The archive.

Behind The General Theory, Rothbard argues, stands a man best understood through egotism, a sense of elite destiny, and open contempt for bourgeois morality, thrift, and the long run. This polemical portrait follows Keynes from the patronage of Cambridge economics and the secret society of the Apostles into Bloomsbury's avant-garde revolt against Victorian values, then reads his economics as an extension of that temperament: anti-principle, opportunistic, and hungry for policy power. Rothbard charges him with misrepresenting classical economics and Pigou, dismissing Mises's monetary work he could barely read in German, and dressing old mercantilist and inflationist fallacies in impenetrable new jargon. He ends by calling Keynes a charismatic, power-driven statist rather than the scientific revolutionary his admirers proclaim.

We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists.

Knowledge and wisdom are not the same: a person may command many facts and still misuse them, for wisdom is the moral use of knowledge, not its mere possession. This short essay in moral political economy carries that distinction into economics, where theory can judge whether means suit chosen ends - prosperity, employment, health care - but never pronounces on the ends themselves. Most political quarrels, Sennholz observes, are disputes over means, not goals; communists, socialists, and fascists too promise prosperity while choosing destructive means. Yet economic wisdom refuses the value-neutral posture and asks whether a policy rests on justice or on vice, condemning forced redistribution as an attempt to steal by political vote. Its closing maxims defend thrift, self-reliance, and refusal of debt laid on future generations: wisdom, he writes, begins at home.

We cannot progress individually or nationally by spending more than we are earning. Thrift is an essential condition of all economic progress.

Pat Buchanan's 1992 convention speech did not start a culture war, on Rothbard's reading — it merely named one the left had been winning for decades through schools, courts, media, and the therapeutic state. The essay's method is to take every liberal claim of neutrality — media objectivity, artistic autonomy, compassion for children — and recast it as an instrument of cultural power. Its sharpest distinction sets individual rights of person and property against the group and therapeutic "rights" administered by bureaucrats and social workers; its central battlefield is the family, where Rothbard casts Hillary Clinton's children's-rights advocacy as a New Class transfer of authority from parents to state-linked experts. Anti-statism and cultural conservatism fuse into one front.

Culture war? It was launched decades ago and liberals were almost into the mopping-up stage before the oppressed finally woke up.

A puzzle drives this October 1992 essay: why do left-liberals react with quasi-religious fury when conservatism threatens not to delay progressive causes but to reverse them? Rothbard's answer is that the left holds, in Whig or Marxoid fashion, a faith in history's inevitable march toward a socialist egalitarian order, so any rollback reads as heresy rather than mere defeat. He distinguishes Communist hard totalitarianism from Social Democratic soft totalitarianism — "Brave New World instead of 1984" — and interprets liberal panic over Franco, Pinochet, McCarthy, feminism, and Buchanan's culture-war rhetoric as fear of reaction. The piece closes as militant paleoconservative rhetoric, urging open reaction and the restoration of an older American order.

In other words: Brave New World instead of 1984.

Max Lerner's "Civilization Watch" column becomes, in this April 1992 polemic, a stand-in for the whole interventionist consensus — Wilsonian collective security, the Marshall Plan, post-Soviet aid, and unconditional support for Israel. Rothbard rejects Lerner's proposed fusion of Wilsonian idealist ends with Hamiltonian means, naming both men as candidates for the most evil politician in American history, and offers a counter-fusion of his own: isolationist ends joined to decentralized, Jeffersonian means. He reads the call for bipartisan foreign-policy responsibility as a device to deny the electorate any real choice, and charges that Lerner's hostility to nationalism is selective — America First and Russia First are sinister, while Israeli nationalism demands maximal U.S. backing.

All nationalisms must be stamped out, it seems, but one.

Representation, Rothbard argues, was once a technological necessity — and Ross Perot's proposal for electronic town meetings exposes that the necessity is gone. Defending Perot against pollsters, journalists, and party professionals whose authority rests on managing opinion, he treats their hostility as more revealing than the plan itself: a class recoiling when participation might become binding. Since telephone, television, and interactive media make direct voting feasible, the only objection left is that voters would choose badly — an objection, he notes, that condemns electing officials no less than deciding issues. The libertarian payoff is fiscal: he backs Perot's amendment requiring popular ratification of any tax increase, and dismisses the establishment balanced-budget amendment as manipulable theater.

The only possible argument against direct democracy, now that the technological argument is obsolete, is that the public’s choices would be wrong.

Rothbard rejects all three stories Americans told about the 1980s during the 1992 recession: the Democratic indictment of greed and tax cuts, the Bush Republican excuse-making, and the anti-Bush nostalgia for an unblemished Reagan boom. Stripping away the moralized language of "greed," he defends Michael Milken as an agent who let shareholders challenge entrenched managers, and shows how Social Security taxes and the 1986 Tax Reform Act offset the advertised rate cuts. The decisive turn is monetary: boom and bust alike were driven by Federal Reserve credit expansion that flowed into real estate and stocks while consumer prices stayed subdued — the 1920s pattern repeating. The true villains, he concludes, wear central bankers' suits.

The arch-villains of the 1980s (and the '90s) are Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan, but they will never be treated as such so long as they remain two of the most beloved figures in American public life.

The 1992 Los Angeles riots draw from Rothbard not sympathy for structural causes but a linguistic charge: to condemn violence while rushing to its "real structural causes," he argues, is precisely to condone it. Even as an anti-statist, he grants government one minimal duty — to defend persons and property under assault — and finds it failed. Liberal remedies of welfare, set-asides, and affirmative action he redescribes as payoffs to violence; Jack Kemp's enterprise zones he calls welfare in market language; repealing minimum-wage and licensing laws he judges helpful but insufficient. Rejecting racial discrimination as the master cause by pointing to Korean-American victims, he lands on impunity: rioters looted because they saw they could get away with it.

Devotion to the sanctity of person and property is not part of their value-system. That’s why, in the short term, all we can do is shoot the looters and incarcerate the rioters.

Behind the closed doors of the Austrian Cabinet Council on 8 July 1919, the finance secretary laid out how a bankrupt young republic might actually pay for its ambitions. Circulated as a strictly secret appendix, this memorandum tackles the financing of the Vermoegensabgabe, socialization, and industrial promotion not as slogans but as a single problem of credit. A brand-new state credit institute is rejected as too slow, too costly, and too weak in emission credit, in favor of converting an existing emission-capable house, the Austrian Credit-Institut fuer Verkehrs-Unternehmungen und oeffentliche Arbeiten, into a mixed-economy bank under state majority control. The ideological quarrel between public and private finance is thereby recast as a question of institutional form: private capital mobilized quietly, without alarming the public, through a vehicle the state commands.

In letzter Linie wird man daher doch gezwungen sein, wieder an das private Kapital zu appellieren, und es wird sich im Wesentlichen darum handeln, eine möglichst glückliche Form für diesen Appell zu finden.

English translation: “In the last analysis one will therefore be compelled once again to appeal to private capital, and it will essentially be a matter of finding as felicitous a form as possible for this appeal.”

Bankruptcy, narrowly defined as the repudiation of state debt, would wreck banks, enterprises, welfare institutions, and households alike, and still leave the budget unsolved. Written as a confidential financial plan appended to a cabinet protocol, this memorandum confronts postwar Deutschoesterreich's six-billion-kronen gap, its collapsing crown, and its exhausted credit. Its guiding principle is austere: not one further note is to be printed, yet any attempt to restore the prewar value of money would bleed the country dry. The real loss already inflicted by depreciation must fall on rentiers and public-debt holders while wages climb toward the new price level. The Vermoegensabgabe becomes the hinge, an instrument for cutting debt and compelling capitalists to place foreign assets at the state's disposal, and orderly socialization is postponed until a balanced budget exists.

Keine Hilfe gibt es für den Rentner.

English translation: “There is no help for the rentier.”

If human decisions are genuinely free from determination by external circumstances, how can economics claim any lawlike regularity at all? Delivered as the inaugural Ludwig Lachmann Memorial Lecture, this essay turns that threat into a foundation. Kirzner argues that subjectivist freedom is not fatal to economic law but indispensable to it. Mainstream microeconomics buys its determinacy cheaply, by draining choice of imagination, error, and surprise and assuming plans already reconciled in equilibrium. Recovering Mises and Shackle, he shows action to be purposeful, future-oriented, and uncertain—and uncertainty, rather than merely obstructing choice, calls forth entrepreneurial alertness. Price convergence and the disappearance of pure-profit opportunities depend on that alertness, since profit exists only where something has not yet been noticed. Freedom, Kirzner concludes against neoclassical and ultra-subjectivist critics alike, is what makes market order intelligible.

Markets do work. They work so obviously well that our scientific curiosity is aroused to seek understanding of the counter-intuitive phenomenon of this success.

In a Vienna unsettled by war and inflation, why did university economists remain absorbed in the purest theory? Hayek’s autobiographical lecture, delivered in 1963 and later published as a prologue to The Fortunes of Liberalism, locates intellectual life as much in evening seminars and professional workplaces as in university chairs. His recollections show how bankers, officials, lawyers, and unpaid teachers sustained discussions that joined marginal utility to questions of money, socialism, and economic crises. The personal thread is unusually candid: American forecasting methods sharpened his skills without satisfying his theoretical questions, while his own business-cycle theory exposed weaknesses in its foundations in capital theory. Republished here in the 2013 edition, this unrevised lecture offers situated testimony about how economic problems took shape through conversation, practical experience, and disagreement.