The archive.

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.

A traffic signal regulates an intersection two ways: by being perfectly timed already, or by being faulty in a manner that feeds back and corrects itself — and that analogy carries the argument here. Economists, Kirzner charges, have flattened Hayek's insight into a single claim, that equilibrium prices efficiently summarize dispersed knowledge, as in the textbook tin example. The deeper, more Austrian truth concerns disequilibrium prices: the wrong prices, the missed trades, the disappointment and regret of a tea market where beneficial exchanges go unmade. Such prices coordinate not by telling the truth but by exposing error, alerting entrepreneurs to arbitrage and profit. Faulting even Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions for the usual emphasis, Kirzner concludes that the market's deepest service is not to broadcast what is already known but to generate the conditions under which the unknown is progressively uncovered — which is why price controls do such damage.

What Hayek's 'Austrian' insights permit us to see is that the social function served by market prices is captured far more significantly by the concept of discovery than by that of communication.

Strip the language of national defense from protectionism and what remains, Sennholz argues, is raw political force: the power to tax one man to subsidize another's business. This 1995 essay treats tariffs, import restrictions, and export promotion as a recurring alliance of fear, interest-group pressure, and economic fallacy shared by old mercantilism and new labor-nationalism alike. The claim that barriers preserve jobs he answers by showing they lower productivity and purchasing power, destroying more employment than they create. The “cheap foreign labor” argument collapses, he notes, once the fiercest agitation targets high-wage Japan and Germany. And the trade deficit with Japan reflects not foreign unfairness but American policy—low saving, capital taxation, and federal deficits—since Japanese dollar earnings flowed back into U.S. Treasury bonds.

Every form of protectionism builds on raw political force.

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.