The archive.

Only the timing is in dispute. Schumpeter opens his letter of 9 February 1917 to Count Otto Harrach by affirming full agreement that Austria-Hungary must articulate aims distinct from the German Reich—the sole open question being the most expedient moment to strike out on its own path, a course he grants is risky in wartime yet rewarding at the peace table. From diplomacy he turns to institutional failure: the Delegations were not even convened at the war's outbreak, and nowhere is there any effort to put the right people in the right places. His constitutional remedy is Harrach's trialism, enlarged by a special status for the Bohemian Crown lands, which must be boldly proclaimed from authoritative heights. The letter then becomes a program for conservative modernization—a disciplined party, a critical Catholic newspaper—converging on one test: whether conservative ideas can govern.

Schließlich muß Ziel aller politischen Tätigkeit praktische Arbeit sein und zu diesem Zweck Erlangung von politischer Macht.

English translation: “Ultimately, the goal of all political activity must be practical work, and to this end the attainment of political power.”

A recession, in the Keynesian telling, is a collapse of confidence and spending to be cured by deficits, cheap money, and public reassurance. George H. W. Bush's response to the early-1990s slump was, Rothbard charges, Keynesian through and through, and blind to the prior inflationary credit expansion that Austrian theory identifies as the real cause. The essay tracks the administration's shifting language from 'no recession' to 'weak recovery' to 'double-dip' as morale-management, then dismantles Bush's and Senator D'Amato's pressure on credit-card rates as price-control thinking that misreads interest as a market price set by risk and demand. Against revenue-neutral tax cuts, which preserve the premise that state revenue must stay intact, Rothbard prescribes not stimulus but liquidation of the state burden: deep cuts in taxes and spending, and more private saving.

The real way to achieve freedom and prosperity is to hurl all three of these icons of the twentieth century into the dustbin of history.

Slightly undersized California peaches and nectarines, perfectly edible, must by federal law be destroyed — and in that absurdity Rothbard finds the whole logic of New Deal agriculture. Farm policy, he argues, is producer cartelization enforced by the state: minimum-size rules become a quality-control language for price maintenance, outlawing cheaper fruit because it threatens the margins of larger produce. His case is Gerawan Farming, prosecuted for selling smaller fruit through channels serving poorer consumers; the forbidden fruit is forbidden because it is affordable. A USDA official’s candid admission that the rules protect the grower’s higher-profit item exposes the truth beneath the consumer-protection rhetoric. Here, in miniature, is the welfare state as Rothbard sees it: coercive cartelization that cuts production, raises prices, and injures the poorest, all draped in humanitarian language.

One of the most horrifying features of the New Deal was its agricultural policy: in the name of “curing the depression,” the federal government organized a giant cartel of America’s farmers.

When a campaign narrows itself to "the issues," the terms have already been rigged: to qualify as a respectable topic, a question must accept that Washington is responsible for jobs, housing, and health care. Writing amid the 1992 recession, Rothbard turns his fire on the machinery of respectable debate — the policy wonks, the computerized forecasts, the false precision of tax projections that never predicted the downturn they now purport to fix. He rejects the establishment equation of tax hikes with spending cuts, insisting the deficit be closed only by shrinking the state, and sets a productive private sector against a parasitic public one. His blunt proposal: cap every federal agency at its 1979 budget.

In media lingo, in short, “discussing” the issues means accepting the media’s statist premises, and solemnly haggling over minute technicalities within those premises.

A civil servant without an academic post, Ewald Schams earned Hayek’s respect through his command of economic theory and his interventions in Viennese discussions. In this short preface, written for a projected collection of Schams’s essays and presented here in English translation, Hayek recalls a reserved colleague educated under Schumpeter and familiar with both Austrian and Lausanne economics. His portrait offers a concrete glimpse of scholarly influence exercised through conversation, meticulous essays, and knowledge of competing theoretical traditions rather than a major treatise. It also traces Schams’s turn toward the history of economic thought and the French eighteenth-century books that eventually entered Hayek’s library. Affection is tempered by acknowledged gaps: Hayek cannot reconstruct Schams’s later isolation or establish how long he continued working.

Czechoslovakia, on the eve of its 1992 split, gets no elegy here — only a welcome. Rothbard reads the country as an artificial "whelp of Versailles," a multinational state manufactured by great-power diplomacy to mask Czech domination over Slovaks, Sudeten Germans, Teschen Poles, Hungarians, and Carpatho-Ruthenians. Against Western opinion that romanticized Tomas Masaryk while denouncing Slovak nationalism, he traces the rapid history from Versailles through German occupation and postwar expulsions to Communist-era Czech predominance. The essay's argument is a case for peaceful secession as the libertarian answer to the post-Communist nationalities question — and its praise falls on the Czechs for letting Slovakia depart rather than holding the federation together by force.

So, farewell Czechoslovakia, what took you so long?

When Hayek died in 1992, the obituaries saluted his classical liberalism and all but ignored the economics beneath it—his standing, Kirzner argues, as a central figure in the twentieth-century Austrian school. This short appraisal recovers that foundation, tracing Hayek from Wieser and Spann's Vienna into Mises's circle, through the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research and the London controversies with Keynes, Sraffa, and Knight, to the socialist calculation debate that turned him toward the problem of knowledge. His 1937 and 1945 essays reframed equilibrium as mutual knowledge and showed society's knowledge to be irreducibly dispersed. Competition, on this view, is a discovery procedure no planner could replicate. Hayek's defense of the rule of law and limited government, Kirzner insists, is the social-philosophical consequence of that economics, not an ideology laid over it.

While accurate information is expressed only through equilibrium prices, the beauty of the price system, in Austrian eyes, consists in the potential of disequilibrium prices to stimulate discovery and overcome existing ignorance.

When F.A. Hayek died in 1992, Rothbard marked the passing of the "Mises-Hayek era" with an obituary that both honors and litigates. He credits Hayek as the great transmitter of Mises's monetary theory of the boom-bust cycle to the English-speaking world, the elaboration of central-bank credit expansion that carried the Austrian account of capital into the London School of Economics and challenged Keynes before Keynesianism triumphed. He recalls Hayek's part in the socialist calculation debate, The Road to Serfdom, and the 1974 Nobel that revived Austrian economics. Yet the essay turns sharply on Hayek's postwar drift: his inconsistent monetary views and a philosophy of unconscious, rule-following man that Rothbard judges too weak to ground natural rights or a rational defense of laissez-faire.

Of all the Misesians who had been nurtured in Vienna and London, by the end of the 1930s only Mises and Hayek were left, as indomitable champions of the free market, and opponents of statism and deficit spending.

Movement conservatives who had defended George H. W. Bush against Pat Buchanan turned on him the moment Clinton surged — and Rothbard reads the reversal not as principle but as an unlovely scramble. He layers three explanations: Sam Francis's "venality" thesis, that conservative organizations thrive on fundraising panic under Democratic presidents; a power-elite analysis built around the "Rockefeller World Empire," the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission, an Eastern Establishment content with Bush or Clinton alike; and the neoconservatives, whose overriding concern he locates in Israel and foreign aid, and whose break with Bush over Shamir and loan guarantees pushed them toward Clinton. Elite continuity, he argues, decides more than elections.

At the very least, it's an unlovely spectacle: rats scurrying off a sinking ship.

Strip away the reverent abstraction, and a government reduces to identifiable persons - legislators, tax collectors, judges, policemen - exercising coercive command over other people. This brief note turns that deflation into a libertarian critique of political worship, attacking the habit of treating the state as a sacred, benevolent being to be petitioned and idolized. For such command, Sennholz argues, no obvious moral foundation exists: those entrusted with protecting natural rights have repeatedly hardened into rulers, oligarchs, and tyrants. He sets Jefferson's jealousy of power against the modern appetite for state benefits, entitlements, and public works, in which questions of right dissolve into struggles over distribution. Political power, he concludes, feeds on its spoils and dies only when its victims refuse to be despoiled.

No man has ever seen a government.

War had reduced supplies, damaged trade, and driven prices upward—but scarcity, Schumpeter insists in this undated wartime memorandum, cannot explain everything. The decisive additional cause of Austria's currency disorder is monetary: the swelling of circulation media, above all banknotes, which no longer function as ordinary commercial credit but as paper money financing state consumption. Against the objection that money merely rose because prices had, he distinguishes transferred purchasing power—taxes and genuinely subscribed loans—from newly created claims that press extra demand onto a shrinking flow of goods. Inflation, on this account, names the portion of depreciation caused from the money side, and neither gold cover nor exchange-market technique can abolish it. Only by confronting the excess of monetary circulation over goods can the crown's lost parity of purchasing power be restored.

Die Grundübel, deren Beseitigung das praktische Ziel unserer Valutapolitik sein muß, sind die Preisrevolution und der ungünstige Stand und die Fluktuation der Wechselkurse.

English translation: “The fundamental evils whose elimination must be the practical goal of our currency policy are the price revolution and the unfavorable level and the fluctuation of exchange rates.”

How should a defeated Germany be brought back into the community of free nations? Writing in 1944, Hayek answers that its historians will decide, for nineteenth-century German scholarship had itself bred reverence for the power-state and expansionist nationalism. He rejects both imposed Allied textbooks and the fantasy of instant conversion, predicting instead a moral desert dotted with isolated 'oases' of sound thinking that private, non-governmental contacts must quietly sustain. Above all, he argues, Germans must recover a belief in objective historical truth and the historian's duty to moral judgment, to call Hitler bad, not merely explain him. Invoking Lord Acton, whose German training, Catholic faith, and early insight into power made him an ideal symbol, Hayek proposes an Acton Society to unite scholars committed to liberty, federalism, and opposition to totalitarianism of both Right and Left.

It is because, whether he wills it or not, the historian shapes the political ideals of the future, that he himself must be guided by the highest ideals and keep free from the political disputes of the day.