[Chapter 1 of Rothbard’s newly edited and released Conceived in Liberty, vol. 5: The New Republic: 1784–1791.]
After peace came in 1783, the new republic faced a two-fold economic adjustment: to peacetime from the artificial production and trade patterns during the war, and to a far different trading picture than had existed before the war. The largest change between the two eras of peace was the shift in trading patterns resulting from independence. Most importantly, while Americans were freed from the shackles of British mercantilism and could trade freely with the rest of the world, the United States was now a foreign country that could no longer freely enjoy a market within the British Empire.
While the bulk of America’s trade remained with the British Empire,

This article was originally published in Libertarian Outlook (vol. 1, no 1, August 1985). This was the only issue of the magazine that was ever published. Permission was granted by Eric Garris, one of the original coeditors, to reprint this article on mises.org.
Libertarians have devoted so much time and energy to the important cause of repealing laws against victimless “crimes” that we have tended to neglect an equally important social problem: crimes with victims, i.e., genuine crime. Our neglect has scarcely been matched by that of the American people, who have rightly put concern and horror at “street crime” near the top of their political agenda. It is also beside the point for Ralph Nadar and his colleagues to wail about the public’s relative indifference

Our country is beset by a large number of economic myths that distort public thinking on important problems and lead us to accept unsound and dangerous government policies. Here are ten of the most dangerous of these myths and an analysis of what is wrong with them.
Myth #1
Deficits are the cause of inflation; deficits have nothing to do with inflation.
In recent decades we always have had federal deficits. The invariable response of the party out of power, whichever it may be, is to denounce those deficits as being the cause of our chronic inflation. And the invariable response of whatever party is in power has been to claim that deficits have nothing to do with inflation. Both opposing statements are myths.
Deficits mean that the federal government is spending

Mercantilism has had a "good press" in recent decades, in contrast to 19th-century opinion. In the days of Adam Smith and the classical economists, mercantilism was properly regarded as a blend of economic fallacy and state creation of special privilege. But in our century, the general view of mercantilism has changed drastically: Keynesians hail mercantilists as prefiguring their own economic insights; Marxists, constitutionally unable to distinguish between free enterprise and special privilege, hail mercantilism as a "progressive" step in the historical development of capitalism; socialists and interventionists salute mercantilism as anticipating modern state building and central planning.
Mercantilism, which reached its height in the Europe of the 17th and

The Free Market 12, no. 9 (September 1994)

In recent years, Americans have been subjected to a concerted assault upon their national symbols, holidays, and anniversaries. Washington’s Birthday has been forgotten, and Christopher Columbus has been denigrated as an evil Euro-White male, while new and obscure anniversary celebrations have been foisted upon us. New heroes have been manufactured to represent "oppressed groups" and paraded before us for our titillation.
There is nothing wrong, however, with the process of uncovering important and buried facts about our past. In particular, there is one widespread group of the oppressed that are still and increasingly denigrated and scorned: the hapless American taxpayer.
This year is the bicentenary of an important

One of the reasons that most economists of the 1920s did not recognize the existence of an inflationary problem was the widespread adoption of a stable price level as the goal and criterion for monetary policy. The extent to which the Federal Reserve authorities were guided by a desire to keep the price level stable has been a matter of considerable controversy. Far less controversial is the fact that more and more economists came to consider a stable price level as the major goal of monetary policy. The fact that general prices were more or less stable during the 1920s told most economists that there was no inflationary threat, and therefore the events of the Great Depression caught them completely unaware.
Actually, bank-credit expansion creates its mischievous

Money is a crucial command post of any economy, and therefore of any society. Society rests upon a network of voluntary exchanges, also known as the “free-market economy”; these exchanges imply a division of labor in society, in which producers of eggs, nails, horses, lumber, and immaterial services such as teaching, medical care, and concerts, exchange their goods for the goods of others. At each step of the way, every participant in exchange benefits immeasurably, for if everyone were forced to be self-sufficient, those few who managed to survive would be reduced to a pitiful standard of living.
Direct exchange of goods and services, also known as “barter,” is hopelessly unproductive beyond the most primitive level, and indeed every “primitive” tribe soon found

[This article is excerpted from Conceived in Liberty, volume 1, chapter 6, "The Social Structure of Virginia: Bondservants and Slaves". An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Floy Lilley, is available for download.]
Until the 1670s, the bulk of forced labor in Virginia was indentured service (largely white, but some Negro); Negro slavery was negligible. In 1683 there were 12,000 indentured servants in Virginia and only 3,000 slaves of a total population of 44,000. Masters generally preferred bondservants for two reasons. First, they could exploit the bondservants more ruthlessly because they did not own them permanently, as they did their slaves; on the other hand, the slaves were completely their owners’ capital and hence the masters were economically

[Originally from Joseph R. Peden and Fred R. Glahe, eds., The American Family and the State (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 1986).]
While the "Progressive Era" used to be narrowly designated as the period 1900–1914, historians now realize that the period is really much broader, stretching from the latter decades of the nineteenth century into the early 1920s. The broader period marks an era in which the entire American polity—from economics to urban planning to medicine to social work to the licensing of professions to the ideology of intellectuals—was transformed from a roughly laissez-faire system based on individual rights to one of state planning and control. In the sphere of public policy issues closely related to the life of the family, most of

These short columns—usually no more than two typewritten pages each—appeared in the Freedom Newspapers. Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968, addressing the campus revolt; the massive antiwar demonstrations; the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab powers; the Newark riots; the Vietnam war; the persecution of H. Rap Brown, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the abdication of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the rise of Richard Nixon — in those two crucial years there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Read the text version here. Narrated by Jim Vann.
Download the complete audiobook (63 MP3 files) in one ZIP file here. This audiobook is also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

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Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

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Tags: Featured,newsletter

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Starting in January of 1967, Rothbard churned out fifty-eight columns, the last one written in the summer of 1968. In those two crucial years, there was, as they say, never a dull moment.
Narrated by Jim Vann.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Everyone will agree that the American tax system is a mess. Taxes are far too high, and the patchwork system is so complicated that even IRS officials don’t understand it. Hence the evident need for some sort of dramatic, even drastic, reform. As often happens, a group of dedicated and determined reformers has arisen to satisfy that need. But before we embrace this new gospel, we should heed the old maxim about jumping from the frying pan into the fire, and also remember the warning of the great H.L. Mencken, who defined “reform” as “Mainly a conspiracy of prehensile charlatans to mulct the American taxpayer.” And we should also bear in mind that all acts of government, however wor­thy they may seem, have a way of winding up solving no problems and only making