Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment

Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, edited by Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, is a centenary anthology about Rothbard. The Property and Freedom Society released it online on his hundredth birthday, March 2, 2026. Part 1 gathers essays by contributors who knew or met him, and Part 2 gathers essays by later readers shaped by his work. An appendix reproduces his UNLV syllabus, a faculty evaluation and letters. The contributors write as admirers. The best reason to read the volume is its analytical chapters, which carry Rothbard's framework into knowledge, property disputes, collateral pricing and reform sequencing. This review draws on that online edition's contents, front matter, appendix and passages from four chapters.

In chapter 8, Kinsella starts from the structure of action. Every action needs scarce means and the knowledge to direct them, which Rothbard called recipes. A scarce resource such as a machine admits competing, incompatible uses, so conflict over it is possible, and property rights settle who controls it. A recipe can guide any number of actors at once, each working his own materials. Kinsella concludes that intellectual property, as exclusive rights in knowledge, gives right-holders control over other people's physical means and so creates the conflicts property exists to prevent. The argument is praxeological and normative. Judging what abolishing patents would do requires empirical evidence. The chapter equips a reader to ask which scarce resource an IP right controls, and whose.

David Dürr, an emeritus Zürich law professor, approaches property through adjudication in chapter 14. He stages an imagined dialogue with the late Rothbard, built on Rothbard's 1975 essay on dispute resolution in a stateless society. B holds a painting or tool, and A tries to take it. Holding is a fact, and both can claim "property," so a mediator, C, asks what each would lose. A answers with history: he built the thing or earned its price, and B took it from him, so losing it would also erase his past effort. C finds for A and calls the outcome A's property. For Dürr, property names the resolution of competing claims, decided on evidence and context. That ruling rests on this specific history of A's effort and B's taking. Whether a full system of private adjudication would work remains an open question.

Of the three channels of asset inflation in Jörg Guido Hülsmann's chapter 5, this review follows the collateral channel. Loans, he observes, are usually collateralized. His theory holds that credit-created money adds demand for assets suited to serve as collateral. As collateral, real estate carries relatively low price risk and stays in place, and government securities resell cheaply. The favored assets, he argues, carry a collateral premium and yield correspondingly lower returns. Existing owners value the collateral service as buyers do, so asking prices rise with bids. With a fixed money stock, the premium comes out of cash balances or other spending, so asset values rise relative to incomes. Hülsmann's 2026 chapter compares this theory with a hypothetical natural monetary order, which would also have collateralized loans. On his account, money creation through credit multiplies that demand. The chapter teaches a reader to separate an asset's value as collateral from its direct use or income.

Josef Šíma's chapter 19 turns to transition. He begins from Rothbard's distinction in The Ethics of Liberty between the ultimate goal and the strategic estimate of how to reach it. In his hypothetical, monetary expansion pushes construction toward an unsustainable boom while rent control holds building down, so repealing rent control alone can intensify the overbuilding. Šíma still endorses removing each intervention and notes that the example left Rothbard's case against rent control intact. The timing and order of reforms, he argues, raise empirical questions inside a framework often read as purely deductive. Before backing a partial repeal, a reader can ask which interventions remain and how they interact.

Read together, the four chapters apply one action-based framework to ideas, title, credit and policy. The weak passage sits in Hoppe's introduction. After listing friendly criticisms, Hoppe explains Rothbard's limited academic recognition partly through sweeping generalizations about Jewish influence over academia and media and about Jewish group solidarity. In our assessment, the passage supplies inadequate evidence for those claims, and we treat them as unsupported assertions. The analytical chapters above stand independently of them.

A workable route starts with the preface for scope, then takes Kinsella, Dürr, Hülsmann and Šíma: action, adjudication, money, reform. Hülsmann's chapter is the densest and assumes comfort with banking terms. The appendix documents Rothbard's UNLV teaching, and this review leaves the remaining Part 1 recollections unassessed. Šíma's notes lead on to The Ethics of Liberty.