Our Tradition

The History of Liberty
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  • B.K. Marcus

“Frank Chodorov, RIP” by Murray N. Rothbard Apr 25, 2014

[Written by Murray N. Rothbard. First published in Left & Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, 1967.] It was almost twenty years ago that I first met Frank Chodorov. It was at one of those luxurious but terribly dreary cocktail parties that have long served as rallying ground for the intelligentsia of the American right wing. There the more articulate of the rightists are wont to gather to declaim at each other for the umpteenth time on the perils of inflation, the immorality of welfare recipients, and the clear and present menace of Walter Reuther to the vitals of the...

By B.K. Marcus Vote3 8

Henry David Thoreau: Is There a Duty to Disobey Unjust Laws? Apr 20, 2014

[Excerpted from The Art of Being Free: Politics Versus the Everyman and Woman by Wendy McElroy] La Boétie presented the dynamics of voluntary servitude and the solution to it: withdraw your consent. But at what point, if any, does the denial of consent require not merely withdrawal but also active disobedience? Through his remarkable life and writings, Henry David Thoreau offers an answer. In his essay “On Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau also offers an insight that all opponents of state power should heed. After being released from jail for what may be the world’s most famous act of civil disobedience, Thoreau...

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Roofs or Ceilings: the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 Apr 18, 2014

On this day in 1906, a great earthquake struck San Francisco and the coast of Northern California at 5:12 a.m. One of the worst natural disasters in US history — and the single greatest loss of life in California's history — the quake and the resulting fires killed at least 3,000 people and destroyed over 80 percent of San Francisco. More than half the city's survivors were left homeless. Why is this natural disaster part of our tradition, the tradition of liberty? Because 40 years later, in 1946, the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) published 500,000 copies of a pamphlet...

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The Cider Rebellion Apr 11, 2014

Today is the anniversary of Lord Bute's 1763 ouster from office in England. In hindsight, we can see that the error that ended this stage of his career could have served as a warning to the British government of their impending loss of the American colonies. In Conceived in Liberty, volume 3, chapter 4 ("The British Army and the Grand Design"), Murray Rothbard tells the history of tax revolts on both sides of the pond before Americans declared independence from Britain. For four decades, the English Whigs (liberals, in the libertarian sense) had maintained a policy of "salutary neglect" of...

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Happy Birthday, Hugo Grotius Apr 10, 2014

If 17th-century Dutch jurist and natural-law theorist Hugo Grotius were alive, he'd be 431 years young today. Murray Rothbard described him as "deeply influenced by the late Spanish Scholastics." Grotius asserted that natural laws and natural rights were "truly independent of the question of whether God had created them." This position was implicit in earlier thought, but never as boldly stated. (See Rothbard's introduction to natural law.)

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Why the Language of Our Tradition Matters Apr 8, 2014

I’ve been blogging recently (An Idiot Abroad, the Economist, Sp!ked) about "Little Englander," a term that I would argue is a contranym, something that means both one thing and its opposite. So what are we to make of these opposed connotations of nationalist bigotry on the one hand and peaceful internationalism on the other, both wrapped up in a single term? For one thing, the contrast is no accident — no more than it is an accident that the term liberal can mean left- or right-wing, pro-or anti-market, an advocate of hard capitalism or soft socialism, depending on the context...

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