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This is the best thing he wrote. He situates conservatism on the far right, liberalism on the far left & state socialism in the unstable center aiming at the liberal ends of universal dignity/egalitarianism via the conservative means of hierarchy/planning.
https://mises.org/library/left-and-right-prospects-liberty https://twitter.com/SatireRedacted/status/1326077369833181186
https://mises.org/library/left-and-right-prospects-liberty https://twitter.com/SatireRedacted/status/1326077369833181186
And read this companion piece by Roderick Long which looks at Rothbard's essay after 40 years. https://mises.org/library/rothbards-left-and-right-forty-years-later
My second favorite piece of his is Anatomy of the State, which is a short, polemical, and seamless synthesis of the classical liberal class theorists, the individualist anarchists, the Old Right, and his Randian-colored Aristotelianism. https://mises.org/library/anatomy-state
There's also War, Peace, and the State in which he concisely lays out a consistent opposition to war in all its incarnations, while also developing a theory of disarmament heavily inspired by liberal class theory & individualist anarchism. https://mises.org/library/war-peace-and-state
As for books For a New Liberty is both a manifesto of his broadly held ideas (natural law, libertarianism, etc.) and a text that is almost impossible to extricate from the cultural context in which it was written, which was the emerging American libertarian movement of the 1970s.
Ethics of Liberty highlights both his weak points (metaethics) and strong points (political theory). I like the way he uses natural law to condemn colonialists and slavers as well as his discussion of alternative theories of liberty offered by Nozick, Hayek, etc.
America's Great Depression is mixed because Rothbard was good on the causes of both the onset & deepening of the depression (systemic malinvestment, price controls) but not the subsequent events in which deflation was caused not my raised productivity but insufficient liquidity.
Same goes for his monographs What Did The Government Do To Our Money? and The Case Against The Fed, both high in polemical appeal but light in nuanced monetary theory.
I forgot to mention his essay that will strike some as conspiratorial-sounding, but in my view, is pretty straightforward institutional analysis of the incentives bound up in US foreign policy, central banking, neo-mercantilist corporatism, etc. https://mises.org/library/wall-street-banks-and-american-foreign-policy-0
Man, Economy, and State is, like, monumental, but only really of interest to econ nerds. Despite being a tad too heavy on a priori theorizing and a tad too light on thymological analysis and emergent order, it does a lot of really foundational stuff on action theory, prices, etc.
