2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A bank run, in this compact polemic, is no irrational panic but a market test that exposes fractional-reserve banking for what it is: a system holding a fraction of the cash it has promised depositors on demand. Taking the Ohio and Maryland runs of the 1980s as his occasion, Rothbard asks why federal deposit insurance inspires confidence where private and state insurers failed, and answers that the FDIC and FSLIC are credible only because the Federal Reserve can print legal tender without limit. Insurance can cover calculable risks; it cannot make a structurally insolvent industry solvent. What passes for banking soundness, he argues, is a confidence trick that would be prosecuted as fraud in any other business. His remedy is abolition: end the Fed, the FDIC, and the FSLIC.
Fractional reserve banks, being inherently insolvent, are uninsurable.
The plain-paper copier grew so familiar that its maker's name nearly became a verb, yet the Xerox 914 began, Rothbard reminds us, as a long-shot gamble no giant would take. Eastman Kodak, IBM, and government laboratories all passed on Chester Carlson's process; the lone patent attorney ran his first experiments in an apartment kitchen in 1938, and it was Haloid, a firm with under seven million dollars in sales, that spent twenty million over twelve years to bring the machine to market. Rothbard refuses a heroic tale, though: the challenger becomes the giant, then the pressured incumbent as Japanese rivals erode its share, before its Marathon copiers claw back ground. Competition, on this telling, is a process no firm ever escapes.
Small business can outcompete, and outinnovate, the giants.
Call a tax deduction a subsidy and you have already conceded that the government owns your income; that buried premise is what Rothbard drags into the light in this brief attack on the Reagan administration's plan to end the deductibility of state and local taxes from federal returns. A subsidy, he insists on its plain meaning, is Peter taxed to fund Paul; allowing a taxpayer to surrender less of his own earnings is nothing of the kind. Behind the tax-expenditure vocabulary and the talk of fair shares he sees a device that turns taxpayers against one another, policing each other's alleged privileges instead of uniting against extraction itself. The real objective, he argues, is not revenue-neutral symmetry but lowering the coerced burden for everyone.
How can allowing you to keep more of your own money be called a “subsidy?”
Near-unanimous praise across the ideological spectrum should make anyone suspicious, Rothbard warns, and the Treasury's 1986 flat-tax draft earns exactly that suspicion. His decisive move is to invert the meaning of tax complexity: the code is tangled because households and firms have fought to shelter income from confiscation, so the deductions and exclusions the reformers deplore are defensive walls, not clutter. Simplification, he shows, would tax capital gains as ordinary income, invent imputed rent for homeowners who cannot pay in imputed dollars, and strip depletion and medical deductions, imposing real losses merely for the sake of symmetry. Tax lawyers and accountants he recasts as locks and fences, rational defenses against seizure. True simplicity, the essay concludes, would come only from abolishing the income tax altogether.
Complexity is good if it allows you to keep more of your own money.
At issue is whether entrepreneurship can be prised apart from uncertainty, capital, and ownership, a quarrel internal to the Austrian school that Rothbard resolves firmly in favor of Mises. Against Israel Kirzner, who reduces the entrepreneur to alertness toward opportunities already lying in plain sight, he insists that profit and loss flow from judgment under uncertain future conditions: the stock speculator and the employer both commit resources now and can be proved wrong. The Kirznerian entrepreneur who owns nothing and risks nothing is dismissed as an abstraction, since profits are only ever changes in the value of owned assets. A closing section recasts Schumpeter as a Walrasian who mistook general equilibrium for a real state and made inflationary bank credit the engine of development.
He is a free-floating wraith, disembodied from real objects.
Give any organization a monopoly on creating money and it will use that power to the hilt—there is the premise from which Rothbard builds his case. Chronic inflation since the 1930s, he argues, is no technical mishap but the institutional fruit of state-controlled fiat paper, and no set of central-bank rules can cure it; only separating money from the state will. He faults Hayek's scheme of competing private currencies for ignoring Mises's regression theorem, by which money must emerge from a commodity already valued in exchange, and rejects commodity-basket standards as constructivist fictions. His remedy is to redefine the dollar as a redeemable weight of gold—a unit of weight, not an administered price—clearing a path toward abolishing the Federal Reserve and a full 100 percent reserve.
There is, for one thing, no such unitary entity as “the price level” which could be kept constant.
Divestment campaigns, embargoes, and bans on the Krugerrand swept American campuses in the mid-1980s, and Rothbard, professing abhorrence of apartheid, warns that they would fall hardest on the black South African workers they meant to rescue. His method is to convert a moral crusade into a question of incidence: withdrawing foreign firms, often the better-paying employers, lowers the demand for labor and so cuts jobs and wages. He attacks the rhetoric of collective sacrifice, the equivocal "we" that quietly assigns the cost to people never consulted. Underneath runs his libertarian theory of racism: in a free market, employers who refuse productive black workers pay for it in lost profits, and only the state can socialize the cost of discrimination and entrench an apartheid system.
The growth of capitalism in South Africa will do far more to end apartheid than the futile and counterproductive grandstanding of American liberals.
Drought, the newspapers said, had starved Ethiopia; Rothbard answers that famine is a political artifact, manufactured wherever states cripple agriculture. Written amid the 1980s relief debate, the essay borrows a class-conflict vocabulary and turns it against Marxism: the exploiters are not capitalists but the urban bureaucrats, planners, and party clients who tax, requisition, and collectivize the peasantry until food output collapses. Pre-Communist Russia exported grain while the Soviet Union imported it; Ethiopia and Mozambique starve under Marxist-Leninist rule. Because international food aid passes through the very governments that engineered the scarcity, Rothbard rejects it as a remedy, arguing that only private property, market prices, and the liberation of farmers from state command can restore abundance.
The root of famine lies not in the gods or in the stars but in the actions of man.
When New York's reservoirs ran low in 1985 and City Hall began policing lawn sprinklers, car washes, and air conditioners, Rothbard saw not a natural drought but a manufactured shortage. His argument turns on pricing: tenants pay nothing per unit and landlords pay flat fees, so no one meets a signal to conserve, and the municipal monopoly, priced politically rather than economically, predictably runs dry. Government then declines to let the price clear the market, preferring coercive rationing that lets it, in his phrase, push people around while draping itself in the language of shared sacrifice. A satirical California interlude, where a drought agency becomes a flood-control office once the rains come, drives home how elastic emergencies are. The remedy is to raise the price, and ultimately to privatize supply.
Governments are invariably at war with their consumers.
A week at a lakeside hotel in northern Poland, March 1986, becomes the occasion for a compressed meditation on communism, censorship, and civil society. Rothbard finds a country he calls a giant slum yet intellectually the freest in the Soviet bloc, where a conference on economics could proceed so long as the paper titles stayed 'ideologically neutral', a theatrical constraint the actual discussion cheerfully ignored. Antony Flew's defense of property and markets scandalizes no one; the assembled scholars, ranging from libertarian to dissident Marxist, share an unmistakable contempt for the regime. The sharpest moment reverses the Cold War hierarchy, when a Polish professor cannot believe Rothbard's report that Americans often trust their government's propaganda. A closing banquet toast to a free, sovereign, and Catholic Poland, joined even by the government's watching agent, gives the essay its quiet irony.
There is no other country in the Soviet orbit at which a conference of this sort could possibly be held.
Not since 1933, when Roosevelt repudiated the gold standard and confiscated the public's coins, had Americans been able to hold gold money, so the American Eagle, struck in September 1986, earns Rothbard's cautious applause. He treats the coin as a test of whether symbolic remonetization can become genuine reform, and detects the Treasury's hand in its $50 legal-tender face value, set many times below the market price of an ounce so that no rational debtor would ever spend it. The essay's governing distinction separates denationalizing gold, prising it out of Fort Knox into private hands, from the harder work of denationalizing the dollar: binding the name irrevocably to a fixed weight of gold, liquidating the Federal Reserve, and ending fiat discretion. The coin is praised only as an opening.
At the designated rate, who would choose to pay their creditors in $4,200 of gold to discharge a $500 debt?
Does Orwell’s opposition to Soviet communism make him an ally of Cold War militarism—or its critic? In this essay, Murray N. Rothbard challenges Norman Podhoretz’s recruitment of Orwell for neoconservative politics. He reads the shifting alliances and peripheral wars of Nineteen Eighty-Four as mechanisms through which rival oligarchies preserve their power at home. Bringing Orwell’s postwar journalism into the dispute, Rothbard explores how nuclear deterrence might prevent decisive war without securing either peace or freedom. His antiwar interpretation extends Orwell’s warning to Western military institutions and political language. The revealing tension lies in Orwell’s own unsettled positions: Rothbard acknowledges impulses toward American backing and preventive war, yet gives priority to his fear of permanent, militarized domination.