The archive.

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of revolt, and it is this buried drama that the study reconstructs — here in the German translation of Voegelin's unpublished English manuscript "The People of God," expanded after 1947.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.

From a Vienna childhood under Carl Menger's tutelage to advisory rooms in wartime Washington, these memoirs follow a banker who cast himself as a forecaster of storms—the 'political meteorologist' of the title. Somary recounts learning marginal utility as it dissolved the labor theory of value, befriending Schumpeter and Otto Bauer, and building at the Anglo-Austrian Bank a career that let him attempt an Anglo-German naval détente before 1914. Independence, he insists, was the price and reward of foresight: his warnings against unrestricted submarine warfare, postwar inflation, the Great Depression, and Hitler repeatedly isolated him from opinion and power. The later chapters carry him through Swiss supply missions to the United States, a skeptical view of Keynes at Bretton Woods, and a lifelong reading of his age as the long aftermath of the French Revolution.

Beide Männer scheiterten in ihrem Vaterland. Jeder der beiden hatte nur im Ausland wirklichen Erfolg, und doch hatten sie eines gemeinsam: Außerhalb ihres Heimatlandes fühlten sie sich wie im Exil.

English translation: “Both men failed in their native country. Each of them enjoyed real success only abroad, and yet they had one thing in common: outside their homeland they felt as if in exile.”

Those who once denounced anti-Communist witch hunts, Rothbard charges in this August 1994 polemic, now conduct a 'Christian hunt' of their own, recasting ordinary Republican mobilization as sinister 'stealth' takeovers. He refuses the media's tidy split between acceptable economic conservatism and menacing social conservatism, arguing that Christian activists have come to see the state, public schooling, taxation, and liberal culture as one connected enemy. His church-state case is symmetry: if Martin Luther King and Catholic bishops could enter politics from moral premises, so may conservative Christians. Strategically he defines the Republican 'big tent' procedurally, battle for nominations and platforms, then back the winner against Democrats, and reads Oliver North in Virginia, Tom Pauken in Texas, and Allen Quist in Minnesota as populist victories over a country-club establishment, with home schooling as radical resistance to coercive public education.

It is pretty clear that the only separation of religion from the public schools that left-liberals are interested in is from Christianity, not from religion in general.

The 1994 Rwandan slaughter becomes, in this short June polemic, less an event to reconstruct than a lesson to extract against the 'New World Order' and its dream of imposing democracy and multiethnicity by force. Rothbard blames the catastrophe on European colonial borders that fused hostile peoples into artificial states, a pattern he links to Burundi, the Balkans, and the Caucasus, and rejects UN troops, air strikes, and imposed elections as imperial fantasy. His anti-interventionism is also anti-centralist: violence, he contends, is the predictable yield of forcing distinct peoples into shared political containers and then demanding they practice liberal universalism. The essay is disfigured by what accompanies that argument, speculation about Hutu-Tutsi intelligence and character that converts political history into ethnic destiny, even as he professes to wish the groups could coexist through free exchange.

In the Rwanda massacres, liberals are again unwilling to face the root causes: clashing tribes in a fairly small territorial area.

Cast as a mock 'Modest Proposal' to invade and permanently occupy the entire planet, this 1994 satire turns Swift's method on post-Cold War foreign policy. With the Soviet enemy gone, Rothbard argues, liberal and neoconservative elites preserved interventionism by inflating 'national interest' until every hunger, civil war, undemocratic regime, and stray 'Hate Thought' abroad became America's business. Sanctions he unmasks as war's preparatory form rather than a moderate alternative to it; UN and NATO approval, Security Council bargaining, and CNN spectacle he treats as rituals that consecrate imperial management. The joke is extrapolation, not fantasy: if nation-building requires armies, elections, and welfare, then withdrawal undoes the project and occupation must be permanent. He indicts both parties as interventionist and rests his hope in an antiwar, paleoconservative grassroots ferment.

The U.S. must, very soon, Invade the Entire World!

Behind a debate ostensibly about 'a few puny tariffs,' Rothbard finds in this 1994 chapter the real stakes of NAFTA: not free trade at all, but a constitution for managed globalization. The disproportionate intensity of the fight is his clue. He reclassifies the agreement as a state-capitalist and Wilsonian project, an economy 'governed by an oligarchic ruling coalition of Big Government, Big Business, and Big Intellectuals/Big Media,' coupled to the Keynesian goal of internationally coordinated fiat-money inflation. The Establishment's version of free trade, he charges, is Orwellian: export promotion subsidized by taxpayers, not the unilateral removal of barriers. Domestically he reads the contest as a war within business, exporters and their bankers defeating import-competing firms, and he ends by calling the New World Order a fragile utopian project that public exposure could still obstruct.

The truth can make us free; and the panic of the entire Establishment in the weeks before Nafta shows that they know what they will be up against once the public is on to their game.

With the Soviet enemy gone but the machinery of alarm still running, the Clinton administration needed a fresh Bad Guy—and in January 1994 it found one in Pyongyang. This antiwar commentary dismantles the North Korean nuclear scare as a politically convenient revival of Cold War mobilization, the "last good war" that once united liberals and conservatives. Leaning on historian Bruce Cumings, Rothbard answers each element of the panic: the "massed" troops have sat near the border since the 1970s, the inspection dispute concerns technical "special inspections," and Les Aspin himself conceded no evidence of plutonium production. The demonizing of Kim Jong Il, he notes, recycles a quarter-century of South Korean intelligence rumor. Threat inflation, he argues, is a bureaucratic ritual timed to defense appropriations.

For the new North Korean threat is, as usual, totally bogus.

As communism and Yugoslavia came apart, long-suppressed nationalities returned to the world stage—and with them a category libertarian thought had wrongly ignored, treating only individuals and states as real. The "nation-state," Rothbard argues, is itself the problem, its hyphen fusing coercive territorial rule with the inherited communities of language, religion, and place that Mises and Nock knew to distinguish. He turns that distinction against Wilsonian collective security, which sanctifies every existing border as property rather than the residue of conquest and dynastic bargaining, and offers secession as the remedy—any group free to leave one state and join another. A closing anarcho-capitalist thought experiment of total private ownership recasts open borders, citizenship, and voting as matters of consent, contract, and exit.

The genuine nation, or nationality, has made a dramatic reappearance on the world stage.

Free trade is the banner NAFTA raises, Sennholz argues, and then quietly lowers with side accords, labor provisions, environmental restrictions, and a thicket of regulation. This 1994 essay treats the agreement not as liberalization but as managed trade dressed in liberal rhetoric. Against popular fears of mass relocation, he insists that firms follow productivity, infrastructure, and institutions rather than nominal wages, and that Mexico remains burdened by corruption, union militancy, the unproductive ejido system, and PEMEX oil kept in political hands. Economic law, he maintains, will override political design, but the agreement itself cannot improve business conditions on either side of the border. What it most resembles, he concludes, is mercantilist policy—promoting exports while limiting imports and empowering commissions and bureaucrats.

NAFTA officially raises the beautiful flag of free trade and peaceful exchange, but then quietly takes it down again with numerous qualifications, regulations, side accords, sequels, and supplements.