The archive.

Rename a tax a "fee" and a president keeps his no-new-taxes pledge—so runs the euphemism Rothbard dismantles in this question-and-answer autopsy of the late-1980s savings-and-loan collapse. Charging depositors for the use of their own money, he insists, is a tax; insuring a fractional-reserve system against its own insolvency is "absurd and impossible," like insuring the Titanic after impact. Far from proving the failure of free enterprise, the S&L debacle was the predictable issue of a state-built cartel: New Deal housing credit, interest-rate ceilings, and federal guarantees that loosened assets while pinning liabilities on the taxpayer. His remedy is deliberately anti-palliative—let insolvent thrifts and their depositors bear the loss—and his cure a dollar redeemable in gold, backed one hundred percent against demand liabilities.

Fractional-reserve banks are philosophically bankrupt because they are engaged in a gigantic con-game: pretending that your deposits are there to be redeemed at any time you wish, while actually lending them out to earn interest.

The entire science of statistical inference, Rothbard contends, balances on a single unproved premise: that samples cluster around the true population value according to the normal curve. Trace the confidence levels and margins of error that lend polling and unemployment figures their air of exactness, and you reach a bell-shaped assumption for which, he charges, there is no evidence whatever. The essay then turns skepticism into disciplinary self-destruction, presenting the computer-driven bootstrap methods of Bradley Efron and Jerome H. Friedman as the profession's own admission that data often refuse to follow the curve. What began as an outsider's suspicion, formed in Harold Hotelling's Columbia lectures, becomes an iconoclastic verdict: a central convention of standard inference was universal neither in evidence nor in practice.

The old mystical faith can now be abandoned; the Normal Curve god is dead at long last.

Poland's Solidarity sweeps the polls, Russians denounce the KGB on television, the Baltics demand property rights, and tanks roll into Tiananmen Square—Rothbard reads the upheavals of 1989 as one world-historical verdict on socialism. He calls it not a defeat imposed from outside but an "implosion," a collapse inward through lost confidence and elite defection, with even the nomenklatura scrambling to trade political privilege for capitalist ownership. The essay's theoretical spine is Hayekian: 1989 vindicates The Road to Serfdom's thesis that political and economic freedom stand or fall together. China supplies the tragic proof, where market reform uncoupled from free speech and assembly could not endure. The lesson Rothbard draws from the massacre is blunt—the government is never the people, even when it calls itself the people's government.

In the “socialist bloc” covering virtually half the world, there are no socialists left.

Behind a century of international monetary reform, Rothbard detects a single Keynesian ambition: to abolish gold and every rival currency, and to inch toward one world fiat money issued by a world central bank. Bretton Woods, he argues, was only a compromise—Keynes's "bancor" and White's "unita" scaled back into a jerry-built dollar-gold standard—while SDRs, James Baker's exchange-rate diplomacy, and the coming European monetary union carry the project forward. Managed exchange rates he treats not as technical stabilization but as political price-fixing, as inane as a planner's "just price." Only Britain's hard-money resistance, he wryly notes, throws a wrench into the machinery. The stakes, in his telling, are the removal of the last metallic and competitive checks on inflation—and the risk of a coordinated slide into global hyperinflation.

Fiat money by any name smells as sour.

Can competitive banks preserve sound money if they issue claims exceeding their specie reserves? Rothbard uses Chile’s nineteenth-century banking experiment to challenge the assumption that removing a central bank is enough. His account follows the permissive banking law of 1860 into credit expansion, wartime rescues, and suspended redemption, arguing that government protection encouraged banks to take further risks. The tension is concrete: how much of the resulting instability should be attributed to fractional reserves, and how much to political intervention? Rothbard’s answer distinguishes freedom to open a bank from freedom to issue unbacked liabilities. This article offers a pointed encounter with his case for full specie backing—and with the historical evidence through which he contests the choice between central banking and competitive note issuance.

For Murray N. Rothbard, American participation in World War I did not interrupt progressive reform: it gave reformers powers they had long sought. This essay asks how moral campaigns and claims to professional expertise became warrants for directing other people’s lives. From prohibitionists invoking food conservation to economists building the statistical machinery of planning, Rothbard traces the convergence of religious purpose, corporate interests, and administrative ambition. His explicitly libertarian perspective makes the coercive implications of benevolent reform central, especially where intellectuals defended wartime conformity or hoped to preserve emergency controls in peace. The revealing tension is between expertise as independent inquiry and expertise as a claim to govern—a distinction readers can test against his accounts of John Dewey, Richard T. Ely, and the institutions that carried wartime planning ambitions forward.

Federal Reserve governor Wayne Angell's advice to a Gosbank official—define the ruble as a fixed weight of gold and make it convertible at once, before any gradual reform—gives Rothbard the occasion for a broader case against fiat money. Monetary credibility, he argues, is not liberalization's final reward but its precondition: a ruble ruined by inflation and official overvaluation cannot be trusted merely by pegging it to dollars or marks. Gold functions as a public test of restraint, tying money to something the state cannot conjure at will. The essay's sharpest turn comes when the Gosbank man asks why the West itself has not restored gold—and Rothbard reads Angell's reply as a confession that Western currencies coast on the borrowed prestige of a convertibility long abandoned.

Without gold, however, Angell warned that the Soviet reform program might well collapse under the blows of rampant inflation and a progressively disintegrating ruble.

Socialism cannot be repaired piecemeal—so runs the anti-gradualist thesis of this transition-economics essay, which holds that a market is an interconnected latticework whose parts must operate together. The Western advice to "phase in" freedom slowly merely shelters vested interests and perpetuates distortions, above all through price controls that mask monetary inflation and breed shortages. Rothbard prescribes the whole institutional order at once: total price decontrol, hard-currency convertibility, a genuine stock market, and immediate privatization of state assets. His most radical move is a property theory of transition—"homesteading," by which present users and workers receive negotiable ownership shares rather than buying back from the state assets it never legitimately held. Invoking Mises, he insists that only private ownership can generate genuine prices and profit-and-loss signals.

Better to have a bar of soap cost ten rubles and be available than to cost two rubles and never appear.

This pugnacious sports column turns a fan's grievance into a manifesto: games are better when they reward scoring, offensive imagination, and heroic individuals, and worse when rules and timid referees let defense strangle play. The Detroit Pistons' bruising basketball becomes Rothbard's chief villain, their "great defense" redescribed as legalized interference, while Michael Jordan stands as the offensive genius a "just basketball order" would crown. Modern soccer he treats as a decline into stalemate, where formations and the offside rule crowd the field until a one-goal lead is nearly insurmountable. Professional football is the hopeful exception, redeemed by the passing game and Mouse Davis's improvisatory run-and-shoot. Beneath the abrasive fandom runs a familiar sensibility: spontaneous adjustment over command planning, entrepreneurial brilliance over brute obstruction.

The “great defense” is, of course, accomplished by thuggery: by physically preventing the offense of the other team from shooting.

A Misesian principle anchors this dissection of American health care. Government intervention, Rothbard argues, breeds new dislocations that are then cited as reasons for still more—and no industry illustrates the process better than medicine. On the demand side, subsidized third-party payment through Medicare and Blue Cross insulates patients from price calculation, breeding moral hazard and "assembly-line" care while providers meet little resistance to higher charges. On the supply side, the Flexner Report of 1910 and AMA-backed licensing cartelized the profession, closing half the country's medical schools and lifting doctors' incomes. Artificial demand expansion meets artificial supply restriction; prices rise, quality falls, and the wreckage is blamed on too little state provision. National health insurance, he warns, would complete the very process that produced the crisis.

One of Ludwig von Mises’s keenest insights was on the cumulative tendency of government intervention.

"Partnership" between business and government sounds like public-spirited cooperation; Rothbard reads it as the oldest name for privilege. What passes for a modern reformist compromise is, in his account, warmed-over mercantilism—the state granting monopolies, subsidies, cartels, and bailouts to favored firms at the expense of consumers and excluded competitors. He runs the pattern from English monopoly grants and tax farming through the American Civil War, where the Whig-Republican "American System" of tariffs, excise taxes, railroad subsidies, greenbacks, and income tax replaced the freer order of the 1840s. Jay Cooke and Salmon P. Chase supply the banking corruption; the National Banking Act becomes a halfway house to the Federal Reserve. His target, he insists, is never commerce but political capitalism—and the Bush establishment is its heir, not its exception.

The “partnership of government and business” is a new term for an old, old condition.

When the January 1990 cost-of-living index jumped 1.1 percent in a single month—an annualized rate above thirteen percent—no one panicked, and that calm is exactly what Rothbard sets out to explain. Commentators, he charges, simply subtracted the fastest-rising categories, food and energy, and christened the remainder the "core rate," turning measurement into reassurance. He traces the maneuver's lineage from Reagan-era housing exclusions to 1923 Germany, where prices measured against gold could show deflation even as the mark collapsed. The Establishment, he argues, keeps economic spin doctors as surely as political ones. Rejecting wage-push explanations, Rothbard locates the real culprit where officials least like to look: the money supply created by the federal government itself.

We consumers don’t have the privilege of paying only for “core” goods; nor, unfortunately, do we enjoy the luxury of paying in gold.