Summary of Murray N. Rothbard's For a New Liberty

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 When I began learning English, my mother was worried about my mental stability. When I added Russian to my curriculum, she took me to the doctor. Luckily, he was a student of Russian himself and was able to assure her that my ambitions were not medically abnormal.

#2 I, too, accepted the laws curtailing my rights quietly. I was 15 when I was struck off the roll of the local high school, and I was forbidden to study on my own. I became a laborer, and I found there were two salary scales - a low one for Jews and a higher one for all others.

#3 I had to take a taxi ride to freedom. I was picked up in Sered, half an hour away, and taken to Trnava, where I paid my mother two hundred crowns for the taxi ride. I then took the train to Sered, where I met my school friend who helped me get to Galanta in Hungary.

#4 I crossed into Hungary at Galanta, and after a long and cold walk, I arrived at my friend’s house at five in the morning. The maid stared at me as if I had a bomb in my pocket. I had to have a bath, and my clothes were freshly sponged and pressed when I came out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822523654

IRB Media

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Insights on Murray N. Rothbard's For a New Liberty

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The libertarian believes that no one may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This implies that the libertarian stands for what are known as civil liberties: the freedom to speak, publish, assemble, and engage in such victimless crimes as pornography and sexual deviation.

#2

The libertarian refuses to give the state any moral sanction to commit acts that are generally considered immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society. The libertarian insists on applying the general moral law to everyone, and makes no special exemptions for any person or group.

#3

The libertarian strives to desanctify the state, and to demonstrate that all governments exist to exploit their subjects. He tries to show that the very existence of taxation and the state creates a class division between the rulers and the ruled.

#4

There are three types of foundation for the libertarian axiom: the emotivist, the utilitarian, and the natural rights viewpoint. The emotivists assert that they take liberty or nonaggression as their premise purely on subjective, emotional grounds. The utilitarians claim that liberty will lead to widely approved goals. But no one trusts a utilitarian to maintain libertarian principle in every specific application.

#5

The natural-rights libertarian believes that all people have a specific nature that determines their actions, and that nature must be respected. While plants and animals have instincts, humans must use their minds to choose their own ends and means to attain them.

#6

The right to self-ownership is the base axiom of the libertarian position. It asserts the absolute right of each person to own their own body free of coercive interference. If you take away someone’s right to own themselves, you take away their right to live.

#7

The libertarian believes that all humans have a right to property, and that no one should be aggressing against that right. But it is difficult to decide what constitutes property in non-human objects. Some libertarians argue that whoever the existing government declares to be the owner of an object should be considered the rightful owner.

#8

The natural-rights position on property titles is that only those who have a theory of justice in property rights that does not depend on government decree can be in a position to scoff at the new rulers’ claims to have private property in the territory of the country.

#9

The question of who owns the work of art as it emerges from the sculptor’s fashioning is often answered by saying that the sculptor owns it. But this is not always the case. The world has three logical alternatives when it comes to property: (1) the transformer or creator owns his creation, (2) another man or set of men own it, or (3) every individual in the world owns an equal, quotal share in the ownership of the sculpture.

#10

The case of the sculptor is not different from all cases of production. The man or men who had extracted the clay from the ground and had sold it to the sculptor may not be as creative as the sculptor, but they are still producers who have mixed their ideas and technological know-how with nature-given materials to produce a useful product.

#11

The Georgist argument is that while every man should own the goods he produces or creates, since Nature or God created the land itself, no individual has the right to assume ownership