1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
This file is a single-author polemical essay/pamphlet, originally tied to Reisman’s broader defense of capitalism. Its scope is not technical environmental policy but a philosophical indictment of environmentalism as Reisman understands it: an anti-human ideology rooted in hostility to reason, industry, capitalism, and human flourishing.
This file is a short single-author economic essay, reprinted from The Freeman in 1951. Its scope is polemical and theoretical: Mises defends the monetary, or circulation-credit, theory of the business cycle against Marxian, Keynesian, and interventionist accounts that locate crises in capitalism itself. The essay’s main thesis is that booms and depressions are not natural products of an unhampered market but consequences of credit expansion that falsifies the rate of interest.
The Why of Human Action is a short single-author polemical and retrospective essay, reprinted from Plain Talk in 1949. Its scope is not a full treatise but a compressed intellectual apologia for Mises’s major works: The Theory of Money and Credit, Socialism, his critique of interventionism, and the newly published Human Action. Its thesis is that economics cannot remain academic detachment, because political action is always guided by theory, even when politicians deny it.
Murray N. Rothbard’s “The Women/Ladies/Girls/Spoiled Brats of Mills” is a short polemical commentary. Its scope is the 1990 Mills College controversy, when the women-only Oakland institution announced it would admit men for financial reasons and students, alumnae, and administrators mobilized to preserve single-sex status. Rothbard treats the episode less as education policy than as evidence, in his view, of feminist inconsistency and of a broader culture-war logic in which ordinary standards of argument are subordinated to group struggle.
This file is a short polemical economics essay by Ludwig von Mises, reprinted from Christian Economics in 1961. Its scope is narrow but programmatic: it explains unemployment by relating wage rates to consumer demand, marginal productivity, capital accumulation, union coercion, government intervention, and inflationary policy. Mises’s central thesis is that durable mass unemployment is not caused by the market economy but by attempts to force wages above market-clearing levels.
This file is a short radio-broadcast essay. Its scope is narrow and polemical: Mises answers whether American wage earners and employers have opposed interests. He structures the argument as a historical contrast between precapitalist conquest and capitalist production, then moves through profit, capital accumulation, productivity, wages, and the worker’s role as saver and investor.
Ludwig von Mises’s “Wage Interference by Government” is a short, single-author economic polemic, reprinted from Christian Economics. Its scope is precise: minimum-wage policy, union power, and the broader question of whether wages can be raised by political command. Mises frames the essay as a defense of the classical doctrine that real wage growth depends on capital accumulation, not decrees.
This file is a short polemical policy essay. Its scope is a single controversy: the use of the Jones Act against Vietnamese-American fishermen in California. Rothbard’s central thesis is that an old maritime protectionist law, originally justified by citizenship and national-security claims, has been revived to protect inefficient domestic competitors and to punish productive immigrants who had sought refuge from communism.
This file is a short single-author introductory essay by Ludwig von Mises, written for a 1953 selection from The Wealth of Nations. Its scope is not a full exposition of Adam Smith’s economics, but a defense of why Smith remains worth reading: as the classical literary and systematic expression of liberal civilization, not as a substitute for modern economic theory.
This essay from Making Economic Sense is a compact antiwar polemic written during Operation Desert Shield. Rothbard’s central question is why the Bush administration committed vast U.S. forces to Saudi Arabia when its stated objective kept shifting among defense of Saudi Arabia, liberation of Kuwait, punishment or removal of Saddam Hussein, protection of democracy, prevention of nuclear danger, and protection of oil consumers.
This file is a single short polemical essay by Murray N. Rothbard, dated February 1991. Its scope is narrow but combative: Rothbard responds to contemporary campus debates over “date rape,” especially a New York Times report and the influence of feminist anti-rape theory. The essay’s thesis is that rape should be understood only as coercive sex against a person’s will, and that campus feminist discourse has blurred this definition by treating ambiguous, intoxicated, or regretted sexual encounters as rape.
This file is a short single-author polemical essay. Its scope is narrow but pointed: Rothbard intervenes in an intra-libertarian quarrel over “tolerance,” political correctness, jokes, and civility. His thesis is that abstract appeals to tolerance often conceal a simpler social failure: bad manners. Rather than treating every clash as a philosophical dispute over ideas, he insists that many conflicts are really about conduct, intrusion, and boorishness.