The archive.

A grassroots revolt against Big Government swept Republicans into Congress in November 1994—and was betrayed, Rothbard charges, almost before the ballots cooled, when party leaders recalled defeated Democrats to a lame-duck session to pass Gatt and midwife the WTO. From that opening scandal he builds a diagnosis of American politics as rule by a bipartisan establishment of big business, high finance, media, and technocrats, arrayed against a public grown hostile to immigration restriction, foreign aid, welfare, gun control, and the Federal Reserve. Against Gingrich and Dole's balanced-budget theater he demands genuine rollback—abolished departments, not caps—and offers an acid test for every Republican: forget the rhetoric, and ask what they actually did. Hope, he ventures, rests with paleoconservative freshmen like Metcalf and Stockman.

The terrible news is that it took less than twenty-four hours for that revolution to be grievously betrayed.

The 1994 midterms register, in Rothbard's reading, not as a routine swing but as a popular anti-statist revolt against Clinton, the Democratic Party, and the machinery of centralized federal power. The celebration is brief. What follows is a warning: the two-party 'duopoly,' cemented by winner-take-all districts and the socialized ballot, works as a cartel that absorbs insurgent anger into elite-managed reform. Rothbard audits the Republican 'contract' against a stringent standard of genuine rollback—on taxes, gun control, the Federal Reserve, foreign aid, GATT, and the federal departments—and finds evasion where he wants abolition. Naming Gingrich and Dole as accommodationists, he argues that only sustained grassroots pressure and a refusal of bipartisan respectability could keep the revolt from being tamed by the party that rode it to power.

The election of 1994 was an unprecedented and smashing electoral expression of the popular revolution that had been building up for many months: a massive repudiation of President Clinton, the Clintonian Democratic Party, their persons and all of their works.

Can an appeal to intellectual openness become a way of refusing criticism? In this combative review of McCloskey’s Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics, Murray N. Rothbard argues that the language of conversation and persuasion can shield methodological claims from scrutiny. His objection is not simply to rhetoric: he welcomes challenges to economic orthodoxy but insists that they remain answerable to evidence and precise argument. The dispute becomes concrete in his defense of The Review of Austrian Economics against charges of doctrinal exclusion and his challenge to McCloskey’s reading of Schumpeter’s “Ricardian Vice.” These encounters let readers examine where a disagreement over scholarly temperament becomes a testable dispute over texts—and whether pluralism can sustain standards without recreating the exclusions it opposes.

How did a religious ambition to perfect society become a program of professional administration and compulsory social insurance? In this essay, republished here in 2017, Murray N. Rothbard locates American welfare-state formation in alliances among Protestant reformers, university-trained experts, wealthy patrons, and corporate employers. His explicitly libertarian account challenges explanations centred on industrial hardship or popular demand: officials and reformers, he argues, helped create the demands they purported to answer. The concrete stakes emerge in his treatment of Social Security, whose compulsory contributions he interprets as benefiting large employers by imposing pension costs on smaller competitors. Following connections from evangelical activism through settlement houses to federal policymaking, readers can examine his provocative contention that moral conviction, professional authority, and economic advantage reinforced one another rather than representing rival explanations of reform.

Britain’s return to gold in 1925 promised monetary restoration—but what, exactly, had been restored? In this 1998 chapter, Rothbard argues that the gold-exchange standard preserved gold’s prestige while weakening the redemption constraints that gave it disciplinary force. His account connects sterling’s return to its prewar parity with restricted access to gold, foreign central banks’ accumulation of sterling reserves, and American credit support. Writing from an Austrian perspective, he interprets Anglo-American central-bank cooperation not as a stabilizing achievement but as an attempt to postpone adjustment. The concrete distinction between holding gold and holding another country’s promise to pay gold gives readers a way to examine his disputed explanation of the system’s collapse in 1931—and to distinguish monetary institutions often grouped under the same name.

Britain’s return to gold at the prewar sterling parity promised monetary discipline while preserving cheap credit—a contradiction at the centre of Murray N. Rothbard’s account. In this restored, unexpurgated chapter, first published in this form in 2002, he argues that the interwar breakdown arose not from gold itself but from arrangements designed to evade its constraints. His Austrian perspective directs attention to the difference between redeemable gold money and a system in which foreign central banks accumulated sterling claims. Through the relationships linking Montagu Norman, Benjamin Strong and Morgan banking interests, readers can examine how cooperation supported an overvalued pound and shifted adjustment abroad. Rothbard’s interpretation makes reserve-currency prestige a source of vulnerability: the claims supporting other currencies could lose value when Britain abandoned convertibility.

Was the Federal Reserve a restraint on powerful bankers, or an institution they sought to overcome the restraints of competition? In this article, reprinted in 2002, Murray N. Rothbard argues for the latter, tracing how financial interests, economists, and political organizers turned demands for monetary “elasticity” into a campaign for central banking. His Austrian, anti-statist perspective makes bank redemption, credit expansion, and institutional privilege the stakes of reform. The distinctive interest lies in the machinery of persuasion: commissions, newspaper publicity, expert appointments, and regional reserve proposals that Rothbard interprets as disguising centralized control. His account also connects domestic reform with overseas gold-exchange schemes, allowing readers to examine how monetary expertise could serve both administrative ambitions and banks’ commercial interests.

A flat income-tax rate above a subsistence exemption looks like a retreat from progression—but does it escape progression’s underlying logic? In this article, written in 1952 and first published in 2001, Murray N. Rothbard turns Walter J. Blum and Harry J. Kalven, Jr.’s arguments against progressive taxation upon their own proposed alternative. He welcomes their critique of measurable tax sacrifice while challenging the exemption that makes effective rates rise with income. His distinctive standard is neither equal sacrifice nor equal percentages, but the market analogy of equal prices for equal services. Readers can examine how that analogy changes the question of tax justice—and why, for Rothbard, dismantling the case for graduated rates does not establish a defensible substitute.

Banking reform can restrain financiers while strengthening the institutions through which they exercise power. That tension drives Murray N. Rothbard’s posthumously published chapter on the transition from Hoover to Roosevelt. Rather than treating party rivalry as the key to monetary policy, Rothbard follows competing Morgan and Rockefeller–Harriman–Kuhn, Loeb networks through appointments, corporate ties, emergency lending, and regulatory battles. His Austrian critique of credit expansion gives this account its distinctive edge: neither Hoover’s interventions nor New Deal reforms escape his charge that government reorganized and protected financial interests. Readers can examine how gold policy, banking separation, and centralized Federal Reserve authority redistributed influence—and test Rothbard’s claim that reforms presented as restraints on finance also served established financial coalitions.

Sputnik convinced many Americans that centrally planned Soviet science had overtaken the free market, and this short monograph answers that panic directly. Rothbard treats science and technology as an ordinary problem of allocating scarce resources, insisting that the only rational, voluntary coordinator is the free price system rather than government direction. He denies any genuine shortage of scientists, since a real shortage would show up as rising relative salaries, and marshals Jewkes and Stigler to show that major inventions came from individuals and small firms, not bureaucratic research teams. Soviet science, crippled by the Lysenko affair, becomes his cautionary case; automation, he adds, deserves no more fear than the machines the Luddites smashed. His preferred lever is tax exemption, never subsidy.

The essential feature of innovation is that the path to it is not known beforehand.

When construction workers marched in 1970 chanting "God Bless the Establishment," the American Right had inverted its own origins. Part history, part memoir, this account traces how the Old Right, the anti-New Deal and anti-interventionist coalition of Mencken, Nock, Garet Garrett, John T. Flynn, and Robert Taft, was captured within the form after National Review's 1955 rise, which kept conservative rhetoric while swapping anti-statism for Cold War militarism. Rothbard follows his own path from minarchism to anarchism, from Republican politics through Cold War revisionism to an improbable alliance with the New Left against Vietnam and conscription. Garrett's warning that the country had crossed from Republic to Empire anchors his lament for a lost antiwar, anti-Establishment tradition.

The Old Right was staunchly opposed to Big Government and the New Deal at home and abroad: that is, to both facets of the welfare-warfare state.

How can libertarians build alliances without becoming indistinguishable from their allies? In this confidential July 1961 memorandum to the Volker Fund, republished here in 2010, Murray N. Rothbard borrows Leninist strategic categories to address a very different political objective. He argues that campaigns for partial reforms require an independent intellectual core capable of resisting both doctrinal isolation and opportunistic compromise. His assessments of Leonard Read’s Foundation for Economic Education, scholarly grantmaking, and National Review conservatism make the problem concrete: wider influence may dilute rather than strengthen a movement’s commitments. The memorandum offers a candid view of Rothbard as an institutional strategist, explaining why he preferred sustained collaboration among scholars to publicity or an ever-expanding network of loosely sympathetic conservatives.