Comments (9)

• A.B. Dada

  Great introduction by a great man. It blows my mind that he wasn't knocked off by the powers that be early in life -- he will be that famous 100 years from now.

  I constantly have to react to what Rothbard considers Whig Theory. Optimism that the world will always be stable because it always seems stable is one of the reasons we freedom lovers have to fight the trends of "growth" that everyone sees, by reminding them of the nihilist upheavels than society has suffered in even recent times. How quickly we forget tragedies 20 years ago!
  

  Published: January 21, 2006 11:02 AM

• Charly O

  Murray Rothbard had a manner of communicating high ideas in real terms that resonated with such force, his true impact is yet to be felt.

  Published: January 21, 2006 12:19 PM

• Dom

  There Must be a problem with the software calculating the price of shipping these items : rates for Western Europe start at 118 US Dollars!!!
  I know the US Dollar is expected to crumble in value , yetI am not prepared to wait that long... Come on, over at Amazon, it costs 10 dollars or thereabouts for the same shipment : 10 times this amount, even if it's a speedier, cannot be but a computer glitch.
  Correct ? please reassure me !

  Gasping for breath

  Published: January 23, 2006 5:44 AM

• Nathan Shepperd

  I ordered a couple of books while visiting the US because of the expense of shipping to the UK. With the generally weighty tomes available it can get quite prohibitive.

  Published: January 23, 2006 7:08 AM

• jeffrey

  Dom, that does seem prohibitive. The software merely accepts the rates given by the shipper but we'll look into it. Write our store manager and tell your precise destination. By the way, as a general rule, if the actual rates vary from the rates given by the software (as happens sometimes because cheaper alternatives can by cobbled together by our staff) we always refund the difference to the customer.

  Published: January 23, 2006 8:05 AM

• Roger M

  Great article. I would just like to add the fruit of some of my own research: Weber also led us down the wrong path with his linking of Calvinism and capitalism. As Rothbard writes, and research on Calvin's economics reveals, Calvin was no friend of free markets. That's why Scotland had such a hard time developing. The first capitalist nation, the Dutch Republic, which rebelled against Spanish tyranny in 1572, succeeded so miraculously because Calvinism did not dominate it in the formative years. The prevailing religion, especially of leaders such as Grotius, was an Erasmian Protestantism, which fought vigorously against a smothering Calvinism. Erasmians learned their economics from the Scholastics that Rothbard promotes. As a result, they championed free markets. Calvin, on the other hand, didn't give much thought to economics, considering it not very important. So he stuck with the medieval economics popular at the time, which emphasized state control over markets and producers.

  The irony is that Catholics created laissez-faire economics, but couldn't persuade their kings to employ it. Erasmian Protestants in the Dutch Republic took their ideas and implemented them, creating the greatest, richest nation in Europe for almost two centuries.

  Published: January 23, 2006 5:05 PM

• GMB

  It might have been that we protestants were so violent and schismatic that we had to bid away all those things which stood to divide us when it came to national politcy.

  Published: January 23, 2006 6:45 PM

• Mike O'Connor

  In the September 1982 Introduction to the Fourth Edition of his "America's Great Depression", Mr. Rothbard wrote:

  "The fact that Reaganomics cannot bring down interest rates for long puts a permanent brake on the stock market, which has been in chronic trouble since the mid-1960s and is increasingly in shaky shape. The bond market is already on the way to collapse. The housing market has at last been stopped short by the high mortgage rates, and the same has happened to many collectibles." [page. xxiii; emphasis added]

  Readers who are unfamiliar with our markets (as Mr. Rothbard evidently was) will want to consult Yahoo! Finance S&P 500 Chart, to see what happened to the stock market immediately upon Mr. Rothbard's having penned his Introduction to the Fourth Edition. Similarly, ten-year bond yields (which go down when the price of the bond goes up) are to be found at Yahoo! Finance 10-Yr Treasury Note Yield Chart.

  His sense of timing was uncanny. Were he still alive his writings could serve as a contrarian indicator par excellence for investment purposes.

  Published: January 24, 2006 1:03 AM

• GMB

  It sounds like you might be unfamiliar with them. The basic nature of the international currency system changed around then as country after country began to float their currencies.

  A lot of foreign currencies were floated and the amount of international transactions leapt upward. So you had the development of hot money.

  We had all these currencies floating right about that time and all these financial markets going through a 'Big Bang' one after the other.

  Reagans strategy may have still worked without international finance suddenly becoming a lot more active. Since he may have had more success cutting spending without all that hot money coming in. But if the basic nature of the financial markets change with deregulation and computers its hardly something to fault Rothbard about.

  It is surely true that if money supply growth had stayed low and interest rates had stayed high there wouldn't have been as much of a rally.

  In some ways libertarians and near-libertarians at the time did underestimate their own ideas. And they did look rather askance at the supply-siders. They did not realise just how powerful bringing down taxes would be. But surely it would have been better and more prudent, if Congress had been willing to slash non-defense spending to match the tax cuts, and gotten the bonus of the revenue boost without counting their chickens.

  Published: January 24, 2006 2:01 AM