The archive.

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.

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.

Philosophy gives economics its intellectual setting—but can economics, in turn, supply the foundations of ethics? In this review of Wolfgang Grassl and Barry Smith’s edited volume, Murray N. Rothbard welcomes studies linking Carl Menger’s economics to Franz Brentano’s Aristotelian philosophy, while resisting attempts to extend marginal analysis into morality. His judgments distinguish the collection’s historical achievement from arguments he finds theoretically confused or politically objectionable. The sharpest boundary concerns Grassl’s proposed “moral market”: balancing virtues, Rothbard argues, cannot justify incremental doses of theft or violence. This short review offers a pointed encounter with Rothbard as both historian and libertarian critic, defending philosophy’s role in explaining economic thought while insisting that ethical limits govern economic choice.