By Murray Sabrin
Murray's Newsletter
October 23, 2026
Dedication
To the memory of my parents and the millions who suffered under the tyranny of totalitarian governments, and to all Americans who deserve to live in a country where individual liberty, personal responsibility, sound money, peace, voluntary cooperation, and constitutional government are not forgotten ideals, but living principles.
May this manifesto help inspire the peaceful abolition of the welfare-warfare state and the restoration of a free America.
And a special thank you to Ludwig von Mises, Murray N. Rothbard, and Henry Hazlitt and countless others who spoke truth to power.
**************************
Preface
1. Why I Am Writing The Abolition Manifesto
I did not set out to write The Abolition Manifesto after I wrote four books, including a memoir, since I retired in 2020. More than fifty years ago, I set out to understand why some societies are free and prosperous while others are poor, authoritarian and dependent on government. That search took me on an intellectual journey that began in the early 1970s when I discovered the Austrian School of economics. What I learned changed my understanding of economics, history, politics and, ultimately, the meaning of freedom.
My interest in freedom is also deeply personal. I came to America in 1949 as the son of Holocaust survivors. Members of my family were murdered in Poland during World War II. I never had the opportunity to know aunts, uncles or grandparents because they were among those who perished. Growing up with that family history left me with a profound appreciation for the uniqueness of America and the importance of protecting individual liberty from the arbitrary exercise of government power.
My intellectual journey accelerated when I encountered the writings of Murray N. Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt. Mises taught me that economics is ultimately about human action and that voluntary exchange, entrepreneurship and private property are the foundation of a prosperous society. His Human Action provided a framework for understanding why individuals, rather than government planners, are best positioned to make decisions about their own lives.
Rothbard did something extraordinary: He connected economics, history and political philosophy into a comprehensive case for liberty. His Man, Economy, and State helped shape my understanding of markets and government intervention. What Has Government Done to Our Money? transformed my understanding of money and central banking. His multivolume Conceived in Liberty showed me that the American Revolution should be understood as a revolt against arbitrary political power and in defense of self-government.
Our intellectual relationship eventually became personal. Rothbard served on my dissertation committee while I was a graduate student at Rutgers. In April 1974, he accepted my invitation to serve as an outside faculty member. My dissertation, on the geography of inflation, grew out of questions stimulated by his analysis of money and inflation. I later attended the historic South Royalton, VT conference that helped launch the modern Austrian revival, where I met Henry Hazlitt whose books and essays are powerful defenses of free markets.
Those experiences reinforced something I had increasingly come to believe: liberty cannot survive if government is continually expanding its claims over our property, our economic decisions and our personal lives.
Many other thinkers helped shape my views. Friedrich Hayek taught me about the limits of centralized knowledge and the impossibility of effective economic planning by bureaucracies. Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Joseph Schumpeter, Israel Kirzner and Hans Sennholz deepened my understanding of markets, capital, entrepreneurship and competition. Milton Friedman demonstrated the power of economic freedom, while James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock helped me understand the incentives facing politicians and bureaucrats through public-choice economics.
My historical and philosophical education came from an equally broad group of writers. John Locke's defense of natural rights, Frederic Bastiat's exposure of "legal plunder," and the writings of Frank Chodorov strengthened my conviction that government cannot create wealth by taking it from one citizen and giving it to another. Clarence Carson and Robert Higgs helped me understand the historical growth of government power. David Beito and Marvin Olasky demonstrated the importance of voluntary institutions and civil society. Peter F. Drucker's writings on nonprofits reinforced my belief that Americans can solve many social problems without government coercion.
My views on foreign policy developed from the same principle. A government that is supposed to protect liberty at home should not be constantly intervening abroad. George Washington's warnings about entangling alliances, Thomas Jefferson's vision of "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations," and the writings of Albert Jay Nock, Garret Garrett, H.L. Mencken and other Old Right thinkers influenced my commitment to a noninterventionist foreign policy.
Over the decades, I watched government expand in virtually every direction. The welfare state grew. Taxes became more complicated. Regulations multiplied. The Federal Reserve gained enormous power over money and credit. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid became permanent fixtures of federal spending. Foreign interventions became routine without the formal declarations of war contemplated by the Constitution.
At the same time, government increasingly blurred the distinction between public and private interests. Corporations sought subsidies and special privileges. Lobbyists sought favorable regulations. Politicians promised benefits to voters at someone else's expense. What began as limited government gradually became the welfare-warfare state .
For many years, the conventional response to this expansion was reform. Make government more efficient. Elect better politicians. Reduce waste. Balance the budget. Reform welfare. Reform the tax code. Reform the Federal Reserve. Add oversight. Strengthen regulation.
I have come to believe that this approach asks the wrong question.
After five decades of studying economics, history and political philosophy, it is clear that the central problem is not creating a well-managed government. The deeper problem is that government has assumed responsibilities that belong to individuals, families, markets and voluntary institutions in the first place.
Once that is understood, the reformer's question-How can we make government work better?-must give way to a more fundamental question:
Why should government be doing this at all?
That question is the intellectual bridge to The Abolition Manifesto.
I use the word abolition deliberately. Reform accepts the institution and seeks to improve its operation. Abolition challenges the institution itself. The abolitionists of the 19th century did not argue that slavery needed better administrators, more efficient regulations or improved oversight. They recognized that the institution itself was incompatible with human liberty.
I am making a different argument about a different set of institutions. But the principle is the same: when an institution systematically violates the principles on which a free society rests, endlessly reforming it can become a way of preserving it.
The question, therefore, is not whether the welfare state can be administered more efficiently, whether the Federal Reserve can manage the economy more competently, whether the tax code can be made somewhat simpler, or whether America's foreign interventions can be made somewhat more selective.
The question is whether these functions belong to government at all.
That is where my five decades of intellectual inquiry have led me.
The Abolition Manifesto therefore calls for abolishing, rather than perpetually reforming, the institutions and policies that have transformed limited constitutional government into the welfare-warfare state. It makes the case for eliminating unconstitutional federal spending, ending the Federal Reserve's monetary monopoly, replacing the income and payroll-tax system, dismantling the machinery of government welfare and corporate subsidies, and returning American foreign policy to a noninterventionist foundation.
This is not a call to abandon people who need help. It is a call to return responsibility for helping them to the institutions closest to them and best equipped to understand their circumstances: families, communities, churches, charities, mutual-aid societies and voluntary nonprofit organizations.
Nor is this a call for disorder or the absence of government. It is a call for government confined to its legitimate constitutional functions and for a society in which individuals once again bear primary responsibility for their own lives.
After more than half a century, I have reached a conclusion that can be stated simply:
A free society requires free people. Free people require property rights, voluntary exchange and personal responsibility. And all three require a government limited enough to leave them alone.
That is why I am writing The Abolition Manifesto.
The book is both an intellectual argument and a personal statement of principle-a culmination of the ideas that have influenced me since I discovered the Austrian School in the early 1970s.
For me, abolition is not a slogan. It is the logical conclusion of a lifetime spent asking one fundamental question:
What must government stop doing so that free people can once again govern themselves?
This article was originally published at Murray's Newsletter.
Murray Sabrin is a Mises Institute Associated Scholar and Emeritus Professor of Finance at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He has a B.A. in history, geography and social studies education from Hunter College, an M.A. in social studies education from Lehman College and a Ph.D. in economic geography from Rutgers University. Sabrin is one of only two individuals who had the honor of having the late Austrian School economist, historian, and philosopher Murray N. Rothbard serve as a member of his dissertation committee. His dissertation, "The Spatial Incidence of Inflation in the United States 1967-1971: An Economic-Geographic Perspective," was completed in 1981.