Murray Rothbard took two separate intellectual traditions and fused them into something the state had every reason to fear. Ludwig von Mises built the demolition case against central planning in 1920. Without private property in capital goods, no rational price signals exist. Without prices, no economic calculation. Without calculation, planners allocate resources by guesswork and ideology. The Soviet Union's 70-year experiment in famine and shortages confirmed this in blood. Mises gave you the economics. He stopped short of the political conclusion. John Locke and the natural rights tradition gave Rothbard the other half. Property rights are natural rights, not government grants. You own yourself, your labor, and the fruits of that labor by natural right. The state does not create property; it either respects it or violates it. Rothbard's synthesis was elegant and ruthless. If Mises is correct that rational economic order requires private property, and if Locke is correct that property rights are pre-political, then the state itself collapses as a logical category. Every tax is expropriation. Every regulation is coercion against a property owner who consented to nothing. Every central bank inflates your savings into dust without firing a single shot. The resulting system, anarcho-capitalism, operates through one principle: no individual or institution may initiate force against another person's body or legitimately acquired property. Courts, security, arbitration, roads, all of it operates through voluntary contract or not at all. Rothbard published this framework in "For a New Liberty" in 1973 and "The Ethics of Liberty" in 1982. Critics called it utopian. Those critics live in a world where the Federal Reserve has destroyed roughly 97 percent of the dollar's 1913 purchasing power, where regulatory agencies consistently serve the industries they supposedly police, and where wars get funded through debt you inherit rather than choose. The state's track record earns it no presumption of necessity.