3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
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.
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.
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.
The gasoline price spikes that followed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 were no sudden outbreak of corporate greed, Rothbard argues; what changed overnight was not the moral character of oilmen but the expectations of everyone anticipating disrupted supply. Prices, he reminds a public he finds economically illiterate, emerge from demand, supply, and speculative anticipation—not from the will of sellers or from cost plus a 'reasonable' markup. Speculation becomes an intertemporal coordinating device, rationing scarce oil before the crisis fully arrives. His closing warning is drawn from the 1970s, when controls produced shortages and gas lines: suppressing a price creates no new oil and clears no market, and the lines to come will be the officials' doing, not Big Oil's.
Imposing controls to stop a price increase is like trying to cure a fever by pushing down the mercury on a thermometer.
The real menace, Rothbard argues, is not a rising hatred of Jews but an organized apparatus for branding dissenters — what he names "Organized Anti-Anti-Semitism," a reputational weapon centered on the ADL. Writing in December 1990 as Pat Buchanan drew fire for opposing war with Iraq and criticizing Israel's American supporters, he charges that the accusation, once attached, invites not reply but exclusion, apology, or silence. He tracks a shifting "shell game" through critics from A.M. Rosenthal to William F. Buckley, likens "objective" antisemitism to Stalinist "objective" crimes, and closes by demanding stable criteria: subjective hatred of Jews, or advocacy of legal and economic disabilities against them. By either test, he insists, Buchanan does not qualify — and the charge stands revealed as a tool for suppressing foreign-policy dissent.
Since the end of World War II, the key strategy of the ADL has been to broaden its definition of anti-Semitism to include any robust criticisms of the State of Israel.
Presented by the world's press as Peru's inevitable free-market savior, Mario Vargas Llosa lost — and Rothbard reads the collapse as a lesson in what "free market" actually names. Vargas Llosa had been converted by the economist Hernando de Soto, whose "The Other Path" called for a popular market of small entrepreneurs; but de Soto broke with him, denouncing a drift toward the state capitalism of Peru's white Criollo elite. Rothbard sharpens the point by rejecting the label pinned on Fernando Collor de Mello's Brazilian "shock treatment," which froze bank accounts and contracted the money supply — inflation followed by confiscation, not reform. The unknown, storefront-funded Alberto Fujimori rose instead, he contends, on grassroots ethnic resentment of Criollo rule rather than on any economic doctrine.
If Vargas loses, it will be because he deserves it.
"The personal is the political": to Rothbard the left's slogan is not liberating but totalitarian, a license for ideological supervision of private conduct, speech, and association. His libertarian counter inverts it — politics itself should be demystified and shrunk, the state reduced to individuals wielding coercive privilege, and personal life defended from regimentation. He tests the claim on sports, where he thinks such policing most intrusive, from the ruined careers of Al Campaneris and Jimmy the Greek to the 1990 locker-room controversy over female reporters and Bengals coach Sam Wyche. Judge Constance Baker Motley's ruling that women hold a constitutional right to enter male locker rooms he treats as judicial activism and a back-door Equal Rights Amendment — professional convenience recast in the language of rights.
For the essence of the libertarian creed is the reverse slogan: “No, dammit, the political is the personal.”
Everyday life goes on during a federal shutdown — and for Rothbard that quiet continuity is exactly what the rhetoric of budget crisis exists to bury. Treating the 1990 standoff as an unintended experiment in limited government, he floats a "modest proposal": suspend all federal taxes and borrowing for one year and let citizens contribute anonymously to whichever departments they value. It is a test of revealed preference, not a budget plan; if the programs are worth their cost, taxpayers will fund them without compulsion. He then interrogates the language of "pain" in fiscal debate, asking why only government is cast as an institution that allocates suffering, and reads establishment demands for tax increases in recession as an argument for a larger public sector dressed up as deficit concern.
Has it occurred to many citizens that, for the few blessed days of federal shutdown, the world does not come to an end?
The collapse of Communist authority across Eastern Europe in 1990 returned a suppressed problem to view: the claims of peoples whose languages, names, and borders had been overridden by empires and postwar settlements. National self-determination, Rothbard argues, is hollow unless it carries a robust right of secession — extending in principle down to the village or even the individual, and grounded not in the sanctity of existing borders but in property rights and voluntary consent. He answers four "hostile" reactions in turn — the American melting-pot faith, Marxist-Leninist universalism, liberal "global democracy," and vulgar libertarian individualism — and drives at the question majority rule can never settle: over what geographical area is the majority to rule. He favors partition referenda down to the parish, backs Croatian and Slovenian secession, and condemns Versailles for turning liberated nations into fresh rulers over others.
Only by boldly asserting the right of secession can the concept of national self-determination be anything more than a sham and a hoax.