3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Disney's plan for a 3,000-acre theme park beside the Manassas battlefield looked to many like free-market development colliding with historical preservation. Rothbard denies the premise. The project is no expression of capitalism at all, he argues, because Disney sought $163 million in Virginia taxpayer money for roads and infrastructure, forced subsidy dressed as enterprise. Market analysis, he insists, must ask whose ends are served and whether exchange is voluntary or coerced. From means he turns to content, attacking the park's planned pedagogy under Michael Eisner and the choice of a prominent Columbia revisionist as its historical consultant, a signal that the Civil War and Reconstruction would be narrated through a Marxist frame. What awaits, he warns, is corporate welfare and contested cultural authority borrowing the prestige of the market.
He is none other than the notorious Eric Foner, distinguished Marxist-Leninist historian at Columbia University, and the country's most famous Marxist historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Dictators and avowed socialists are the obvious threats to liberty, but Sennholz's polemical diagnosis reaches further: the more durable enemies are the ordinary beneficiaries of coercive systems—government employees, public educators, tax consumers, and the recipients of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, Pell Grants, Social Security, and Medicare—whose incomes depend on the state's expansion. Translating political economy into a moral psychology of dependence, he argues that bureaucracy breeds a class with no interest in deregulation or fiscal restraint, and that when voting follows income interest, democracy becomes an engine of endless redistribution. Yet the essay refuses fatalism. Because these constituencies quarrel among themselves and defend only their own subsidies, no unified anti-liberty coalition can form, and a residual attachment to freedom survives in every human heart.
Power pollutes whatever it touches.
Eleven languages were spoken in the battle Hayek served in as the Habsburg empire collapsed, the scene, he later said, that first turned his mind toward the problems of political organization. Assembled from autobiographical notes and interviews and published here in its 1994 form, this dialogue follows him from imperial Vienna through Mises's private seminar and the marginal-utility tradition of Menger, to the London School of Economics and his long duel with Keynes, and on to Chicago, Freiburg, and the Nobel. He recalls The Road to Serfdom, his essay 'Economics and Knowledge' on the market as a coordinator of dispersed knowledge, and the psychology of The Sensory Order. Throughout, he casts economics not as a mechanics of equilibrium but as a theory of adaptation to the unknowable, and socialism's central error as the conceit of designing society.
There are two alternative methods of ordering social affairs—competition and government direction. I am opposed to government direction, but I want to make competition work.
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.
Theft remains theft even when a majority blesses it—the austere charge at the heart of Sennholz's essay on democratic redistribution. Beginning from cooperation as the basic fact of economic life, he contrasts the market's contractual order of private property with command systems that direct labor by official decree, then argues that each rests on a distinct ethical order. His decisive move applies the commandments against theft, violence, and fraud not only to private persons but to democratic majorities: people who would never steal individually endorse tariffs, transfer payments, and compulsory benefits collectively. Inflation earns special scorn as hidden redistribution enriching politicians while robbing savers and pensioners, and public debt as a promise the spenders mean to inflate away. Two souls, he writes, contend in every breast—one honest, one eager to plunder by ballot.
A very popular form of thievery is inflation. It takes property away from millions of unsuspecting individuals and enriches politicians and their favorites by printing and emitting ever-new quantities of money.
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.
Christian churches have always shaped the economic affairs of their believers, but two modern movements trouble Sennholz precisely because they pursue mercy and justice through political coercion rather than charity: the Social Gospel and liberation theology. Separating ends from means, he grants their humanitarian language while arguing that their programs hand moral authority to legislators, regulators, and expropriating states. Liberation theology, in his reading, smuggles the Marxian doctrine of class struggle and Leninist dependency theory into Christian ethics, then blames Latin American poverty on a capitalism that scarcely exists there, the region's economic life being interventionist and bureaucratic rather than free. Against clerical appeals to equality he sets differences in ability, industry, and responsibility, warning that the rhetoric of justice curdles into a politics of envy. Compassion divorced from economic reasoning, he concludes, becomes an apology for coercion and violence.
While the churchmen are speaking of peace, they are sowing the seeds of violence.