1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Profit and loss enter the analysis where certainty ends. The second volume—continuing the German translation of Man, Economy, and State—moves from the static market into dynamic change, treating entrepreneurial profit as the reward for correctly appraising underpriced factors and loss as the penalty for error. From here Rothbard mounts his assault on rival doctrines: he denies that a monopoly price can be identified on an unhampered market, dismantles the Keynesian multiplier and consumption function, rejects Fisher's quantity equation and its 'price level' as pseudo-measurements, and defends 100 percent gold reserves against fractional-reserve banking, which he calls fraud. Unions, he argues, win restrictive wages for some only by forcing others into unemployment. Value, throughout, flows from consumer demand back to factor prices, never from cost forward to price.
Das Kapital erzeugt keinen Gewinn. Das tun nur kluge unternehmerische Entscheidungen.
English translation: “Capital does not generate profit. Only shrewd entrepreneurial decisions do.”
Even the laissez-faire economist, Rothbard charges, harbors a contradiction: he defends market liberty yet keeps a tax-funded monopoly over police and courts, though the state can supply protection only by violating the very property it claims to guard. Concluding the treatise—here as the German translation of Power and Market (1970)—this volume sketches competing defense agencies and private courts, then anatomizes intervention itself. Following Oppenheimer, Rothbard divides the economic means from the political means and classifies every intrusion as autistic, binary, or triangular—price controls that breed shortages and black markets, licensing and tariffs as monopoly privilege, patents that curtail rather than defend property, and a taxation that, whatever its form, can never be made neutral.
Die einzigen Menschenrechte sind, kurz gesagt, die Eigentumsrechte.
English translation: “The only human rights, in short, are property rights.”
Medieval apocalyptic prophets, modern futurologists, and chart-wielding investment gurus share one trick, Rothbard argues: the fudge factor that lets a failed prediction be reinterpreted rather than admitted. From that sociology of forecasting he turns on the Kondratieff long cycle, the supposed 54-year rhythm he calls the flimsiest alleged cycle of all. Its evidence survives only after Kondratieff detrended his data, divided by population, and smoothed it with nine-year moving averages, erasing the very industrial growth that disproved it. Falling nineteenth-century prices, Rothbard insists, marked productivity and abundance, not depression, and the alleged long booms were merely short wartime inflations. Against this statistical mysticism he sets the Austrian account of booms and busts as products of central-bank credit expansion, comparing hidden multiple cycles to Ptolemaic epicycles.
The cause of the boom-bust cycle is not some mystical periodic Force to which man must bend his will; the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.