The archive.

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.

The American "money question" runs from Civil War greenbacks and Bryan's Cross of Gold to the Federal Reserve, and Reed's 1982 essay revives it with a radical claim: money must be divorced from politics and returned to the market. He builds on Carl Menger's account of money as an emergent product of exchange rather than a state invention, arising as traders seek a widely marketable medium to escape the limits of barter. Precious metals prevailed through durability, divisibility, and stability; paper began as a redeemable substitute before political privilege turned it into unbacked fiat. Against reforms that leave the state monopoly intact, Reed insists the framework of thought must change first, likening faith in managed money to obsolete superstition and modest fixes to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Monetary history records no instance of a people voluntarily choosing in the marketplace to use unbacked fiat paper as their money!

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”!

Postwar Europe, in Sennholz's telling, defended itself against communism without any confidence in its own inheritance, gripped by a general mood of despair over an order that seemed to have failed of its own accord. This April 1996 commemorative essay reconstructs the climate in which the Foundation for Economic Education arose and advances a pointed revisionist thesis: the classical liberal order had not collapsed but had been smothered and dismantled by political authority. Sennholz gathers the scattered remnant that resisted, from Orwell and disillusioned socialists to Hazlitt's Economics In One Lesson and Mises's Human Action, and links Marxian planning to Keynesian deficit finance as forms of the same drift toward political supremacy. He closes by reading election-year credit expansion and permanent deficits as a political business cycle of manipulation and debt transfer.

It was the surrender of freedom that provoked the return of autocracy and tyranny.

National Socialism cannot be grasped as mere immorality, propaganda, or institutional power; it is a religious phenomenon, and a satanic force cannot be beaten by ethics and humanity alone. From that 1938 provocation Voegelin builds a morphology of sacred-political symbols reaching back to Echnaton's Aton cult, where a world-god and god-son king bind cosmos and empire. His decisive concept is the Realissimum: whatever is experienced as holy becomes the most real center around which collective life crystallizes. When secularization lets worldly contents — people, race, class, nation — swell until God vanishes behind them, these become innerworldly apocalypses, and the Führer becomes the point at which the sacred substance of the people speaks. Judged from a Christian standpoint, such divinization of collectives is apostasy.

Wo immer ein Wirkliches im religiösen Erlebnis sich als ein Heiliges zu erkennen gibt, wird es zum Allerwirklichsten, zum Realissimum.

English translation: “Wherever a reality reveals itself in religious experience as a sacred one, it becomes the most real of all, the realissimum.”

Prosperity, employment, stable prices, a clean environment, care for the disadvantaged: on such ends most Americans agree, this compact 1996 essay argues, and the bitter quarrels begin only over means. Sennholz sorts the combatants into activists who would mandate, tax, and print money and those who would trust property and exchange, and traces the split to incompatible theories of social order. Against the Marxian conflict dogma, which he sees extended into later idioms of race, gender, and generational struggle, he sets Adam Smith's Invisible Hand and a harmony thesis grounded not in sentiment but in the higher productivity of cooperation and the division of labor. The closing turn is ethical: rights and justice cannot be reduced to votes, and a majority can violate them as surely as any private actor.

Evil is evil; it is none the better for being committed on behalf of the majority.

By the mid-1990s measured consumer-price inflation had fallen to roughly 2.5 percent across the developed world, and mainstream economists were ready to declare the long battle won. Sennholz accepts the statistics and rejects the conclusion. Reduced price indexes, he argues in this August 1996 note, say nothing about the inflationary institutions that remain intact: the central bank's legal monopoly over money, legal-tender laws, welfare-state deficit finance, and the paper-dollar standard completed when the United States cut its last gold tie in 1971. Easy credit has not vanished but migrated from consumer goods into securities, leveraged speculation, and soaring stock valuations. So long as legislators and central bankers keep discretionary control of fiat money, he warns, inflationary pressure will surface again in one form or another.

Inflation is not dead but very much alive. It has moved from Main Street to Wall Street.

If imports truly destroyed jobs, Sennholz observes, the vast expansion of American imports after 1950 should have produced permanent mass unemployment, yet living standards rose instead. This July 1996 essay dismantles three explanations of joblessness: the Marxian reserve army of labor, the Keynesian shortfall of spending, and the protectionist charge that low-wage foreigners displace domestic workers. Employment, he insists, is a phenomenon of productivity and cost; jobs are not a fixed national stock that foreign sellers can drain but arise wherever labor can be employed productively at a price buyers will bear. Unemployment thus signals maladjustment rather than market failure, as training and specialization drift away from what commerce actually values. International competition disciplines sellers and steers labor and capital toward better uses, while tariffs merely shelter high-cost producers and raise prices.

Free trade is fair trade; those who deny it to others do not deserve it for themselves.

What affluent Americans call a sweatshop, Sennholz contends, the workers inside may hail as an opportunity shop, and what looks from above like a slave wage may be, by local measure, a living one. This adversarial November 1996 essay reinterprets foreign factory labor as a step out of worse deprivation rather than its cause, insisting that wages and working conditions rise with the stock of capital invested per worker, not with legislation or union command. The same productivity, not reformist law, once freed Western women and children from the early mills. Campaigns against child labor abroad, he argues, court unintended consequences and often mask ordinary protectionism dressed in humanitarian sentiment. He defends the post-Cold War order of expanding trade and multinational production as an exchange from which both foreign workers and American export industries visibly gain.

They are old-fashioned protectionists who seek to disguise their odious intentions in the sweet talk of great love for children.

Saving produces genuine growth; credit expansion produces boom and bust, Garrison compresses the Austrian theory of the business cycle into that contrast. When artificial credit pushes the bank rate below the natural rate of interest, he argues, the result is not merely too much investment but malinvestment: capital committed to the wrong stages of an economy's intertemporal production structure, later exposed and unwound in the downturn. Drawing the line from Menger, Boehm-Bawerk, Wicksell, Mises, and Hayek back to the British Currency School, the summary sets capital-based macroeconomics against the Keynesian aggregates that see only investment in the lump, and against demand management as a cure. Its policy conclusion is spare: prevent the distortion at its monetary source through hard money and decentralized banking.

Changes within the capital structure may be significant even when the change in net investment is not.