The archive.

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.

Economists wait for the National Bureau of Economic Research to pronounce the economy in or out of recession, and Rothbard's quarrel is with that deference. The Bureau advertises a Baconian method, no theories, only facts averaged into leading, coincident, and lagging indicators, but its procedures, he argues, smuggle in arbitrary choices at every step. Selecting a single peak and trough month from a flat or ambiguous plateau, then dividing the interval into equal parts, forces irregular movement into neat sawtoothed lines; averaging cycles across decades assumes a stable population of events that economic history, with its shifting institutions and monetary regimes, never supplies. Invoking Burns and Mitchell's Measuring Business Cycles as measurement without theory, he challenges the legitimacy of letting a statistical authority define the cycle.

Everyone waits for the National Bureau to speak; when the oracle finally makes its pronouncement, it is accepted without question.

Modern liberalism, in Rothbard's satire, runs as a machine for converting ordinary scarcity, hangnails, unaffordable BMWs, a fable of federally funded beri-beri, into public emergencies whose every failure only justifies tripled funding. Against that ratchet he defends a distinction conservatives forgot: a subsidy hands you money taken from others, while a tax credit merely lets an earner keep his own. When conservatives joined liberals after the 1986 Tax Reform Act in scorning credits as loopholes and subsidies, they surrendered one of the few devices limiting state extraction. Tracing the tactic through the 1988 childcare debate, Rothbard urges not the closing of loopholes but their endless widening, until the federal revenue system becomes one vast opening and the tax state is structurally hollowed out.

Modern liberalism works in a simple but effective manner: liberals Find Problems.

Against the split between academic economics and applied policy—between 'neutral' analysis without theory and scholarship detached from public life—Rothbard offers the Mises Institute as the cure. Part institutional history, part manifesto, the essay recounts a founding in the fall of 1982 with no endowment and no billionaires, then narrates the post-1974 Austrian revival after Hayek's Nobel and the softening 'Austrianism' that whispered Mises had been too dogmatic, too extreme. Rothbard accepts the charge as praise: dogmatism means fidelity to truth. He describes the journals, seminars, fellowships, and Auburn programs not as administration but as the infrastructure a living discipline requires, and treats the word 'Austrian' itself as contested ground nearly captured from within. His conclusion reclaims it—uncompromisingly Misesian, free-market, and radical.

Above all, Austrian economics is once again, as it ever shall be, Misesian.