The archive.

Establishment economists, politicians, and the financial press come in for withering treatment here, as Rothbard catalogs the contradictory stories Clinton-era commentators told about interest rates, unemployment, inflation, and recession. Against the reigning fetish for low rates, he explains that pushing interest below the market's time-preference level does not stimulate but distorts, seeding malinvestment; against the Keynesian inflation-unemployment tradeoff, he denies the bargain exists at all. The essay presses from these conceptual distinctions to a forecast: the credit expansion of the 1980s Federal Reserve inflated asset prices and misdirected capital, so that absent a genuine industrial recovery, stocks and bonds face a sharp fall. Austrian business-cycle theory here serves as a solvent for the establishment's reflexive optimism.

But Clinton's huge tax increase during a recession was an economic master-stroke, you see, because this will lower deficits, which in turn will lower interest rates, which in turn will bring us out of the recession.

Richard Nixon's death in 1994 occasions not an obituary but an assault on the ritual that sanctifies dead presidents. Rothbard reads the bipartisan funeral homage—Bill Clinton honoring a man his circle once opposed—as evidence of a "statolatry" in which the office is sacralized and even disgraced officeholders are ritually purified. Separating Nixon's conservative rhetoric from his governing substance, he presents him as the consummate example of Big Government Conservatism: welfare expansion, affirmative action, wage and price controls, OSHA, the EPA, and the abandonment of gold, with a Vietnam War lengthened rather than ended. The essay's sharpest inversion concerns Watergate, which he refuses to mourn: its value lay not in moral outrage but in the precedent that a president could be brought down.

The great thing about Watergate is that it made the unthinkable thinkable at long last, that it established the precedent for impeaching the Monster in the White House.

No federal agency is more secretive or less accountable, and that opacity is exactly what Rothbard sets out to strip away. He argues that the Federal Reserve's celebrated independence merely shields the true engine of inflation, tracing money from its market origin in weights of gold and silver through the slow corruption of deposit banking into fractional-reserve warehousing he flatly calls fraud. Central banks, he contends, exist to cartelize the banks and finance the state; the Fed itself was engineered by Morgan- and Rockefeller-linked financiers and sold to the public as Progressive reform, culminating in the secret 1910 conclave at Jekyll Island. His remedy is not a reformed Fed but its liquidation and a return to gold-coin money.

The Federal Reserve System is accountable to no one; it has no budget; it is subject to no audit; and no Congressional committee knows of, or can truly supervise, its operations.

The official price of crime is radically understated, this 1994 essay contends, because statistics count offenses while missing fear, lost production, defensive spending, and the diversion of police and courts toward regulatory enforcement. Sennholz sorts illegality into three kinds—violent crime, property crime, and violations of government rules—arguing that the third often criminalizes mutually beneficial exchange and manufactures the caseloads that agencies then cite to demand larger budgets. American crime control, he estimates, exceeds $150 billion a year yet grows more expensive without producing security. Fear itself becomes a social tax that suppresses movement, work, and investment. Behind the inefficiency he sees a welfare-transfer state that, by normalizing coercive redistribution, teaches private criminals to imitate its logic on a smaller scale.

A fearful society is a poor society that is crippled by fear and burdened by high costs of defense.

Under the gold standard, fixed exchange rates were mere definitions—the dollar, pound, and mark were only different names for weights of a single commodity. Once Nixon severed that link in 1971, Rothbard argues, each national currency became a separate good and its exchange rate an ordinary market price; to peg it by fiat is therefore to impose a price control, with all the shortages, surpluses, and Gresham's Law effects that ceilings and floors produce. Floating fiat money is defective enough, he concedes, but pegging it by decree is worse still. His 1994 targets are the Clinton administration's dollar interventions and Nafta, which he reads as a back-channel toward international currency regulation and unaccountable supranational planning—no government, he maintains, can ever find the 'ideal' rate it pretends to seek.

What the world has failed to grasp is that there is one thing much worse than fluctuating fiat moneys: and that is fiat money where governments try to fix the exchange rates.

Sold as public safety, the Clinton administration's firearms proposals really teach, on Rothbard's account, a lesson in market structure. A policy advertised as crime control, he argues, operates through taxation, coercive licensing, and cartelization—warring against every entity except the actual criminals. The telling detail is the federal gun-dealer license fee, raised from $10 to $66 under the Brady Bill, with Lloyd Bentsen proposing $600 and welcoming its power to thin the retail trade. Because a fixed cost burdens small firms more than large, Rothbard joins Austrian price theory to public-choice analysis: the fee eliminates marginal dealers and rewards incumbents, forging a coalition of anti-gun ideologues and big dealers. His remedy is not cheaper licenses but abolishing licensing altogether.

First, a license “fee” is a euphemism for a tax, pure and simple.

Frank Knight's 1923 paper delivered what Kirzner calls the most powerful ethical critique of the market economy ever written — and its power, he contends, is also its flaw. Knight built the moral case against capitalism on the model of perfect competition, in which tastes, resources, and techniques are already given and rewards can be weighed against a fixed standard of desert. Against this closed-ended picture Kirzner sets the Austrian market as an open-ended discovery procedure, where competition reveals goods, methods, and needs no one had foreseen. The distributive complaint that incomes fail to track productive contribution then misses its mark, because much income is entrepreneurial profit — the gain from noticing what others overlooked. The quarrel with Knight, Kirzner argues, is finally economic rather than ethical: get the workings of competition right, and many familiar moral objections dissolve.

The ethics of competition, for Knight, boils down to an ethical analysis of the ethics of the perfectly competitive world, and of the extent to which real world markets approximate that model.

Can central-bank support foster an unsustainable boom without conspicuously cheap credit or rapid monetary expansion? In this 1994 article, Roger W. Garrison compares the interwar cycle with the boom and contraction of the 1980s–1990s, shifting attention from investment timing to risk bearing. His Austrian perspective locates the later distortion in the interaction of federal borrowing, potential debt monetization, banking regulation, and deposit insurance. These arrangements, he argues, encouraged investments riskier than savers would knowingly finance while insulating Treasury creditors from default. The comparison offers a concrete way to examine what monetary aggregates can miss: guarantees that alter incentives before any rescue occurs, and investment patterns whose unwinding may be prolonged even when the measured recession remains shallow.

Markets do have limits — but not the ones the textbooks name. The imagined "inner limits" of externalities, public goods, prisoner's dilemmas, and transaction costs are, Kirzner argues, no failures at all once the market is understood after Hayek as a discovery procedure coordinating plans within a given framework of rights, not as a machine for globally efficient allocation. Judged against an imagined social omniscience, outcomes may look defective; the defect, if any, lies in the rights framework rather than in market coordination. The real "outer limits" are prerequisites the market cannot itself produce: private property, freedom of contract, enforcement, and the shared ethical convictions beneath them. Against law-and-economics accounts that derive rights from amoral cost-benefit forces, he insists a Hobbesian jungle cannot become a legal order by economic pressure alone.

No understanding of the market can afford to ignore the fundamental insight that its institutional foundations are to be sought directly, not in economic considerations but in ethical ones.

Reverse the usual alarm about the Christian right, Rothbard urges: the real menace is a "Religious Left" whose lineage runs from medieval millenarian heresy to the Clinton White House. He builds a typological genealogy—Joachim of Fiore as prototype, then the Brethren of the Free Spirit, Thomas Muntzer and the Anabaptists, the English Civil War sects—reading each as a vanguard of "saints" abolishing private property under a messianic leader. The decisive move is secularization: Marxism, he argues, is Anabaptism atheized, substituting material forces for Providence as the engine of redemption, with Ernst Bloch and the Social Gospel confirming the shared salvific grammar. The essay ends on the Clintons as the tradition's latest exponents, indicting any politics—welfare, community, morality—that expands state power toward a coercive earthly kingdom.

He said that the goal of his “ministry” was to bring about no less than the “Kingdom of God on Earth”!

Ballot access, not ideology, is where New York politics begins — convention thresholds and petition requirements let party organizations decide who is even viable. Rothbard reads the 1994 statewide season as a managed electoral cartel, a “circus” of fusion tickets, ethnic blocs, and patronage in which nominations and cross-endorsements discipline every candidate. He tracks Al D’Amato’s machine clearing George Pataki’s path while blocking Herb London’s convention access, the Conservative Party’s chronic struggle between principle and pragmatism, and a Mario Cuomo grown vulnerable on crime, taxes, and urban decay. Betsy McCaughey draws special scorn for a health-care critique that still concedes universal access to state planning. The recurring question, applied to every office, is unity at what price — how much principle must be surrendered to beat Cuomo.

Mario, however, has palled in office; New Yorkers are tired of Mario, of his lousy performance, the rampant crime, the high taxes and spending, the visible decay of New York in his twelve years of office.

One week after the 1994 Republican sweep, in a confidential memo published here for the first time, Rothbard reads the midterms not as anti-incumbency but as a “November Revolution” against Clintonism and the Leviathan state. The danger, he warns, is that Republican elites will capture anti-state energy and convert it into preservation — as Reagan did, turning free-market rhetoric into a cover for continuity in taxes, spending, and intervention. He anatomizes the ruling coalition of privilege-seekers, bureaucrats, and opinion-makers, cites the courts’ overturning of Proposition 187 and the lame-duck GATT/WTO vote as elite shell games, and demands Congress strip federal judicial jurisdiction. His remedy is speed, dispossession, and relentless education — with the Mises Institute the one independent force he trusts.

Since World War II, and especially since the 1950s, the function of the Republican Party has been to be the "loyal," "moderate," "bi-partisan," pseudo-opposition to the collectivist and leftist program of the Democratic Party.