Why does everything a government touches turn to shit? Every tax, regulation, and price control produces an economic consequence its architects either ignore or actively conceal from you. Murray Rothbard's Power and Market, published in 1970, tears apart the intellectual cover governments use to justify intervention. Rothbard builds the case like this: no form of state interference improves on the voluntary exchange economy. Every intervention distorts prices, misallocates capital, and ultimately harms the very people the policy claimed to protect. Take price ceilings. New York City imposed rent control in 1943 as a wartime emergency. Eight decades later, landlords still face legal caps on rents, and the city faces a perpetual housing shortage. Capping prices below market rates destroys the incentive to supply. Investors channel capital elsewhere, housing stock deteriorates, and you pay more for less under the table through bribes, key fees, and "finder's fees" to brokers. Rothbard also categorizes interventions. Autistic intervention forces you to act or refrain without directly involving your property in exchange. Binary intervention forces an exchange between the state and a private party. Triangular intervention forces exchange between two private parties on state-dictated terms. The specificity matters because each category produces distinct distortions, and grouping them all as "regulation" lets politicians dodge accountability for the specific damage each one causes. Then there is the calculation issue. Governments do not possess the price signals needed to allocate resources correctly. Mises already proved this in 1920, and Rothbard extends the argument: intervention actively destroys the information system that makes optimization possible in the first place. Free market thinkers after Rothbard have added data, case studies, and formalized models. None have overturned the logic. Governments intervene, prices lie, and you bear the cost.