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McKinley’s assassination made a Morgan man president. Rothbard details the syndicate headed by J. P. Morgan and Company that bought the old French canal company’s shares before Roosevelt’s engineered Panamanian revolution doubled their price, and reads the antitrust assault on Standard Oil as a move in the Morgan–Rockefeller war.

Blocked in China by Russia and a Belgian syndicate, an American banking consortium pressed Washington toward a harder Asian line. Rothbard follows the American China Development Company through the Boxer Rebellion to Theodore Roosevelt egging Japan on to attack Russia—and to the Morgan bargain backing McKinley in exchange for the gold standard.

After 1873 the House of Morgan became the leading investment firm in the country and, through Cleveland’s Democratic administrations, a decisive voice in foreign policy. Rothbard follows the Morgan and Rothschild men through the State, War, and Navy departments and into the gunboat diplomacy stretching from Nicaragua and Santo Domingo to the road to war with Spain.

Rothbard’s opening thesis: commercial bankers, engaged in fractional reserve credit, always teeter toward bankruptcy and reach for bailout, while investment bankers underwrite government bonds and profit from deficits. He traces the first great American investment bank—Jay Cooke’s—to a monopoly on the federal debt secured by lobbying and a $100,000 payment to Salmon P. Chase.

Justin Raimondo places the essay in Rothbard’s career, showing how methodological individualism and the Austrian analysis of banking combine into a history of the American elite. He draws out the Nock, Flynn, and Chodorov insight at its center: the biggest capitalists have been the deadliest enemies of capitalism.

Writing after the 2008 collapse and the bailouts, Anthony Gregory argues that left and right each see half of the corporate-state picture and refuse the rest—one blaming Wall Street while excusing its president, the other detecting elitism but declining to question the warfare state. He makes the case for Rothbard’s power-elite history as the tool partisan analysis cannot supply.

The neoliberal establishment has done much to define our highly-interventionist, inflationary, and crony system as true free-market capitalism. They shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that people are turning against it.

Read the article here: https://mises.org/mises-wire/how-neoliberals-fueled-rise-socialism

2026 is the Year of Rothbard—Murray's 100th birthday—and we're celebrating by giving away free copies of Economic Depressions: Their Cause and Cure through September 30. Grab yours today at https://mises.org/gabfreebook

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The term that best describes the CEO of the "private" company Flock is "parasite" or "plutocrat" or "welfare queen" because his "business model" is simply finding ways to exploit the taxpayers.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/no-flock-not-really-private-company

Can fighting a war ever be just? Murray Rothbard dealt with that question and, of course, had some definitive answers.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/ethical-foundations-just-war-doctrine

Federal Reserve policy has been to expand credit out of nothing without regard for the real damage it does to the economy.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/credit-out-thin-air-brings-wealth-destruction