4,249 works (including 483 books, 3,406 articles and 357 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
Why would large businesses support reforms ostensibly designed to restrain them? In the preface and nine-chapter core of his unfinished manuscript, published in 2017, Murray N. Rothbard argues that regulation could secure advantages that competition repeatedly dissolved. Railroad rate-cutting and failed industrial combinations anchor his distinction between competitive markets and the interests of established firms. His explicitly libertarian interpretation also connects corporate demands to conflicts over prohibition and schooling: electoral realignment weakened resistance to intervention, while reformers, economists, and union leaders helped give it institutional form. The distinctive tension is between reform’s public purposes and the coalitions sustaining it. Readers can examine how Rothbard links economic incentives to religious allegiance and party organization, while weighing the distance between documented relationships and inferred motives.
How did compensation for wartime injury become a federal benefit covering disabilities unrelated to military service? Murray N. Rothbard approaches Union veterans’ pensions through the interests that sustained their expansion: veterans’ organizations, claims attorneys, Republican politicians, and pension administrators. His explicitly anti-statist account connects retroactive payments and widened eligibility to a less obvious fiscal bargain: spending tariff-generated surpluses on pensions could help protect high duties from demands for reduction. Cleveland’s resistance and the eventual spending plateau complicate any picture of inevitable growth. The essay offers a concrete case of benefits helping to organize their own political constituency, while making clear why Rothbard locates a beginning of the American welfare state in Civil War institutions rather than later social reform.
The Constitution, in Rothbard's telling, was no fulfillment of the American Revolution but a counterrevolution: a nationalist coup that scrapped the Articles of Confederation for a central state armed with taxation, military power, and the elastic supremacy and general-welfare clauses. Recovered from a handwritten manuscript and completed by editor Patrick Newman, this long-lost fifth volume follows the story from the depression of the 1780s to ratification, reading Shays' Rebellion as a libertarian tax revolt, the Philadelphia Convention as a bloodless coup against an unresisting Congress, and the Federalists' command of the mails and press as the machinery of adoption. Slavery, Rothbard argues, was driven into the document's heart through the three-fifths clause and the twenty-year protection of the slave trade, while the coercion of a holdout Rhode Island completed Power's victory over Liberty.
There is little joy in volume five.