The archive.

Even a genuine insurance crisis, Rothbard argues, would give insurers no claim on legislative rescue—and he doubts the crisis is genuine, reading its alarming anecdotes, unsupported by transparent industry data, as a device to deny injured parties fair recompense. Insurers are entrepreneurial firms whose losses reflect failed forecasting like anyone else's. Against the tort-reform campaign of insurers, manufacturers, and organized medicine, he defends contingency fees as the instrument that gives poorer plaintiffs their day in court, and the jury as an inherited safeguard against arbitrary caps on justice. His own reform is qualitative, not quantitative: liability should fall in full, but only on those who actually caused the harm—never on retailers or shareholders singled out for their deep pockets.

So there may well be no insurance crisis at all, and the entire hysteria may be trumped-up to gain benefits for the insurance industry at the expense of victims of injury to person or property who are entitled to just compensation.

Separate money creation from saving, real resources from accounting totals, causal theory from statistical coincidence: the same analytic move recurs through the ten refutations Rothbard assembles in this compact 1984 brief against the language of macroeconomic management. Deficits, he argues, are inflationary only when financed through the banking system; falling prices are the mark of dynamic growth, not catastrophe; wage rates track productivity, not tariff walls. He punctures the Phillips curve as an ideological fallback and the Laffer curve for making state revenue the measure of policy, asking why maximizing government receipts should be anyone's aim at all. The only sound cure for deficits, he concludes, is the one no politician will name: cut the federal budget.

People are contrary cusses whose behavior, thank goodness, cannot be forecast precisely in advance.

A federal gasoline-tax increase, revived at Clinton's 1992 economic summit, arrives dressed in every fashionable justification—conservation, fuel efficiency, energy independence, fairness, deficit reduction—and Rothbard strips each away in turn. Conservation, he argues, is already performed by market prices, which weigh present demand against future scarcity without dictatorial coercion; fuel efficiency is arbitrary single-factor planning that ignores the tradeoffs of time, safety, and comfort a car actually balances. The deficit rationale he treats as pretext, noting that liberals discover the deficit only when it excuses a tax. Beneath the economics lies a cultural animus: liberals, he charges, reserve a special hatred for the automobile, whose private, self-directed mobility rebukes the collective, timetabled discipline of mass transit.

In contrast to mass transport, which liberals find satisfyingly collective, egalitarian, and rigidly fixed to time and place schedules, the automobile is gloriously individualistic.

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.

Both the conservatives who would criminalize flag 'desecration' and the civil libertarians who defend it as 'symbolic speech' are convicted at once in this compact test case for Rothbard's theory of rights. To make the flag sacred, he argues, is to embrace statolatry and leave the police to divine intent—sparing reverent Legionnaires who ceremonially burn worn flags while jailing hippie-sneerers for the identical act. The opposing camp fares no better: treating flag burning as protected expression collapses the distinction between speech and conduct until any action can claim shelter. Both errors dissolve, he contends, once the question shifts from expression to ownership. One may fly, wear, bury, or burn a flag one owns; burning another's is not protest but arson—and private property, not free speech, is the ground on which dissent stands.

There is no way, then, that flag laws can be declared unconstitutional as violations of the First Amendment.

A grassroots revolt against Big Government swept Republicans into Congress in November 1994—and was betrayed, Rothbard charges, almost before the ballots cooled, when party leaders recalled defeated Democrats to a lame-duck session to pass Gatt and midwife the WTO. From that opening scandal he builds a diagnosis of American politics as rule by a bipartisan establishment of big business, high finance, media, and technocrats, arrayed against a public grown hostile to immigration restriction, foreign aid, welfare, gun control, and the Federal Reserve. Against Gingrich and Dole's balanced-budget theater he demands genuine rollback—abolished departments, not caps—and offers an acid test for every Republican: forget the rhetoric, and ask what they actually did. Hope, he ventures, rests with paleoconservative freshmen like Metcalf and Stockman.

The terrible news is that it took less than twenty-four hours for that revolution to be grievously betrayed.

The 1994 midterms register, in Rothbard's reading, not as a routine swing but as a popular anti-statist revolt against Clinton, the Democratic Party, and the machinery of centralized federal power. The celebration is brief. What follows is a warning: the two-party 'duopoly,' cemented by winner-take-all districts and the socialized ballot, works as a cartel that absorbs insurgent anger into elite-managed reform. Rothbard audits the Republican 'contract' against a stringent standard of genuine rollback—on taxes, gun control, the Federal Reserve, foreign aid, GATT, and the federal departments—and finds evasion where he wants abolition. Naming Gingrich and Dole as accommodationists, he argues that only sustained grassroots pressure and a refusal of bipartisan respectability could keep the revolt from being tamed by the party that rode it to power.

The election of 1994 was an unprecedented and smashing electoral expression of the popular revolution that had been building up for many months: a massive repudiation of President Clinton, the Clintonian Democratic Party, their persons and all of their works.

Against the split between academic economics and applied policy—between 'neutral' analysis without theory and scholarship detached from public life—Rothbard offers the Mises Institute as the cure. Part institutional history, part manifesto, the essay recounts a founding in the fall of 1982 with no endowment and no billionaires, then narrates the post-1974 Austrian revival after Hayek's Nobel and the softening 'Austrianism' that whispered Mises had been too dogmatic, too extreme. Rothbard accepts the charge as praise: dogmatism means fidelity to truth. He describes the journals, seminars, fellowships, and Auburn programs not as administration but as the infrastructure a living discipline requires, and treats the word 'Austrian' itself as contested ground nearly captured from within. His conclusion reclaims it—uncompromisingly Misesian, free-market, and radical.

Above all, Austrian economics is once again, as it ever shall be, Misesian.

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.

Free-market advocates know what to do with state operations, privatize them, but what should be done in the meantime? Rothbard's answer divides government activity in two: coercive agencies like regulators and tax collectors should be abolished, not privatized or made efficient, while the services people actually use, schools, streets, libraries, police, should in the interim be run as efficiently and business-like as possible on shrinking budgets. Against the "equal access" doctrine embraced by courts, left-liberals, and some libertarians, he argues that stripping public institutions of the authority to exclude or set standards destroys their very purpose. His sharpest scorn falls on libertarians who welcome public-sector decay as a strategy to shock citizens into demanding reform, a tactic he calls deeply immoral and unlikely to work.

On the activities in Group B, what we want is not privatization but abolition.

Born in London and trained under the hard-money economist Edwin Cannan at the London School of Economics, William Harold Hutt built a body of work that Rothbard here rescues from neglect, treating its obscurity as a verdict on the profession rather than on the man. Hutt emerges as a unified theorist of market coordination: The Theory of Collective Bargaining argued that unions cannot raise wages generally, only redistribute them by displacing less privileged labor; his writing on South Africa read apartheid economically, as compulsory racial labor cartelization; and The Theory of Idle Resources recast Keynesian unemployment as capacity withheld from the market, not proof of deficient demand. Across labor, race, money, and Say's Law runs one conviction—that waste and exclusion arise from coercive privilege, not from free exchange—and it places Hutt beside the Austrian revival he supported.

Indeed, he showed that industrial apartheid was imposed by a successful general strike in 1922 led by William H. Andrews, head of the Communist Party of South Africa under the slogan “Whites Unite and Fight for a Workers’ World”!

What exactly counts as money? Rothbard's answer refuses the Chicago school's habit of choosing a monetary aggregate because it correlates with national income—statistical fit, he argues, evades the prior question of what money is. Returning to Mises's definition of money as the generally accepted medium of exchange, he counts demand deposits and other claims the public treats as redeemable at par in standard money, while excluding stocks, bonds, and real estate that are merely liquid and must first be sold. The functional test yields his aggregate Ma: cash plus fixed-rate redeemable claims. A second measure, Mb, isolates newly created bank money entering business credit—the channel that, in Austrian cycle theory, distorts the structure of production toward higher-order capital goods, distinct from deficit finance or consumer lending.

Furthermore, the approach overlooks the fact that statistical correlation cannot establish causal connections; this can only be done by a genuine theory that works with definable and defined concepts.