The archive.

When a campaign narrows itself to "the issues," the terms have already been rigged: to qualify as a respectable topic, a question must accept that Washington is responsible for jobs, housing, and health care. Writing amid the 1992 recession, Rothbard turns his fire on the machinery of respectable debate — the policy wonks, the computerized forecasts, the false precision of tax projections that never predicted the downturn they now purport to fix. He rejects the establishment equation of tax hikes with spending cuts, insisting the deficit be closed only by shrinking the state, and sets a productive private sector against a parasitic public one. His blunt proposal: cap every federal agency at its 1979 budget.

In media lingo, in short, “discussing” the issues means accepting the media’s statist premises, and solemnly haggling over minute technicalities within those premises.

Czechoslovakia, on the eve of its 1992 split, gets no elegy here — only a welcome. Rothbard reads the country as an artificial "whelp of Versailles," a multinational state manufactured by great-power diplomacy to mask Czech domination over Slovaks, Sudeten Germans, Teschen Poles, Hungarians, and Carpatho-Ruthenians. Against Western opinion that romanticized Tomas Masaryk while denouncing Slovak nationalism, he traces the rapid history from Versailles through German occupation and postwar expulsions to Communist-era Czech predominance. The essay's argument is a case for peaceful secession as the libertarian answer to the post-Communist nationalities question — and its praise falls on the Czechs for letting Slovakia depart rather than holding the federation together by force.

So, farewell Czechoslovakia, what took you so long?

When Hayek died in 1992, the obituaries saluted his classical liberalism and all but ignored the economics beneath it—his standing, Kirzner argues, as a central figure in the twentieth-century Austrian school. This short appraisal recovers that foundation, tracing Hayek from Wieser and Spann's Vienna into Mises's circle, through the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research and the London controversies with Keynes, Sraffa, and Knight, to the socialist calculation debate that turned him toward the problem of knowledge. His 1937 and 1945 essays reframed equilibrium as mutual knowledge and showed society's knowledge to be irreducibly dispersed. Competition, on this view, is a discovery procedure no planner could replicate. Hayek's defense of the rule of law and limited government, Kirzner insists, is the social-philosophical consequence of that economics, not an ideology laid over it.

While accurate information is expressed only through equilibrium prices, the beauty of the price system, in Austrian eyes, consists in the potential of disequilibrium prices to stimulate discovery and overcome existing ignorance.

When F.A. Hayek died in 1992, Rothbard marked the passing of the "Mises-Hayek era" with an obituary that both honors and litigates. He credits Hayek as the great transmitter of Mises's monetary theory of the boom-bust cycle to the English-speaking world, the elaboration of central-bank credit expansion that carried the Austrian account of capital into the London School of Economics and challenged Keynes before Keynesianism triumphed. He recalls Hayek's part in the socialist calculation debate, The Road to Serfdom, and the 1974 Nobel that revived Austrian economics. Yet the essay turns sharply on Hayek's postwar drift: his inconsistent monetary views and a philosophy of unconscious, rule-following man that Rothbard judges too weak to ground natural rights or a rational defense of laissez-faire.

Of all the Misesians who had been nurtured in Vienna and London, by the end of the 1930s only Mises and Hayek were left, as indomitable champions of the free market, and opponents of statism and deficit spending.

Movement conservatives who had defended George H. W. Bush against Pat Buchanan turned on him the moment Clinton surged — and Rothbard reads the reversal not as principle but as an unlovely scramble. He layers three explanations: Sam Francis's "venality" thesis, that conservative organizations thrive on fundraising panic under Democratic presidents; a power-elite analysis built around the "Rockefeller World Empire," the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission, an Eastern Establishment content with Bush or Clinton alike; and the neoconservatives, whose overriding concern he locates in Israel and foreign aid, and whose break with Bush over Shamir and loan guarantees pushed them toward Clinton. Elite continuity, he argues, decides more than elections.

At the very least, it's an unlovely spectacle: rats scurrying off a sinking ship.

Strip away the reverent abstraction, and a government reduces to identifiable persons - legislators, tax collectors, judges, policemen - exercising coercive command over other people. This brief note turns that deflation into a libertarian critique of political worship, attacking the habit of treating the state as a sacred, benevolent being to be petitioned and idolized. For such command, Sennholz argues, no obvious moral foundation exists: those entrusted with protecting natural rights have repeatedly hardened into rulers, oligarchs, and tyrants. He sets Jefferson's jealousy of power against the modern appetite for state benefits, entitlements, and public works, in which questions of right dissolve into struggles over distribution. Political power, he concludes, feeds on its spoils and dies only when its victims refuse to be despoiled.

No man has ever seen a government.

War had reduced supplies, damaged trade, and driven prices upward—but scarcity, Schumpeter insists in this undated wartime memorandum, cannot explain everything. The decisive additional cause of Austria's currency disorder is monetary: the swelling of circulation media, above all banknotes, which no longer function as ordinary commercial credit but as paper money financing state consumption. Against the objection that money merely rose because prices had, he distinguishes transferred purchasing power—taxes and genuinely subscribed loans—from newly created claims that press extra demand onto a shrinking flow of goods. Inflation, on this account, names the portion of depreciation caused from the money side, and neither gold cover nor exchange-market technique can abolish it. Only by confronting the excess of monetary circulation over goods can the crown's lost parity of purchasing power be restored.

Die Grundübel, deren Beseitigung das praktische Ziel unserer Valutapolitik sein muß, sind die Preisrevolution und der ungünstige Stand und die Fluktuation der Wechselkurse.

English translation: “The fundamental evils whose elimination must be the practical goal of our currency policy are the price revolution and the unfavorable level and the fluctuation of exchange rates.”

How should a defeated Germany be brought back into the community of free nations? Writing in 1944, Hayek answers that its historians will decide, for nineteenth-century German scholarship had itself bred reverence for the power-state and expansionist nationalism. He rejects both imposed Allied textbooks and the fantasy of instant conversion, predicting instead a moral desert dotted with isolated 'oases' of sound thinking that private, non-governmental contacts must quietly sustain. Above all, he argues, Germans must recover a belief in objective historical truth and the historian's duty to moral judgment, to call Hitler bad, not merely explain him. Invoking Lord Acton, whose German training, Catholic faith, and early insight into power made him an ideal symbol, Hayek proposes an Acton Society to unite scholars committed to liberty, federalism, and opposition to totalitarianism of both Right and Left.

It is because, whether he wills it or not, the historian shapes the political ideals of the future, that he himself must be guided by the highest ideals and keep free from the political disputes of the day.

Behind The General Theory, Rothbard argues, stands a man best understood through egotism, a sense of elite destiny, and open contempt for bourgeois morality, thrift, and the long run. This polemical portrait follows Keynes from the patronage of Cambridge economics and the secret society of the Apostles into Bloomsbury's avant-garde revolt against Victorian values, then reads his economics as an extension of that temperament: anti-principle, opportunistic, and hungry for policy power. Rothbard charges him with misrepresenting classical economics and Pigou, dismissing Mises's monetary work he could barely read in German, and dressing old mercantilist and inflationist fallacies in impenetrable new jargon. He ends by calling Keynes a charismatic, power-driven statist rather than the scientific revolutionary his admirers proclaim.

We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists.

Knowledge and wisdom are not the same: a person may command many facts and still misuse them, for wisdom is the moral use of knowledge, not its mere possession. This short essay in moral political economy carries that distinction into economics, where theory can judge whether means suit chosen ends - prosperity, employment, health care - but never pronounces on the ends themselves. Most political quarrels, Sennholz observes, are disputes over means, not goals; communists, socialists, and fascists too promise prosperity while choosing destructive means. Yet economic wisdom refuses the value-neutral posture and asks whether a policy rests on justice or on vice, condemning forced redistribution as an attempt to steal by political vote. Its closing maxims defend thrift, self-reliance, and refusal of debt laid on future generations: wisdom, he writes, begins at home.

We cannot progress individually or nationally by spending more than we are earning. Thrift is an essential condition of all economic progress.

Pat Buchanan's 1992 convention speech did not start a culture war, on Rothbard's reading — it merely named one the left had been winning for decades through schools, courts, media, and the therapeutic state. The essay's method is to take every liberal claim of neutrality — media objectivity, artistic autonomy, compassion for children — and recast it as an instrument of cultural power. Its sharpest distinction sets individual rights of person and property against the group and therapeutic "rights" administered by bureaucrats and social workers; its central battlefield is the family, where Rothbard casts Hillary Clinton's children's-rights advocacy as a New Class transfer of authority from parents to state-linked experts. Anti-statism and cultural conservatism fuse into one front.

Culture war? It was launched decades ago and liberals were almost into the mopping-up stage before the oppressed finally woke up.

A puzzle drives this October 1992 essay: why do left-liberals react with quasi-religious fury when conservatism threatens not to delay progressive causes but to reverse them? Rothbard's answer is that the left holds, in Whig or Marxoid fashion, a faith in history's inevitable march toward a socialist egalitarian order, so any rollback reads as heresy rather than mere defeat. He distinguishes Communist hard totalitarianism from Social Democratic soft totalitarianism — "Brave New World instead of 1984" — and interprets liberal panic over Franco, Pinochet, McCarthy, feminism, and Buchanan's culture-war rhetoric as fear of reaction. The piece closes as militant paleoconservative rhetoric, urging open reaction and the restoration of an older American order.

In other words: Brave New World instead of 1984.