The archive.

"Free and fair trade" — the Bush administration's phrase — is the target here: a slogan Rothbard treats as hypocrisy, contradicted by managed trade with Japan and a fixation on bilateral deficits he calls a fallacy the 17th-century mercantilists had already discarded. His larger move is to widen the definition of free trade beyond the mere absence of tariffs. Genuine freedom, he insists, must also be unregulated and unsubsidized, which turns three establishment favorites into protectionism by other routes: regional blocs like the European Community that raise external barriers, foreign aid as disguised export subsidy, and — the gravest danger — a coordinated world central bank issuing fiat money. His alternative is unilateral: cut the barriers, no treaties required.

The major point is that genuine free trade requires no negotiations, treaties, super-power creations, or presidential jetting abroad. All it requires is for the United States to cut tariffs and quotas, as well as taxes and regulations. Period.

The early-1990s downturn was no temporary relapse, Sennholz argues, but a crisis of profit, capital, and investment concealed beneath financial inflation. He refuses the reassurance of Keynesian stimulus and Federal Reserve ease: business profitability is the mainspring of a private-enterprise order, and its savage contraction, sharpest in manufacturing, makes stagnation and unemployment predictable. Cheap money cures none of it; it drives savers out of deposits and into equities, inflating bubbles of value even as thrifts and banks fail by the thousands. Sennholz compares the moment to the 1920s, when price stability masked deep capital-market distortion, and warns that the real danger is not a 1970s-style inflationary outbreak but hidden malinvestment and depleted profitability. His conclusion is guarded rather than apocalyptic: no exact repeat of the Depression, if trade barriers and business taxes fall.

An old error is always more popular than a new truth.

Assembled as a dossier on the American right's lost genealogy, this Rothbard-centered collection asks how anti-New Deal constitutionalists, libertarians, and anti-interventionists were displaced by Cold War conservatism and neoconservative gatekeeping. The title chapter defines the 'Original' Right of 1933 to 1955 as radical rather than conservative: America First, anti-statist, bent on rollback of a regime the New Deal had already transformed. Ruling classes govern through manufactured legitimacy, Rothbard argues, invoking La Boetie, Mises, and Calhoun; so the movement cannot win through Hayekian elite persuasion or Fabian gradualism, but needs a confrontational right-wing populism with a social base outside managerial institutions. Memoir, interview, and polemic braid together: McCarthy and Buchanan as populist exemplars, Buckley and National Review as the purgers who narrowed the right, and a closing call to 'repeal the twentieth century.'

The Marxists, who have spent a great deal of time thinking about strategy for their movement, always pose the question: who is the agency of social change?

Americans condemn federal deficits in principle while resisting nearly every specific cut that would touch their own families' benefits—and that contradiction, not the venality of politicians, is where Sennholz locates the roots of the entitlement state. Broadening the category of beneficiary far beyond formal recipients—Social Security relieves children of supporting parents, Medicare relieves families, student subsidies help spouses—he argues that visible benefits obscure hidden costs to character, productivity, and republican institutions. Invoking Jefferson on public debt and Madison on majority tyranny, the essay reframes fiscal imbalance as a moral rather than budgetary problem: majority rule cannot legitimate taking from minorities, and a republic dependent on forced redistribution drifts toward despotism unless the majority voluntarily limits its own numerical power.

Although most people readily support reduction in federal spending, they balk at virtually every proposal of specific cuts.

The most successful cartel in history was no advertisement for free-market monopoly. DeBeers seems to refute the Austrian claim that cartels are inherently unstable, having restricted supply through its Central Selling Organization and held prices above competitive levels for decades, yet Rothbard insists the market was never really free. South African nationalization, state licensing, and the criminalizing of 'illegal' independent miners supplied the coercion that private property and exchange never could; the Soviet Union, monopolist to monopolist, cooperated rather than competed. Then comes Angola: civil war's end, wildcat prospectors on the Cuango River, and drought-exposed alluvial deposits that no fence or patrol can enclose. Rising inventories, forced purchases, a dividend cut, and a 25 percent sales cutback reveal the fragility cartel theory predicts once the barriers to competition begin to fall.

If you fly a patrol over the province you can get shot down by a missile. And it's a 100-mile river. You can't put a fence around it.

Establishment economists who pronounced early-1990s America 'undertaxed' are Rothbard's quarry in this brief polemic from Making Economic Sense. Robert Solow, Benjamin Friedman, Charles Schultze, and the Galbraithian lament over 'private affluence and public squalor' all rest, he argues, on one fallacy: the idea that coerced government spending is a form of saving and investment, superior to the private kind. It is nothing of the sort. Higher taxes drain command over resources from individuals disciplined by profit, loss, and consumer choice, handing it to politicians and bureaucrats whose expenditure is political consumption disciplined only by political incentives. Comparisons to heavier European burdens beg the question; the Soviet Union, where the state took everything, is his reductio. The cure for public squalor is not more revenue but privatization, tested, he proposes, as a Great Social Experiment.

All government spending, far from deserving the term "investment," is in reality consumption spending by politicians and bureaucrats.

What must a bank promise to redeem before its money can count as free-market money? In this review essay, originally published in 1992 and reprinted in 2011, Murray N. Rothbard uses Richard H. Timberlake’s Gold, Greenbacks, and the Constitution to expose a division among opponents of central banking. For Rothbard, competitive issuance is insufficient: banknotes and demand deposits must represent enforceable claims to property, anchored in a definite commodity standard. His criticism of Timberlake’s commodity-index proposal makes redemption—not merely private ownership—the decisive test. Linking monetary theory to disputes over legal tender and the interests behind banking legislation, the essay shows why Rothbard’s case for gold challenges some free-banking proposals as sharply as it challenges the Federal Reserve.

Twenty years after shattering Soviet dominance at the board, Bobby Fischer returned in 1992 to play Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia, and the American media that once lionized him turned savage. Rothbard reads the reversal as elite signaling, not independent criticism: charges of paranoia, eccentricity, and reclusiveness are inverted one by one into evidence of foresight, independence, or ordinary self-protection. The real offense, he contends, is political, Fischer's open defiance of United Nations sanctions and his heterodox views, punished under the rubric of Political Correctness. When Fischer spits on a Treasury warning and denies the UN's sovereignty, he becomes for Rothbard a dissident case study, a would-be political prisoner. The closing worry stretches from chess to every profession: must dentists, astronomers, and composers now pass an ideological test before their achievements can be honored?

Bobby met this challenge by heroically spitting on the Treasury letter, and declaring that he doesn’t recognize the sovereignty of the United Nations in fact, that the world would be a lot better without the UN.

A polite acknowledgment that swells into a memorandum on statecraft, this wartime letter to Count Otto Harrach, unpublished until 1992, turns Schumpeter's praise of Harrach's composed detachment into a warning. Neutral initiatives, he argues, are not peripheral gestures but instruments capable of shaping the terms of peace, and no belligerent is so well advised as Austria to cooperate with them. He laments how alien the United States, financially and politically decisive, remains to Austrian diplomatic and finance-ministerial circles, drawing on his own earlier stay in America. The letter darkens toward its close: intensified submarine warfare, he fears, will alienate Washington and stiffen English resolve, and the deeper the gulf between the blocs grows, the more the Monarchy falls subordinate to Berlin, forfeiting the Western sympathies that might have served it at the peace.

Die Zeichen der Zeit sind düster.

English translation: “The signs of the times are gloomy.”

Loyalty to Germany without the appearance of vassalage: that is the knot this January 1916 letter to Count Otto Harrach tries to untie. Composed at Graz and unpublished until 1992, it contends that excessive deference to Prussia has weakened Austria's standing and disorganized its state-idea, alienating the non-German nationalities. The remedy is a program of specifically Austrian war aims that would make the Monarchy visible as an autonomous power and rally public opinion across national lines; Schumpeter treats opinion not as noise but as an instrument of state consolidation. Uninvolved in the Anglo-German antagonism, Austria could even speak a word of reconciliation with real authority. He weighs Habsburg openings in Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, urges conciliation rather than punitive centralism in the Bohemian question, and closes by tracing the Monarchy's every setback ultimately to financial causes.

Es kommt die Gefahr hinzu, daß Oesterreich zum Objekt von Compensationen für manche der kriegführenden Mächte werden könnte.

English translation: “There is the added danger that Austria could become an object of compensations for some of the belligerent powers.”

By the same post, two memoranda travel to an aristocratic recipient—copies of documents Schumpeter had written across 1916 and Prince Jaroslav Thun had already circulated among some twelve gentlemen. The covering note of 14 January 1917 is modest in tone but pointed in purpose: private memoranda are offered as a "Substrat" for collective deliberation, a channel through which aristocratic correspondence might harden into coordinated conservative opinion on the Monarchy's external and internal future. Schumpeter sketches the documents' dialogic history—the first written in spring 1916, the second a rejoinder Thun requested once replies and criticisms had arrived—and asks that they be passed to Gesinnungsgenossen. Slight as it is, the letter captures how he imagined political influence: through discreet circulation, aristocratic patronage, criticism and reply, and the slow consolidation of like-minded opinion.

Gratitude, in this short letter of 17 May 1917, is doing political work. Schumpeter thanks an aristocratic correspondent for approving—and criticizing—a memorandum on the wartime situation, explains a delay caused by misdirected forwarding between Graz and Vienna, and accepts an invitation to discuss the document in person. He treats the memorandum less as a finished statement than as a text needing reception and refinement, valuing the critical remarks and suggestions as much as the praise. The most consequential lines concern the Foreign Ministry: the memorandum has been forwarded to Count Czernin, and Schumpeter plans to inquire whether the Minister might grant him an audience. Deferential in posture but purposeful in aim, the note documents the informal infrastructure of wartime governance, in which access and timing weigh as heavily as argument.