The archive.

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?”

The 'arrogance of reason', the conceit that prosperity and civilization were consciously designed rather than inherited, gives this lecture its title and its target. Hayek denies that morality is a rational construction: like reason itself, it emerged through an evolutionary process, and the groups that adopted private property and the family could sustain denser populations and a deeper division of labour, displacing rivals who did not. Capitalism and socialism, on this account, are not positions within a shared morality but a clash between rival moral traditions, and he singles out Jacques Monod's claim that science has dissolved inherited ethics, along with Keynes's hostility to saving, as symptoms of a scientistic overreach. Science cannot invent a replacement ethics, he concludes, because a complex order draws on more knowledge than any planner, and he links Adam Smith's invisible hand to cybernetics and biology.

Die klassische moralische Tradition hat eine freie Gesellschaft geschaffen, indem sie den Menschen überredet hat, gewisse primitive Instinkte zu unterdrücken.

English translation: “The classical moral tradition created a free society by persuading men to suppress certain primitive instincts.”

Capitalism appears here not as a machine for allocating known resources but as an open-ended process in which entrepreneurs notice what no one had seen before. Across seven essays Kirzner binds Mises's entrepreneurial market, Hayek's dispersed knowledge, and his own concept of alertness into a single account of the economy as coordinated learning through profit-seeking. He traces how the entrepreneur vanished from neoclassical theory as disequilibrium noise, recasts uncertainty and discovery as two faces of one phenomenon, and turns the argument on policy: taxing pure profit may suppress discoveries that never become visible, and regulation is perilous less because it distorts equilibrium than because it stifles the discovery process and breeds a wholly superfluous ingenuity of evasion. The Lange-Dickinson response to Mises and Hayek, he insists, mistook administered prices for the entrepreneurial function they can never replicate.

The process of creative discovery is never completed, nor is it ever arrested.

A 1984-85 high-school debate resolution proposing federal employment for every employable poor citizen gives Sennholz his foil, and his answer inverts its premise: government is not the cure for unemployment but a leading cause. He first contests the category of American poverty, arguing that an income-threshold definition confuses relative inequality with destitution and points to homeownership, savings, appliances, and cars among households counted poor. Employment, he then insists, is a price-and-cost phenomenon: taxes, mandates, union privileges, minimum wages, and Federal Reserve boom-bust cycles raise the cost of hiring until workers whose output cannot cover it are priced out. Business, not the state, is the genuine source of jobs, since government has no productive fund of its own and must finance make-work through taxation, borrowing, or inflation. To hand that state the role of employer of last resort, he warns, only expands dependency while eroding the production that funds it.

To make government their employer of last resort is to put the culprit in charge and urge him to continue his transgressions.

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.

Wage restraint may increase employment eventually while deepening unemployment first. Peter Rosner, Gerhard Tintner, Andreas Wörgötter, and Gabriele Wörgötter make this tension central to their analysis of a small open economy. Their modified Dornbusch model treats restraint as slower wage and price growth without shifting income from wages to profits. Under fixed exchange rates, reduced inflation raises real interest rates before improved competitiveness can stimulate demand; under flexible rates, the initial currency movement makes the transition less predictable. Yet the model’s eventual employment gains are the same under either regime. The article offers a precise way to distinguish a policy’s destination from the costs of reaching it—and to understand why demand support and coordinated policy matter when wage adjustment promises recovery but initially worsens recession.

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.