In the podcast version, the cultural difference between 1961 (when the article was written) and 2009 (when the article was read aloud) shows up every time the narrator encounters the phrase “hardcore men”. He reads it with the emphasis on the word “men”, as if there were going to be some contrasting point about WOMEN in the next sentence.

The phrase should properly be read with the emphasis on “hardcore” because it was intended to contrast with wishy-washy men in the next phrase. Rothbard was writing in the days when one could use the word “men” to mean individuals of either sex, without raising an eyebrow.

Rothbard’s comments are particularly interesting to me as a hardcore libertarian Canadian because they so accurately reflect what is happening in Canada these days. The only intellectual society up here is Civitas, which contains a small minority of libertarians and a large majority of conservatives. Libertarians are too diluted to have much influence. We need something like the Mises Institute in Canada.

Peter Jaworski and 2 others have founded the Institute for Liberal Studies, a hardcore libertarian group, but it needs to grow.

Interesting read.

Brief sources:

- Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard
- A Letter to Liberals by Leo Tolstoy
- Do You Hate the State? by Murray N. Rothbard
- On the Impossibility of Limited Government and the Prospects for a Second American Revolution by Hoppe
- Strategy: Secession, Privatization, and the Prospects of Liberty by Hoppe
- How America Can Be Saved by Hoppe
- A Strategy for Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard
- Ethics of Liberty: Chp 30. Toward a Theory of Strategy for Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard