It Has Arrived

My copy of Murray Rothbard’s treatise, Man, Economy, and State arrived in the mail yesterday, all 890 pages (plus appendices) worth. Why should an ordinary plebeian like me bother to read such a vast work? I’ll let Rothbard’s mentor, the late Ludwig von Mises, explain:

[F]or whom are essays of this consequence written: only for specialists, the students of economics, or for all of the people?

To answer this question we have to keep in mind that the citizens, in their capacity as voters, are called upon to determine ultimately all issues of economic policies...

American public opinion rejects the market economy... Full government control of all activities of the individual is virtually the goal of both national parties. The individual is to be deprived of his moral, political, and economic responsibility and autonomy, and to be converted into a pawn in the schemes of a supreme authority aiming at a “national” purpose...

It is a fateful error on the part of our most valuable contemporaries to believe that economics can be left to specialists in the same way in which various fields of technology can be safely left to those who have chosen to make any one of them their vocation. The issues of society’s economic organization are every citizen’s business. To master them to the best of one’s ability is the duty of everyone.