The archive.

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.

Compassion for laid-off workers, in Sennholz's reading, hardens into a coercive levy on their employers—the mechanism behind the plant-closing laws spreading through the states, notably the Massachusetts statute Michael Dukakis signed. He does not deny the pain of a shutdown; he reframes it as a defensive, loss-minimizing act rather than predation, since profit rates signal where consumers most want scarce capital employed and keeping it in declining uses only misallocates resources. Against the claim that owners owe workers reinvestment in the same plant, he deploys the Austrian logic of consumer sovereignty and attacks the socialist exploitation theory beneath residual worker claims, treating union job rights as state-created privileges dressed up as human rights. His policy inversion is the sharpest stroke: restrictions on exit become restrictions on entry, for mandated severance and retraining raise the penalty on failure until firms invest elsewhere, substitute capital for labor, or never open at all.

In the end, the law that means to prevent unemployment by order of politicians, judges and policemen, actually creates it.

Before money is a technical problem, it is a question of freedom, property, and power - and inflation, on this account, is no accident of markets but the fruit of statist monetary ideas turned into coercive institutions. Offered here in the Spanish translation of the 1985 Money and Freedom, the essay dismantles the Federal Reserve as a politically protected monopoly, an instrument of Treasury finance whose independence is an institutional fiction. Legal tender is the coercive core: by forcing creditors to accept depreciated paper, the state expropriates without consent. Sennholz rejects the false solutions alike - Keynesian demand management, Friedman's monetary rule, the administered gold of Mundell and Laffer - because each keeps government in charge of money. His remedy is a parallel standard: abolish legal tender, permit free banking, and let gold, silver, and private notes compete for acceptance.

La moneda fuerte y la banca libre no son imposibles, simplemente son ilegales.

English translation: “Sound money and free banking are not impossible; they are merely illegal.”

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.

There are, for Hazlitt in this 1985 primer, only two ways to organize economic life — voluntary exchange or political command — and mixed systems drift toward coercion unless the market principle is consciously defended. To clear the ground he rehabilitates the 'profit motive,' recasting it as the near-universal drive of families to preserve and better their condition, then builds outward through the division of labor to a self-correcting order in which prices and losses discipline error and capital equips labor with sharper tools. Half the essay is polemic: against Marx's labor theory of value, which omits risk, management, and entrepreneurial judgment, and against the interventionist faith that price ceilings, rent controls, and minimum wages can legislate prosperity. Each such remedy, he shows, misfires into shortage, unemployment, or inflation.

It was not consciously planned by anybody. It evolved.

Give any organization a monopoly on creating money and it will use that power to the hilt—there is the premise from which Rothbard builds his case. Chronic inflation since the 1930s, he argues, is no technical mishap but the institutional fruit of state-controlled fiat paper, and no set of central-bank rules can cure it; only separating money from the state will. He faults Hayek's scheme of competing private currencies for ignoring Mises's regression theorem, by which money must emerge from a commodity already valued in exchange, and rejects commodity-basket standards as constructivist fictions. His remedy is to redefine the dollar as a redeemable weight of gold—a unit of weight, not an administered price—clearing a path toward abolishing the Federal Reserve and a full 100 percent reserve.

There is, for one thing, no such unitary entity as “the price level” which could be kept constant.

Divestment campaigns, embargoes, and bans on the Krugerrand swept American campuses in the mid-1980s, and Rothbard, professing abhorrence of apartheid, warns that they would fall hardest on the black South African workers they meant to rescue. His method is to convert a moral crusade into a question of incidence: withdrawing foreign firms, often the better-paying employers, lowers the demand for labor and so cuts jobs and wages. He attacks the rhetoric of collective sacrifice, the equivocal "we" that quietly assigns the cost to people never consulted. Underneath runs his libertarian theory of racism: in a free market, employers who refuse productive black workers pay for it in lost profits, and only the state can socialize the cost of discrimination and entrench an apartheid system.

The growth of capitalism in South Africa will do far more to end apartheid than the futile and counterproductive grandstanding of American liberals.

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.

Cost, in the only sense that explains why someone chooses as he does, is neither a physical alternative displaced nor a sum of money paid out, but the chooser's own perceived sacrifice at the instant of decision. Reclaiming opportunity cost after its migration from Wieser and Buchanan into neoclassical orthodoxy, Kirzner works through Alchian's swimming-pool example to separate four meanings tangled together, then skewers Gary North's claim that a man incurs a heavy cost by marrying an educated woman, for he never possessed her professional income and so sacrifices nothing of it. Two people facing identical options may bear different costs because they perceive facts, forecast futures, and weigh consequences differently; such private appraisals cannot be ranked between persons. Even social cost, he argues, smuggles in an imagined chooser whose objectivity rests on a hidden, quasi-subjective act of valuation.

To rank the costs faced by different decision makers is as conceptually impossible a task as is that of comparing utilities interpersonally.

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?