2026: The Year of Rothbard
We clearly live in a time when the idea of freedom is not exactly popular in Washington. The US government has gotten itself into another costly war, and federal spending is at historic highs. Federal deficits are running at levels that rival the worst year of the covid panic. The president has raised taxes on millions of Americans, and now the White House is even talking about drafting people into the military. Although price inflation is well above the Fed’s arbitrary 2% target, Trump and other federal politicians are demanding more easy money.
This looks pretty bad, but now imagine how things would look without the efforts of the scholars and authors who have fought to keep the idea of freedom alive over the decades. Whatever support for true freedom exists today we owe to champions of liberty like William Leggett, William Graham Sumner, Garet Garrett, Rose Wilder Lane, Albert Jay Nock, Leonard Read, Henry Hazlitt, Frank Chodorov, F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and many others. Many more are now forgotten, but it is these brave people who made it possible for the idea of freedom and free markets to survive from generation to generation. This happened in spite of relentless propaganda through media and the public schools, which work to mold Americans into obedient acolytes of our modern welfare-warfare state.
Among those who fought back against all this, perhaps none was more energetic and erudite than Murray Rothbard. This year we celebrate the centennial of Rothbard’s birthday in 1926.
Rothbard was a brilliant economist who preserved, popularized, and built upon the Austrian School framework that had progressed so far under Mises. In many ways, Rothbard made the Austrian School revival of the late twentieth-century possible. But for Rothbard, it wasn’t enough to be an economist. His scholarship in history remains crucial to understanding the nature of the state and is filled with insights into the true villains of history. As an economic historian, Rothbard provided us with some of the best research out there on the Great Depression, the need for sound money, and the boom-bust cycle in general. His monumental work on the American Revolution—Conceived in Liberty—is an essential reinterpretation that reveals the Federalist counterrevolution as the seed of today’s runaway American government.
But at the heart of all of Rothbard’s work was a thirst for justice that permeates nearly every page. It is especially present in his work on war and state violence, where we feel his outrage and his desire to create a more just order. But for Rothbard, there can never be justice without freedom. It is clear today that in every way, Rothbard was the necessary heir to the radical profreedom party that had survived in America from the Jeffersonians to the libertarian Old Right of postwar America. Through his dozens of books and thousands of articles, Rothbard preserved the spirit of radical freedom for another generation, and at a time when all the forces of state propaganda were against him.
In this issue of The Misesian, we feature a new essay from Patrick Newman, one of the scholars most familiar with Rothbard’s work and the inner workings of his academic mind. Newman here explores the many ways that Rothbard remains so relevant to our current economic and political controversies. Beyond that, readers will find here other articles, all of which are in the Rothbardian tradition of advancing the scholarship of freedom and sound economics. This is just a small part of our scholars’ work on the new books, lectures, and events that will be part of the Year of Rothbard.
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