The archive.

Inflation never really left, it merely waited. Writing at the end of the 1980s, Rothbard explains the return of rising prices as the delayed harvest of earlier money-supply expansion, held back for a time by the collapse of OPEC and an expensive dollar and by the public's willingness to hold rather than spend its cash. Against the mechanical monetarism of the Chicago School, he insists that Austrians recognize no fixed leads and lags: money creation drives the cycle, but expectation and choice decide when its price effects surface. He faults the Federal Reserve for expanding in recession, mistaking the lag for success, then attempting gradual restraint under Alan Greenspan. Reading his preferred M-A aggregate, he sees recession already in motion, and refuses to call for the fresh expansion that would only postpone a necessary correction.

Whatever the Fed does, it unerringly makes matters worse.

Eight years of free-market rhetoric under Reagan, Rothbard contends, accomplished the opposite of what they promised: the resurrection of a Keynesianism that the stagflation of the 1970s should have buried. Stripped of its algebraic jargon, the doctrine reduces to a simple political creed—recessions come from underspending, inflation from overspending, and 'Big Daddy government' stands ready to fine-tune both. But simultaneous recession and inflation, he argues, expose a contradiction at the model's heart, unmasking it as an economics of power rather than explanation. Tracing how Keynesians' promise of budgets balanced over the cycle dissolved into permanent deficits, and how the collapse of monetarism left Keynesians dominant in the Reagan and Bush teams, this 1989 essay reads macroeconomic management as inseparable from the growth of the state.

The stark fact of inflationary recession violates the fundamental assumptions of Keynesian theory and the crucial program of Keynesian policy.

A $550 million income earned Michael Milken the shared contempt of John Kenneth Galbraith, Donald Trump, and David Rockefeller, an alliance Rothbard reads as a tell rather than a verdict. The scandal, he argues, was not greed but competition: Milken's pay measured his marginal value product to Drexel Burnham Lambert, and his high-yield bonds resurrected the takeover bid that the 1967 Williams Act had shielded incumbent managers against. Leveraged buyouts handed shareholders a mechanism to displace inefficient management, precisely the control that critics since Berle and Means had claimed to want, and shifted capital from less to more efficient hands. The junk label, and the eventual Justice Department and SEC prosecutions, he casts as entrenched elites wielding state power against an innovator who threatened them.

People like Michael Milken perform a vitally important economic function for the economy and for consumers, in addition to profiting themselves.

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.

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.