The archive.

Why should sound economic arguments prevail when political privileges reward those best organized to defend them? In this review of Ludwig von Mises’ Economic Policy, Murray N. Rothbard praises his teacher’s accessible defense of capitalism but challenges the adequacy of his political analysis. Rothbard endorses Mises’ account of markets as systems of mass provision rather than fixed privilege, then asks why politicians should be expected to rise above ordinary self-interest. Sugar protection supplies the concrete test: producers have a concentrated stake in lobbying, while consumers bear costs too dispersed to command sustained attention. The review’s interest lies in this turn from intellectual allegiance to criticism. For Rothbard, economic education needs both an account of institutions that favor intervention and a moral argument against special privilege.

Fusionism, the conservative synthesis that promised to reconcile traditionalist moral order with libertarian freedom, is dismantled here as a myth that cannot stand as a philosophy in its own right. Reading Frank S. Meyer's arguments closely, Rothbard finds that on every decisive issue the mediation dissolves into libertarianism. Virtue cannot be coerced, since a compelled act is mere motion, not moral choice; community holds no rights above the persons who compose it; order arises from voluntary interaction, not state command. Meyer's real quarrel, Rothbard argues, is with utilitarian liberalism and the Chicago law-and-economics that swaps justice for efficiency — not with a rights-based libertarianism grounded in natural law. Only his appeal to tradition, which cannot judge itself without some standard beyond it, marks a true inconsistency. Fusionism emerges as a Sorelian coalition myth, not a coherent third way.

Unless he can choose his worst, he cannot choose his best.

Can a tax leave market choices undistorted when payment itself is compulsory? In this article, first published in 1981 and reprinted in 2011, Murray N. Rothbard challenges the search for neutral taxation at its foundation. His benchmark is voluntary exchange: a purchase demonstrates an expected benefit, whereas a tax payment, he argues, demonstrates no comparable consent. This distinction puts him at odds not only with defenders of government provision but also with free-market economists seeking less distorting taxes. His discussion of public goods and equal head taxes makes the stakes concrete, especially where colonial monetary taxes forced subsistence producers into wage employment. The essay offers a sharply defined encounter with the difference between improving a tax’s economic effects and justifying compulsory payment at all.

Were American banking crises failures of monetary freedom, or consequences of privileges that insulated banks from their contractual obligations? In this historical report chapter, republished as Part 1 of the 2002 collection, Murray N. Rothbard argues for the latter. His libertarian perspective directs attention to concrete arrangements: permission to suspend specie payments, banknotes secured by government debt, and reserves concentrated through correspondent banks. Against these he sets the Suffolk Bank’s private clearing system, whose redemption discipline offers a contrasting model. Rothbard also challenges familiar political divisions, identifying wealthy merchants and railroad promoters among inflation’s beneficiaries. Readers encounter an interpretation that makes the enforcement of banking promises—not simply the presence or absence of a central bank—the decisive test of monetary freedom.

Can an economist oppose interference with private exchange while treating taxation as something fundamentally different? In this short formal comment on Don Lavoie, Murray N. Rothbard accepts corrections to his classification of intervention, then presses its implications beyond conventional free-market policy. He argues that consistent opposition to coerced transfers reaches government expenditure as well as taxation. Yet noninterference alone cannot define legitimate exchange: his example of a stolen horse shows why protecting a transaction may protect theft rather than ownership. The distinctive interest of this response lies in its movement from technical distinctions to uncomfortable normative commitments. Readers can see how Rothbard connects fiscal analysis to opposition to government, and why he holds that market advocacy requires a theory of just property titles rather than economics alone.

Not administrative regulation, not Coasean bargaining, not judicial balancing of 'social' costs—only a strict law of property, Rothbard argues, should govern air pollution. Reconstructing environmental tort law from libertarian first principles, he holds that coercion is justified solely against an overt physical invasion of another's person or justly held property: smoke, odor, dust, or excessive noise crossing a boundary, proven by strict causation beyond a reasonable doubt. His most distinctive move ties pollution to homesteading—a factory or airport that first emitted over unused land may acquire a prescriptive easement, leaving later arrivals to 'come to the nuisance.' From this follow his rejections of a general right to clean air, the ad coelum doctrine, statutory clean-air rules, vicarious 'deep pocket' liability, and binding class actions, and his proposal to collapse criminal law into a tort law prosecuted only by victims, heirs, or assigns.

In sum, no one has a right to clean air, but one does have a right to not have his air invaded by pollutants generated by an aggressor.

Beginning from the premise that money emerged from barter rather than state decree, this treatise builds a full Austrian theory of money and then turns it against the banks. Rothbard separates honest loan banking, which lends real savings, from deposit banking that issues more warehouse receipts than it holds gold, fractional reserves he treats as inherently fraudulent, inflationary, and structurally bankrupt. Free banking, he argues, restrains such expansion through redemption by rival banks; central banking exists precisely to remove that limit, monopolizing note issue and pyramiding credit through open-market operations. Tracing the story from the 1694 Bank of England to the Federal Reserve, and debating Lawrence White over Scottish free banking, he closes with a demand for 100 percent gold reserves.

Inflation is a process of subtle expropriation, where the victims understand that prices have gone up but not why this has happened.

Every generation of economists, Rothbard notes, hunts for the next culminating doctrine after Keynes, and in the late 1970s supply-side economics seemed to furnish it, though without a systematic treatise, a single major theorist, or real doctrinal unity. This polemic grants the movement its one valid point, that lower marginal tax rates can spur work, saving, and investment, then attacks the fiscal myth grafted onto it: the Laffer Curve promise that tax cuts will pay for themselves and erase deficits with no confrontation over government spending. Supply-siders, he argues, are closer to Keynesians than they admit, tolerating deficits and cheap money while dressing managed currency in gold symbolism. Through Jude Wanniski's populism he exposes a doctrine that flatters voters by promising mutually inconsistent goods at once.

For the “gold standard” they want provides only the illusion of a gold standard without the substance.

Watch how a spending increase becomes a "cut." Rothbard dissects the vocabulary by which federal economists redescribe fiscal expansion as restraint: budget "cuts" that merely fall below a projected increase, tax "cuts" offset by Social Security hikes and inflation-driven bracket creep, tax increases rebranded as "revenue enhancement," and exemptions recast as "loopholes." He borrows Mises's observation that the very word "loophole" presumes the government rightfully owns all you earn. The pattern, he insists, is never neutral: by swapping observable dollars for baselines and counterfactuals, the state claims austerity while it grows. His most pointed case is the redefinition of the deficit as an inflation-adjusted "real increase" in debt, a maneuver he likens to apologetics for Germany's 1923 hyperinflation, and the shrinking of "down payment" to a hoped-for slowing of future borrowing.

Now we have "budget cuts" which are not cuts, but rather substantial increases over the previous year's expenditures.

Separate money creation from saving, real resources from accounting totals, causal theory from statistical coincidence: the same analytic move recurs through the ten refutations Rothbard assembles in this compact 1984 brief against the language of macroeconomic management. Deficits, he argues, are inflationary only when financed through the banking system; falling prices are the mark of dynamic growth, not catastrophe; wage rates track productivity, not tariff walls. He punctures the Phillips curve as an ideological fallback and the Laffer curve for making state revenue the measure of policy, asking why maximizing government receipts should be anyone's aim at all. The only sound cure for deficits, he concludes, is the one no politician will name: cut the federal budget.

People are contrary cusses whose behavior, thank goodness, cannot be forecast precisely in advance.

What if the Federal Reserve’s early record is measured against bankers’ interests rather than its public promises of stability? In this essay, Rothbard interprets central banking as a means of coordinating credit expansion that competition and demands for redemption would otherwise constrain. His distinctive approach connects monetary mechanisms with banking alliances, political negotiations, and the influence of Benjamin Strong at the New York Fed. The argument becomes especially concrete in his account of Federal Reserve support for bankers’ acceptances and for Britain’s return to gold at sterling’s prewar parity. Readers can examine how reserve provision, securities purchases, and international cooperation worked—and assess Rothbard’s contention that the resulting instability arose from protected credit expansion, not merely from failures to manage it effectively.

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.