The archive.

The hurricane was natural; the disaster, Rothbard contends, was substantially manufactured by government. Taking Hugo's 1989 landfall as a case study in libertarian political economy, he moves outward through the layers of intervention: FEMA relief that forces distant taxpayers to underwrite reconstruction on a known high-risk coast; compulsory evacuations and mayors barring owners from their own damaged homes; Charleston's anti-gouging law that turned rising prices, the market's rationing signal, into Eastern-European lines and empty shelves. His fiercest fire is reserved for beachfront rebuilding restrictions, which he treats not as ecological prudence but as uncompensated confiscation, citing litigation over whether the state may forbid an owner to build without paying for the taking. The storm, in his reading, is merely the occasion; the state's assault on property is the subject.

Perhaps the worst blow to the coastal residents was the intervention of those professional foes of humanity—the environmentalists.

As Soviet-style legitimacy visibly crumbled across Eastern Europe in 1989, the pressing question was no longer whether socialism had failed but how to undo it, and here, Rothbard argues, decades of anticommunist scholarship had left the cupboard bare. Liberalization is the easy part: legalize black markets, free the currency, scrap price and production controls, cut taxes. The hard problem is ownership, since the economy's main assets remain in state hands and cannot simply be sold to citizens who lack the funds or restored to pre-communist owners. Following Paul Craig Roberts, he would give land to peasants and factories to workers, even buying off the nomenklatura with stock, while rejecting privatization by lottery: the first titles, he insists, must carry enough justice to make the new market order endure.

But the trouble here is that Roberts ignores the hunger for justice among most people, and particularly among victims of communism.

Inflation never really left, it merely waited. Writing at the end of the 1980s, Rothbard explains the return of rising prices as the delayed harvest of earlier money-supply expansion, held back for a time by the collapse of OPEC and an expensive dollar and by the public's willingness to hold rather than spend its cash. Against the mechanical monetarism of the Chicago School, he insists that Austrians recognize no fixed leads and lags: money creation drives the cycle, but expectation and choice decide when its price effects surface. He faults the Federal Reserve for expanding in recession, mistaking the lag for success, then attempting gradual restraint under Alan Greenspan. Reading his preferred M-A aggregate, he sees recession already in motion, and refuses to call for the fresh expansion that would only postpone a necessary correction.

Whatever the Fed does, it unerringly makes matters worse.

Eight years of free-market rhetoric under Reagan, Rothbard contends, accomplished the opposite of what they promised: the resurrection of a Keynesianism that the stagflation of the 1970s should have buried. Stripped of its algebraic jargon, the doctrine reduces to a simple political creed—recessions come from underspending, inflation from overspending, and 'Big Daddy government' stands ready to fine-tune both. But simultaneous recession and inflation, he argues, expose a contradiction at the model's heart, unmasking it as an economics of power rather than explanation. Tracing how Keynesians' promise of budgets balanced over the cycle dissolved into permanent deficits, and how the collapse of monetarism left Keynesians dominant in the Reagan and Bush teams, this 1989 essay reads macroeconomic management as inseparable from the growth of the state.

The stark fact of inflationary recession violates the fundamental assumptions of Keynesian theory and the crucial program of Keynesian policy.

A $550 million income earned Michael Milken the shared contempt of John Kenneth Galbraith, Donald Trump, and David Rockefeller, an alliance Rothbard reads as a tell rather than a verdict. The scandal, he argues, was not greed but competition: Milken's pay measured his marginal value product to Drexel Burnham Lambert, and his high-yield bonds resurrected the takeover bid that the 1967 Williams Act had shielded incumbent managers against. Leveraged buyouts handed shareholders a mechanism to displace inefficient management, precisely the control that critics since Berle and Means had claimed to want, and shifted capital from less to more efficient hands. The junk label, and the eventual Justice Department and SEC prosecutions, he casts as entrenched elites wielding state power against an innovator who threatened them.

People like Michael Milken perform a vitally important economic function for the economy and for consumers, in addition to profiting themselves.

Rename a tax a "fee" and a president keeps his no-new-taxes pledge—so runs the euphemism Rothbard dismantles in this question-and-answer autopsy of the late-1980s savings-and-loan collapse. Charging depositors for the use of their own money, he insists, is a tax; insuring a fractional-reserve system against its own insolvency is "absurd and impossible," like insuring the Titanic after impact. Far from proving the failure of free enterprise, the S&L debacle was the predictable issue of a state-built cartel: New Deal housing credit, interest-rate ceilings, and federal guarantees that loosened assets while pinning liabilities on the taxpayer. His remedy is deliberately anti-palliative—let insolvent thrifts and their depositors bear the loss—and his cure a dollar redeemable in gold, backed one hundred percent against demand liabilities.

Fractional-reserve banks are philosophically bankrupt because they are engaged in a gigantic con-game: pretending that your deposits are there to be redeemed at any time you wish, while actually lending them out to earn interest.

The entire science of statistical inference, Rothbard contends, balances on a single unproved premise: that samples cluster around the true population value according to the normal curve. Trace the confidence levels and margins of error that lend polling and unemployment figures their air of exactness, and you reach a bell-shaped assumption for which, he charges, there is no evidence whatever. The essay then turns skepticism into disciplinary self-destruction, presenting the computer-driven bootstrap methods of Bradley Efron and Jerome H. Friedman as the profession's own admission that data often refuse to follow the curve. What began as an outsider's suspicion, formed in Harold Hotelling's Columbia lectures, becomes an iconoclastic verdict: a central convention of standard inference was universal neither in evidence nor in practice.

The old mystical faith can now be abandoned; the Normal Curve god is dead at long last.

Poland's Solidarity sweeps the polls, Russians denounce the KGB on television, the Baltics demand property rights, and tanks roll into Tiananmen Square—Rothbard reads the upheavals of 1989 as one world-historical verdict on socialism. He calls it not a defeat imposed from outside but an "implosion," a collapse inward through lost confidence and elite defection, with even the nomenklatura scrambling to trade political privilege for capitalist ownership. The essay's theoretical spine is Hayekian: 1989 vindicates The Road to Serfdom's thesis that political and economic freedom stand or fall together. China supplies the tragic proof, where market reform uncoupled from free speech and assembly could not endure. The lesson Rothbard draws from the massacre is blunt—the government is never the people, even when it calls itself the people's government.

In the “socialist bloc” covering virtually half the world, there are no socialists left.

Behind a century of international monetary reform, Rothbard detects a single Keynesian ambition: to abolish gold and every rival currency, and to inch toward one world fiat money issued by a world central bank. Bretton Woods, he argues, was only a compromise—Keynes's "bancor" and White's "unita" scaled back into a jerry-built dollar-gold standard—while SDRs, James Baker's exchange-rate diplomacy, and the coming European monetary union carry the project forward. Managed exchange rates he treats not as technical stabilization but as political price-fixing, as inane as a planner's "just price." Only Britain's hard-money resistance, he wryly notes, throws a wrench into the machinery. The stakes, in his telling, are the removal of the last metallic and competitive checks on inflation—and the risk of a coordinated slide into global hyperinflation.

Fiat money by any name smells as sour.

Can competitive banks preserve sound money if they issue claims exceeding their specie reserves? Rothbard uses Chile’s nineteenth-century banking experiment to challenge the assumption that removing a central bank is enough. His account follows the permissive banking law of 1860 into credit expansion, wartime rescues, and suspended redemption, arguing that government protection encouraged banks to take further risks. The tension is concrete: how much of the resulting instability should be attributed to fractional reserves, and how much to political intervention? Rothbard’s answer distinguishes freedom to open a bank from freedom to issue unbacked liabilities. This article offers a pointed encounter with his case for full specie backing—and with the historical evidence through which he contests the choice between central banking and competitive note issuance.

The savings-and-loan collapse is usually blamed on private greed or reckless deregulation; Sennholz reads it instead as the predictable failure of a politically designed housing-finance cartel. Tracing the thrifts from voluntary building societies through federal chartering, the Home Loan Bank System, and flat-rate deposit insurance, he argues that Washington restricted entry, socialized risk, and forced institutions to borrow short while lending long on favored mortgages. When 1970s inflation lifted market rates above regulated ceilings, the protected structure buckled. The 1989 Reform and Rescue Act, in his account, merely renamed agencies and shifted losses to taxpayers while prosecuting managers and sparing the legislators who built the system. His remedy is abolition: liquidate insolvent firms through bankruptcy and privatize deposit insurance entirely.

Federal deposit insurance subsidizes risk in direct proportion to the degree of risk taken.

Three disorders defined the late-1980s world economy, and Haberler traces each to the same root: not technical malfunction but domestic policy failure. The persistent US budget and trade deficits, matched by German and Japanese surpluses; the volatility of a managed float in which governments pretend to know equilibrium rates and unsettle markets with interventions and communiques; and a debt crisis, opened by Mexico in 1982, that he reads less as a liquidity shortage than as the fruit of inflation, exchange controls, and bloated state enterprises. Rejecting Ricardian equivalence as psychologically false, he prescribes a credible multi-year phaseout of the structural deficit, funded by a stiff gasoline tax, and would leave currencies to competitive markets, contrasting Argentina's squandered decline with Chile's liberalization.

People just don’t think that way. Nobody knows what his future tax liabilities will be, let alone those of his children and grandchildren.