The archive.

Every generation of economists, Rothbard notes, hunts for the next culminating doctrine after Keynes, and in the late 1970s supply-side economics seemed to furnish it, though without a systematic treatise, a single major theorist, or real doctrinal unity. This polemic grants the movement its one valid point, that lower marginal tax rates can spur work, saving, and investment, then attacks the fiscal myth grafted onto it: the Laffer Curve promise that tax cuts will pay for themselves and erase deficits with no confrontation over government spending. Supply-siders, he argues, are closer to Keynesians than they admit, tolerating deficits and cheap money while dressing managed currency in gold symbolism. Through Jude Wanniski's populism he exposes a doctrine that flatters voters by promising mutually inconsistent goods at once.

For the “gold standard” they want provides only the illusion of a gold standard without the substance.

Watch how a spending increase becomes a "cut." Rothbard dissects the vocabulary by which federal economists redescribe fiscal expansion as restraint: budget "cuts" that merely fall below a projected increase, tax "cuts" offset by Social Security hikes and inflation-driven bracket creep, tax increases rebranded as "revenue enhancement," and exemptions recast as "loopholes." He borrows Mises's observation that the very word "loophole" presumes the government rightfully owns all you earn. The pattern, he insists, is never neutral: by swapping observable dollars for baselines and counterfactuals, the state claims austerity while it grows. His most pointed case is the redefinition of the deficit as an inflation-adjusted "real increase" in debt, a maneuver he likens to apologetics for Germany's 1923 hyperinflation, and the shrinking of "down payment" to a hoped-for slowing of future borrowing.

Now we have "budget cuts" which are not cuts, but rather substantial increases over the previous year's expenditures.

Separate money creation from saving, real resources from accounting totals, causal theory from statistical coincidence: the same analytic move recurs through the ten refutations Rothbard assembles in this compact 1984 brief against the language of macroeconomic management. Deficits, he argues, are inflationary only when financed through the banking system; falling prices are the mark of dynamic growth, not catastrophe; wage rates track productivity, not tariff walls. He punctures the Phillips curve as an ideological fallback and the Laffer curve for making state revenue the measure of policy, asking why maximizing government receipts should be anyone's aim at all. The only sound cure for deficits, he concludes, is the one no politician will name: cut the federal budget.

People are contrary cusses whose behavior, thank goodness, cannot be forecast precisely in advance.

What if the Federal Reserve’s early record is measured against bankers’ interests rather than its public promises of stability? In this essay, Rothbard interprets central banking as a means of coordinating credit expansion that competition and demands for redemption would otherwise constrain. His distinctive approach connects monetary mechanisms with banking alliances, political negotiations, and the influence of Benjamin Strong at the New York Fed. The argument becomes especially concrete in his account of Federal Reserve support for bankers’ acceptances and for Britain’s return to gold at sterling’s prewar parity. Readers can examine how reserve provision, securities purchases, and international cooperation worked—and assess Rothbard’s contention that the resulting instability arose from protected credit expansion, not merely from failures to manage it effectively.

Medieval apocalyptic prophets, modern futurologists, and chart-wielding investment gurus share one trick, Rothbard argues: the fudge factor that lets a failed prediction be reinterpreted rather than admitted. From that sociology of forecasting he turns on the Kondratieff long cycle, the supposed 54-year rhythm he calls the flimsiest alleged cycle of all. Its evidence survives only after Kondratieff detrended his data, divided by population, and smoothed it with nine-year moving averages, erasing the very industrial growth that disproved it. Falling nineteenth-century prices, Rothbard insists, marked productivity and abundance, not depression, and the alleged long booms were merely short wartime inflations. Against this statistical mysticism he sets the Austrian account of booms and busts as products of central-bank credit expansion, comparing hidden multiple cycles to Ptolemaic epicycles.

The cause of the boom-bust cycle is not some mystical periodic Force to which man must bend his will; the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Ordinary businessmen may choose free markets or state privilege, but bankers, on Rothbard's account, are structurally driven toward statism, and that inclination threads through a century of American foreign policy. This compressed revisionist essay follows the rivalry and collusion of Morgan and Rockefeller interests from Jay Cooke's Civil War debt monopoly through the 1890s turn to imperial expansion, Wilson's entry into World War I, the founding of the Federal Reserve, and the Cold War machinery of the Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission. Naming cabinets, coups, and interlocking directorates from the Spanish-American War to Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, Rothbard argues that a permanent government of finance rules regardless of which party wins office.

The great turning point of American foreign policy came in the early 1890s, during the second Cleveland administration.

When flight delays snarled American airports in 1984, the press told a tidy story of wise government-business cooperation reining in airlines that had over-scheduled peak hours. Rothbard reverses the causation. The congestion, he argues, was not a failure of deregulation but the reappearance of cartel policy: after the Civil Aeronautics Board was abolished, the FAA picked up its restrictive function, imposing flight ceilings in the name of scarce controllers left short by the PATCO firings. That incumbents like Eastern Airlines, facing People's Express at Newark, welcomed the quotas gives the piece its public-choice edge. A persistent shortage, Rothbard reminds the reader, signals a price held below the market-clearing level, here because airports are government-owned. His remedy is market-clearing slot fees, privatized airports, and privatized air-traffic control.

Whenever economists see a shortage, they are trained to look immediately for the maximum price control below the free-market price.

A bank run, in this compact polemic, is no irrational panic but a market test that exposes fractional-reserve banking for what it is: a system holding a fraction of the cash it has promised depositors on demand. Taking the Ohio and Maryland runs of the 1980s as his occasion, Rothbard asks why federal deposit insurance inspires confidence where private and state insurers failed, and answers that the FDIC and FSLIC are credible only because the Federal Reserve can print legal tender without limit. Insurance can cover calculable risks; it cannot make a structurally insolvent industry solvent. What passes for banking soundness, he argues, is a confidence trick that would be prosecuted as fraud in any other business. His remedy is abolition: end the Fed, the FDIC, and the FSLIC.

Fractional reserve banks, being inherently insolvent, are uninsurable.

The plain-paper copier grew so familiar that its maker's name nearly became a verb, yet the Xerox 914 began, Rothbard reminds us, as a long-shot gamble no giant would take. Eastman Kodak, IBM, and government laboratories all passed on Chester Carlson's process; the lone patent attorney ran his first experiments in an apartment kitchen in 1938, and it was Haloid, a firm with under seven million dollars in sales, that spent twenty million over twelve years to bring the machine to market. Rothbard refuses a heroic tale, though: the challenger becomes the giant, then the pressured incumbent as Japanese rivals erode its share, before its Marathon copiers claw back ground. Competition, on this telling, is a process no firm ever escapes.

Small business can outcompete, and outinnovate, the giants.

Call a tax deduction a subsidy and you have already conceded that the government owns your income; that buried premise is what Rothbard drags into the light in this brief attack on the Reagan administration's plan to end the deductibility of state and local taxes from federal returns. A subsidy, he insists on its plain meaning, is Peter taxed to fund Paul; allowing a taxpayer to surrender less of his own earnings is nothing of the kind. Behind the tax-expenditure vocabulary and the talk of fair shares he sees a device that turns taxpayers against one another, policing each other's alleged privileges instead of uniting against extraction itself. The real objective, he argues, is not revenue-neutral symmetry but lowering the coerced burden for everyone.

How can allowing you to keep more of your own money be called a “subsidy?”

Near-unanimous praise across the ideological spectrum should make anyone suspicious, Rothbard warns, and the Treasury's 1986 flat-tax draft earns exactly that suspicion. His decisive move is to invert the meaning of tax complexity: the code is tangled because households and firms have fought to shelter income from confiscation, so the deductions and exclusions the reformers deplore are defensive walls, not clutter. Simplification, he shows, would tax capital gains as ordinary income, invent imputed rent for homeowners who cannot pay in imputed dollars, and strip depletion and medical deductions, imposing real losses merely for the sake of symmetry. Tax lawyers and accountants he recasts as locks and fences, rational defenses against seizure. True simplicity, the essay concludes, would come only from abolishing the income tax altogether.

Complexity is good if it allows you to keep more of your own money.

At issue is whether entrepreneurship can be prised apart from uncertainty, capital, and ownership, a quarrel internal to the Austrian school that Rothbard resolves firmly in favor of Mises. Against Israel Kirzner, who reduces the entrepreneur to alertness toward opportunities already lying in plain sight, he insists that profit and loss flow from judgment under uncertain future conditions: the stock speculator and the employer both commit resources now and can be proved wrong. The Kirznerian entrepreneur who owns nothing and risks nothing is dismissed as an abstraction, since profits are only ever changes in the value of owned assets. A closing section recasts Schumpeter as a Walrasian who mistook general equilibrium for a real state and made inflationary bank credit the engine of development.

He is a free-floating wraith, disembodied from real objects.