The archive.

Watch how a spending increase becomes a "cut." Rothbard dissects the vocabulary by which federal economists redescribe fiscal expansion as restraint: budget "cuts" that merely fall below a projected increase, tax "cuts" offset by Social Security hikes and inflation-driven bracket creep, tax increases rebranded as "revenue enhancement," and exemptions recast as "loopholes." He borrows Mises's observation that the very word "loophole" presumes the government rightfully owns all you earn. The pattern, he insists, is never neutral: by swapping observable dollars for baselines and counterfactuals, the state claims austerity while it grows. His most pointed case is the redefinition of the deficit as an inflation-adjusted "real increase" in debt, a maneuver he likens to apologetics for Germany's 1923 hyperinflation, and the shrinking of "down payment" to a hoped-for slowing of future borrowing.

Now we have "budget cuts" which are not cuts, but rather substantial increases over the previous year's expenditures.

Disney's plan for a 3,000-acre theme park beside the Manassas battlefield looked to many like free-market development colliding with historical preservation. Rothbard denies the premise. The project is no expression of capitalism at all, he argues, because Disney sought $163 million in Virginia taxpayer money for roads and infrastructure, forced subsidy dressed as enterprise. Market analysis, he insists, must ask whose ends are served and whether exchange is voluntary or coerced. From means he turns to content, attacking the park's planned pedagogy under Michael Eisner and the choice of a prominent Columbia revisionist as its historical consultant, a signal that the Civil War and Reconstruction would be narrated through a Marxist frame. What awaits, he warns, is corporate welfare and contested cultural authority borrowing the prestige of the market.

He is none other than the notorious Eric Foner, distinguished Marxist-Leninist historian at Columbia University, and the country's most famous Marxist historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

San Antonio's water supply becomes a test case for Rothbard's critique of socialized resource management. When drought threatens the Edwards Aquifer, litigation under the Endangered Species Act, brought by the Sierra Club, joined by the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, and blessed by Judge Lucius Bunton, would reserve enough spring flow to protect four obscure species, among them the Texas blind salamander and the fountain darter, even at the cost of the city's residents, farmers, and ranchers. Rothbard reads the classification fight over whether the aquifer is a "river" or a "lake" as a maneuver to shift control from Texas to federal courts, and detects institutional self-interest behind the ecological piety. His remedy is neither better regulation nor conservation but the privatization of water and water rights, so that markets, not judges, allocate a scarce resource.

"That's what this is all about," he warned bitterly. "It's not about fountain darters."

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.

Inflation never really left, it merely waited. Writing at the end of the 1980s, Rothbard explains the return of rising prices as the delayed harvest of earlier money-supply expansion, held back for a time by the collapse of OPEC and an expensive dollar and by the public's willingness to hold rather than spend its cash. Against the mechanical monetarism of the Chicago School, he insists that Austrians recognize no fixed leads and lags: money creation drives the cycle, but expectation and choice decide when its price effects surface. He faults the Federal Reserve for expanding in recession, mistaking the lag for success, then attempting gradual restraint under Alan Greenspan. Reading his preferred M-A aggregate, he sees recession already in motion, and refuses to call for the fresh expansion that would only postpone a necessary correction.

Whatever the Fed does, it unerringly makes matters worse.

Every time establishment economists announce a permanent boom, Rothbard writes, a big recession is just around the corner, and he offers that complacency as his one reliable leading indicator. The late-1920s "New Era," the Keynesian confidence of the 1960s, and Reaganite optimism each preceded a downturn; half a century of fine-tuning, he argues, has produced not stability but the hybrid of recession with continuing inflation. He mocks the National Bureau of Economic Research for taking so long to certify a recession that it is nearly over, and declares flatly, on housing and unemployment and debt liquidation, that one is already underway. Recession, in his Austrian reading, is the necessary cleansing of malinvestment. Against the reflex to raise taxes, he prescribes the opposite: halt Federal Reserve credit expansion, cut taxes, and cut spending harder still.

The one thing worse than a deficit, furthermore, is higher taxes; increasing taxes will only bring us more of both.

"It's the economy, stupid" gets the politics exactly backward, Rothbard contends. The Clintonian slogan reduces voting to macroeconomic mood and then reduces the economy to the business cycle, crude economic determinism he calls "vulgar Marxism." Public revolt, he argues, springs also from crime, immigration, broken promises, and distaste for the Clintons themselves, and its economic core is not cyclical recovery but secular decline: rising taxation, persistent inflation, falling real family income, and the need for married women to work simply to hold a household's standard of living in place. He trusts ordinary budgeting over official statistics and futurist cheer about computers and media, reading the public's anger as a rational response to the slow erosion of the postwar promise that each generation would surpass the last.

Instead, to capture the Clintonian meaning, the sentiment should be rephrased as “it’s the business cycle, stupid.”

Keynesians, on Rothbard's account, have the whole causal story backward. They treat idle labor and unused capacity as brute aggregate facts, then insist inflation cannot revive while slack persists, yet stagflation and the renewed inflation of later years refuted them. The missing piece, he argues, is the price system. Unemployment is a surplus like any other: resources go unused because their owners hold out for wages or prices above what buyers will pay, which makes idleness, in an analytical sense, voluntary. Drawing on William H. Hutt, he traces persistent mass unemployment to interventions, compulsory unionism, minimum-wage laws, welfare, and unemployment insurance, that keep wages above market-clearing levels. Monetary expansion can mobilize idle resources only by raising the returns paid for them, which is to say only through inflation. Idle capacity and rising prices, then, are no paradox at all.

The Keynesians themselves create the problem by leaving out the price system.

Eight years of free-market rhetoric under Reagan, Rothbard contends, accomplished the opposite of what they promised: the resurrection of a Keynesianism that the stagflation of the 1970s should have buried. Stripped of its algebraic jargon, the doctrine reduces to a simple political creed—recessions come from underspending, inflation from overspending, and 'Big Daddy government' stands ready to fine-tune both. But simultaneous recession and inflation, he argues, expose a contradiction at the model's heart, unmasking it as an economics of power rather than explanation. Tracing how Keynesians' promise of budgets balanced over the cycle dissolved into permanent deficits, and how the collapse of monetarism left Keynesians dominant in the Reagan and Bush teams, this 1989 essay reads macroeconomic management as inseparable from the growth of the state.

The stark fact of inflationary recession violates the fundamental assumptions of Keynesian theory and the crucial program of Keynesian policy.

Widow, archivist, and combatant, Margit von Mises spent the two decades after her husband's death as an indefatigable one-woman 'Mises industry,' supervising translations, guarding his reputation, and refusing to let any slight against him pass unchastised. This 1993 memorial, written after her death at 102, honors her not as a self-effacing helpmeet but as one of the strongest-minded women her friends had known, whose memoir My Years with Ludwig von Mises kept a marriage and a movement alive at once. Rothbard makes her the last vestige of Old Vienna—elegance, formed character, and principled independence set against an age of conformity and politically correct status-seeking. To mourn her, he insists, is to preserve the persons, institutions, and loyalties through which Mises's legacy survived.

The death of Margit von Mises, yes even at age 102, leaves us all poorer and diminished in spirit.

When Londoners rioted against Margaret Thatcher's 'community charge' in March 1990, most commentators saw only disorder or left-wing egalitarianism; Rothbard insisted they were watching an anti-tax revolt, and a movement against taxation can't be all bad. He grants the head tax real theoretical interest—on the market people do not pay in proportion to their incomes—but locates its virtue elsewhere: an equal tax must be drastically reduced before ordinary people can pay it, making it a club against runaway local spending. Thatcher's fatal error was to impose equality without austerity, so that burdens rose by roughly a third instead of falling. The verdict widens to Thatcherism entire, which he reads, like Reaganism, as free-market rhetoric masking statist content.

Charging a man for his very existence seems to imply that the government owns all of its subjects, body and soul.

The gasoline price spikes that followed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 were no sudden outbreak of corporate greed, Rothbard argues; what changed overnight was not the moral character of oilmen but the expectations of everyone anticipating disrupted supply. Prices, he reminds a public he finds economically illiterate, emerge from demand, supply, and speculative anticipation—not from the will of sellers or from cost plus a 'reasonable' markup. Speculation becomes an intertemporal coordinating device, rationing scarce oil before the crisis fully arrives. His closing warning is drawn from the 1970s, when controls produced shortages and gas lines: suppressing a price creates no new oil and clears no market, and the lines to come will be the officials' doing, not Big Oil's.

Imposing controls to stop a price increase is like trying to cure a fever by pushing down the mercury on a thermometer.