Murray Rothbard

==Background==
* Rothbard at Wikipedia
* Bio
* Author of a classic book from 1973, For a New Liberty, The Libertarian Manifesto See here, For a New Liberty
: http://www.mises.org/store/For-A-New-Liberty-P301C1.aspx
: This book is the result of the only contract Rothbard ever received from a mainstream commercial publisher.
* called, "Mr. Libertarian" and "The State's Greatest Living Enemy."
* Author of America's Great Depression - 5th edition, a PDF.
==Details==
Rothbard proposes a once-and-for-all escape from the two major political parties, the ideologies they embrace, and their central plans for using state power against people. Libertarianism is Rothbard's radical alternative that says state power is unworkable and immoral and ought to be curbed and finally overthrown. 
To make his case, Rothbard deploys his entire system of thought: natural law, natural rights, Austrian economics, American history, the theory of the state, and more.
Society without the nation state? Rothbard shows that this is the way for peace, prosperity, security, and freedom for all. In the entire history of libertarian ideas, no book has more successfully combined ideological rigor, theoretical exposition, political rhetoric, historical illustration, and strategic acumen. Rothbard poured a lifetime of research and all his intellectual energy into this project and he succeeded in writing a classic.
The book shows that the revolution of 1776 was the most libertarian of any in history. The pastors, pamphleteers, and statesmen who led it held that the state has no rights of the people that the people themselves do not possess. They demand full liberty, not some truncated version that existed in the old world.
The central axiom: no man or group of men may aggress against the person and property of anyone else. He justifies the axiom on the basis of natural rights. It is an axiom that has few opponents, until Rothbard spells out the implications: taxation is theft, conscription is slavery, and war is mass murder.
The state is the primary violator of this simple axiom. It presumes the right to rob and kill while purporting to protect you from robbing and killing. Thus follows a full theory of the state, how it gains and maintains controls over the population (not through a social contract!), the various failed methods for keeping it in check (not even constitutions work!), its operations and tendencies to work its evil (it never has enough power), and how intellectuals become co-opted by the forces of state power.
The most pressing problems of society are wrapped up in government operations. Whether it is medical issues, the price of oil, the disaster of education, conflicts over religion, police corruption, the scandal of war, the issues that are tearing us apart are invariably the result of government intervention into the sector.
Rothbard