2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Twenty years after shattering Soviet dominance at the board, Bobby Fischer returned in 1992 to play Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia, and the American media that once lionized him turned savage. Rothbard reads the reversal as elite signaling, not independent criticism: charges of paranoia, eccentricity, and reclusiveness are inverted one by one into evidence of foresight, independence, or ordinary self-protection. The real offense, he contends, is political, Fischer's open defiance of United Nations sanctions and his heterodox views, punished under the rubric of Political Correctness. When Fischer spits on a Treasury warning and denies the UN's sovereignty, he becomes for Rothbard a dissident case study, a would-be political prisoner. The closing worry stretches from chess to every profession: must dentists, astronomers, and composers now pass an ideological test before their achievements can be honored?
Bobby met this challenge by heroically spitting on the Treasury letter, and declaring that he doesn’t recognize the sovereignty of the United Nations in fact, that the world would be a lot better without the UN.
A polite acknowledgment that swells into a memorandum on statecraft, this wartime letter to Count Otto Harrach, unpublished until 1992, turns Schumpeter's praise of Harrach's composed detachment into a warning. Neutral initiatives, he argues, are not peripheral gestures but instruments capable of shaping the terms of peace, and no belligerent is so well advised as Austria to cooperate with them. He laments how alien the United States, financially and politically decisive, remains to Austrian diplomatic and finance-ministerial circles, drawing on his own earlier stay in America. The letter darkens toward its close: intensified submarine warfare, he fears, will alienate Washington and stiffen English resolve, and the deeper the gulf between the blocs grows, the more the Monarchy falls subordinate to Berlin, forfeiting the Western sympathies that might have served it at the peace.
Die Zeichen der Zeit sind düster.
English translation: “The signs of the times are gloomy.”
Loyalty to Germany without the appearance of vassalage: that is the knot this January 1916 letter to Count Otto Harrach tries to untie. Composed at Graz and unpublished until 1992, it contends that excessive deference to Prussia has weakened Austria's standing and disorganized its state-idea, alienating the non-German nationalities. The remedy is a program of specifically Austrian war aims that would make the Monarchy visible as an autonomous power and rally public opinion across national lines; Schumpeter treats opinion not as noise but as an instrument of state consolidation. Uninvolved in the Anglo-German antagonism, Austria could even speak a word of reconciliation with real authority. He weighs Habsburg openings in Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, urges conciliation rather than punitive centralism in the Bohemian question, and closes by tracing the Monarchy's every setback ultimately to financial causes.
Es kommt die Gefahr hinzu, daß Oesterreich zum Objekt von Compensationen für manche der kriegführenden Mächte werden könnte.
English translation: “There is the added danger that Austria could become an object of compensations for some of the belligerent powers.”
By the same post, two memoranda travel to an aristocratic recipient—copies of documents Schumpeter had written across 1916 and Prince Jaroslav Thun had already circulated among some twelve gentlemen. The covering note of 14 January 1917 is modest in tone but pointed in purpose: private memoranda are offered as a "Substrat" for collective deliberation, a channel through which aristocratic correspondence might harden into coordinated conservative opinion on the Monarchy's external and internal future. Schumpeter sketches the documents' dialogic history—the first written in spring 1916, the second a rejoinder Thun requested once replies and criticisms had arrived—and asks that they be passed to Gesinnungsgenossen. Slight as it is, the letter captures how he imagined political influence: through discreet circulation, aristocratic patronage, criticism and reply, and the slow consolidation of like-minded opinion.
Gratitude, in this short letter of 17 May 1917, is doing political work. Schumpeter thanks an aristocratic correspondent for approving—and criticizing—a memorandum on the wartime situation, explains a delay caused by misdirected forwarding between Graz and Vienna, and accepts an invitation to discuss the document in person. He treats the memorandum less as a finished statement than as a text needing reception and refinement, valuing the critical remarks and suggestions as much as the praise. The most consequential lines concern the Foreign Ministry: the memorandum has been forwarded to Count Czernin, and Schumpeter plans to inquire whether the Minister might grant him an audience. Deferential in posture but purposeful in aim, the note documents the informal infrastructure of wartime governance, in which access and timing weigh as heavily as argument.
Addressed to a noble correspondent in February 1918, this private letter turns political sentiment into a question of institutional design. Schumpeter praises his reader's articles for crystallizing conservative Austrian concerns, then insists that such feeling counts for nothing without a strong, well-organized party, disciplined newspapers, and talent—hence his approval of the acquisition of the Wiener Neueste Nachrichten as strategic infrastructure. The second half sketches a constitutional bargain over Bohemia: concede as much as possible in form while preserving substance. German Bohemia must not fall under Czech domination, yet it might stand nominally under the Wenceslas Crown if full autonomy and language rights are guarded by an imperial court—a symbolic concession bought to secure German as the state language.
Sie drücken mit lapidarer Kürze und unübertrefflicher Präzision aus, was jedem conservativen Oesterreicher am Herzen liegt – und hoffentlich werden sie beherzigt werden.
English translation: “You express with lapidary brevity and unsurpassable precision what lies close to the heart of every conservative Austrian—and it is to be hoped that they will be taken to heart.”
To reach political power one first needs an audience, and in this letter of 4 June 1917 to Count Otto Harrach, Schumpeter cannot secure one. Count Czernin has acknowledged his memorandum in a gracious, approving note, yet the presidial office refused an interview two weeks earlier on grounds of the minister's overload, making a renewed request awkward. Just arrived from the Waldviertel for his weekly Vienna stay, Schumpeter regrets a missed meeting and registers unease at a domestic situation growing daily more troubling for conservative ideas. Political thought, he shows, needs channels—memoranda, audiences, a projected conservative organ—and bureaucratic limits keep foreclosing them. He remains eager to join preliminary talks on founding that publication, if his official duties permit, and a postscript returns the exchange to the rhythm of trains between Graz and Vienna.
Mortal danger hangs over Austria-Hungary, this cover letter insists, unless it can defuse national conflict, repair parliamentary breakdown, and assert a will of its own against Prussian-German domination. Deferentially addressed to Graf Otto Harrach and transmitting an accompanying memorandum, it catches Schumpeter not as detached economist but as political analyst of imperial collapse. Every national group, he observes, has radicalized and adopted so unqualifiable a language that old sympathies are hard to keep—yet a constitutional modus must still be found that satisfies them in essence and removes the sharpest points of friction. News of a military convention with Germany leaves him aghast, a surrender he had never thought Austria capable of. His remedy is neither nationalist surrender nor parliamentary drift, but a strong government that knows what it wants.
Ich vermag die Nachricht nicht auf ihre Richtigkeit zu prüfen, aber ich gestehe: nie hätte ich es für möglich gehalten, daß Oesterreich vor Preußen kapitulieren könnte!
English translation: “I am unable to verify the accuracy of the report, but I confess: I would never have thought it possible that Austria could capitulate before Prussia!”
What alarms Schumpeter in this letter of 7 May 1917 is less that Social Democracy is advancing than that peace itself might come to appear its achievement, lending the socialists the credit for it. Paired with the German sensitivities aroused by Austria's newly independent diplomatic stance, that danger makes the moment, he writes, perhaps decisive for the Monarchy's fate. Enclosing a memorandum on the situation, he urges a rallying of all conservative elements before parliament convenes and revives a patron's plan for a conservative newspaper to counter the near-total absence of conservative viewpoints in public life. His boldest stroke turns scholarship into statecraft: a June journey to Sweden, ostensibly to lecture on scientific themes, in fact to draw information from private talks with leading figures—an unofficial mission possible, he concedes, only with the Foreign Ministry's support.
Zweitens bedeutet das Vordringen der Sozialdemokratie, besonders wenn der Friede als ihr Werk erscheinen sollte, eine überaus ernste innerpolitische Situation.
English translation: “Second, the advance of Social Democracy, especially should peace come to appear as its achievement, means an exceedingly grave domestic-political situation.”
Only the timing is in dispute. Schumpeter opens his letter of 9 February 1917 to Count Otto Harrach by affirming full agreement that Austria-Hungary must articulate aims distinct from the German Reich—the sole open question being the most expedient moment to strike out on its own path, a course he grants is risky in wartime yet rewarding at the peace table. From diplomacy he turns to institutional failure: the Delegations were not even convened at the war's outbreak, and nowhere is there any effort to put the right people in the right places. His constitutional remedy is Harrach's trialism, enlarged by a special status for the Bohemian Crown lands, which must be boldly proclaimed from authoritative heights. The letter then becomes a program for conservative modernization—a disciplined party, a critical Catholic newspaper—converging on one test: whether conservative ideas can govern.
Schließlich muß Ziel aller politischen Tätigkeit praktische Arbeit sein und zu diesem Zweck Erlangung von politischer Macht.
English translation: “Ultimately, the goal of all political activity must be practical work, and to this end the attainment of political power.”
A recession, in the Keynesian telling, is a collapse of confidence and spending to be cured by deficits, cheap money, and public reassurance. George H. W. Bush's response to the early-1990s slump was, Rothbard charges, Keynesian through and through, and blind to the prior inflationary credit expansion that Austrian theory identifies as the real cause. The essay tracks the administration's shifting language from 'no recession' to 'weak recovery' to 'double-dip' as morale-management, then dismantles Bush's and Senator D'Amato's pressure on credit-card rates as price-control thinking that misreads interest as a market price set by risk and demand. Against revenue-neutral tax cuts, which preserve the premise that state revenue must stay intact, Rothbard prescribes not stimulus but liquidation of the state burden: deep cuts in taxes and spending, and more private saving.
The real way to achieve freedom and prosperity is to hurl all three of these icons of the twentieth century into the dustbin of history.
Slightly undersized California peaches and nectarines, perfectly edible, must by federal law be destroyed — and in that absurdity Rothbard finds the whole logic of New Deal agriculture. Farm policy, he argues, is producer cartelization enforced by the state: minimum-size rules become a quality-control language for price maintenance, outlawing cheaper fruit because it threatens the margins of larger produce. His case is Gerawan Farming, prosecuted for selling smaller fruit through channels serving poorer consumers; the forbidden fruit is forbidden because it is affordable. A USDA official’s candid admission that the rules protect the grower’s higher-profit item exposes the truth beneath the consumer-protection rhetoric. Here, in miniature, is the welfare state as Rothbard sees it: coercive cartelization that cuts production, raises prices, and injures the poorest, all draped in humanitarian language.
One of the most horrifying features of the New Deal was its agricultural policy: in the name of “curing the depression,” the federal government organized a giant cartel of America’s farmers.