1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
The Clinton-era “White House Car Talks” floated higher minimum driving ages, forced license surrender by older drivers, limits on cars per household, and alternating driving days — and in these Rothbard sees not environmental administration but the rationing of everyday life. His conceptual move is to read incremental regulation as a political ratchet: concessions never satisfy, because the real target is private automotive freedom itself. The automobile matters precisely because it is ordinary, popular, and decentralized, an institution of autonomy that frees the individual from schedules, terminals, and collective routes. He traces the hostility back before pollution, to liberal contempt for 1950s tail-fins, and groups the war on the car with gun control, smoking bans, and attacks on speech as one collectivist project. If that isn’t totalitarianism, he asks, what would qualify?
Instead, the private automobile made each individual “King of the Road”; he could ride wherever and whenever he wanted, with no compulsion to clear it with his neighbors or his “community.”
On the rebellion’s bicentenary, Rothbard overturns the textbook story of a localized western Pennsylvania uprising crushed by Washington’s 13,000-man army. Recent research, he argues, shows that no one paid Hamilton’s whiskey excise across the entire American back-country — from Maryland and Virginia through Kentucky — in a non-violent, civil-disobedient refusal that no local jury would convict. He distinguishes hated internal taxation, with its intrusive revenue men, from external tariffs, and roots the resistance in the British cry of “liberty, property, and no excise!” The excise favored large distillers over small, struck at whiskey used as frontier money, and was eventually repealed under the Jeffersonians. Both rebels and officials, he adds, conspired to bury the scale of the revolt — the former to escape prosecution, the latter to hide federal weakness.
The Whiskey Rebellion, then, considered properly, was a victory for liberty and property rather than for federal taxation.
Vouchers failed in California, Rothbard insists, not because teachers’ unions outspent them but because the scheme itself was flawed. Proposition 174, the most ambitious voucher plan to date, lost overwhelmingly — and he reads that defeat as voters sensing that the certificate was another mechanism of state redistribution, not an escape from it. His decisive principle is that control always follows subsidy: funding private schools with tax money would extend government domination to the last more-or-less independent institutions, while forcing middle-class taxpayers to subsidize others’ choices. Shifting the debate from abstract “choice” to property and money honestly earned, he rejects education vouchers alongside food and housing subsidies. The alternative he offers is concrete: deregulate private schools, cut public-school budgets and taxes, and restore strictly local control.
By far the best "voucher," and the only voucher needed, is the dollar bill that you earn honestly, and don't grab from others, even if they are merely taxpayers.
To retire into idle leisure while still capable of work is, in this brief essay of moral economy, a form of waste—of human energy and of the capital that future generations will need. Sennholz opposes a “trough philosophy,” in which retirees draw down private savings or public benefits, to an “accountability philosophy” that treats continued productivity and capital preservation as duties owed to one's descendants. Every consumption of capital, he argues, diminishes society's productivity regardless of who does it. Drawing on Austrian capital theory and a Protestant-inflected discipline, he holds up Ludwig von Mises, who taught and wrote until death, as his model of productive old age, and indicts Social Security and Medicare for sustaining a leisure class at the expense of active producers.
Fortunately for the world, the great men among us retire only when death calls them.
Clinton’s pledge to end “welfare as we know it” would not shrink the welfare state, Rothbard argues, but enlarge it — swapping idle welfare for subsidized workfare that costs the taxpayer more. He redirects popular anger: the middle and working classes rage that recipients sit idle, when they ought to object to funding them at all. The proposed reform, he shows, hides a whole apparatus of wage subsidies, public make-work, child care, food stamps, housing, transportation, and a supervisory bureaucracy. His sharpest distinction is between productive service and state-sponsored motion: activity coerced from taxpayers and staged by government has no moral weight simply because it is no longer idleness. Workfare thus proves worse than welfare, normalizing dependency under the language of work — one more stage in a long march toward socialism.
It is, in other words, simply another part of the 20th century's Long March toward socialism.
A defense-secretary nominee greeted with near-unanimous acclaim collapsed within a month, and Rothbard refuses the press’s explanation that Bobby Ray Inman was merely thin-skinned or psychologically unstable. The withdrawal, he argues, was a coordinated media-political campaign. He runs through the pending controversies — the International Signal and Control and Tracor ties, and “Nannygate” — but treats them as ammunition rather than proof of guilt. The deeper root, he contends, lay in Inman’s 1981 decision to restrict Israeli access to U.S. satellite photographs after the bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor, which earned him the lasting hostility of William Safire and other pro-Israel commentators. Mapping CIA factions and “Big Media’s” power to define plausibility, he insists that “conspiracy” can name ordinary elite coordination, and laments that Inman fled rather than forcing the networks into the open.
To pundits, media people, politicians, and leading “well-informed sources” inside the Beltway, Bobby Ray Inman could walk on water.
As the federal debt crosses the $5 trillion mark, Sennholz calls it bankruptcy already underway—not the legal kind that liquidates a debtor, but a moral and monetary default achieved through inflation, taxation, and currency debasement. He dismantles the comforting slogans: “we owe it to ourselves” erases the real distinction between creditor and debtor and ignores the foreign institutions holding much of the debt, while the promise that future income will offset present borrowing founders on the fact that deficits produce political claims, not productive assets. His core Austrian move treats debt as a present reallocation of scarce capital: government borrowing consumes real savings, lowers productivity, and rewards industries tied to public spending, leaving later generations a weakened, politicized economy along with the interest bill.
Debts, follies, and crimes are generally mixed together; the federal debt is a $5 trillion mixture.
A bank run, in this compact polemic, is no irrational panic but a market test that exposes fractional-reserve banking for what it is: a system holding a fraction of the cash it has promised depositors on demand. Taking the Ohio and Maryland runs of the 1980s as his occasion, Rothbard asks why federal deposit insurance inspires confidence where private and state insurers failed, and answers that the FDIC and FSLIC are credible only because the Federal Reserve can print legal tender without limit. Insurance can cover calculable risks; it cannot make a structurally insolvent industry solvent. What passes for banking soundness, he argues, is a confidence trick that would be prosecuted as fraud in any other business. His remedy is abolition: end the Fed, the FDIC, and the FSLIC.
Fractional reserve banks, being inherently insolvent, are uninsurable.
Slightly undersized California peaches and nectarines, perfectly edible, must by federal law be destroyed — and in that absurdity Rothbard finds the whole logic of New Deal agriculture. Farm policy, he argues, is producer cartelization enforced by the state: minimum-size rules become a quality-control language for price maintenance, outlawing cheaper fruit because it threatens the margins of larger produce. His case is Gerawan Farming, prosecuted for selling smaller fruit through channels serving poorer consumers; the forbidden fruit is forbidden because it is affordable. A USDA official’s candid admission that the rules protect the grower’s higher-profit item exposes the truth beneath the consumer-protection rhetoric. Here, in miniature, is the welfare state as Rothbard sees it: coercive cartelization that cuts production, raises prices, and injures the poorest, all draped in humanitarian language.
One of the most horrifying features of the New Deal was its agricultural policy: in the name of “curing the depression,” the federal government organized a giant cartel of America’s farmers.
Denounce deficits, then propose both major tax increases and major spending increases: Rothbard calls Clinton’s February 1993 budget schizoid, a program resting on the pretense that taxation, spending, deficits, and production sit in hermetically sealed compartments. Against that, he presses economic interconnectedness — taxes erode saving and raise business costs; only cutting spending can lower the deficit; and government “investment” is not private capital formation but resources diverted to political allocation. The rhetoric is the real target. Renaming taxes as “contributions” and spending as “investment” makes Clintonomics, he charges, Orwellian economics, coercion relabeled as social responsibility. Invoking Austrian business-cycle theory against Keynesian stimulus, and measuring the plan against Reaganomics and Bushonomics, he concludes that beneath the incoherence runs a consistent tendency: the expansion of government at the expense of the private market.
In short, Clintonomics is, in essence, a Great Leap Forward, American style, not toward Maoist communism but toward Democratic Socialism, toward Marxism without the Leninism.
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.
Modern dictatorship is not rule by a clique, a bureaucracy, or a defensive capitalist class; it arises, Lederer argues, when a society loses the classes, parties, associations, and publics through which individuals become politically articulate. What remains is an amorphous mass, available for emotional mobilization, crystallized around a leader and held together by propaganda that mimics argument while severing it from truth. Tracing d'Annunzio at Fiume, Italian Fascism, and the SA's conquest of the German street, he presents fascism as the destruction of society itself rather than its capture. His warning against the classless society defends not hierarchy but stratification, the plural conflict on which freedom depends. Written in American exile and read here in Angela Kornberger's German rendering of the 1940 English original, State of the Masses, it stands among the first emigre theories of totalitarianism.
Der totalitäre Staat ist der Staat der Massen.
English translation: “The totalitarian state is the state of the masses.”