The archive.

Citizens fleeing oppressive taxes into black markets have a public-sector mirror image, and it is the real subject here: the off-budget enterprise, through which officials expand spending and debt beyond any voter's scrutiny. Authorities, boards, corporations, and trusts, formally outside normal government accounting, lack taxing power yet wield vast spending power, borrowing without debt limits or voter approval, monopolizing services, accumulating losses, and passing them to taxpayers. Sennholz walks from municipal airport and sewer authorities to New York, where repeated rejection of bond issues merely prompted the legislature to invent new off-budget entities, and on to federal loan guarantees that redirect private credit. Each device makes the state appear smaller than it is. His warning is constitutional: balanced-budget rules and debt ceilings are futile so long as these legal backdoors let government reorganize its costs out of sight.

The possibilities for concealment, deception, pretext, sophistry, stratagem, and plain trickery are endless.

A memorial becomes an argument about memory. Recounting the career of V. Orval Watts, who died in 1993, Rothbard traces a life lived inside institutions rather than abstractions: the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, where Watts became the first full-time economist employed by a chamber in the United States; the Foundation for Economic Education, which he joined as Leonard Read's economic adviser in 1946; and Northwood University, where he resumed teaching at sixty-five. Watts's books against Keynesianism, union power, and the United Nations stand as evidence of a consistent educator against collectivism. But the tribute turns outward in its closing claim—that a movement forgetting its own leaders and heroes will not amount to much, and that remembrance is itself part of the free-market cause's survival.

Any movement that has no sense of its own history, that fails to acknowledge its own leaders and heroes, is not going to amount to very much, nor does it deserve a better fate.

Minimum-wage floors, union seniority rules, and the Davis-Bacon Act present themselves as worker protections; here they are recast as barriers that price the least-skilled out of employment. Writing in a classical-liberal register, Sennholz separates the inequalities that arise from differing service and productivity in free markets from those manufactured by coercive policy. He concedes the historical weight of Jim Crow and the real gains of civil-rights law, yet insists the remaining obstacle is state-created: a legal wage floor forbids hiring the low-productivity beginner, seniority layoffs reproduce old exclusions, and prevailing-wage mandates he traces to racial protectionism. His remedy joins anti-racist language to anti-interventionist economics—wages and jobs set by productivity rather than statute or union rank.

The Act was spawned by racism and continues to sow the evils of racism.

Somalia, Bosnia, Tajikistan, Iraq, Korea: the post-Cold War map, in this September 1993 commentary, reads to Washington's interventionists as a cornucopia of opportunities to feed, bomb, and occupy. Rothbard's thesis is that intervention is an appetite rather than a response to necessity, and that humanitarian rescue, democracy promotion, and anti-fundamentalism have become interchangeable warrants for force. Somalia is the central case: a relief mission that disrupted local food arrangements, cast General Aidid as the lone villain, and mutated into armed vengeance once American and UN troops became combatants. The recurring device he exposes is the 'Good Guys vs. Bad Guys' frame, a political technology that manufactures the enemy needed to authorize war. He notes the blowback of Afghan fighters recast overnight from freedom fighters to fanatics, and dismisses the whole crusade as Wilsonian quagmire.

But Uncle Sam will have a difficult time trying to figure out on which side to intervene. How is it going to sort out the Good Guys from the Bad Guys?

Free-market think tanks and pundits did not merely approve of NAFTA in 1993; they defended it, Rothbard observed, with a frantic passion they never mustered against the income tax or the Federal Reserve, and that disproportion is the puzzle this November polemic sets out to solve. His answer separates genuine free trade from a treaty administered by state-created bodies: NAFTA, he argues, is managed trade whose supranational commissions, unaccountable to any taxpayer, can 'upwardly harmonize' environmental and labor regulation against the wishes of citizens. Turning to public choice, he traces the fervor to concrete beneficiaries, Mexican state energy, Koch-linked interests, and lobbying money, and to the pattern by which private firms enlist the state to socialize their costs. Professed market principles, he insists, must be judged against the subsidies they conceal.

There is a vital lesson here: much of Big Government, much of the welfare-interventionist State, is pushed by private businesses in order to force the taxpayers to subsidize their own costs.

A genuine grassroots right-wing revolt against Washington, Rothbard announces in this October 1994 essay, has for the first time in years broken loose from the Beltway, and libertarian strategy must break with it. He sets the insurgency against the 'Official Conservative and Libertarian movement' of think tanks, direct-mail firms, and access-seeking reformers whose real product is donor reassurance, and he redefines 'access' itself as corruption: to court credibility inside Washington is already to concede its centrality. Cataloguing county militias, sheriff resistance to the Brady bill, Tenth Amendment campaigns, secessionist and land-rights activism, and hostility to the Federal Reserve, he reads them not as a finished doctrine but as an anti-centralist instinct that intellectuals should clarify rather than command. Hatred of the Clintons, he argues, fused personal disgust with anti-statism into a mass politics more radical than Perot's.

These heartland rebels are close to the spirit, not of blow-dried Beltway think-tankers, but of the patriots of the American Revolution.

When the dollar slid against the mark and yen in the mid-1990s, the political reflex was to blame the Bundesbank, Japan, and speculators. Sennholz redirects the causality homeward: a weak dollar, he argues, is the endogenous product of Treasury deficits and Federal Reserve credit creation, its central mechanism the monetization of federal debt. Bond purchases supply banks with reserves, deficits crowd out productive investment, and present political consumption is charged to future generations as capital erodes. Rejecting the Keynesian case for monetary ease and distrusting official inflation figures produced by the very authorities inflating, this compact monetary polemic reframes a currency-market event as a crisis of the American fiscal-monetary nexus—one that electoral pressure for low rates makes unlikely to correct.

The dollar weakness is no foreign phenomenon; it is an American calamity with its roots in Washington.

Can entrepreneurial alertness explain profit if it does not also explain exposure to loss? This question gives a concrete edge to Murray N. Rothbard’s 1994 review of the collection edited by Bruce Caldwell and Stephan Boehm. Rothbard argues that the volume marginalizes Misesian praxeology while treating the Hayek–Kirzner approach as representative of Austrian economics. His criticism becomes a compact defence of the capitalist entrepreneur: someone who commits resources, forecasts uncertain events, and can lose as well as gain. Readers can discover why Rothbard regards ownership and uncertainty-bearing as indispensable to entrepreneurship, and how this position informs his objections to the collection’s methodological emphasis and historical framing. The review offers a partisan but sharply defined account of divisions within the Austrian school.

Lovers of liberty, Sennholz observes, are strangely prone to despair, reading every new regulation and tax as evidence that freedom is losing irrevocably. This short essay answers that mood on two fronts. Historically, it refuses to romanticize a past that brought world wars, mass murder, and totalitarian brutality far exceeding present policy disputes. Politically, it distinguishes trend from destiny: the New Deal, Great Society, and Reagan-Bush expansions of the welfare-regulatory state are real, yet history, he insists, never moves in a straight line. Reading the late twentieth century as a worldwide retreat from socialism, he grounds his optimism in a Misesian faith that ideas shape policy and that a habitual pessimist can never lead the way toward reform.

Fortunately, history never moves in a straight line.

Beneath the visible institutions of the West runs a thousand-year undercurrent of revolt, and it is this buried drama that the study reconstructs — here in the German translation of Voegelin's unpublished English manuscript "The People of God," expanded after 1947. The governing distinction is between institution and movement: the Church civilizes by objectifying grace sacramentally and compromising with human weakness, while the sect renews the demand for immediate relation to God and evangelical poverty. Tracing Paulicians, Cathars, Hussites, Anabaptists, and Puritans, Voegelin shows how mystical symbols of perfection — apokatastasis, the Third Realm descending from Joachim of Fiore — harden into activist political programs. The result is an eschatological violence, a passage between aeons that runs from A Glimpse of Sion's Glory to Marx, Lenin, and Hitler.

Der Ruf nach Reform wandelt sich nun zu einer Attacke gegen den Geist.

English translation: “The call for reform now turns into an attack against the spirit.”

Subsidize any condition and its incidence rises: that law of demand, Rothbard insists in this chapter from Making Economic Sense, governs behavior far outside the marketplace, from coffee consumption and subway ridership to childbirth and welfare dependency. The argument turns on marginal analysis, since blanket appeals to 'need' obscure the fact that consumers at the margin respond sharply to relative costs and benefits. His evidentiary center is a Change-NY estimate that the combined Medicaid, housing, food, and cash benefits of a New York single mother with two children equal a $45,000 pre-tax salary, more than entry-level municipal work returns after tax. From this he casts welfare not as a safety net but as a rival income system competing against low-skill employment, one that over time erodes the work ethic and the old stigma against the dole.

And yet, if welfare payments are far higher than any sum that a single teenager can make on the market, who can deny the powerful extra tug from the prospects of tax-subsidized moolah without any need to work?

When Prime Minister Chernomyrdin announced that “the period of market romanticism is over,” Sennholz read it as a confession that reform had been politically defeated. This 1994 commentary examines Russia's stalled post-Soviet transition, where officials favoring “stability” propped up state conglomerates through subsidies, central-bank credit, and inflationary finance. Small shops and service firms flourish under new private titles, he grants, but legal ownership has not yet become economic control, and the large enterprises still look to the state to preserve unproductive employment. Currency confiscations, price controls, and indexation he dismisses as futile inflationist maneuvers. The verdict is uncompromising: no durable middle ground exists between capitalism and socialism, and partial reform will end in monetary collapse before genuine recovery becomes possible.

The failure once again will demonstrate that there is no durable middle-of-the-road between capitalism and socialism and that any attempt at building one invariably will lead to hyperinflation and chaos.