The archive.

By 1979 the postwar liberal order, GATT, the IMF, convertibility, nondiscriminatory tariffs, faced a pincer: demands for a New International Economic Order from the South and resurgent protectionism in the North. Haberler answers with a historical defense whose recurring move is to distinguish liberalism from laissez-faire and market order from policy failure. Nineteenth-century growth he calls capitalist success confirmed even by Marx; the Great Depression he reads not as capitalism's contradiction but as monetary and banking collapse under a rigid gold standard. Reviewing Lipsey and UNCTAD data, he denies any secular deterioration in developing-country terms of trade and reverses the indictment: the damage came not from open markets but from quotas, voluntary restraints, and the wage and price rigidities that generate stagflation.

Obviously, it is not liberal policies that hurt the LDCs but deviations from liberalism.

Conceived as an introduction to The Free Man's Library, this 1956 essay pairs a bibliography of individualist and classical-liberal writing with a warning about how easily its lessons are forgotten. Hazlitt's target is the modern progressive who champions freedom of thought and speech while dismantling economic liberty, not seeing that the two cannot be separated. He reclaims the word liberal for Adam Smith, Bastiat, Cobden, and Herbert Spencer, sets historic liberalism's Rule of Law against the drift toward planning and bureaucracy, and quotes Hamilton to the effect that power over a man's subsistence is power over his will. The essay's provocation is its final inversion: the intelligent conservative, defending inherited liberties against expanding state power, has become the truer heir of the liberal tradition.

Liberty is a whole, and to deny economic liberty is finally to destroy all liberty. Socialism is irreconcilable with freedom.

Political language does the work that arguments cannot, Rothbard contends: market socialism once seduced American elites while remaining socialism, and free trade now sells a treaty hostile to market freedom. Real liberalization would demand only that Washington unilaterally repeal its own tariffs, quotas, and anti-dumping laws; NAFTA instead entrenches neo-mercantilism, in which imports are merely the price government pays to win export markets for politically connected firms. He casts the pact as a North American Maastricht, an attempt to integrate and cartelize government through a supranational commission practicing upward harmonization. The Clinton side agreements on labor and the environment are the sharpest danger, locking welfare-state regulation in place forever, while demands that Americans rescue Carlos Salinas's reforms sit oddly beside Mexico's continued ban on private oil and gas.

Labels are often enough to nab the suckers.

Tolerable, for once, is Rothbard's verdict on the 1993 Academy Awards, where the ceremony ran longer and more politically correct than ever but the outcomes proved less disastrous than he feared. His relief turns on a single result: The Crying Game's loss of Best Picture, which he treats as the night's real victory. Reading films as moral evidence, he grants Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven a grudging pass for redeeming its guilt-ridden revisionism with a final burst of unembarrassed retribution, and champions Scent of a Woman as an old-fashioned movie-movie carried by Al Pacino's bravura. The column then broadens into a culture-war attack on Hollywood liberalism, avant-garde criticism, and what he decries as gender-bending, arguing that identity politics and sexual pluralism have crowded out heroic drama and moral clarity.

For once, the Academy Awards were tolerable—not the ceremony, which was longer, more boring, and more Politically Correct than ever—but the awards themselves.

Written in 1943 with postwar reconstruction already in view, this chapter poses a constitutional rather than merely tariff question: whether international cooperation should be built through universal institutions or through larger regional and continental federations. Haberler answers cautiously. Larger markets do permit mass production and a wider division of labour, but that gain belongs to nondiscriminatory liberalization, not to protected spheres, so he separates the complete customs union, which genuinely enlarges a market, from the incomplete preference, which merely diverts imports from cheaper outsiders to favoured insiders and hands them a windfall. Dismantling Pan-Europe, Pan-America, and Danubian schemes as geographically incoherent or coercive, he anticipates the later vocabulary of trade creation and diversion, and warns that partial blocs turn cooperation into exclusion.

To put the question the other way around: suppose that some machinery for international co-operation on a worldwide scale, like the League of Nations, is set up; should it be based on regional blocs or on independent states?

Why should the owner of a tree, a machine, or any capital asset continue to draw net income when competition ought to bid the asset's price up until no surplus remains? The pure time-preference theory — a doctrine moderns often dismiss as absurd — answers that interest is no 'fruit' of physical productivity at all, but an expression of the premium people place on attaining goals sooner rather than later. Defending Fetter and Mises, Kirzner disarms the productivity counterexamples — Fisher's sheep, Knight's Crusonia plant, Samuelson's growing rice — by showing they establish only commodity own-rates, never the Böhm-Bawerkian phenomenon of a present value generating a greater future value. Interest's essence, he insists in Menger's essentialist spirit, is value-productivity rooted in time preference, even as physical productivity may still shape the observed rate.

‘A theory of interest must be essentially a value-theory.’

A pro-choice libertarian welcoming Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority may seem a contradiction, yet Rothbard builds exactly that case in this February 1993 strategy essay. Christian conservatives, he argues, are not aspiring theocrats but people fighting a left-liberal elite that used government to assault Christian culture; the true battleground is not the bedroom but anti-discrimination law, which he condemns as an assault on property and freedom of association. He would return abortion to the states through radical decentralization and the Tenth Amendment, narrow the establishment clause to mere tax funding of churches, and replace public schools, those centers of ideological brainwashing, with unregulated private and home schooling. His conclusion is a call to abandon sectarian isolation: after the Cold War and amid political correctness, paleolibertarians belong in an anti-egalitarian coalition of the Right.

Establishing a religion has a specific meaning: paying for ministers and churches out of taxpayer funds.

Robert Frost's fork in the road supplies the governing image: a society that keeps choosing government intervention travels a path that grows harder to leave the longer it is followed. Surveying the decades after the Foundation for Economic Education's 1946 founding, Hazlitt traces one recurring pattern across Bretton Woods and the collapse of gold convertibility, minimum-wage floors that price low-productivity workers out of jobs, unemployment insurance that lengthens joblessness, rent control that starves buildings of maintenance, and OPEC-era oil price controls. Each measure suppresses prices or defers costs, then becomes politically irreversible as constituencies organize around the distortion. Beneath the critique lies a positive claim: prices transmit dispersed knowledge better than officials can, so markets correct errors that intervention only compounds.

The wrong road has been the road of government economic intervention.

The savings-and-loan collapse is usually blamed on private greed or reckless deregulation; Sennholz reads it instead as the predictable failure of a politically designed housing-finance cartel. Tracing the thrifts from voluntary building societies through federal chartering, the Home Loan Bank System, and flat-rate deposit insurance, he argues that Washington restricted entry, socialized risk, and forced institutions to borrow short while lending long on favored mortgages. When 1970s inflation lifted market rates above regulated ceilings, the protected structure buckled. The 1989 Reform and Rescue Act, in his account, merely renamed agencies and shifted losses to taxpayers while prosecuting managers and sparing the legislators who built the system. His remedy is abolition: liquidate insolvent firms through bankruptcy and privatize deposit insurance entirely.

Federal deposit insurance subsidizes risk in direct proportion to the degree of risk taken.

Three disorders defined the late-1980s world economy, and Haberler traces each to the same root: not technical malfunction but domestic policy failure. The persistent US budget and trade deficits, matched by German and Japanese surpluses; the volatility of a managed float in which governments pretend to know equilibrium rates and unsettle markets with interventions and communiques; and a debt crisis, opened by Mexico in 1982, that he reads less as a liquidity shortage than as the fruit of inflation, exchange controls, and bloated state enterprises. Rejecting Ricardian equivalence as psychologically false, he prescribes a credible multi-year phaseout of the structural deficit, funded by a stiff gasoline tax, and would leave currencies to competitive markets, contrasting Argentina's squandered decline with Chile's liberalization.

People just don’t think that way. Nobody knows what his future tax liabilities will be, let alone those of his children and grandchildren.

The claim that Black Americans had been shut out of postwar prosperity is met here with income statistics arguing the reverse. Measured in constant dollars, Hazlitt shows, median Black family income rose sharply between 1949 and 1969 while the share of families under $3,000 fell steeply—gains at least fully proportional to those of white families. He concedes the persistent relative gap, Black median income climbing only from 51 to 63 percent of white, and warns against treating either group as homogeneous across region, age, and class. Rising Black teenage unemployment he blames chiefly on minimum-wage laws that price the low-skilled out of jobs, holding the free market, not regulation, to be the strongest counterforce to discrimination. The engine of advance, he concludes in this 1971 essay, is integration into an expanding capitalist economy, not a separate "black economy."

What chiefly counts is the productivity of the whole economy; what counts is the maximization of the incentives to that productivity.

What one person can do against the drift toward socialism is the easy question; the harder one is what defenders of liberty must do together. Hazlitt reframes the problem strategically: interventionism survives not through bad arguments alone but through entrenched institutions—agencies, beneficiaries, pressure groups, and paid experts, some 2,133 federal bureaus by the Hoover Commission's 1954 count—each defending its own program with specialized authority. His remedy is a division of intellectual labor: general principles cannot substitute for detailed mastery of farm policy, labor law, monetary policy, and taxation. He distrusts business as a reliable ally, invokes Bastiat on the state as the fiction by which everyone lives at everyone else's expense, and settles on honest money as the single front where every libertarian can concentrate.

The war must be fought on a thousand fronts, and the true libertarians are grossly outnumbered on practically all these fronts.