The archive.

Blame for the vanishing whale and the emptied fisheries is usually laid at the door of capitalist greed; Rothbard reverses the charge, arguing that depletion follows from absent or insecure property rights rather than from private ownership. An owner conserves because present extraction lowers the capital value of what remains, whereas officials who control but do not own, and firms that merely lease from government, have every incentive to strip a resource before someone else does. He traces the ruin of the nineteenth-century western grasslands to a federal homestead unit of 160 acres, sized for eastern farms and hopeless in arid ranching country. Extending the argument from land to water, he casts aquaculture as the aquatic parallel to agriculture and reads rejection of the Law of the Sea Treaty as a chance to escape global bureaucratic ownership.

Their every incentive is to loot the resource as quickly as possible.

Reagan's economists announced a miracle: the money supply had climbed in double digits while consumer prices stayed flat, proof that the old laws no longer bound. Rothbard recognizes the boast, because every boom generates it, and answers by prying apart two things the word inflation conflates. Money inflation is an increase in the money supply, counterfeiting that redistributes purchasing power to whoever receives the new cash first, and it works its damage long before any price index moves. Entering through bank loans to business, it over-stimulates capital goods, construction, stocks, and real estate exactly as Misesian cycle theory predicts, so a boom can look healthy while its structure is being falsified. The calm of the 1980s CPI he credits to one-shot offsets, recession, a high dollar, collapsing oil, that were already ending, with price inflation and reckoning to follow.

For monetary inflation is counterfeiting, plain and simple.

Rename it 'desocialization', Rothbard suggests, and privatization stops looking like managerial housekeeping and becomes what it is: the reversal of nearly a century of creeping socialism. His case rests on incentives, private income depending on satisfying consumers while government revenue is secured by taxation or inflation, and it refuses the usual concession that some functions are inherently public. Anything is fair game; every service the state supplies has at some point been supplied privately, the Post Office standing as monument to public monopoly. He then presses the fiscal argument past ordinary deficit pragmatism, casting the federal government as a giant monopolist hoarding land, water, minerals, and forests, and urges selling even its loss-making assets cheaply, brushing aside Keith Joseph's claim that Britain's unprofitable nationalized steel could command no buyer at all.

There is no such thing as no price.

Who should shape a child’s moral world: parents and churches, or publicly appointed experts? In this essay, first published in 1986 and republished here in 2017, Murray N. Rothbard places that conflict at the centre of progressive family policy. His distinctive emphasis is ethnoreligious: he argues that evangelical campaigns for moral reform helped supply popular support for centralized institutions, complementing the ambitions of business leaders and professional administrators. The struggle over San Francisco’s schools makes the argument concrete, showing how administrative “efficiency” could transfer authority away from immigrant voters and families. Rothbard’s polemical interpretation challenges readers to distinguish expanded public provision from expanded public control—and to examine the religious and cultural purposes that ostensibly neutral expertise could serve.

Every so often the recurring monetary crisis flares up, elites propose a new arrangement, and the same contradictions return under a fresh name; this, for Rothbard, is the shell game of twentieth-century money. He refuses the standard quarrel between fixed and floating rates, insisting the real question is whether a currency redeems for a market commodity or merely for state paper, and sorts the options into three: genuine gold, Keynesian world paper money, and national fiat currencies afloat. Bretton Woods he calls a mockery of gold, sustained only by America's privilege of exporting inflation abroad until Nixon shut the gold window in 1971; the Smithsonian Agreement tried vainly to fix prices among irredeemable fiats. Answering 1985 proposals from Kemp and Bradley to refix rates, he holds that neither managed fixity nor clean floating can be sound while the unit itself is fiat.

The world is in permanent monetary crisis, but once in a while, the crisis flares up acutely, and we noisily shift gears from one flawed monetary system to another.

Was Adam Smith’s achievement a new beginning for economics—or a diversion from more promising explanations of exchange? In this polemical essay, Murray N. Rothbard argues that Smith’s authority obscured a Continental tradition connecting prices to utility and scarcity. The contrast turns on concrete problems: why water costs less than diamonds, how markets adjust to changes in money, and whether production costs can explain value independently of consumer choice. Judging Smith by Austrian commitments to subjective value and market process, Rothbard also tests his laissez-faire reputation against his support for interest-rate ceilings and navigation laws. Readers encounter a sharply contested genealogy of economics in which scholastic thinkers, Cantillon, and Turgot become alternatives to—not merely precursors of—Smith.

When the Group of Seven moved in 1987 to prop up a falling dollar and revive coordinated fixed exchange rates, Rothbard saw one more attempt to preserve inflationary discretion under a gold-colored disguise. Tracing the line from the classical gold-coin standard through the interwar sterling system, Bretton Woods, and the short-lived Smithsonian Agreement, he argues that fixed rates without genuine gold money become arbitrary political prices, doomed to collapse under redemption pressure and Gresham's Law. He dissects James Baker's proposed scheme, a secret commodity-price index granting gold only a token, formulaic role, and the odd alliance of conservative Keynesians and supply-siders such as Robert Mundell and Jack Kemp who back it. Floating fiat rates are bad, he concludes; fixed fiat rates, which add international price-fixing to paper money, are worse.

Once again, the market proves wiser than economists.

Can a science of exchange explain the economic choices of someone with nobody to trade with? In this dictionary article, republished in the 2008 New Palgrave, Rothbard traces the possibilities and limits of defining economics through exchange rather than material wealth. Subjective valuation explains how both trading partners can gain and why services belong alongside tangible goods in economic analysis. Yet the isolated individual poses a problem for an exclusively interpersonal account. Rothbard favours Mises’s resolution: place market exchange within a broader science of purposeful human action. This compact intellectual history shows how a seemingly terminological dispute changes what economists can explain—from mutual gains in trade to the solitary allocation of scarce resources.

Why does a productive asset yield rent, and what determines its price today? In this brief entry from the 2008 second edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Murray N. Rothbard presents Frank Albert Fetter’s answer: productivity determines rental returns, while time preference determines the rate at which future returns are discounted. Rothbard’s distinctly Austrian appraisal credits Fetter with extending subjective valuation into a unified account of rent, capital, and interest—without making productivity explain interest itself. Readers can grasp this consequential distinction through an account that extends beyond lending to entrepreneurs’ purchases of productive factors. Rothbard’s admiration is selective: he sharply questions Fetter’s later opposition to basing-point pricing.

Champagne land commands high rents because consumers value champagne—not the other way round. This reversal anchors Rothbard’s dictionary article, presented here in its 2008 republication, on how productive resources acquire value. His Austrian perspective separates two questions easily conflated: why means derive their value from desired ends, and how actual prices for those means emerge. Against attempts to calculate factor values directly from subjective preferences, Rothbard stresses market exchange and entrepreneurial trial and error. The distinction gives this compact entry its bite: explaining the logical dependence of production on consumption does not, he argues, supply the knowledge needed for economic calculation. Readers can discover both the force of that distinction and a limiting case in which market participants must bargain over relative factor prices.

Keynesians, on Rothbard's account, have the whole causal story backward. They treat idle labor and unused capacity as brute aggregate facts, then insist inflation cannot revive while slack persists, yet stagflation and the renewed inflation of later years refuted them. The missing piece, he argues, is the price system. Unemployment is a surplus like any other: resources go unused because their owners hold out for wages or prices above what buyers will pay, which makes idleness, in an analytical sense, voluntary. Drawing on William H. Hutt, he traces persistent mass unemployment to interventions, compulsory unionism, minimum-wage laws, welfare, and unemployment insurance, that keep wages above market-clearing levels. Monetary expansion can mobilize idle resources only by raising the returns paid for them, which is to say only through inflation. Idle capacity and rising prices, then, are no paradox at all.

The Keynesians themselves create the problem by leaving out the price system.

How can individual valuations explain money, economic crises, and the limits of central planning? In this New Palgrave dictionary entry, republished in 2008, Murray N. Rothbard presents Ludwig von Mises’s economics as a connected response to that question. Money poses a particularly revealing puzzle: people value it for its purchasing power, yet purchasing power itself depends on their demand. Rothbard’s account of Mises’s solution opens onto a broader contrast between causal explanations grounded in human action and mathematical descriptions of equilibrium. Writing sympathetically from within the Austrian tradition, Rothbard treats Mises’s defence of laissez-faire as a consequence of his economic reasoning. The result is a compact intellectual portrait that shows how monetary theory, economic calculation, and deductive method fit together in Rothbard’s interpretation of Mises.