Liberty Magazine Archives

by Stephan Kinsella on January 14, 2026

Liberty magazine, one the original libertarian magazines ¹ was published in print form from 1987 to 2010, and then online at https://libertyunbound.com/ until a few years ago. It was founded and edited by by R.W. Bradford (1947–2005), and then by Stephen Cox (1948–2024).

Back in the day, it was one of the primary outlets for libertarian thought. In the 1980s and 1990s, when I came of libertarian age, before the Internet, there were fewer libertarians, fewer books, and fewer periodicals. There was the Laissez-Faire Books catalog and a number of Objectivist and libertarian newsletters and magazines. I devoured all the periodicals I could find–the Mises Institute’s The Free Market (see some essays collected in Llewellyn H. Rockwell, ed., The Free Market Reader: Essays in the Economics of Liberty), FEE’s The Freeman, Hillsdale’s Imprimis, Reason magazine, the Journal of Libertarian Studies (Center for Libertarian Studies and later the Mises Institute), The Ayn Rand Letter, The Intellectual Activist, the Cato Journal, Jeffrey Friedman’s odd and uneven Critical Review, the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (many of its pieces by Rothbard collected in The Irrepressible Rothbard).

And, of course, Liberty magazine, one of my favorites. For several years, I read it from cover to cover. It was my favorite one to receive every month. It contains so many treasures. Just a few personal favorites:

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Ultimate Justification of the Ethics of Private Property” (September 1988; also in EEPP), which I read in law school and which had a deep effect on my thinking ²
- Symposium on Hoppe’s argumentation ethics: “Breakthrough or Buncombe?”, esp. Murray N. Rothbard, “Beyond Is And Ought” (Nov. 1988)
Loren Lomasky’s attack on Hoppe’s anarchism and argumentation ethics, “The Argument from Mere Argument” (Sep. 1989), and the responses:
- Rothbard, “Hoppephobia” (March 1990)
- Hoppe, “Intimidation by Argument—Once Again” (Nov. 1989; also in EEPP, Appendix)
R.W. Bradford, “The Search for We The Living” (Nov. 1988)
The Liberty Magazine Poll 1988 and 2008: Flagpoles, Parental Obligations, Private Nukes
Murray N. Rothbard, “My Expulsion from the Ayn Rand Cult” (Sep. 1989)
And … my own attack on intellectual property, “Intellectual Property and Libertarianism” (Dec. 2009)

And from Jesse Walker:

Good to have these online again, even if it increases the risk that people will read my juvenalia. (My writing appeared there regularly from 1992 to 1996.)

… Lots of fascinating moments in here. Like: on p. 12 of the Nov. 1988 issue, Rothbard—right on the verge of his paleo period—has a pseudonymous piece deriding libertarian Republicans and explaining why he prefers Dukakis to Bush. ³

Now after the Internet and the huge growth of libertarian publications, podcasts, online video and audio, and so on, Liberty’s popularity and relevance began to decline. But the old issues still had treasures. The online site had an archive of PDF files for all the old print issues. Unfortunately, the online site disappeared some time ago and the Internet archive only has spotty archives.

I’ve long been an opponent of copyright, ⁴ closed publishing and paywalls and a proponent of open publishing. After my anti-IP work started to have some influence, Jeffrey Tucker during his tenure at the Mises Institute started releasing its publications with a CC-BY license and released as much material as possible open and online, no paywalls. ⁵ The purpose was spreading the word and communicating the ideas of liberty, after all, not pretending to make money selling books.

I’ve done what I could in the service of open information. Over ten years ago, I offered to help Reason Papers put all its old material online, by scanning and formatting all its old volumes and helping editor Aeon Skoble put them online; now all new issues are put online and all the old ones are available as well. When the Journal of Libertarian Studies, originally founded and edited by Rothbard in 1977 until his death in 1995, and then by Hans-Hermann Hoppe from 1995–2005, fell into desuetude, with Jeff Tucker’s help I founded a new journal, Libertarian Papers, which was also open course (CC-BY) and completely open and online ⁶ (it was published for ten years until the JLS was revived).

Frustrated by the loss of the online archives of Liberty, I recently searched for anyone connected with Liberty to see if could obtain the PDF files, including my friend Timo Wirkman Virkkala, and finally was contacted by Mark Rand, who worked at Liberty for a few years. He sent me the PDFs and told me that “Liberty’s board (now dissolved) always hoped to find a way to make these issues freely available to the public, so I am more than happy to share them with you for that purpose.” Therefore, I post them here, with permission.

I’m reminded here of Ayn Rand’s angry cursing of Nathaniel Branden after she discovered his lies and affairs: “If you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health—you’ll be impotent for the next twenty years! And if you achieve any potency, you’ll know it’s a sign of still worse moral degradation!” ⁷ Likewise, while I cannot stop pro-intellectual property libertarians from using this material, in all justice they should not, or should at least feel ashamed and hypocritical when doing so or, even better, rethink their misguided support of evil IP law.

I may update this later with more detailed information and prettier formatting, but for now the issues below are available online. If any mistakes are found please let me know. You can find some descriptions of past issues and contents in the spotty and incomplete archives, e.g. here, here, here. If anyone wants to volunteer to extract this information and send it to me to add here in a more useable form to describe the content of each issue, contact me.