I’ve just finished reading Power and Market by Murray Rothbard, a masterly analysis of government intervention in the economy. The book forms the last section of Man, Economy and State (“MES”), and was originally intended to be the published in the same volume. However the original publishers unfortunately considered it to be too “radical” and excluded it from MES. Recently, the Ludwig von Mises Institute has republished the whole thing as originally intended – in one book. Page numbers refer to this edition.
The most important section of
Power and Market is a difficult call to make, but ultimately the prize has to go "Defense Services on the Free Market", which forms just the first ten pages. Rothbard here demonstrates that the free market can, economically speaking, provide for everything. Seriously,
everything – including defense against violent invasion of person and property, courts and so on. This isn’t, as Rothbard repeatedly stresses, a work on ethics, so he only provides utilitarian arguments in support of his contentions. Rothbard’s basic argument is a simple one, and follows on from the pathbreaking work of Gustave de Molinari, who wrote in his essay
The Production of Security that:
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