Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty

Murray Rothbard’s treatise, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998) is online in a couple of obscure places, and some of its individual chapters or portions is available online in separate articles. I’ve listed below those I am aware of:

• pdf (pdf2)
• audiobook
• Hoppe’s Introduction: Murray N. Rothbard and the Ethics of Liberty
• 1: Natural Law and Reason, in Introduction to Natural Law
• 2: Natural Law as “Science,” in Introduction to Natural Law
• 3: Natural Law versus Positive Law, in Introduction to Natural Law
• 4: Natural Law and Natural Rights, in Introduction to Natural Law
• 5: The Task of Political Philosophy, in Introduction to Natural Law
• 6: “A Crusoe Social Philosophy,” in “A Crusoe Social Philosophy”
• 7: “Interpersonal Relations: Voluntary Exchange,” in “A Crusoe Social Philosophy”
• 8: “Interpersonal Relations: Ownership and Aggression,” in “A Crusoe Social Philosophy”
• 9: “Property and Criminality,” in “A Crusoe Social Philosophy”
• 12: “Self-Defense”
• 13: “Punishment and Proportionality”
• 14: “Children and Rights“
• 15: “Human Rights as Property Rights”
• 16: Knowledge, True and False
• 17: Bribery
• 18: The Boycott
• 19: “Property Rights and the Theory of Contracts”¹

• 20: Lifeboat Situations
• 21: The “Rights” of Animals
• 26: Utilitarian Free-Market Economics
• 27: Isaiah Berlin on Negative Freedom
• 28: F.A. Hayek and the Concept of Coercion
• 29: Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State
• 30: Toward a Theory of Strategy for Liberty

1. The 1998 print version is missing some text on p. 139, that is present in the online version linked here. The bolded portion is the missing text:
   

   “Thus, if A agreed to sell a parcel of land in exchange for B’s agreed-upon payment of a money price, each would obligate himself to pay a certain sum, usually twice the value of his contractual obligation, in case of failure to pay. In the case of a money debt, called “a common money bond,” someone who owed $1000 agreed to pay $2000 to the creditor if he failed to pay $1000 by a certain date. (Or, more strictly the obligation to pay $2000 was conditional upon the debtor’s paying $1000 by a certain date. Hence the term “conditional penal bond.”) 

   It may be considered more moral to keep promises than to break them, but any coercive enforcement of such a moral code is itself an invasion of property rights and therefore impermissible in the libertarian society.

   In the above example of a contract to perform personal service, suppose that the failure of the actor to appear cost the theater owner $10,000 in damages; in that case, the actor would sign, or “execute,” a penal performance bond, agreeing to pay $20,000 to the theater owner upon failure to appear. [↩]