4,099 works, 472 books, 3,268 articles, 356 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Sold to the public as insurance, Social Security is in Sennholz's account a coercive political transfer, class legislation that rewards early beneficiaries who drew far more than they paid while loading mounting payroll taxes onto workers and generations yet to come. Born of the New Deal as a full-employment measure that failed, it survived by becoming the most powerful welfare mechanism ever devised, moving trillions from the working population to some thirty million retirees, Medicare included. Every such transfer, he argues, splits society into beneficiaries and the victims forced to bear the cost, breeding a conflict that grows with its size. His remedies aim less at solvency than at honesty: benefit stubs disclosing contributions and payouts, means testing once recipients recover their own money, renewed family responsibility, and freedom to opt out. Reform, he insists, begins by naming the system's true nature.
Politicians love it because it buys votes and re-elections.
Both the conservatives who would criminalize flag 'desecration' and the civil libertarians who defend it as 'symbolic speech' are convicted at once in this compact test case for Rothbard's theory of rights. To make the flag sacred, he argues, is to embrace statolatry and leave the police to divine intent—sparing reverent Legionnaires who ceremonially burn worn flags while jailing hippie-sneerers for the identical act. The opposing camp fares no better: treating flag burning as protected expression collapses the distinction between speech and conduct until any action can claim shelter. Both errors dissolve, he contends, once the question shifts from expression to ownership. One may fly, wear, bury, or burn a flag one owns; burning another's is not protest but arson—and private property, not free speech, is the ground on which dissent stands.
There is no way, then, that flag laws can be declared unconstitutional as violations of the First Amendment.
Strip a business's earnings of implicit wages, market interest, and the return on owned capital, and a residue remains that fits no ordinary category — pure economic profit, income seemingly without a productive factor behind it. That residue poses an ethical puzzle as much as an economic one, and Kirzner works toward it through the theorists who circled it: J.B. Clark on dynamic friction, Hawley on risk-bearing, Knight on uninsurable uncertainty and residual claimancy, Schumpeter on innovation. Each, he argues, explains when profit appears but leaves the moral gap open, since profit still looks like neither wage nor property income. Mises supplies the resolution: profit is the reward of alert discovery, of noticing that resources are underpriced against the future value of what they can yield. Between deliberate labor and blind luck stands a third title — a finders-keepers claim on opportunities one's alertness first made real.
What does the entrepreneur, qua entrepreneur, contribute to the emergence of the product?
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.