1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
The textbook Hoover—last champion of laissez-faire, undone by his own passivity—is, on Rothbard's telling, pure mythology. This 1972 revisionist essay recasts him as the precursor of Roosevelt and a principal architect of the twentieth-century corporate state. From his 1919 Reconstruction proposals and Commerce Department activism through the crash, Hoover pressed "voluntary" national planning, Federal Reserve credit allocation, public dams, home-loan banking, union recognition, and countercyclical public works. After 1929 his White House conferences induced industry to hold wage rates up—a purchasing-power doctrine Rothbard blames for deepening unemployment—alongside the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Farm Board price supports, and mounting deficits. Where voluntary cartels failed, the logic pushed toward compulsion; Hoover recoiled only at Gerard Swope's openly fascistic plan, and that hesitation, ironically, later earned him his reputation as a conservative individualist.
All his life he had sought and employed the mailed fist of coercion inside the velvet glove of traditional voluntarist rhetoric.
More than any other single period, Rothbard argues, the First World War remade the American business system. Wartime mobilization figures here not as a temporary emergency but as the formative episode of American corporate statism—a public-private command economy in which industrialists staffed the very agencies regulating them. Through the Council of National Defense, Bernard Baruch's War Industries Board, Hoover's Food Administration, and railroad nationalization, business leaders fixed prices, allocated materials, standardized products, and "substituted cooperation for competition" under the banner of national service. Rothbard dubs this a twentieth-century New Mercantilism, cloaking monopoly as planning, efficiency, and the common good. The essay then traces its personnel and precedents—Baruch, Peek, Johnson, Swope—forward into interwar associationism and the New Deal, casting the war as the rehearsal for a permanent corporate monopoly state.
Never before had so many intellectuals and academicians swarmed into government to help plan, regulate, and mobilize the economic system.
Between Keynesian fiscal management and monetarist money-supply tinkering, Rothbard insists, almost no one considers a third path: removing government from money and the economy altogether. This compact 1973 introduction presents Ludwig von Mises as that neglected alternative, tracing his thought across nine chapters from the Menger–Böhm-Bawerk roots of marginal utility and time preference through the regression theorem, the integration of money into price theory, and the Austrian theory of the business cycle, where credit expansion breeds the malinvestment later liquidated in depression. It follows Mises's calculation argument against socialism, his praxeological method against positivism, the achievement of Human Action, and his marginalized years of exile at New York University. Rothbard reads stagflation and monetary disorder as vindication, offering Mises as both economic theorist and remedy for a civilization in crisis.
Human Action is IT; it is economics whole, developed from sound praxeological axioms, based squarely on analysis of acting man, the purposive individual as he acts in the real world.
Conservatives, Rothbard charges, have long ceded the moral high ground to the Left, objecting to egalitarian programs only as impractical—a fatal concession, since ideals move the status quo. His 1973 essay therefore attacks the ideal itself. Equality, he argues, is intelligible only with respect to a specific attribute; taken literally it collapses into identity, and identity would demand coercive leveling of beauty, intelligence, and strength—the dystopias of Hartley's Facial Justice and Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron." Grounding human difference in biology as well as culture, he assails egalitarian readings of sex roles, youth quotas, and intelligence, then widens the charge from anthropology to ontology: utopian socialism from Fourier to Lenin becomes a revolt against the very structure of nature. Egalitarianism, he concludes, is not a humane ideal impeded by circumstance but something anti-human at its root.
The egalitarian world would necessarily be a world of horror fiction—a world of faceless and identical creatures, devoid of all individuality, variety, or special creativity.
A market transaction is not the transport of goods but the transfer of a title; free-market economists, Rothbard insists, therefore cannot defend voluntary exchange without also defending the justice of the ownership behind it. His 1974 essay presses this against the utilitarians Coase and Demsetz, whose deference to whatever government defines as property collapses, he argues, into legal positivism—ready to endorse arbitrary redistribution or even slavery so long as it is legal. Against them he builds a natural-rights theory from two principles: self-ownership of one's body, and the homesteading of unused nature through labor, from which exchange, wages, saving, and bequest follow. Applied to real titles it cuts both ways, condemning holdings rooted in conquest or state grant, as with coercive Latin American landlords, while validating many others—making it as anti-conservative as it is anti-socialist.
Whichever way he decides, the economist cannot escape a judgment, a theory of justice in the ownership of property.
What could children's liberation actually mean—perhaps, Rothbard suspects, little more than a right to kick adults in the shins on a guaranteed income from long-suffering parents? Beneath the joke, his 1972 essay puts a genuine puzzle to libertarian theory: the infant is neither a full self-owner nor an owned object. His move is to shift from vague "freedom" to jurisdiction over property. Parents may set household rules as conditions of residence on their own property, but may never own the child's body; every child must therefore hold an absolute right to run away, forced return amounting to kidnapping. The parent is trustee-owner and guardian, morally bound to rear and educate yet not legally compelled to do so. Rothbard extends the logic to a market in guardianship and against compulsory schooling and child-labor law, liberating child and parent alike from the State.
Therefore, the child must always be free to run away; he then becomes a self-owner whenever he chooses to exercise his right to run-away freedom.
Strip away the civic pieties and the State stands revealed, in this 1965 essay, as something other than society organized for the common good. Rothbard opposes the comfortable equation of government with "we the people," insisting that taxation, conscription, and imprisonment are impositions by one organized group upon another. Borrowing Franz Oppenheimer's distinction between the "economic means" of production and exchange and the "political means" of seizure, he casts the State as the institutionalized political means—born of conquest and tribute, not social contract. Because rulers are always a minority, they enlist intellectuals to manufacture legitimacy; because constitutions are interpreted by the very power they would bind, limits become licenses. War, feared alongside revolution, is the great engine of expansion. History itself becomes a race between social power and State power, cooperation against predation.
It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale.
Delivered as an address in Brussels in 1974, this brief tribute remembers Ludwig von Mises less through doctrine than through bearing—the teacher who, in his New York seminar, still urged students to read German and who carried, for younger admirers, a last breath of the noble atmosphere of pre-1914 Vienna. Rothbard's estimate of the achievement is exact: Mises built an integrated structure of economics, methodology, philosophy, and history at a time when such architectonic systems had grown unfashionable, and it was precisely that scale the narrowing academy could not recognize. Neglect, on this reading, indicts the age rather than the man. From intellectual scale Rothbard turns to moral character—the courage to keep producing unfashionable truth without trimming principle for status—and closes by observing that Mises's influence was accelerating among younger scholars even after his death.
Every person is in some sense unique and irreplaceable, but I think it is fair to say that Ludwig von Mises was uniquely unique.
A one-year moratorium is all Rothbard asks for in this comic New Year's reprimand to the libertarian movement: no more survivalists urging flight to the hills with stockpiles of dried beans, no more escapist schemes to found liberty on offshore platforms and islands like Minerva, Abaco, or Atlantis, no more therapeutic chatter about open relationships and getting in touch with one's feelings, and, for good measure, a year without science fiction. Behind the satire runs a serious demand: liberty is won by disciplined engagement with actual institutions, not by fantasies of purity, withdrawal, or self-expression. Rothbard writes as an irritated insider who prefers a crippled market and urban comfort to any private Eden, insisting the movement come back and fight for freedom at home.
I know it's a hopeless fantasy, but I can dream, can't I?
Should national currencies float freely against one another like any other market price? Milton Friedman and the Chicago School said yes; Rothbard's answer is that the question rests on a false analogy. A market makes sense between different goods, not between different units of the same good, and the dollar, pound, and franc were once merely names for definite weights of gold. Written after the collapse of Bretton Woods, this essay recasts the classical gold standard not as arbitrary price-fixing but as a monetary order in which exchange rates follow from fixed definitions, the way pounds and ounces do. Fluctuating fiat money, Rothbard argues, fractures the unit of account, works like a hidden tariff, invites inflation and exchange controls, and drifts back toward barter.
It is virtually a law of politics that government will use the power that it is given.
What defines the State, on Rothbard's account, is not the provision of defense, courts, or law, but two things only: revenue extracted through coerced taxation and a compulsory territorial monopoly over protection. Strip those away and anarchism becomes not the absence of order but the absence of legalized aggression against person and property. Delivered in 1974, this compact statement of polycentric legal theory imagines disputes resolved through competing private courts, arbitration bodies, and insurance-linked protection agencies, drawing on William Wooldridge's history of merchant law and on the thousands of arbitrations already conducted outside state compulsion. The Jones family thought experiment turns the standard case for monopoly government into a reductio, while a shared libertarian law code forbidding aggression holds the whole framework together.
Pay us for your 'protection' or else.
Money re-enters general economic theory through individual action, marginal utility, and market exchange unfolding in time; that is the thread Rothbard follows in reconstructing Mises's monetary theory, which he traces to the 1912 Theory of Money and Credit. The demand for money becomes the demand to hold cash balances, and its purchasing power a heterogeneous array of exchange ratios rather than the inverse of some measurable price level. At the theoretical center stands Mises's regression theorem, which dissolves the apparent circularity of money's value by tracing it back through time to a commodity once valued for direct use. Along the way Rothbard turns the analysis against index-number thinking, Walrasian equilibrium, and government credit expansion, defending commodity money as the one check on political creation of purchasing power.
Every good and service will have an almost infinite array of prices in terms of every other good and service.