[Chapter 13 of Rothbard’s newly edited and released Conceived in Liberty , vol. 5, The New Republic: 1784–1791 .] From the very beginning of the great emerging struggle over the Constitution the Antifederalist forces suffered from a grave and debilitating problem of leadership. The problem was that the liberal leadership was so conservatized
[Chapter 14 of Rothbard’s newly edited and released Conceived in Liberty , vol. 5, The New Republic: 1784–1791 .] The nationalists who went into the convention agreed on certain broad objectives, crucial for a new government, all designed to remodel the United States into a country with the British political structure. They had the ultimate
[Chapter 15 of Rothbard’s newly edited and released Conceived in Liberty , vol. 5, The New Republic: 1784–1791 .] At the end of May [of 1787], the convention approved with little debate the severely national power granted to Congress, including the absolute power to act when it deemed the states to be “incompetent” and to veto all state laws it
As everyone knows, the West, and especially northern California, has been suffering from a year-long drought, leading numerous statists and busybodies to leap in to control, ration, and ordain. The water “shortage” may not be exactly blamed on the private sector, but it is there, supposedly, and surely government must leap in to combat it—not, of
The Constitution had been ratified and was going into effect, and the next great question before the country was the spate of amendments which the Federalists had reluctantly agreed to recommend at the state conventions. Would they, as Madison and the other Federalists wanted, be quietly forgotten? The Antifederalists, particularly in Virginia and
It was a bloodless coup d’état against an unresisting Confederation Congress. The original structure of the new Constitution was now complete. The Federalists, by use of propaganda, chicanery, fraud, malapportionment of delegates, blackmail threats of secession, and even coercive laws, had managed to sustain enough delegates to defy the wishes
[Editor’s note: Two interviews from August 1992 given by Murray Rothbard to the Swedish student publication Svensk Linje (continuously published since 1942) were recently discovered in the Rothbard Archives and translated by Sven Thommesen for the first time. In this interview, Rothbard offers his thoughts on the 1992 election and the role of the
[Column written by Murray Rothbard for the New Libertarian 4, no. 7 (April-June 1980): 13–15.] The Iran/Afghanistan crises have been a god-send to Jimmy Carter. From being lowest in the polls of any President in American history, Carter has vaulted to a probably shoo-in for reelection. Iran helped; but it was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
[Chapter 19 of Rothbard’s newly edited and released Conceived in Liberty , vol. 5, The New Republic: 1784–1791 .] A particularly vital aspect of the Constitution was the procedure to be set up for its ratification. The draft proposed that the Constitution be submitted to Congress and then to special conventions, so that state legislatures could
[This passage is excerpted from Murray N. Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty , vol. 5, The New Republic: 1784–1791 .] All the articles of the draft plan having been considered by the convention, the amended draft was referred on August 31 to a grand Committee of Unfinished Parts. In the committee, the nationalists, not content with their plethora
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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.
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