Murray Rothbard

**Murray Newton Rothbard** (March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American economist and writer.  He helped make the Austrian School of economics popular in the United States.

Rothbard helped to create modern libertarianism, a political belief in less government and more personal freedom. He founded a form of free-market anarchism which he called "anarcho-capitalism". Rothbard believed society should organise itself, and he didn't like central planning.

Rothbard wrote over twenty books and was an important central figure in the American libertarian movement.

## His ideas 
Rothbard supported the  of government. He considered the government having a monopoly on force the greatest danger to liberty and the long-term well-being of the people. He called the state a "gang of thieves writ large — the most immoral, grasping and unscrupulous individuals in any society".

Rothbard thought that all services provided by monopoly governments could be provided more efficiently by the private sector. According to him, many regulations and laws passed "for the public interest" were self-interested power grabs by scheming government bureaucrats to make themselves look important. These schemes were not subject to market disciplines.

Government services were not efficient, and would get eliminated, if the services could be provided by competition in the private sector.

Rothbard was equally condemning of big business working with government. Business elites, he thought, used government's monopoly power so as to influence laws and regulatory policy to help themselves at the expense of their competitive rivals.

He argued that taxation was theft on a grand scale, backed by law. It was "a compulsory monopoly of force" which prevented the more efficient voluntary procurement of defense and judicial services from competing suppliers. He also argued against central banking and fractional reserve banking. A monopoly system where the government decides how much money to print is, to him, a form of state-sponsored, legalized financial fraud. It is against libertarian principles and ethics. Rothbard opposed military, political, and economic s in the affairs of other nations.

## Books 
* *Man, economy, and state* Full text ;  (1962)
* *The panic of 1819*. 1962, 2006 edition: 
* ''America's great depression*. Full text . (1963, 1972, 1975, 1983, 2000)
* *What has government done to our money?* Full text / Audio Book   (1963)
* *Economic depressions: causes and cures* (1969)
* *Power and market*. . (1970) restored to *Man, economy, and state* , 2004
* *Education: free and compulsory*.  (1972)
* *Left and Right, selected essays 1954-65* (1972)
* *For a new liberty: the libertarian manifesto* Full text / Audio book  (1973, 1978)
* *The essential von Mises* (1973)
* *The case for the 100 percent gold dollar*.  Full text / Audio Book  (1974)
* *Egalitarianism as a revolt against nature and other essays*  (1974)
* *Conceived in liberty* 4 vols  (1975-79)
* *Individualism and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences*.  (1979)
* *The ethics of liberty* Full text / Audio Book   (1982)
* *The mystery of banking*   (1983)
* *Ludwig von Mises: scholar, creator, hero*.  (1988)
* *Freedom, inequality, primitivism, and the division of labor*. Full text included as Chapter 16 in *Egalitarianism* above (1991)
* *The case against the Fed*.  (1994)
* *An Austrian perspective on the history of economic thought* 2 vols  (1995)
* *Wall Street, banks, and American foreign policy*. Full text with an introduction by Justin Raimondo. (1995)
* *Making economic sense*.  (1995, 2006)
* *Logic of action* 2 vols  and  (1997)
* *The Austrian theory of the trade cycle and other essays*.  (also by Mises, Hayek, & Haberler)
* *Irrepressible Rothbard: the Rothbard-Rockwell report: essays of Murray N. Rothbard*. Full Text  (2000)
* *A history of money and banking in the United States*.  (2005)
* *The complete Libertarian Forum* 2 vols Full text  (2006)
* *The betrayal of the American Right*.  (2007)

## Related pages
* List of anarchists
* anarcho-capitalism

## Notes 
## Other websites
* Murray N. Rothbard Library and Resources 
* Murray N. Rothbard Media Archive at Mises.org 
* BlackCrayon.com: People: Murray Rothbard
* Chronological Bibliography of Murray Rothbard 
* The Complete Archives of *The Libertarian Forum*, written about twice a month between 1969 and 1984.
* *Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult* (pamphlet published by the Center for Libertarian Studies)
* A 1972 *New Banner'' interview with Murray Rothbard
* A 1990 interview with Murray Rothbard
* Murray Rothbard Institute , Belgium