The archive.

Free-market think tanks and pundits did not merely approve of NAFTA in 1993; they defended it, Rothbard observed, with a frantic passion they never mustered against the income tax or the Federal Reserve, and that disproportion is the puzzle this November polemic sets out to solve. His answer separates genuine free trade from a treaty administered by state-created bodies: NAFTA, he argues, is managed trade whose supranational commissions, unaccountable to any taxpayer, can 'upwardly harmonize' environmental and labor regulation against the wishes of citizens. Turning to public choice, he traces the fervor to concrete beneficiaries, Mexican state energy, Koch-linked interests, and lobbying money, and to the pattern by which private firms enlist the state to socialize their costs. Professed market principles, he insists, must be judged against the subsidies they conceal.

There is a vital lesson here: much of Big Government, much of the welfare-interventionist State, is pushed by private businesses in order to force the taxpayers to subsidize their own costs.

A genuine grassroots right-wing revolt against Washington, Rothbard announces in this October 1994 essay, has for the first time in years broken loose from the Beltway, and libertarian strategy must break with it. He sets the insurgency against the 'Official Conservative and Libertarian movement' of think tanks, direct-mail firms, and access-seeking reformers whose real product is donor reassurance, and he redefines 'access' itself as corruption: to court credibility inside Washington is already to concede its centrality. Cataloguing county militias, sheriff resistance to the Brady bill, Tenth Amendment campaigns, secessionist and land-rights activism, and hostility to the Federal Reserve, he reads them not as a finished doctrine but as an anti-centralist instinct that intellectuals should clarify rather than command. Hatred of the Clintons, he argues, fused personal disgust with anti-statism into a mass politics more radical than Perot's.

These heartland rebels are close to the spirit, not of blow-dried Beltway think-tankers, but of the patriots of the American Revolution.

When the dollar slid against the mark and yen in the mid-1990s, the political reflex was to blame the Bundesbank, Japan, and speculators. Sennholz redirects the causality homeward: a weak dollar, he argues, is the endogenous product of Treasury deficits and Federal Reserve credit creation, its central mechanism the monetization of federal debt. Bond purchases supply banks with reserves, deficits crowd out productive investment, and present political consumption is charged to future generations as capital erodes. Rejecting the Keynesian case for monetary ease and distrusting official inflation figures produced by the very authorities inflating, this compact monetary polemic reframes a currency-market event as a crisis of the American fiscal-monetary nexus—one that electoral pressure for low rates makes unlikely to correct.

The dollar weakness is no foreign phenomenon; it is an American calamity with its roots in Washington.

Lovers of liberty, Sennholz observes, are strangely prone to despair, reading every new regulation and tax as evidence that freedom is losing irrevocably. This short essay answers that mood on two fronts. Historically, it refuses to romanticize a past that brought world wars, mass murder, and totalitarian brutality far exceeding present policy disputes. Politically, it distinguishes trend from destiny: the New Deal, Great Society, and Reagan-Bush expansions of the welfare-regulatory state are real, yet history, he insists, never moves in a straight line. Reading the late twentieth century as a worldwide retreat from socialism, he grounds his optimism in a Misesian faith that ideas shape policy and that a habitual pessimist can never lead the way toward reform.

Fortunately, history never moves in a straight line.

Beneath the visible institutions of the West runs a thousand-year undercurrent of revolt, and it is this buried drama that the study reconstructs — here in the German translation of Voegelin's unpublished English manuscript "The People of God," expanded after 1947. The governing distinction is between institution and movement: the Church civilizes by objectifying grace sacramentally and compromising with human weakness, while the sect renews the demand for immediate relation to God and evangelical poverty. Tracing Paulicians, Cathars, Hussites, Anabaptists, and Puritans, Voegelin shows how mystical symbols of perfection — apokatastasis, the Third Realm descending from Joachim of Fiore — harden into activist political programs. The result is an eschatological violence, a passage between aeons that runs from A Glimpse of Sion's Glory to Marx, Lenin, and Hitler.

Der Ruf nach Reform wandelt sich nun zu einer Attacke gegen den Geist.

English translation: “The call for reform now turns into an attack against the spirit.”

Subsidize any condition and its incidence rises: that law of demand, Rothbard insists in this chapter from Making Economic Sense, governs behavior far outside the marketplace, from coffee consumption and subway ridership to childbirth and welfare dependency. The argument turns on marginal analysis, since blanket appeals to 'need' obscure the fact that consumers at the margin respond sharply to relative costs and benefits. His evidentiary center is a Change-NY estimate that the combined Medicaid, housing, food, and cash benefits of a New York single mother with two children equal a $45,000 pre-tax salary, more than entry-level municipal work returns after tax. From this he casts welfare not as a safety net but as a rival income system competing against low-skill employment, one that over time erodes the work ethic and the old stigma against the dole.

And yet, if welfare payments are far higher than any sum that a single teenager can make on the market, who can deny the powerful extra tug from the prospects of tax-subsidized moolah without any need to work?

When Prime Minister Chernomyrdin announced that “the period of market romanticism is over,” Sennholz read it as a confession that reform had been politically defeated. This 1994 commentary examines Russia's stalled post-Soviet transition, where officials favoring “stability” propped up state conglomerates through subsidies, central-bank credit, and inflationary finance. Small shops and service firms flourish under new private titles, he grants, but legal ownership has not yet become economic control, and the large enterprises still look to the state to preserve unproductive employment. Currency confiscations, price controls, and indexation he dismisses as futile inflationist maneuvers. The verdict is uncompromising: no durable middle ground exists between capitalism and socialism, and partial reform will end in monetary collapse before genuine recovery becomes possible.

The failure once again will demonstrate that there is no durable middle-of-the-road between capitalism and socialism and that any attempt at building one invariably will lead to hyperinflation and chaos.

Disney's plan for a 3,000-acre theme park beside the Manassas battlefield looked to many like free-market development colliding with historical preservation. Rothbard denies the premise. The project is no expression of capitalism at all, he argues, because Disney sought $163 million in Virginia taxpayer money for roads and infrastructure, forced subsidy dressed as enterprise. Market analysis, he insists, must ask whose ends are served and whether exchange is voluntary or coerced. From means he turns to content, attacking the park's planned pedagogy under Michael Eisner and the choice of a prominent Columbia revisionist as its historical consultant, a signal that the Civil War and Reconstruction would be narrated through a Marxist frame. What awaits, he warns, is corporate welfare and contested cultural authority borrowing the prestige of the market.

He is none other than the notorious Eric Foner, distinguished Marxist-Leninist historian at Columbia University, and the country's most famous Marxist historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Dictators and avowed socialists are the obvious threats to liberty, but Sennholz's polemical diagnosis reaches further: the more durable enemies are the ordinary beneficiaries of coercive systems—government employees, public educators, tax consumers, and the recipients of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, Pell Grants, Social Security, and Medicare—whose incomes depend on the state's expansion. Translating political economy into a moral psychology of dependence, he argues that bureaucracy breeds a class with no interest in deregulation or fiscal restraint, and that when voting follows income interest, democracy becomes an engine of endless redistribution. Yet the essay refuses fatalism. Because these constituencies quarrel among themselves and defend only their own subsidies, no unified anti-liberty coalition can form, and a residual attachment to freedom survives in every human heart.

Power pollutes whatever it touches.

Eleven languages were spoken in the battle Hayek served in as the Habsburg empire collapsed, the scene, he later said, that first turned his mind toward the problems of political organization. Assembled from autobiographical notes and interviews and published here in its 1994 form, this dialogue follows him from imperial Vienna through Mises's private seminar and the marginal-utility tradition of Menger, to the London School of Economics and his long duel with Keynes, and on to Chicago, Freiburg, and the Nobel. He recalls The Road to Serfdom, his essay 'Economics and Knowledge' on the market as a coordinator of dispersed knowledge, and the psychology of The Sensory Order. Throughout, he casts economics not as a mechanics of equilibrium but as a theory of adaptation to the unknowable, and socialism's central error as the conceit of designing society.

There are two alternative methods of ordering social affairs—competition and government direction. I am opposed to government direction, but I want to make competition work.

Those who once denounced anti-Communist witch hunts, Rothbard charges in this August 1994 polemic, now conduct a 'Christian hunt' of their own, recasting ordinary Republican mobilization as sinister 'stealth' takeovers. He refuses the media's tidy split between acceptable economic conservatism and menacing social conservatism, arguing that Christian activists have come to see the state, public schooling, taxation, and liberal culture as one connected enemy. His church-state case is symmetry: if Martin Luther King and Catholic bishops could enter politics from moral premises, so may conservative Christians. Strategically he defines the Republican 'big tent' procedurally, battle for nominations and platforms, then back the winner against Democrats, and reads Oliver North in Virginia, Tom Pauken in Texas, and Allen Quist in Minnesota as populist victories over a country-club establishment, with home schooling as radical resistance to coercive public education.

It is pretty clear that the only separation of religion from the public schools that left-liberals are interested in is from Christianity, not from religion in general.

The 1994 Rwandan slaughter becomes, in this short June polemic, less an event to reconstruct than a lesson to extract against the 'New World Order' and its dream of imposing democracy and multiethnicity by force. Rothbard blames the catastrophe on European colonial borders that fused hostile peoples into artificial states, a pattern he links to Burundi, the Balkans, and the Caucasus, and rejects UN troops, air strikes, and imposed elections as imperial fantasy. His anti-interventionism is also anti-centralist: violence, he contends, is the predictable yield of forcing distinct peoples into shared political containers and then demanding they practice liberal universalism. The essay is disfigured by what accompanies that argument, speculation about Hutu-Tutsi intelligence and character that converts political history into ethnic destiny, even as he professes to wish the groups could coexist through free exchange.

In the Rwanda massacres, liberals are again unwilling to face the root causes: clashing tribes in a fairly small territorial area.