July 10, 2006

Editor's Note: Follow the links to a greater understanding of the real free market and individual liberty. Unless you understand these concepts - which are impossible to separate - you can't be an effective voice or example for liberty and justice. You have everything to gain and nothing to lose, except some of the misconceptions learned in government "schools" and the puppet media.

The Ethics of Liberty
Murray N. Rothbard

INTRODUCTION
By Hans-Hermann Hoppe
IN AN AGE OF intellectual hyperspecialization, Murray N. Rothbard was a grand system builder. An economist by profession, Rothbard was the creator of a system of social and political philosophy based on economics and ethics as its cornerstones. For centuries, economics and ethics (political philosophy) had diverged from their common origin into seemingly unrelated intellectual enterprises. Economics was a value-free "positive" science, and ethics (if it was a science at all) was a "normative" science. As a result of this separation, the concept of property had increasingly disappeared from both disciplines. For economists, property sounded too normative, and for political philosophers property smacked of mundane economics. Rothbard's unique contribution is the rediscovery of and philosophy, and the systematic reconstruction and conceptual integration of modern, marginalist economics and natural-law political philosophy into a unified moral science: libertarianism. (Read the rest here)

Table of Contents
Preface

ALL OF MY WORK has revolved around the central question of human liberty. For it has been my conviction that, while each discipline has its own autonomy and integrity, in the final analysis all sciences and disciplines of human action are interrelated, and can be integrated into a "science" or discipline of individual liberty. In particular, my Man, Economy, and State (2 vols., 1962) set forth a comprehensive analysis of the free-market economy; while the analysis was praxeologic and value-free, and no political conclusions were directly upheld, the great virtues of the free market and the evils of coercive intervention into that market were evident to the discerning reader. The sequel to that work, Power and Market (1970), carried the analysis of Man, Economy, and State further in several ways: (a) a systematic analysis of the types of government intervention in the economy clearly shows the myriad of unfortunate consequences of such intervention; (b) for the first time in modern political economic literature, a model was outlined of the way in which a totally stateless and therefore purely free (or anarchistic) market economy could function successfully; and (c) a praxeological and therefore still value-free critique was conducted of the lack of meaningfulness and consistency of various types of ethical attacks on the free market. The latter section moved from pure economics to ethical criticism, but it remained within the bounds of value-freedom, and thus did not attempt a positive ethical theory of individual liberty. Yet, I was conscious that the latter task needed almost desperately to be done, for, as will be seen further in this work, I at no time believed that value-free analysis or economics or utilitarianism (the standard social philosophy of economists) can ever suffice to establish the case for liberty. Economics can help supply much of the data for a libertarian position, but it cannot establish that political philosophy itself. Political judgments are necessarily value judgments, political philosophy is therefore necessarily ethical, and hence a positive ethical system must be set forth to establish the case for individual liberty.

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