Jun

29

The Uncompromising Rothbard

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The Uncompromising Rothbard
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

This originally appeared in the September 2005 issue of The Free Market

There are many varieties of libertarianism alive in the world today, and they owe a great debt to the work of Ludwig von Mises. His top American student was Murray N. Rothbard, and Rothbardianism remains the center of its intellectual gravity, its primary muse and conscience, its strategic and moral core, and the focal point of debate even when its name is not acknowledged. The reason is that Rothbard forged a blend between Austrian economics and natural-rights political theory of the old liberal school to create a modern libertarianism, a political-economic-ideological system that proposes a once-and-for-all escape from the trappings of left and right and their central plans for how state power should be used. Libertarianism is the radical alternative that says state power is both unworkable and immoral. Read more

May

8

The Malicious Myth of the ‘Libertarian’ Fed

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The Malicious Myth of the ‘Libertarian’ Fed
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

In the history of American politics the statists have always been advocates of a central bank, whereas the defenders of liberty – libertarians – have opposed it. Legalized governmental counterfeiting has always been every totalitarian’s dream and every right-minded libertarian’s nightmare.

A Federal Reserve publication entitled “A History of Central Banking in America” correctly calls Alexander Hamilton “the founding father of central banking in America.” His nemesis, Thomas Jefferson, strongly opposed Hamilton’s Bank of the United States as a mortal threat to liberty and economic stability. So did Jefferson’s political heir, Andrew Jackson, who vetoed the re-chartering of Hamilton’s Bank of the United States. By that time (the late 1830s) the face of the Hamiltonian/statist cabal in American politics was the face of the Whig Party, and no one was a more strident advocate of a central bank than the young Whig Abraham Lincoln. After being snuffed out by the 1840s, central banking was revived by Lincoln’s National Currency Acts in the 1860s, and then finally cemented into place fifty years later with the creation of the Fed. Read more