[Keynote Address to the Libertarian Party Convention, 1977] I am honored and delighted to be here, and particularly happy that the theme of this convention is Turning Point, 1777/1977. For one thing, it means that the Libertarian Party is, to my knowledge, the only organization in the country that realizes that the Bicentennial does not merely
[First published in Left & Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought , 1967.] It was almost twenty years ago that I first met Frank Chodorov. It was at one of those luxurious but terribly dreary cocktail parties that have long served as rallying ground for the intelligentsia of the American right wing. There the more articulate of the rightists are
The Just Tax and the Just Price Costs of Collection, Convenience, and Certainty Distribution of the Tax Burden Uniformity of Treatment Equality Before the Law: Tax Exemption The Impossibility of Uniformity The “Ability-To-Pay” Principle The Ambiguity of the Concept The Justice of the Standard “Distribution of the Tax Burden,” continued Sacrifice
This unsigned editorial, written by Murray N. Rothbard, appeared in the April 15, 1969 issue of The Libertarian (soon to become The Libertarian Forum ). April 15, that dread Income Tax day, is around again, and gives us a chance to ruminate on the nature of taxes and of the government itself. The first great lesson to learn about taxation is that
[This article is excerpted from chapter 14 of The Ethics of Liberty . Listen to this article in MP3 , read by Jeff Riggenbach. The entire book is being prepared for podcast and download .] We have now established each man’s property right in his own person and in the virgin land that he finds and transforms by his labor, and we have shown that
[This article is excerpted from chapter 15 of The Ethics of Liberty . Listen to this article in MP3 .] Liberals generally wish to preserve the concept of “rights” for such “human” rights as freedom of speech, while denying the concept to private property. And yet, on the contrary the concept of “rights” only makes sense as property rights. For
[This article is excerpted from chapter 16 of The Ethics of Liberty . Listen to this article in MP3 , read by Jeff Riggenbach. The entire book is being prepared for podcast and download .] Our theory of property rights can be used to unravel a tangled skein of complex problems revolving around questions of knowledge, true and false, and the
[This article is taken from chapter 19 of The Ethics of Liberty . The full audiobook is available for download .] The right of property implies the right to make contracts about that property: to give it away or to exchange titles of ownership for the property of another person. Unfortunately, many libertarians, devoted to the right to make
[This article is taken from chapter 21 of The Ethics of Liberty . Listen to this article in MP3 , read by Jeff Riggenbach. The entire book is being prepared for podcast and download .] It has lately become a growing fashion to extend the concept of rights from human beings to animals, and to assert that since animals have the full rights of
[First published in The Libertarian Forum , May, 1973.] On the evening of Saturday, April 21, Dr. F.A. “Baldy” Harper died suddenly, of a heart attack, at the age of 68. To say that Baldy’s death is an irreparable loss, personally and in every other way, to the libertarian movement, would be a masterpiece of understatement. Ever since he came to
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.