2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Does Orwell’s opposition to Soviet communism make him an ally of Cold War militarism—or its critic? In this essay, Murray N. Rothbard challenges Norman Podhoretz’s recruitment of Orwell for neoconservative politics. He reads the shifting alliances and peripheral wars of Nineteen Eighty-Four as mechanisms through which rival oligarchies preserve their power at home. Bringing Orwell’s postwar journalism into the dispute, Rothbard explores how nuclear deterrence might prevent decisive war without securing either peace or freedom. His antiwar interpretation extends Orwell’s warning to Western military institutions and political language. The revealing tension lies in Orwell’s own unsettled positions: Rothbard acknowledges impulses toward American backing and preventive war, yet gives priority to his fear of permanent, militarized domination.
Blame for the vanishing whale and the emptied fisheries is usually laid at the door of capitalist greed; Rothbard reverses the charge, arguing that depletion follows from absent or insecure property rights rather than from private ownership. An owner conserves because present extraction lowers the capital value of what remains, whereas officials who control but do not own, and firms that merely lease from government, have every incentive to strip a resource before someone else does. He traces the ruin of the nineteenth-century western grasslands to a federal homestead unit of 160 acres, sized for eastern farms and hopeless in arid ranching country. Extending the argument from land to water, he casts aquaculture as the aquatic parallel to agriculture and reads rejection of the Law of the Sea Treaty as a chance to escape global bureaucratic ownership.
Their every incentive is to loot the resource as quickly as possible.
Deep methodological differences separate the two men usually paired as modern Austrians: Mises grounds economics in a priori praxeology, Hayek in empirically discovered regularities, and their shared stands on socialist calculation and the business cycle do not by themselves make one the heir of the other. Kirzner locates their real unity in a deepening of subjectivism beyond given preferences. Against Lionel Robbins's economizer, who merely solves a pre-set maximization problem, Mises restores purposeful human action—futurity, uncertainty, the entrepreneurial appraisal of ends and means. Hayek then supplies the complementary insight: equilibrium as the mutual compatibility of plans, and the market as a procedure for communicating dispersed and tacit knowledge. Together, Kirzner argues, they carry Austrian economics past both mechanical equilibrium and radical indeterminism, furnishing it with an acting man and the knowledge problem that makes his discoveries necessary.
His imagination of these alternative futures is very much an intrinsic element of choice.
Reagan's economists announced a miracle: the money supply had climbed in double digits while consumer prices stayed flat, proof that the old laws no longer bound. Rothbard recognizes the boast, because every boom generates it, and answers by prying apart two things the word inflation conflates. Money inflation is an increase in the money supply, counterfeiting that redistributes purchasing power to whoever receives the new cash first, and it works its damage long before any price index moves. Entering through bank loans to business, it over-stimulates capital goods, construction, stocks, and real estate exactly as Misesian cycle theory predicts, so a boom can look healthy while its structure is being falsified. The calm of the 1980s CPI he credits to one-shot offsets, recession, a high dollar, collapsing oil, that were already ending, with price inflation and reckoning to follow.
For monetary inflation is counterfeiting, plain and simple.
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.
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.