1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
This file is a brief single-author political-economic essay. Its scope is the rise of federal involvement in American medical care from New Deal-era proposals through Medicare, Medicaid, and early-1990s reform debates. Sennholz’s central thesis is that health care becomes morally and economically destructive when transformed from voluntary medical service into a political system of entitlement, redistribution, regulation, and coercion.
This file is a short argumentative essay-note on national underdevelopment, dated May 1993 and later printed in Reflection and Remembrance. Its scope is broad but compressed: Sennholz moves from the pain of personal poverty to the problem of whole societies trapped in low productivity, short life expectancy, weak institutions, and anti-productive moral codes.
This file is a single methodological essay by Murray N. Rothbard, organized around three movements: a critique of positivist economics, a reconstruction of the praxeological tradition, and a defense of methodological individualism. Its thesis is that economics and the social sciences cannot properly imitate physics, because their subject matter is purposive human action rather than externally observable, repeatable motion.
Rothbard’s essay is a methodological argument about what economics can and cannot do in public controversy. He distinguishes ethics, which concerns proper ends, from praxeology, which analyzes purposive action and the consequences of means chosen to attain ends.
This file is a single-authored methodological essay/chapter. Its scope is the epistemological and methodological defense of Austrian economics: Rothbard explains what praxeology is, how it reasons, why it differs from positivist social science, and how it relates to psychology, ethics, technology, and history.
Hans F. Sennholz’s “Public Education” is a compact libertarian essay on the moral purpose, institutional history, and political consequences of schooling in America. It argues that education should prepare persons for peaceful social cooperation, but that state schooling transforms this formative task into an instrument of political direction, financed by compulsion and sustained by habits of dependence.
Hans F. Sennholz’s “Ruinous Litigation” is a short policy essay, originally a January 1996 Notes piece, examining the spread of liability suits through American professional and commercial life. Its main thesis is that malpractice, product-liability, and insurance crises are symptoms of a deeper entitlement culture: when political claims replace private responsibility, ordinary relations become adversarial and insurable risks multiply. The opening anecdote, a dismissed malpractice suit against a church after pastoral counseling preceded suicide, sets up the argument that even acts of counsel or service are being drawn into litigation.
This short libertarian policy essay, dated February 1995, is a polemical critique of the U.S. Social Security system and its Medicare extension. Sennholz’s central thesis is that Social Security is falsely described as insurance: in substance, it is a coercive political transfer system that rewards one class of beneficiaries by imposing mounting burdens on workers and future generations.
This file is a single-author monetary-policy essay by Murray N. Rothbard, originally a chapter-length intervention in Austrian monetary theory. Its scope is both diagnostic and programmatic: it explains post-1930s inflation as the predictable result of fiat paper money, critiques rival “denationalization” and commodity-basket proposals, and argues for redefining the dollar as a redeemable fixed weight of gold.
Rothbard’s essay revisits the socialist calculation debate after the collapse of Soviet-style planning, presenting that collapse as belated confirmation of Ludwig von Mises’s 1920 argument. He treats the failure of socialism not as an administrative mishap or a shortage of idealism, but as a structural economic impossibility rooted in the abolition of private property in capital goods.
This file is a short, single-author theoretical essay, originally a comment on Mario Rizzo’s critique of efficiency in law-and-economics. Rothbard accepts Rizzo’s attack on efficiency but radicalizes it: the problem is not merely that efficiency needs specified ends, but that ends are plural, changing, conflicting, and unknowable in the form required by economic policy science. His thesis is that “efficiency” cannot serve as a neutral criterion for law, public policy, or social institutions; only explicit ethical principles, especially justice, can do that work.
This file is a single-authored conference paper: Rothbard’s polemical assessment of Austrian economics after the 1970s revival. Its range is broad—methodology, subjectivism, knowledge, entrepreneurship, equilibrium, socialist calculation, reason, monetary theory, and movement history—but its governing claim is narrow: Austrian economics must be re-centered on Misesian praxeology rather than dispersed among Hayekian knowledge theory, Lachmannian radical uncertainty, or ecumenical “Austrian” pluralism.