Customer Reviews

The Free Market Reader: Essays in the Economics of Liberty

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This 1988 collection of 76 essays from the Mises Institute newsletter (FREE MARKET), is also available under the title of, Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. ROTHBARD.

These essays are each short and to the point (between 2 and 6 pages long), and make for refreshing little doses of (uncompromising) free-market economic sanity. As editor Llewellyn Rockwell makes clear in his introduction, there is a big difference between "tax payers and tax eaters." "The government is separate from us, and almost always opposed to our interests. We do not have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. We have a government to the people. And one important tool in keeping it going is the lie."

Rockwell further states, the general purpose of this collection is to preserve the "ephemeral" nature of the original newsletter essays as well as provide a coherent primer on "free-market theory and policy from an Austrian perspective." Several different facets of this perspective are covered, from fundamental to specifics, and the result seems pretty comprehensive, universal and timeless even though much of the content is specific to issues, administrations and public figures of the 60's 70's and 80's. (My only complaint is there are no notes of original publication dates, so statements like Rothbard's, "This March, I spent a fascinating week at a conference...in ...Poland", leave me wondering what year? What decade?.)

There are 25 different writers represented here. Murray Rothbard is the most prominent (with 25 out of 76 essays), while editor Rockwell contributes 16, and several others have more than one essay - Walter Block 4, Ron Paul 3, Lawrence Reed 3, Sam Wells 3, Mark Hughes 2, Bradley Miller 2, Sheldon Richman 2.