About the author: Murray Rothbard was a political theorist, professor, economist of the Austrian school, and one of the founding fathers of modern anarcho-capitalism – a synthesis of classical liberalism and individualist anarchism. He was active in the Libertarian Party in the 1970s and '80s and cofounded the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. His other major works include America's Great Depression, The Ethics of Liberty, and Man, Economy, and State.

About the book: This book is considered a Libertarian Manifesto that lays out the foundational principles of libertarianism, which puts individual rights and freedom above government rights written in 1973 by By Murray N. Rothbard. After reading this book, we continue developing the idea of open markets, and you can try to look at governments in a more critical way. We believe this is a good entrance to understanding the libertarians and how we see the functioning of society in the future without strong central governments and tyrants justifying their poor decisions with religion. Here we prepared a summary of a book for your convenience. We strongly recommend you read this book in full and have a great time with yourselves doubting many things you learn in school and developing your own critical thinking arguing with the best minds in the world through reading their pages.

Key ideas from the book

1/ United States was founded on libertarian principles. 

Before the 18th century, governments generally consisted of an all-powerful State headed by a king. He had absolute control, imposed high taxes, and ruled monopolies. English philosophers John Locke, John Trenchard, and Thomas Gordon laid the foundations for modern libertarianism. Their key arguments were that the State is always an agent of tyranny and coercion and that citizens had a right to revolt if a government became tyrannical. These principles were put into the founding documents of the United States of America. However, these values continued to erode as time passed, and the central government's power increased.

2/ The nonaggression axiom is the core of libertarianism.

"No person or group should initiate or threaten violence against anyone else."

This principle lies in the core of libertarian beliefs and is the only rule which stays at the center of all libertarian views and decision-making processes. This principle does not only forbid physical aggression; it also works for the protection of other people's private property. According to the libertarians, private property is anything produced when someone takes raw material and mixes it with his labor. The good analogy here is to look at private property as an extension of its owner's body. For example, libertarians do not consider prostitution as a crime since no aggression is involved in it.

The biggest aggressor in society is the State, to be more precise - the central entity that governs a group of individuals. The State has developed a sophisticated vocabulary to convince everyone that what it does is for the common good or public welfare. But these terms just hide the fact that the State has a monopoly on aggression.

Despite the State also being made up of individuals, it regularly engages in actions that would never be acceptable for private citizens. For instance, a citizen setting off bombs is considered a mass murderer. But when the State does this, it's simply called "war." 

3/ Slavery is still alive, however, it is still alive but hidden in the new words and actively utilised by the Government.

The State regularly compels forced labor. Consider the military. In many countries, all young people are obligated to register for the armed forces. If the government said the word, these men had no choice but to kill, capture, and put their own lives in danger in service of the State. Another major perpetrator of involuntary servitude is the tax system. The very existence of income tax means that all of us work some amount of time per year entirely for free, making us part-time slaves to the State. Naturally, not all of our problems stem from the issue of forced labor. 

4/ The State also regularly intrudes upon our personal liberties. 

For example, criminal suspects are often jailed before they're even proven guilty. In our society, we don't only unjustly jail criminal suspects – we do the same to people who have mental illnesses.

Mentally ill people can still be involuntarily hospitalized because they're supposedly a "danger to themselves and others." A person with a mental illness shouldn't be involuntarily committed to a hospital any more than another person should be jailed under the premise that he might one day commit a crime. In a libertarian system, a suspect wouldn't be jailed until the court has made its verdict. Statistically, teenage males are more likely to commit crimes than any other demographic. Does that mean all teenage males should be systematically rounded up and locked in prison?

5/ The State should not legislate a particular moral code.

For libertarians, morality and legality are two separate spheres. Through the legal code, the State should not impose any particular moral views on anyone else. From the libertarian perspective, commonly accepted rights like freedom of speech and freedom of the press fall under the blanket of property rights. Importantly, though, libertarians also believe in freedom of the will. 

Conservatives and liberals have very different views on morality. However, both advocate for a society that encodes their particular morals into law. To libertarians, moral questions are irrelevant. Instead, violations of the nonaggression axiom are the only crimes. When the State legislates morality, someone's freedoms are always impinged upon.

6/ The Federal Reserve causes inflation and economic recession.

Inflation plays a vital role in the economic boom and bust cycle, which the Fed is largely responsible for perpetuating.

The Federal Reserve is in complete control of the total dollar supply. And it can write checks or bank demand deposits. These checks are promises that the Fed will pay out a deposit-holder's demand deposit in cash whenever it desires. In practice, this means banks lend much more money than they actually physically have. If every person suddenly demanded to have all the cash that was stored in their bank accounts, the Fed would have no chance of paying out that much money all at once – unless, of course, it simply printed as much money as it needed, causing major inflation.

During the boom cycle, the Fed increases the money supply, and banks hand out lots of loans at artificially low interest rates. Businessmen, then, are incentivized to invest in capital goods – for example, factories. The extra money they're spending goes to workers – the consumers – in the form of higher wages. The larger money supply then causes the prices of consumer goods to rise.

At some point, banks must start asking people for debt repayments to replenish their reserves. An economic depression ensues. Next, the Fed steps in and bails out the banks, inflating the currency further. This expands the government's revenue, but it hurts everyone else. The money supply never shrinks, which means prices never fall, and so the cycle continues.

7/ Public sector services like streets, police, and courts should be privatized.

Libertarians believe that the free market could provide public services like roads at much lower prices and higher quality. If the public sector were abolished, all pieces of land would become privately owned – including streets and roads. In a residential neighborhood, landlords might band together to purchase and become joint owners of a particular block. To increase the market value of their block, the landlords would automatically be incentivized to ensure that their streets remained efficient and safe. They would hire private police that would ensure street safety since these landlords wouldn't be able to attract many tenants if their streets were constantly plagued with crime. 

In this society, there would be no State enforcing the court's judgment. Instead, a criminal would be incentivized to comply with his sentence because of the consequences of not doing so. If a merchant was found to be a scammer, for example, and then didn't pay his court-ordered fine, the news would spread, and he'd quickly find himself out of business.

8/ A fully free market could correct the environmental ills the government has created.

When it comes to many resources, the free market has done an excellent job of conservation. For example, the government is largely in control of the timber industry, which is experiencing scarcity issues. The State owns most of the forests, and it leases parts of the forests out to private timber companies. These companies are allowed to use the forests but never own them. That means there's no economic incentive for companies to conserve and maintain the forests – their goal is simply to generate as much profit as possible, then leave. Privatizing the forests would create an economic incentive for companies to maintain them carefully. This same principle could help solve the problem of pollution, too: rivers and lakes are heavily polluted by sewage companies, which the State employs to dispose of everyone's waste for free. If this service didn't exist, everyone would invest in eco-friendly toilets that can burn off sewage on their own. These toilets are already on the market, but there's currently little incentive to buy them.

To sum up: To many people, the government seems like a necessary and inevitable entity. But from the libertarian perspective, the State is nothing more than a highwayman that forcibly robs its citizens at gunpoint, impinges upon people's liberties, and impedes free enterprise. All of the services the State currently provides could perform just as well – or even better – if they were privatized and the market was allowed to operate freely.