The archive.

For Murray N. Rothbard, American participation in World War I did not interrupt progressive reform: it gave reformers powers they had long sought. This essay asks how moral campaigns and claims to professional expertise became warrants for directing other people’s lives. From prohibitionists invoking food conservation to economists building the statistical machinery of planning, Rothbard traces the convergence of religious purpose, corporate interests, and administrative ambition. His explicitly libertarian perspective makes the coercive implications of benevolent reform central, especially where intellectuals defended wartime conformity or hoped to preserve emergency controls in peace. The revealing tension is between expertise as independent inquiry and expertise as a claim to govern—a distinction readers can test against his accounts of John Dewey, Richard T. Ely, and the institutions that carried wartime planning ambitions forward.

Federal Reserve governor Wayne Angell's advice to a Gosbank official—define the ruble as a fixed weight of gold and make it convertible at once, before any gradual reform—gives Rothbard the occasion for a broader case against fiat money. Monetary credibility, he argues, is not liberalization's final reward but its precondition: a ruble ruined by inflation and official overvaluation cannot be trusted merely by pegging it to dollars or marks. Gold functions as a public test of restraint, tying money to something the state cannot conjure at will. The essay's sharpest turn comes when the Gosbank man asks why the West itself has not restored gold—and Rothbard reads Angell's reply as a confession that Western currencies coast on the borrowed prestige of a convertibility long abandoned.

Without gold, however, Angell warned that the Soviet reform program might well collapse under the blows of rampant inflation and a progressively disintegrating ruble.

Socialism cannot be repaired piecemeal—so runs the anti-gradualist thesis of this transition-economics essay, which holds that a market is an interconnected latticework whose parts must operate together. The Western advice to "phase in" freedom slowly merely shelters vested interests and perpetuates distortions, above all through price controls that mask monetary inflation and breed shortages. Rothbard prescribes the whole institutional order at once: total price decontrol, hard-currency convertibility, a genuine stock market, and immediate privatization of state assets. His most radical move is a property theory of transition—"homesteading," by which present users and workers receive negotiable ownership shares rather than buying back from the state assets it never legitimately held. Invoking Mises, he insists that only private ownership can generate genuine prices and profit-and-loss signals.

Better to have a bar of soap cost ten rubles and be available than to cost two rubles and never appear.

Menger's real revolution, on this reassessment occasioned by the facsimile reprint of the Grundsaetze, was not diminishing marginal utility but a teleological vision of the whole economy: production as the conversion of higher-order into lower-order goods, every price, wage, rent, and interest an expression of subjective valuation reaching back from consumer wants. Kirzner defends that language against Frank Knight, then presses an immanent critique that Menger founded subjectivism without carrying it far enough. His theory of needs stays half-objectivist, and he writes as if consumer valuations transmit themselves automatically to factor prices, the very lapse Hayek exposed in Schumpeter, since only an omniscient mind could make that deduction without entrepreneurial discovery under uncertainty. Treating error as merely pathological, Menger missed the market process his heirs would supply. The Grundsaetze founded the Austrian School; Mises and Hayek completed it.

This perspective transmutes all the phenomena of the economy from being simply physical transformations, relationships or ratios into direct or indirect expressions of human valuations, preferences, expectations and dreams.

Condemn capitalism, and the indictment almost always circles back to a single target: entrepreneurial profit, a surplus attributable to no productive input and so, critics insist, undeserved. Kirzner answers not with a new moral axiom but with a corrected economic picture. Accusers and classic defenders alike—John Bates Clark's marginal-productivity theory, Robert Nozick's entitlement account—share what he calls the 'given-pie' perspective, treating resources and opportunities as simply there to be divided. Against it he sets discovery: an unnoticed price gap, like an undiscovered island, enters social existence only when someone perceives it, so the entrepreneur who seizes a pure-profit opportunity has, in the relevant sense, created it. On this 'finders, keepers' ethic, private property and profit gain a defense that Lockean labor-mixing could never supply.

A newly discovered island rich in natural resources has been created, for purposes of social science, in the act of its discovery.

This pugnacious sports column turns a fan's grievance into a manifesto: games are better when they reward scoring, offensive imagination, and heroic individuals, and worse when rules and timid referees let defense strangle play. The Detroit Pistons' bruising basketball becomes Rothbard's chief villain, their "great defense" redescribed as legalized interference, while Michael Jordan stands as the offensive genius a "just basketball order" would crown. Modern soccer he treats as a decline into stalemate, where formations and the offside rule crowd the field until a one-goal lead is nearly insurmountable. Professional football is the hopeful exception, redeemed by the passing game and Mouse Davis's improvisatory run-and-shoot. Beneath the abrasive fandom runs a familiar sensibility: spontaneous adjustment over command planning, entrepreneurial brilliance over brute obstruction.

The “great defense” is, of course, accomplished by thuggery: by physically preventing the offense of the other team from shooting.

A Misesian principle anchors this dissection of American health care. Government intervention, Rothbard argues, breeds new dislocations that are then cited as reasons for still more—and no industry illustrates the process better than medicine. On the demand side, subsidized third-party payment through Medicare and Blue Cross insulates patients from price calculation, breeding moral hazard and "assembly-line" care while providers meet little resistance to higher charges. On the supply side, the Flexner Report of 1910 and AMA-backed licensing cartelized the profession, closing half the country's medical schools and lifting doctors' incomes. Artificial demand expansion meets artificial supply restriction; prices rise, quality falls, and the wreckage is blamed on too little state provision. National health insurance, he warns, would complete the very process that produced the crisis.

One of Ludwig von Mises’s keenest insights was on the cumulative tendency of government intervention.

"Partnership" between business and government sounds like public-spirited cooperation; Rothbard reads it as the oldest name for privilege. What passes for a modern reformist compromise is, in his account, warmed-over mercantilism—the state granting monopolies, subsidies, cartels, and bailouts to favored firms at the expense of consumers and excluded competitors. He runs the pattern from English monopoly grants and tax farming through the American Civil War, where the Whig-Republican "American System" of tariffs, excise taxes, railroad subsidies, greenbacks, and income tax replaced the freer order of the 1840s. Jay Cooke and Salmon P. Chase supply the banking corruption; the National Banking Act becomes a halfway house to the Federal Reserve. His target, he insists, is never commerce but political capitalism—and the Bush establishment is its heir, not its exception.

The “partnership of government and business” is a new term for an old, old condition.

When the January 1990 cost-of-living index jumped 1.1 percent in a single month—an annualized rate above thirteen percent—no one panicked, and that calm is exactly what Rothbard sets out to explain. Commentators, he charges, simply subtracted the fastest-rising categories, food and energy, and christened the remainder the "core rate," turning measurement into reassurance. He traces the maneuver's lineage from Reagan-era housing exclusions to 1923 Germany, where prices measured against gold could show deflation even as the mark collapsed. The Establishment, he argues, keeps economic spin doctors as surely as political ones. Rejecting wage-push explanations, Rothbard locates the real culprit where officials least like to look: the money supply created by the federal government itself.

We consumers don’t have the privilege of paying only for “core” goods; nor, unfortunately, do we enjoy the luxury of paying in gold.

Hayek's claim that a society's knowledge exists only as scattered, incomplete fragments underwrites his account of markets, and he stretched it to explain how law, language, money, and measurement standards evolve without design. That extension is where Kirzner presses. He splits the dispersed-knowledge failure in two. Knowledge Problem A is disappointed optimism about what others will do, and it corrects itself through failed plans; Knowledge Problem B is the unnoticed mutually beneficial trade, revealed only by entrepreneurial alertness to pure profit. Markets solve both, because a missed opportunity is also a private profit opportunity. Institutions solve mainly Problem A: a stable rule needs only that everyone expect it, not that it be the best rule. A society may cling to feet and inches, no entrepreneur able to capture the social gain of the metric system. Hayek's analogy, Kirzner concludes, is only half right.

There appears no obvious way in which any private entrepreneur could be attracted to notice the superiority of the metric system – let alone any chance of it being within his power to effect its adoption.

The textual record on Carl Menger's politics refuses to settle: Boehm reads him rejecting Manchester laissez-faire, Streissler finds rigorous liberalism in his lectures to Crown Prince Rudolph, Mises recalls the Austrians as foes of intervention, Myrdal sees pure political detachment, and Bukharin treats the school as Marxism's fiercest antagonist. Kirzner reconciles them by separating Menger's central theoretical vision from its policy fine print. The marginal-utility revolution, on this reading, was less a technical device than a systemic picture of the economy as consumer-driven, valuations flowing upward to govern factor prices and resource use. That doctrine of consumer sovereignty made markets look like efficient servants of the public, yet it presupposed a given distribution of property, allowed that consumers might misjudge their own good, and separated ideal economic prices from error-distorted real ones, leaving ample room for intervention.

Markets are not only not seen as chaotically discoordinated, they are seen as systematic, efficient servants of the consuming public.

When Londoners rioted against Margaret Thatcher's 'community charge' in March 1990, most commentators saw only disorder or left-wing egalitarianism; Rothbard insisted they were watching an anti-tax revolt, and a movement against taxation can't be all bad. He grants the head tax real theoretical interest—on the market people do not pay in proportion to their incomes—but locates its virtue elsewhere: an equal tax must be drastically reduced before ordinary people can pay it, making it a club against runaway local spending. Thatcher's fatal error was to impose equality without austerity, so that burdens rose by roughly a third instead of falling. The verdict widens to Thatcherism entire, which he reads, like Reaganism, as free-market rhetoric masking statist content.

Charging a man for his very existence seems to imply that the government owns all of its subjects, body and soul.