The archive.

Millions of tax dollars, mobilized by a propaganda campaign that has suddenly discovered the homeless: this is the spectacle Rothbard sets out to deflate. He argues that "the homeless" and "the hungry" are political labels manufactured in sequence, fracturing a single condition, poverty or lack of money, into discrete emergencies. The fragmentation is not innocent: separate needs create separate constituencies, funneling subsidies to construction firms, agriculture, food distributors, and the social-work bureaucracies that administer them. Concrete images of need, he notes, dramatize far better than cash income. Turning from rhetoric to incentives, he presses the uncomfortable questions the welfare framing avoids: why people lack money, and how permanent public aid erodes work effort, rehabilitation, and private charity.

Money does not have nearly the sentimental value of home and hearth and Christmas dinner.

Defending deregulation on the strength of whichever statistics happen to be convenient, Rothbard warns, invites disaster when the data turn against you. When bankruptcies, mergers, congestion, and delays revived calls to re-regulate the airlines in the late 1980s, he answered that these were the ordinary results of competition, not signs of failure. The old Civil Aeronautics Board, he reconstructs, was a state-enforced cartel that fixed fares far above market levels and rationed choice routes to favored incumbents; falling fares and crowded planes simply mark travel opened to students and families once priced out. The genuine bottlenecks, delays and airport congestion and air-traffic control, remain in government hands. His remedy is not nostalgia for the CAB but fuller deregulation: privatized airports and competitively priced runway space.

Empiricism without theory is a shaky reed on which to build a case for freedom.

Does capital earn interest because it is productive, or because people value present goods more highly than future goods? In this dictionary article, republished in the 2008 second edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Rothbard defends the second explanation while tracing its disputed intellectual ancestry. His account gives Turgot a larger role than Böhm-Bawerk allowed and finds in Fetter a crucial distinction: productivity explains the rental price of a capital good, whereas time preference explains the discount applied to its future returns. The historical argument sharpens a conceptual challenge—how to explain consumer-loan interest and returns on production within one theory. Readers can discover why, for Rothbard, explaining what a machine produces is not yet explaining why advancing money to buy it earns interest.

Media applause for Bruce Babbitt's courage in demanding higher taxes to shrink the deficit provokes Rothbard to redefine the word. Courage, he insists, once meant battling the powers-that-be, not urging the state to intensify its parasitic plunder of productive citizens, which is precisely what Babbitt, like Walter Mondale in 1984, does. The essay's central move is a class distinction: politicians and bureaucrats are not genuine taxpayers but net tax-receivers, so a public employee who remits part of a tax-funded salary merely reduces his net transfer. Shared sacrifice, on this account, is an accounting fiction that puts officials and citizens on a false common footing. Rejecting both tax hikes and supply-side complacency about deficits, Rothbard prescribes the neglected alternative: drastic, across-the-board cuts in government spending.

The proper answer is: anywhere and everywhere; only wholesale flailing away with a meat axe could possibly do justice to the task.

Judged by their actual policies rather than their campaign imagery, George Bush and Michael Dukakis emerge in Rothbard's account as interchangeable establishment centrists, proof, he says, of George Wallace's jibe that there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the parties. Both are committed to Keynesian spending, deficits, higher taxes by semantic disguise, monetary inflation, and regulation. He marshals the governing record against partisan myth: Reagan's supposedly anti-government years left federal spending higher as a share of private product, complete with protectionism, farm subsidies, and an assault on insider trading. The essay's gravest warning targets James Baker's drive toward coordinated central-bank inflation, a European currency unit, and finally a world central bank issuing world paper money. The one real difference Rothbard allows is that a Dukakis victory might simply lack the connections to advance it.

There would be no remaining checks on any country’s inflation except the wisdom and the will of the World Central Bank.

The most fashionable new mathematics of the 1980s, Rothbard argues, quietly demolishes orthodox mathematical economics from within. Chaos theory cannot be waved off as anti-mathematical, since it comes from the cutting edge, yet its lessons cut against the neoclassical apparatus. Through Lorenz's Butterfly Effect and Mandelbrot's fractals, it shows that tiny causes yield vast effects and that smooth, continuous curves misrepresent a jagged world. Rothbard turns this against calculus-based equilibrium, rational expectations, and the random-walk theory of stock markets, which he finds absurd for making the market omniscient while denying that historical events are causally connected. Careful to reject claims that nature is random or undetermined, he endorses chaos theory only tactically: newer, more advanced mathematics now does to formal economics what Austrian critics long attempted from outside.

Calling it the Butterfly Effect, he pointed out that if a butterfly flapped its wings in Brazil, it could well produce a tornado in Texas.

A just price fixed by moral authority—or one discovered through market exchange? In this review of Alejandro Antonio Chafuen’s Christians for Freedom, Murray N. Rothbard argues that Spanish scholastics understood value, wages, and entrepreneurial uncertainty in ways that anticipate Austrian economics. He praises Chafuen’s recovery of arguments that separate moral disapproval from economic rights, including a prostitute’s entitlement to her earnings. Yet his endorsement turns into a dispute over inheritance: Rothbard rejects the picture of Adam Smith as a faithful successor, charging that Smith displaced subjective valuation with labor and production costs. This short review offers both a concrete glimpse of scholastic market reasoning and a sharply partisan challenge to the familiar genealogy of modern economics.

Part intellectual biography, part act of homage, this essay follows Ludwig von Mises from his education in Vienna to his lonely American years, presenting him as the central system-builder of modern Austrian economics and a model of principled liberal resistance. Rothbard traces the achievements in turn: the integration of money into marginal-utility theory through the regression theorem in The Theory of Money and Credit; the business-cycle account of credit-induced malinvestment and corrective liquidation; and the socialist-calculation argument that without private ownership and market prices for capital goods, rational planning is impossible. He sets Mises against the German Historical School, positivism, and interventionism, and dwells on the human cost: the denied Vienna professorship, the private seminar that formed Hayek and Machlup, exile from the Nazis, and poverty in New York. Mises could delay catastrophe, Rothbard concludes, not reverse the statist age.

I fought because I could do no other.

When the market broke on October 19, 1987, the commentary that followed was, in Rothbard's account, mostly nonsense, and he answers it point by point. Black Monday was no isolated technical glitch but the seal on a contraction already running since early September, the visible culmination of a boom that Federal Reserve credit expansion had inflated. Across nine rebuttals he dismantles the fashionable culprits: overvaluation (a definition dressed up as a cause), computer trading, the trade deficit, the budget deficit, and tight money. Against Greenspan's post-crash liquidity injections, more credit poured on a credit-made wound, he insists that recession is the corrective liquidation of malinvestment, best left to run its course. His closing warning is of an inflationary recession worse than the crash itself.

Only in Cloud Cuckoo-land, to repeat, is the cure for inflation, more inflation.

Strip the minimum wage of its protective vocabulary, Rothbard argues, and what remains is not a wage floor but a ban on jobs. A law forbidding hire below a statutory rate creates no employment and lifts no worker's productivity; it merely outlaws the contracts that marginal workers, teenagers, black workers, those with the weakest bargaining position, would otherwise make. Taking the 1988 push to raise the federal minimum as his occasion, he reads the two parties as tactically distinct but identical in substance, and presses a reductio: if a wage floor helps without cost, why not set it at a thousand dollars an hour. Behind the humanitarian language he finds cartel privilege, senior union labor shielding itself from low-wage competition, and a welfare paternalism that denies the poor the choice to produce.

In truth, there is only one way to regard a minimum wage law: it is compulsory unemployment, period.

Glasnost, perestroika, and the scramble toward markets across the socialist bloc read, in this 1988 essay, as something larger than policy adjustment: an ideology publicly conceding its own bankruptcy. Rothbard interprets the reforms in the Soviet Union, Hungary, China, and Yugoslavia as belated confessions that Ludwig von Mises had been right all along, that without market prices and profit-and-loss tests, central planning cannot coordinate a modern industrial economy. He denies socialism its claim to be the heir of progress, casting it as a rival modernism that borrowed liberal ends while substituting coercion for exchange, and he links economic liberalization to glasnost's loosening of censorship. His conclusion refuses the narrower Cold War target: the enemy is socialism itself, not merely its Communist variant.

In 1988, we were living through the most significant and exciting event of the 20th century: nothing less than the collapse of socialism.

Interest rates, Rothbard insists, are prices in credit markets, not headlines to be read off the last few weeks of Fed activity, a habit he mocks with the Marxist term impressionism. The essay's decisive distinction separates a genuine fall in rates, driven by real saving and lower time preference, from an artificial one manufactured by bank-credit expansion that only mimics thrift. From there follows the Austrian cycle: cheap credit validates capital-intensive projects the economy has not actually saved for, until rising prices force an inflation premium onto rates and expose the malinvestments. Extending the logic to capital flows, exchange rates, and the gold standard, he argues that government money is what makes interest-rate signals unstable, needlessly complicating what price theory would otherwise render simple.

Without the interference of government, the entire topic would be duck soup.