The archive.

Rename it 'desocialization', Rothbard suggests, and privatization stops looking like managerial housekeeping and becomes what it is: the reversal of nearly a century of creeping socialism. His case rests on incentives, private income depending on satisfying consumers while government revenue is secured by taxation or inflation, and it refuses the usual concession that some functions are inherently public. Anything is fair game; every service the state supplies has at some point been supplied privately, the Post Office standing as monument to public monopoly. He then presses the fiscal argument past ordinary deficit pragmatism, casting the federal government as a giant monopolist hoarding land, water, minerals, and forests, and urges selling even its loss-making assets cheaply, brushing aside Keith Joseph's claim that Britain's unprofitable nationalized steel could command no buyer at all.

There is no such thing as no price.

Who should shape a child’s moral world: parents and churches, or publicly appointed experts? In this essay, first published in 1986 and republished here in 2017, Murray N. Rothbard places that conflict at the centre of progressive family policy. His distinctive emphasis is ethnoreligious: he argues that evangelical campaigns for moral reform helped supply popular support for centralized institutions, complementing the ambitions of business leaders and professional administrators. The struggle over San Francisco’s schools makes the argument concrete, showing how administrative “efficiency” could transfer authority away from immigrant voters and families. Rothbard’s polemical interpretation challenges readers to distinguish expanded public provision from expanded public control—and to examine the religious and cultural purposes that ostensibly neutral expertise could serve.

Every so often the recurring monetary crisis flares up, elites propose a new arrangement, and the same contradictions return under a fresh name; this, for Rothbard, is the shell game of twentieth-century money. He refuses the standard quarrel between fixed and floating rates, insisting the real question is whether a currency redeems for a market commodity or merely for state paper, and sorts the options into three: genuine gold, Keynesian world paper money, and national fiat currencies afloat. Bretton Woods he calls a mockery of gold, sustained only by America's privilege of exporting inflation abroad until Nixon shut the gold window in 1971; the Smithsonian Agreement tried vainly to fix prices among irredeemable fiats. Answering 1985 proposals from Kemp and Bradley to refix rates, he holds that neither managed fixity nor clean floating can be sound while the unit itself is fiat.

The world is in permanent monetary crisis, but once in a while, the crisis flares up acutely, and we noisily shift gears from one flawed monetary system to another.

Was Adam Smith’s achievement a new beginning for economics—or a diversion from more promising explanations of exchange? In this polemical essay, Murray N. Rothbard argues that Smith’s authority obscured a Continental tradition connecting prices to utility and scarcity. The contrast turns on concrete problems: why water costs less than diamonds, how markets adjust to changes in money, and whether production costs can explain value independently of consumer choice. Judging Smith by Austrian commitments to subjective value and market process, Rothbard also tests his laissez-faire reputation against his support for interest-rate ceilings and navigation laws. Readers encounter a sharply contested genealogy of economics in which scholastic thinkers, Cantillon, and Turgot become alternatives to—not merely precursors of—Smith.

Philosophy gives economics its intellectual setting—but can economics, in turn, supply the foundations of ethics? In this review of Wolfgang Grassl and Barry Smith’s edited volume, Murray N. Rothbard welcomes studies linking Carl Menger’s economics to Franz Brentano’s Aristotelian philosophy, while resisting attempts to extend marginal analysis into morality. His judgments distinguish the collection’s historical achievement from arguments he finds theoretically confused or politically objectionable. The sharpest boundary concerns Grassl’s proposed “moral market”: balancing virtues, Rothbard argues, cannot justify incremental doses of theft or violence. This short review offers a pointed encounter with Rothbard as both historian and libertarian critic, defending philosophy’s role in explaining economic thought while insisting that ethical limits govern economic choice.

When the Group of Seven moved in 1987 to prop up a falling dollar and revive coordinated fixed exchange rates, Rothbard saw one more attempt to preserve inflationary discretion under a gold-colored disguise. Tracing the line from the classical gold-coin standard through the interwar sterling system, Bretton Woods, and the short-lived Smithsonian Agreement, he argues that fixed rates without genuine gold money become arbitrary political prices, doomed to collapse under redemption pressure and Gresham's Law. He dissects James Baker's proposed scheme, a secret commodity-price index granting gold only a token, formulaic role, and the odd alliance of conservative Keynesians and supply-siders such as Robert Mundell and Jack Kemp who back it. Floating fiat rates are bad, he concludes; fixed fiat rates, which add international price-fixing to paper money, are worse.

Once again, the market proves wiser than economists.

Can a science of exchange explain the economic choices of someone with nobody to trade with? In this dictionary article, republished in the 2008 New Palgrave, Rothbard traces the possibilities and limits of defining economics through exchange rather than material wealth. Subjective valuation explains how both trading partners can gain and why services belong alongside tangible goods in economic analysis. Yet the isolated individual poses a problem for an exclusively interpersonal account. Rothbard favours Mises’s resolution: place market exchange within a broader science of purposeful human action. This compact intellectual history shows how a seemingly terminological dispute changes what economists can explain—from mutual gains in trade to the solitary allocation of scarce resources.

A society that borrows to fund present consumption, Sennholz argues, is quietly eating its own productive capital. Written against the fiscal record of Reagan-era Washington, this Austrian-libertarian indictment treats deficits, entitlements, inflation, and off-budget government as linked symptoms of a public that wants benefits without sacrifice. The federal budget becomes a contest among organized interests seeking income through law; Social Security is exposed as intergenerational transfer rather than insurance; privatization is dismissed as counterfeit unless assets are actually sold at market prices. He draws a pointed parallel between the credit expansion that preceded 1929 and the easy money of the 1980s, warning that debt is disguised default and that no line-item veto or balanced-budget amendment can discipline a people who prefer dependence. Reform, he concludes, demands moral limits as much as budgetary ones.

To live beyond its means is to invite poverty and deprivation in the end.

Why does a productive asset yield rent, and what determines its price today? In this brief entry from the 2008 second edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Murray N. Rothbard presents Frank Albert Fetter’s answer: productivity determines rental returns, while time preference determines the rate at which future returns are discounted. Rothbard’s distinctly Austrian appraisal credits Fetter with extending subjective valuation into a unified account of rent, capital, and interest—without making productivity explain interest itself. Readers can grasp this consequential distinction through an account that extends beyond lending to entrepreneurs’ purchases of productive factors. Rothbard’s admiration is selective: he sharply questions Fetter’s later opposition to basing-point pricing.

Champagne land commands high rents because consumers value champagne—not the other way round. This reversal anchors Rothbard’s dictionary article, presented here in its 2008 republication, on how productive resources acquire value. His Austrian perspective separates two questions easily conflated: why means derive their value from desired ends, and how actual prices for those means emerge. Against attempts to calculate factor values directly from subjective preferences, Rothbard stresses market exchange and entrepreneurial trial and error. The distinction gives this compact entry its bite: explaining the logical dependence of production on consumption does not, he argues, supply the knowledge needed for economic calculation. Readers can discover both the force of that distinction and a limiting case in which market participants must bargain over relative factor prices.

Keynesians, on Rothbard's account, have the whole causal story backward. They treat idle labor and unused capacity as brute aggregate facts, then insist inflation cannot revive while slack persists, yet stagflation and the renewed inflation of later years refuted them. The missing piece, he argues, is the price system. Unemployment is a surplus like any other: resources go unused because their owners hold out for wages or prices above what buyers will pay, which makes idleness, in an analytical sense, voluntary. Drawing on William H. Hutt, he traces persistent mass unemployment to interventions, compulsory unionism, minimum-wage laws, welfare, and unemployment insurance, that keep wages above market-clearing levels. Monetary expansion can mobilize idle resources only by raising the returns paid for them, which is to say only through inflation. Idle capacity and rising prices, then, are no paradox at all.

The Keynesians themselves create the problem by leaving out the price system.

Development is ordinary economics practised under difficult conditions, not a separate discipline licensing illiberal policy. From that premise Haberler, writing as a trade theorist, prosecutes the anti-market doctrines that captured the postwar field: import substitution, exchange control, the big push, and chronic trade pessimism. He traces their appeal to a fatal misreading of the Great Depression, which he insists was a monetary catastrophe rather than proof of capitalist stagnation, and to an aggregation that lumped unlike countries together. The Prebisch-Singer terms-of-trade thesis he rejects with Lipsey's evidence; the demonstration effect he calls patronizing; disguised unemployment he answers with Viner and Schultz. His comparisons, West Germany against East, South Korea against North, Taiwan against China, turn the chapter into a broad indictment of planning, defending monoeconomics throughout.

The best policy would be to let free markets, in other words, capitalism, do what they do best – develop new industries.