The First Libertarian?

Most libertarians count Murray Rothbard as one of their mentors. They will know that one of Rothbard’s primary mentors was Ludwig Von Mises. But Rothbard dug deeper in his search for libertarian thinking. Here is a little-seen paper that he wrote in 1967:

The first libertarian intellectual was Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism. Little is known about his life, but apparently he was a personal acquaintance of Confucius in the late sixth century BC and like the latter came from the state of Sung and w...