The archive.

Efficiency, the supposedly neutral yardstick of law and public policy, is a chimera—so runs Rothbard's radicalization of Mario Rizzo's critique. Ends are plural, shifting, and conflicting, he argues, and under genuine uncertainty even an individual cannot be said to choose the 'best' means, since action is itself a process of discovery. Social efficiency fares worse: it presumes ends that can be added and compared across persons, when the real question is whose ends shall rule. On the Austrian theory of cost—subjective, ex ante, vanishing the moment a choice is made—'social cost,' transaction cost, and externality become incoherent, and cost-benefit analysis collapses as an objective guide. The essay carries the point into tort law, defending the misfeasance-nonfeasance line and insisting that justice govern.

Efficiency can never serve as the basis for ethics; on the contrary, ethics must be the guide and touchstone for any consideration of efficiency. Ethics is the primary.

Why should sound economic arguments prevail when political privileges reward those best organized to defend them? In this review of Ludwig von Mises’ Economic Policy, Murray N. Rothbard praises his teacher’s accessible defense of capitalism but challenges the adequacy of his political analysis. Rothbard endorses Mises’ account of markets as systems of mass provision rather than fixed privilege, then asks why politicians should be expected to rise above ordinary self-interest. Sugar protection supplies the concrete test: producers have a concentrated stake in lobbying, while consumers bear costs too dispersed to command sustained attention. The review’s interest lies in this turn from intellectual allegiance to criticism. For Rothbard, economic education needs both an account of institutions that favor intervention and a moral argument against special privilege.

Fusionism, the conservative synthesis that promised to reconcile traditionalist moral order with libertarian freedom, is dismantled here as a myth that cannot stand as a philosophy in its own right. Reading Frank S. Meyer's arguments closely, Rothbard finds that on every decisive issue the mediation dissolves into libertarianism. Virtue cannot be coerced, since a compelled act is mere motion, not moral choice; community holds no rights above the persons who compose it; order arises from voluntary interaction, not state command. Meyer's real quarrel, Rothbard argues, is with utilitarian liberalism and the Chicago law-and-economics that swaps justice for efficiency — not with a rights-based libertarianism grounded in natural law. Only his appeal to tradition, which cannot judge itself without some standard beyond it, marks a true inconsistency. Fusionism emerges as a Sorelian coalition myth, not a coherent third way.

Unless he can choose his worst, he cannot choose his best.

Not administrative regulation, not Coasean bargaining, not judicial balancing of 'social' costs—only a strict law of property, Rothbard argues, should govern air pollution. Reconstructing environmental tort law from libertarian first principles, he holds that coercion is justified solely against an overt physical invasion of another's person or justly held property: smoke, odor, dust, or excessive noise crossing a boundary, proven by strict causation beyond a reasonable doubt. His most distinctive move ties pollution to homesteading—a factory or airport that first emitted over unused land may acquire a prescriptive easement, leaving later arrivals to 'come to the nuisance.' From this follow his rejections of a general right to clean air, the ad coelum doctrine, statutory clean-air rules, vicarious 'deep pocket' liability, and binding class actions, and his proposal to collapse criminal law into a tort law prosecuted only by victims, heirs, or assigns.

In sum, no one has a right to clean air, but one does have a right to not have his air invaded by pollutants generated by an aggressor.

Beginning from the premise that money emerged from barter rather than state decree, this treatise builds a full Austrian theory of money and then turns it against the banks. Rothbard separates honest loan banking, which lends real savings, from deposit banking that issues more warehouse receipts than it holds gold, fractional reserves he treats as inherently fraudulent, inflationary, and structurally bankrupt. Free banking, he argues, restrains such expansion through redemption by rival banks; central banking exists precisely to remove that limit, monopolizing note issue and pyramiding credit through open-market operations. Tracing the story from the 1694 Bank of England to the Federal Reserve, and debating Lawrence White over Scottish free banking, he closes with a demand for 100 percent gold reserves.

Inflation is a process of subtle expropriation, where the victims understand that prices have gone up but not why this has happened.

Every generation of economists, Rothbard notes, hunts for the next culminating doctrine after Keynes, and in the late 1970s supply-side economics seemed to furnish it, though without a systematic treatise, a single major theorist, or real doctrinal unity. This polemic grants the movement its one valid point, that lower marginal tax rates can spur work, saving, and investment, then attacks the fiscal myth grafted onto it: the Laffer Curve promise that tax cuts will pay for themselves and erase deficits with no confrontation over government spending. Supply-siders, he argues, are closer to Keynesians than they admit, tolerating deficits and cheap money while dressing managed currency in gold symbolism. Through Jude Wanniski's populism he exposes a doctrine that flatters voters by promising mutually inconsistent goods at once.

For the “gold standard” they want provides only the illusion of a gold standard without the substance.

Watch how a spending increase becomes a "cut." Rothbard dissects the vocabulary by which federal economists redescribe fiscal expansion as restraint: budget "cuts" that merely fall below a projected increase, tax "cuts" offset by Social Security hikes and inflation-driven bracket creep, tax increases rebranded as "revenue enhancement," and exemptions recast as "loopholes." He borrows Mises's observation that the very word "loophole" presumes the government rightfully owns all you earn. The pattern, he insists, is never neutral: by swapping observable dollars for baselines and counterfactuals, the state claims austerity while it grows. His most pointed case is the redefinition of the deficit as an inflation-adjusted "real increase" in debt, a maneuver he likens to apologetics for Germany's 1923 hyperinflation, and the shrinking of "down payment" to a hoped-for slowing of future borrowing.

Now we have "budget cuts" which are not cuts, but rather substantial increases over the previous year's expenditures.

Separate money creation from saving, real resources from accounting totals, causal theory from statistical coincidence: the same analytic move recurs through the ten refutations Rothbard assembles in this compact 1984 brief against the language of macroeconomic management. Deficits, he argues, are inflationary only when financed through the banking system; falling prices are the mark of dynamic growth, not catastrophe; wage rates track productivity, not tariff walls. He punctures the Phillips curve as an ideological fallback and the Laffer curve for making state revenue the measure of policy, asking why maximizing government receipts should be anyone's aim at all. The only sound cure for deficits, he concludes, is the one no politician will name: cut the federal budget.

People are contrary cusses whose behavior, thank goodness, cannot be forecast precisely in advance.

What if the Federal Reserve’s early record is measured against bankers’ interests rather than its public promises of stability? In this essay, Rothbard interprets central banking as a means of coordinating credit expansion that competition and demands for redemption would otherwise constrain. His distinctive approach connects monetary mechanisms with banking alliances, political negotiations, and the influence of Benjamin Strong at the New York Fed. The argument becomes especially concrete in his account of Federal Reserve support for bankers’ acceptances and for Britain’s return to gold at sterling’s prewar parity. Readers can examine how reserve provision, securities purchases, and international cooperation worked—and assess Rothbard’s contention that the resulting instability arose from protected credit expansion, not merely from failures to manage it effectively.

Medieval apocalyptic prophets, modern futurologists, and chart-wielding investment gurus share one trick, Rothbard argues: the fudge factor that lets a failed prediction be reinterpreted rather than admitted. From that sociology of forecasting he turns on the Kondratieff long cycle, the supposed 54-year rhythm he calls the flimsiest alleged cycle of all. Its evidence survives only after Kondratieff detrended his data, divided by population, and smoothed it with nine-year moving averages, erasing the very industrial growth that disproved it. Falling nineteenth-century prices, Rothbard insists, marked productivity and abundance, not depression, and the alleged long booms were merely short wartime inflations. Against this statistical mysticism he sets the Austrian account of booms and busts as products of central-bank credit expansion, comparing hidden multiple cycles to Ptolemaic epicycles.

The cause of the boom-bust cycle is not some mystical periodic Force to which man must bend his will; the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Ordinary businessmen may choose free markets or state privilege, but bankers, on Rothbard's account, are structurally driven toward statism, and that inclination threads through a century of American foreign policy. This compressed revisionist essay follows the rivalry and collusion of Morgan and Rockefeller interests from Jay Cooke's Civil War debt monopoly through the 1890s turn to imperial expansion, Wilson's entry into World War I, the founding of the Federal Reserve, and the Cold War machinery of the Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission. Naming cabinets, coups, and interlocking directorates from the Spanish-American War to Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, Rothbard argues that a permanent government of finance rules regardless of which party wins office.

The great turning point of American foreign policy came in the early 1890s, during the second Cleveland administration.

When flight delays snarled American airports in 1984, the press told a tidy story of wise government-business cooperation reining in airlines that had over-scheduled peak hours. Rothbard reverses the causation. The congestion, he argues, was not a failure of deregulation but the reappearance of cartel policy: after the Civil Aeronautics Board was abolished, the FAA picked up its restrictive function, imposing flight ceilings in the name of scarce controllers left short by the PATCO firings. That incumbents like Eastern Airlines, facing People's Express at Newark, welcomed the quotas gives the piece its public-choice edge. A persistent shortage, Rothbard reminds the reader, signals a price held below the market-clearing level, here because airports are government-owned. His remedy is market-clearing slot fees, privatized airports, and privatized air-traffic control.

Whenever economists see a shortage, they are trained to look immediately for the maximum price control below the free-market price.