In his review of Murray Rothbard’s Egalitariansim As a Revolt Against Nature, Andy Duncan notes how, even in the darkest days of the Cold War, Rothbard was already declaring the prevailing socialist/Communist movements to be doomed to failure, primarily because of their inability to stuff the genie of social and economic progress back into the bottle:

The revolutions of the last few hundred years — particularly the Industrial Revolution — have made the world too complex for the Old Order to rule over in the manner to which it aspires. Yes, it can rule agrarian nonindustrialized societies, as it did with the Inca Empire, the Roman Empire, and the Athenian-dominated Delian League — though you’ll notice that none of these once-mighty edifices lasted. However, the world’s population will no longer stand for such serfdom and penury, even if it currently tolerates a pelf-extraction rate of 40 or 50 percent. The ratchet of liberty has clicked, and there’s no turning back the mass-industrial technological clock, says Rothbard.

Even if we claim to be socialists, and allow the state to continually extract a pelf “protection” tax rate from us of 40 percent or more, we will only tolerate a society in which we can have our iPhones, iPads, and Macbooks, along with foreign travel, exotic food, windsurfing opportunities, the potential of an exciting career, and most of all some fun in our lives instead of the endless unendurable austerity, tedium, and deference of terminal servitude to a ruling criminal oligopoly and its supportive caste of privileged bureaucratic and priestly technocratic tax eaters.

The passing reference to “iPhones, iPads” and the rest resonates with the recent rioting in Europe.

All of what we want as modern people can only be delivered via complex industrial society, tied together with trillions of streams of disparate information held within the minds of billions of individuals. Complex industrial society, and these myriad communication pathways, can only be achieved through freedom and the final elimination of the Old Order — a fate which Rothbard brands as inevitable, in a seemingly deliberate and playful historicist swipe at Marx, the libertarian.

Duncan’s review is entitled “A Rip-roaring Masterpiece of a Book” and can be found on the Mises Daily weblog. You can buy Rothbard’s book here.