreneurs , economically the more important type of entrepreneur. These are the men who invest in “capital” (land and/or capital goods) used in the productive process. The capitalist-entrepreneur buys factors or factor services in the present; his
The task of the libertarian intellectual is not limited to political and economic theory, as this neglected essay by Murray Rothbard argues. It extends also to understanding history, not from the point of view of the state and the ruling class, or from a priori theorizing, but from looking at the raw facts of the case. Doing so yields results
[This review of Paul Samuelson’s Ninth edition of his famous textbook Economics is reprinted from The Wall Street Review of Books (December 1973): “A Review of Paul Samuelson, Economics, 9th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973)”; and The Logic of Action II (Edward Elgar, 1997, pp. 254–59. Samuelson’s Economics is now in its 17 th edition.] Reviewing
I come to bury Reaganomics, not to praise it. How well has Reaganomics achieved its own goals? Perhaps the best way of discovering those goals is to recall the heady days of Ronald Reagan’s first campaign for the presidency, especially before his triumph at the Republican National Convention in 1980. In general terms, Reagan pledged to return, or
The student of economics is invariably taught a certain mythology about the history of the study of business cycles. That mythology holds (a) that before 1913, nobody realized that there are cycles of prosperity and depression in the economy—instead, everyone thought only of isolated crises or panics, and (b) that this all changed with the advent
[This lively essay appeared in James H. Weaver, ed., Modern Political Economy (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1973), pp. 419–30, as chapter 28; it followed an essay by Professor Robert T. Averitt, to which Rothbard refers once or twice in his piece.] In order to discuss the “future of capitalism,” we must first decide what the meaning of the term
Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is a farrago of confusions, absurdities, fallacies, and distorted attacks on the free market. The temptation is to engage in almost a line-by-line critique. I will abjure this to first set out some of the basic philosophic and economic flaws, before going into some of the detailed criticisms. One basic
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.