The archive.

When New York's reservoirs ran low in 1985 and City Hall began policing lawn sprinklers, car washes, and air conditioners, Rothbard saw not a natural drought but a manufactured shortage. His argument turns on pricing: tenants pay nothing per unit and landlords pay flat fees, so no one meets a signal to conserve, and the municipal monopoly, priced politically rather than economically, predictably runs dry. Government then declines to let the price clear the market, preferring coercive rationing that lets it, in his phrase, push people around while draping itself in the language of shared sacrifice. A satirical California interlude, where a drought agency becomes a flood-control office once the rains come, drives home how elastic emergencies are. The remedy is to raise the price, and ultimately to privatize supply.

Governments are invariably at war with their consumers.

Between the wars, the restored gold standard was never the specie standard of 1914 but a fragile gold-exchange construction, hobbled by an overvalued pound, an undervalued franc, reparations, and the sterilization of gold in Paris and Washington. Tracing its restoration after 1923 and its collapse across the United States, Britain, Germany, France, and Japan, Haberler—here in the English translation of his 1976 German essay—argues that the Great Depression was no ordinary cyclical downswing but the product of banking failures, timid central banks, and the adjustable peg that turned devaluation into competitive depreciation. He weighs Hayek and Robbins's Austrian theory of credit-induced malinvestment against Hansen's secular stagnation and the structural-maladjustment school, and closes by contrasting the deflationary 1930s with the inflationary crisis of the 1970s.

If a death certificate for the gold standard is required, September 21, 1931 would be a reasonable date to put on it.

A week at a lakeside hotel in northern Poland, March 1986, becomes the occasion for a compressed meditation on communism, censorship, and civil society. Rothbard finds a country he calls a giant slum yet intellectually the freest in the Soviet bloc, where a conference on economics could proceed so long as the paper titles stayed 'ideologically neutral', a theatrical constraint the actual discussion cheerfully ignored. Antony Flew's defense of property and markets scandalizes no one; the assembled scholars, ranging from libertarian to dissident Marxist, share an unmistakable contempt for the regime. The sharpest moment reverses the Cold War hierarchy, when a Polish professor cannot believe Rothbard's report that Americans often trust their government's propaganda. A closing banquet toast to a free, sovereign, and Catholic Poland, joined even by the government's watching agent, gives the essay its quiet irony.

There is no other country in the Soviet orbit at which a conference of this sort could possibly be held.

Cost, in the only sense that explains why someone chooses as he does, is neither a physical alternative displaced nor a sum of money paid out, but the chooser's own perceived sacrifice at the instant of decision. Reclaiming opportunity cost after its migration from Wieser and Buchanan into neoclassical orthodoxy, Kirzner works through Alchian's swimming-pool example to separate four meanings tangled together, then skewers Gary North's claim that a man incurs a heavy cost by marrying an educated woman, for he never possessed her professional income and so sacrifices nothing of it. Two people facing identical options may bear different costs because they perceive facts, forecast futures, and weigh consequences differently; such private appraisals cannot be ranked between persons. Even social cost, he argues, smuggles in an imagined chooser whose objectivity rests on a hidden, quasi-subjective act of valuation.

To rank the costs faced by different decision makers is as conceptually impossible a task as is that of comparing utilities interpersonally.

Not since 1933, when Roosevelt repudiated the gold standard and confiscated the public's coins, had Americans been able to hold gold money, so the American Eagle, struck in September 1986, earns Rothbard's cautious applause. He treats the coin as a test of whether symbolic remonetization can become genuine reform, and detects the Treasury's hand in its $50 legal-tender face value, set many times below the market price of an ounce so that no rational debtor would ever spend it. The essay's governing distinction separates denationalizing gold, prising it out of Fort Knox into private hands, from the harder work of denationalizing the dollar: binding the name irrevocably to a fixed weight of gold, liquidating the Federal Reserve, and ending fiat discretion. The coin is praised only as an opening.

At the designated rate, who would choose to pay their creditors in $4,200 of gold to discharge a $500 debt?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Before money is a technical problem, it is a question of freedom, property, and power - and inflation, on this account, is no accident of markets but the fruit of statist monetary ideas turned into coercive institutions. Offered here in the Spanish translation of the 1985 Money and Freedom, the essay dismantles the Federal Reserve as a politically protected monopoly, an instrument of Treasury finance whose independence is an institutional fiction. Legal tender is the coercive core: by forcing creditors to accept depreciated paper, the state expropriates without consent. Sennholz rejects the false solutions alike - Keynesian demand management, Friedman's monetary rule, the administered gold of Mundell and Laffer - because each keeps government in charge of money. His remedy is a parallel standard: abolish legal tender, permit free banking, and let gold, silver, and private notes compete for acceptance.

La moneda fuerte y la banca libre no son imposibles, simplemente son ilegales.

English translation: “Sound money and free banking are not impossible; they are merely illegal.”