The archive.

Unemployment, on this account, is not an inevitable calamity but a labor surplus manufactured by law - the predictable result of wage rates held above the level at which willing workers could be hired. Treating labor like any other market factor whose price clears supply and demand, Sennholz converts the moral language of jobs policy into price theory and turns it against the reformers, accusing minimum wages, the Davis-Bacon Act, benefit mandates, unemployment compensation, and union privilege of causing the very misery they claim to cure. He roots sustainable wages in productivity and the division of labor rather than political pressure, exposes the racist origins of Davis-Bacon, dismantles the natural-rate doctrine and the Phillips curve, and closes by arraigning the college textbooks - Samuelson's above all - that teach Keynesian orthodoxy as settled truth.

If they are set above the market rate they create surpluses, called unemployment.

Defending deregulation on the strength of whichever statistics happen to be convenient, Rothbard warns, invites disaster when the data turn against you. When bankruptcies, mergers, congestion, and delays revived calls to re-regulate the airlines in the late 1980s, he answered that these were the ordinary results of competition, not signs of failure. The old Civil Aeronautics Board, he reconstructs, was a state-enforced cartel that fixed fares far above market levels and rationed choice routes to favored incumbents; falling fares and crowded planes simply mark travel opened to students and families once priced out. The genuine bottlenecks, delays and airport congestion and air-traffic control, remain in government hands. His remedy is not nostalgia for the CAB but fuller deregulation: privatized airports and competitively priced runway space.

Empiricism without theory is a shaky reed on which to build a case for freedom.

Does capital earn interest because it is productive, or because people value present goods more highly than future goods? In this dictionary article, republished in the 2008 second edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Rothbard defends the second explanation while tracing its disputed intellectual ancestry. His account gives Turgot a larger role than Böhm-Bawerk allowed and finds in Fetter a crucial distinction: productivity explains the rental price of a capital good, whereas time preference explains the discount applied to its future returns. The historical argument sharpens a conceptual challenge—how to explain consumer-loan interest and returns on production within one theory. Readers can discover why, for Rothbard, explaining what a machine produces is not yet explaining why advancing money to buy it earns interest.

Media applause for Bruce Babbitt's courage in demanding higher taxes to shrink the deficit provokes Rothbard to redefine the word. Courage, he insists, once meant battling the powers-that-be, not urging the state to intensify its parasitic plunder of productive citizens, which is precisely what Babbitt, like Walter Mondale in 1984, does. The essay's central move is a class distinction: politicians and bureaucrats are not genuine taxpayers but net tax-receivers, so a public employee who remits part of a tax-funded salary merely reduces his net transfer. Shared sacrifice, on this account, is an accounting fiction that puts officials and citizens on a false common footing. Rejecting both tax hikes and supply-side complacency about deficits, Rothbard prescribes the neglected alternative: drastic, across-the-board cuts in government spending.

The proper answer is: anywhere and everywhere; only wholesale flailing away with a meat axe could possibly do justice to the task.

Judged by their actual policies rather than their campaign imagery, George Bush and Michael Dukakis emerge in Rothbard's account as interchangeable establishment centrists, proof, he says, of George Wallace's jibe that there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the parties. Both are committed to Keynesian spending, deficits, higher taxes by semantic disguise, monetary inflation, and regulation. He marshals the governing record against partisan myth: Reagan's supposedly anti-government years left federal spending higher as a share of private product, complete with protectionism, farm subsidies, and an assault on insider trading. The essay's gravest warning targets James Baker's drive toward coordinated central-bank inflation, a European currency unit, and finally a world central bank issuing world paper money. The one real difference Rothbard allows is that a Dukakis victory might simply lack the connections to advance it.

There would be no remaining checks on any country’s inflation except the wisdom and the will of the World Central Bank.

The most fashionable new mathematics of the 1980s, Rothbard argues, quietly demolishes orthodox mathematical economics from within. Chaos theory cannot be waved off as anti-mathematical, since it comes from the cutting edge, yet its lessons cut against the neoclassical apparatus. Through Lorenz's Butterfly Effect and Mandelbrot's fractals, it shows that tiny causes yield vast effects and that smooth, continuous curves misrepresent a jagged world. Rothbard turns this against calculus-based equilibrium, rational expectations, and the random-walk theory of stock markets, which he finds absurd for making the market omniscient while denying that historical events are causally connected. Careful to reject claims that nature is random or undetermined, he endorses chaos theory only tactically: newer, more advanced mathematics now does to formal economics what Austrian critics long attempted from outside.

Calling it the Butterfly Effect, he pointed out that if a butterfly flapped its wings in Brazil, it could well produce a tornado in Texas.

Pure free trade is politically rare and even theory admits exceptions to it, so the question Haberler pursues is not whether governments intervene but how. The form decides everything. A tariff is visible, general, price-based, and pours revenue into the treasury; a quota fixes volume by fiat and mints scarcity rents for whoever holds the license; worse still, a voluntary export restraint, like the one pressed on Japanese carmakers, ships that rent abroad. Around the surviving GATT core of most-favoured-nation treatment he charts a proliferating tangle of preferences, origin rules, and discretionary licensing, with agricultural protection, above all the self-contradicting sugar program, as his sharpest case. Where quotas cannot be abolished he would auction the licenses. His liberalism is institutional: rules and transparency against the administrative sprawl of managed trade.

But the élan of trade liberalization of the first 15 or 20 years of the postwar period has evaporated.

Freedom, in this 1958 Princeton lecture to the Mont Pelerin Society, is neither a gift of nature nor the aristocrat's inherited privilege but a social achievement resting on private property. Mises separates modern liberty from the oligarchic freedoms of Greece and Rome, which shielded a minority while the propertyless surplus was left to coercion, and locates the decisive break in capitalism—defined not as machinery but as mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses. Entrepreneurs, on this account, are revocable mandates of the buying public, disciplined daily by profit and loss. From that premise he argues that freedom is indivisible: whoever cannot choose among brands of soap will not long choose among parties either. Against Lenin's post-office socialism and legal theorists who call property a private government, he defends the market as the infrastructure of dissent.

Government is essentially the negation of liberty.

Part intellectual biography, part act of homage, this essay follows Ludwig von Mises from his education in Vienna to his lonely American years, presenting him as the central system-builder of modern Austrian economics and a model of principled liberal resistance. Rothbard traces the achievements in turn: the integration of money into marginal-utility theory through the regression theorem in The Theory of Money and Credit; the business-cycle account of credit-induced malinvestment and corrective liquidation; and the socialist-calculation argument that without private ownership and market prices for capital goods, rational planning is impossible. He sets Mises against the German Historical School, positivism, and interventionism, and dwells on the human cost: the denied Vienna professorship, the private seminar that formed Hayek and Machlup, exile from the Nazis, and poverty in New York. Mises could delay catastrophe, Rothbard concludes, not reverse the statist age.

I fought because I could do no other.

When the market broke on October 19, 1987, the commentary that followed was, in Rothbard's account, mostly nonsense, and he answers it point by point. Black Monday was no isolated technical glitch but the seal on a contraction already running since early September, the visible culmination of a boom that Federal Reserve credit expansion had inflated. Across nine rebuttals he dismantles the fashionable culprits: overvaluation (a definition dressed up as a cause), computer trading, the trade deficit, the budget deficit, and tight money. Against Greenspan's post-crash liquidity injections, more credit poured on a credit-made wound, he insists that recession is the corrective liquidation of malinvestment, best left to run its course. His closing warning is of an inflationary recession worse than the crash itself.

Only in Cloud Cuckoo-land, to repeat, is the cure for inflation, more inflation.

Strip the minimum wage of its protective vocabulary, Rothbard argues, and what remains is not a wage floor but a ban on jobs. A law forbidding hire below a statutory rate creates no employment and lifts no worker's productivity; it merely outlaws the contracts that marginal workers, teenagers, black workers, those with the weakest bargaining position, would otherwise make. Taking the 1988 push to raise the federal minimum as his occasion, he reads the two parties as tactically distinct but identical in substance, and presses a reductio: if a wage floor helps without cost, why not set it at a thousand dollars an hour. Behind the humanitarian language he finds cartel privilege, senior union labor shielding itself from low-wage competition, and a welfare paternalism that denies the poor the choice to produce.

In truth, there is only one way to regard a minimum wage law: it is compulsory unemployment, period.

Wilderness is best protected, this 1988 essay from The Freeman contends, not by the state but by owners and donors whose incentives make conservation outlast the electoral cycle. Public land, Reed argues, can become no one's land, while private title fixes a decision in place. Eight cases carry the claim: The Nature Conservancy quietly buying habitat rather than lobbying Congress, the Audubon society permitting monitored oil and gas drilling on its Rainey Sanctuary without measurable harm, a for-profit sea-lion cave that preserves a rookery once thinned by a state bounty, a Utah cattle ranch made compatible with elk and cutthroat trout, and Conservation International's Bolivian debt-for-nature swap. The examples are selective and polemically arranged, but the conceptual move is plain: conservation reframed as a question of institutions that make care accountable.

The truth is that many of the very best examples of environmental preservation are the products of private groups and private property.