The archive.

A reform can sound market-oriented, even anti-deficit, and still deepen the very power it claims to check. Turning Hazlitt’s lesson of unseen effects against his own side, Rothbard attacks the conservative appetite for politically catchy “quick fixes” that isolate one abuse while ignoring the wider machinery of taxation and control. School vouchers, welfare reform, and the 1986 Tax Reform Act all fail this test, but the Balanced Budget Amendment is his central target: a hoax, he argues, easily evaded through projections and off-budget devices, and worse still because it would shift the power of the purse from an elected Congress to unelected judges. A closing warning about privatized tax collection — a revival of the hated pre-modern tax farmers — shows that redesigning coercion is not the same as reducing it.

The one fiscal thing worse than a deficit is higher taxes; imposing a BBA and raising taxes in order to combat deficits is akin to curing a patient of bronchitis by shooting him in the chest.

The Clinton-era “White House Car Talks” floated higher minimum driving ages, forced license surrender by older drivers, limits on cars per household, and alternating driving days — and in these Rothbard sees not environmental administration but the rationing of everyday life. His conceptual move is to read incremental regulation as a political ratchet: concessions never satisfy, because the real target is private automotive freedom itself. The automobile matters precisely because it is ordinary, popular, and decentralized, an institution of autonomy that frees the individual from schedules, terminals, and collective routes. He traces the hostility back before pollution, to liberal contempt for 1950s tail-fins, and groups the war on the car with gun control, smoking bans, and attacks on speech as one collectivist project. If that isn’t totalitarianism, he asks, what would qualify?

Instead, the private automobile made each individual “King of the Road”; he could ride wherever and whenever he wanted, with no compulsion to clear it with his neighbors or his “community.”

On the rebellion’s bicentenary, Rothbard overturns the textbook story of a localized western Pennsylvania uprising crushed by Washington’s 13,000-man army. Recent research, he argues, shows that no one paid Hamilton’s whiskey excise across the entire American back-country — from Maryland and Virginia through Kentucky — in a non-violent, civil-disobedient refusal that no local jury would convict. He distinguishes hated internal taxation, with its intrusive revenue men, from external tariffs, and roots the resistance in the British cry of “liberty, property, and no excise!” The excise favored large distillers over small, struck at whiskey used as frontier money, and was eventually repealed under the Jeffersonians. Both rebels and officials, he adds, conspired to bury the scale of the revolt — the former to escape prosecution, the latter to hide federal weakness.

The Whiskey Rebellion, then, considered properly, was a victory for liberty and property rather than for federal taxation.

Vouchers failed in California, Rothbard insists, not because teachers’ unions outspent them but because the scheme itself was flawed. Proposition 174, the most ambitious voucher plan to date, lost overwhelmingly — and he reads that defeat as voters sensing that the certificate was another mechanism of state redistribution, not an escape from it. His decisive principle is that control always follows subsidy: funding private schools with tax money would extend government domination to the last more-or-less independent institutions, while forcing middle-class taxpayers to subsidize others’ choices. Shifting the debate from abstract “choice” to property and money honestly earned, he rejects education vouchers alongside food and housing subsidies. The alternative he offers is concrete: deregulate private schools, cut public-school budgets and taxes, and restore strictly local control.

By far the best "voucher," and the only voucher needed, is the dollar bill that you earn honestly, and don't grab from others, even if they are merely taxpayers.

To retire into idle leisure while still capable of work is, in this brief essay of moral economy, a form of waste—of human energy and of the capital that future generations will need. Sennholz opposes a “trough philosophy,” in which retirees draw down private savings or public benefits, to an “accountability philosophy” that treats continued productivity and capital preservation as duties owed to one's descendants. Every consumption of capital, he argues, diminishes society's productivity regardless of who does it. Drawing on Austrian capital theory and a Protestant-inflected discipline, he holds up Ludwig von Mises, who taught and wrote until death, as his model of productive old age, and indicts Social Security and Medicare for sustaining a leisure class at the expense of active producers.

Fortunately for the world, the great men among us retire only when death calls them.

Clinton’s pledge to end “welfare as we know it” would not shrink the welfare state, Rothbard argues, but enlarge it — swapping idle welfare for subsidized workfare that costs the taxpayer more. He redirects popular anger: the middle and working classes rage that recipients sit idle, when they ought to object to funding them at all. The proposed reform, he shows, hides a whole apparatus of wage subsidies, public make-work, child care, food stamps, housing, transportation, and a supervisory bureaucracy. His sharpest distinction is between productive service and state-sponsored motion: activity coerced from taxpayers and staged by government has no moral weight simply because it is no longer idleness. Workfare thus proves worse than welfare, normalizing dependency under the language of work — one more stage in a long march toward socialism.

It is, in other words, simply another part of the 20th century's Long March toward socialism.

A defense-secretary nominee greeted with near-unanimous acclaim collapsed within a month, and Rothbard refuses the press’s explanation that Bobby Ray Inman was merely thin-skinned or psychologically unstable. The withdrawal, he argues, was a coordinated media-political campaign. He runs through the pending controversies — the International Signal and Control and Tracor ties, and “Nannygate” — but treats them as ammunition rather than proof of guilt. The deeper root, he contends, lay in Inman’s 1981 decision to restrict Israeli access to U.S. satellite photographs after the bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor, which earned him the lasting hostility of William Safire and other pro-Israel commentators. Mapping CIA factions and “Big Media’s” power to define plausibility, he insists that “conspiracy” can name ordinary elite coordination, and laments that Inman fled rather than forcing the networks into the open.

To pundits, media people, politicians, and leading “well-informed sources” inside the Beltway, Bobby Ray Inman could walk on water.

As the federal debt crosses the $5 trillion mark, Sennholz calls it bankruptcy already underway—not the legal kind that liquidates a debtor, but a moral and monetary default achieved through inflation, taxation, and currency debasement. He dismantles the comforting slogans: “we owe it to ourselves” erases the real distinction between creditor and debtor and ignores the foreign institutions holding much of the debt, while the promise that future income will offset present borrowing founders on the fact that deficits produce political claims, not productive assets. His core Austrian move treats debt as a present reallocation of scarce capital: government borrowing consumes real savings, lowers productivity, and rewards industries tied to public spending, leaving later generations a weakened, politicized economy along with the interest bill.

Debts, follies, and crimes are generally mixed together; the federal debt is a $5 trillion mixture.

Government first distorts markets and injures vulnerable groups, then expands its own power by claiming to repair the damage—so runs Sennholz's reading of affirmative action as a case study in self-defeating intervention. Tracing the program from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the EEOC through comparable-worth doctrine and ERISA pension mandates, he argues that hiring by ethnicity rather than productivity drove business from the inner cities, that comparable worth revives a discredited just-price theory, and that pension rules meant to protect the elderly instead closed private plans. The market, he insists, rewards services valued by consumers, not academic degrees or occupational dignity. The verdict is severe: the minorities, women, and elderly the program names as beneficiaries become its primary victims.

Affirmative Action does both; it inflicts economic harm and then seeks to alleviate it.

Government debt, Sennholz insists, is not stimulus but consumed capital—a distinction that anchors this April 1995 essay written as the U.S. debt neared five trillion dollars. Private borrowing can finance production and raise output per worker; public borrowing merely absorbs savings that would otherwise become productive investment, redirecting scarce resources toward political uses that voters see as costless benefits and never as the goods forgone. Behind the marble temples of politics he reads hidden deprivation, and behind the debt a moral outrage: one generation has no right to mortgage the labor of the next. Legal restraints alone, he concludes, cannot break the spending habit; only a change in economic ideas can, beginning with visible sacrifice—salary cuts for the president and legislators—before citizens are asked to accept restraint.

The federal debt is a pyramid of IOUs for income and wealth consumed in the past.

Economic thought did not climb steadily from Smith to Ricardo to Mill; it discovered truths and then lost them. That wager governs this second volume of Rothbard's Misesian history, which demotes Adam Smith from founder to interrupter — the man who shunted a nearly complete proto-Austrian tradition of subjective value onto the dead end of labor and cost. Ricardo deepens the error with class-conflict distribution and abstract model-building, while Nassau Senior and a neglected Irish school of utility theorists mark the road not taken. Long chapters follow the bullionist controversy, Peel's Act, and the currency-versus-banking debate over fractional reserves, then reconstruct Marxism as heir to millenarian communism from Babeuf onward. Throughout, the reversal is the same: cost never creates value, and entrepreneurs spend only because they anticipate what consumers will pay.

‘Value does not spring from the labour of the producer, but from the desire of the consumer’.

Americans measure their institutions against wisdom, righteousness, justice, and liberty, and so feel the painful distance between the Founders' principles and modern interventionism - yet measured against the world's actual alternatives, Sennholz argues, they remain unusually fortunate. Moving from lament to comparison, he surveys Canada's stagnating welfare state, Mexico's one-party corruption and currency collapse, Britain's diminished pound, Germany's "double-barreled" post-reunification transfers, and Japan's ordered but statistically distorted prosperity, reading each outcome as a consequence of taxation, regulation, monetary instability, and ideology rather than accident. The American advantage is not perfection but relative room for enterprise and correction. Writing in the mid-1990s, he detects signs that the interventionist habit is weakening as anti-business politics and organized labor lose their grip, and closes on conditional rather than triumphant hope.

The sixty-year-old death grip of government is loosening.