The archive.

A grassroots revolt against Big Government swept Republicans into Congress in November 1994—and was betrayed, Rothbard charges, almost before the ballots cooled, when party leaders recalled defeated Democrats to a lame-duck session to pass Gatt and midwife the WTO. From that opening scandal he builds a diagnosis of American politics as rule by a bipartisan establishment of big business, high finance, media, and technocrats, arrayed against a public grown hostile to immigration restriction, foreign aid, welfare, gun control, and the Federal Reserve. Against Gingrich and Dole's balanced-budget theater he demands genuine rollback—abolished departments, not caps—and offers an acid test for every Republican: forget the rhetoric, and ask what they actually did. Hope, he ventures, rests with paleoconservative freshmen like Metcalf and Stockman.

The terrible news is that it took less than twenty-four hours for that revolution to be grievously betrayed.

The 1994 midterms register, in Rothbard's reading, not as a routine swing but as a popular anti-statist revolt against Clinton, the Democratic Party, and the machinery of centralized federal power. The celebration is brief. What follows is a warning: the two-party 'duopoly,' cemented by winner-take-all districts and the socialized ballot, works as a cartel that absorbs insurgent anger into elite-managed reform. Rothbard audits the Republican 'contract' against a stringent standard of genuine rollback—on taxes, gun control, the Federal Reserve, foreign aid, GATT, and the federal departments—and finds evasion where he wants abolition. Naming Gingrich and Dole as accommodationists, he argues that only sustained grassroots pressure and a refusal of bipartisan respectability could keep the revolt from being tamed by the party that rode it to power.

The election of 1994 was an unprecedented and smashing electoral expression of the popular revolution that had been building up for many months: a massive repudiation of President Clinton, the Clintonian Democratic Party, their persons and all of their works.

Every major advance in economic theory, Hayek once claimed, has been a further application of subjectivism — and this essay asks what that word came to mean along the divergent paths descending from Carl Menger. Menger's revolution, Kirzner contends, was not chiefly marginal utility but the vision of the whole production structure as bearing the imprint of human valuation, with consumer wants conferring significance on higher-order goods. Yet Menger assumed those wants translate into resource values automatically, under complete knowledge — a gap the socialist-calculation debate exposed. Three heirs emerged: Robbinsian-Walrasian formalism, which keeps subjective choice but presumes coordinated knowledge; the radical subjectivism of Shackle and Lachmann, which surrenders any systematic tendency to coordinate; and the Mises-Hayek revival, which deepens subjectivism through entrepreneurial alertness amid pervasive mutual ignorance.

Briefly put, the Mises—Hayek theory of the market process sees it as a systematic process of knowledge expansion, the equilibrating character of which is the expression of entrepreneurial discovery.

Do not make money your god, an old Christian saying warns, for it will plague you like the devil, to which Sennholz adds that placing politicians in charge of money plagues worse still. American banking, he argues, has been turned from private intermediation into an arm of the state by cumulative regulation: the Federal Reserve Act, the 1933 gold confiscation, FDIC and FSLIC deposit guarantees, and a myriad of later statutes. His method is inversion, terms of protection recast as instruments of control. Bank 'secrecy' under the Bank Secrecy Act now means concealed reporting to the authorities, and the Community Reinvestment Act supplants creditworthiness with race, gender, and national origin. Compliance costs, he predicts, will force mergers and concentration, hollow out the character of the profession, and drain capital markets toward the conditions of poor countries.

Men of character, integrity, and independent judgment will give way to two types which thrive in all kinds of command systems: the servants and bondsmen who obey all orders and the villains who corrupt all orders.

Postwar Europe, in Sennholz's telling, defended itself against communism without any confidence in its own inheritance, gripped by a general mood of despair over an order that seemed to have failed of its own accord. This April 1996 commemorative essay reconstructs the climate in which the Foundation for Economic Education arose and advances a pointed revisionist thesis: the classical liberal order had not collapsed but had been smothered and dismantled by political authority. Sennholz gathers the scattered remnant that resisted, from Orwell and disillusioned socialists to Hazlitt's Economics In One Lesson and Mises's Human Action, and links Marxian planning to Keynesian deficit finance as forms of the same drift toward political supremacy. He closes by reading election-year credit expansion and permanent deficits as a political business cycle of manipulation and debt transfer.

It was the surrender of freedom that provoked the return of autocracy and tyranny.

Theoretical innovation does not guarantee an intellectual tradition’s survival. In this 1996 commemorative essay, republished in 2016 as Austrian Economics and FEE, Israel M. Kirzner connects the postwar fortunes of Austrian economics to the practical support of the Foundation for Economic Education. His account turns on a tension: while Mises and Hayek were developing explanations of entrepreneurial judgment and dispersed knowledge, much of the economics profession regarded their tradition as exhausted or already absorbed. Writing as an Austrian economist and participant in its revival, Kirzner combines theoretical interpretation with recollections of funding, doctoral training, and summer seminars. Readers can discover both what he believes mainstream equilibrium analysis missed and how teaching, patronage, and scholarly contact kept those alternative ideas available to a later generation.

Prosperity, employment, stable prices, a clean environment, care for the disadvantaged: on such ends most Americans agree, this compact 1996 essay argues, and the bitter quarrels begin only over means. Sennholz sorts the combatants into activists who would mandate, tax, and print money and those who would trust property and exchange, and traces the split to incompatible theories of social order. Against the Marxian conflict dogma, which he sees extended into later idioms of race, gender, and generational struggle, he sets Adam Smith's Invisible Hand and a harmony thesis grounded not in sentiment but in the higher productivity of cooperation and the division of labor. The closing turn is ethical: rights and justice cannot be reduced to votes, and a majority can violate them as surely as any private actor.

Evil is evil; it is none the better for being committed on behalf of the majority.

The share of national income flowing to America's top fifth rose sharply between 1968 and 1994—a fact Sennholz concedes before turning the standard explanation on its head. Rising inequality, he argues, is not a market failure calling for more redistribution but the predictable result of intervention itself: deficit spending crowds out private investment, consumes capital, lifts interest rates, and depresses wages while inflating returns to capital. He indicts Federal Reserve easy money for the era's financial bubble, adds corporate taxation and regulation that push firms toward downsizing and mergers, and notes how dual-earner professional households widen the gap further. From Roosevelt's New Deal through Johnson's war on poverty to Clinton's tax increases, egalitarian effort has produced its opposite, confirming his rule that political intervention in economic life is bound to make matters worse.

It is ironic that the spenders create the very pressures that cause interest rates to rise and capital income to soar.

Freedom becomes 'inscrutable,' Sennholz contends, when a single word names two opposing principles: the individual's liberty against coercion, and the collective power exercised in the name of social provision. Setting the lovers of freedom against the devotees of power, he defines liberty concretely—freedom to move, worship, vote, and trade within the equal rights of others—and warns that economic freedom is the first casualty when tyranny advances. The essay's sharpest edge falls on the American welfare-state vocabulary of 'freedom from want,' traced unbroken from Franklin Roosevelt to Clinton as a coercive entitlement funded by taxpayers. Every entitlement, he insists, is a legal claim on another person's earnings; government is no deus ex machina. Invoking Madison's warning about gradual and silent encroachments, he concludes that liberty is lost less by open coup than by popular demand.

The evils of tyranny are seen and felt only by those who resist it.

Can an appeal to intellectual openness become a way of refusing criticism? In this combative review of McCloskey’s Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics, Murray N. Rothbard argues that the language of conversation and persuasion can shield methodological claims from scrutiny. His objection is not simply to rhetoric: he welcomes challenges to economic orthodoxy but insists that they remain answerable to evidence and precise argument. The dispute becomes concrete in his defense of The Review of Austrian Economics against charges of doctrinal exclusion and his challenge to McCloskey’s reading of Schumpeter’s “Ricardian Vice.” These encounters let readers examine where a disagreement over scholarly temperament becomes a testable dispute over texts—and whether pluralism can sustain standards without recreating the exclusions it opposes.

By the mid-1990s measured consumer-price inflation had fallen to roughly 2.5 percent across the developed world, and mainstream economists were ready to declare the long battle won. Sennholz accepts the statistics and rejects the conclusion. Reduced price indexes, he argues in this August 1996 note, say nothing about the inflationary institutions that remain intact: the central bank's legal monopoly over money, legal-tender laws, welfare-state deficit finance, and the paper-dollar standard completed when the United States cut its last gold tie in 1971. Easy credit has not vanished but migrated from consumer goods into securities, leveraged speculation, and soaring stock valuations. So long as legislators and central bankers keep discretionary control of fiat money, he warns, inflationary pressure will surface again in one form or another.

Inflation is not dead but very much alive. It has moved from Main Street to Wall Street.

If imports truly destroyed jobs, Sennholz observes, the vast expansion of American imports after 1950 should have produced permanent mass unemployment, yet living standards rose instead. This July 1996 essay dismantles three explanations of joblessness: the Marxian reserve army of labor, the Keynesian shortfall of spending, and the protectionist charge that low-wage foreigners displace domestic workers. Employment, he insists, is a phenomenon of productivity and cost; jobs are not a fixed national stock that foreign sellers can drain but arise wherever labor can be employed productively at a price buyers will bear. Unemployment thus signals maladjustment rather than market failure, as training and specialization drift away from what commerce actually values. International competition disciplines sellers and steers labor and capital toward better uses, while tariffs merely shelter high-cost producers and raise prices.

Free trade is fair trade; those who deny it to others do not deserve it for themselves.