The archive.

Why do people consent to their own enslavement? Rescued here from Montaigne's shadow, the sixteenth-century Discourse of Voluntary Servitude is read by Rothbard as an abstract inquiry into the mechanics of domination rather than a topical anti-tyrannical pamphlet. La Boétie's insight is that no tyrant holds independent power: subjects lend him their taxes, offices, soldiers, and submission, so every regime rests finally on popular acquiescence. From this follows a strategy of liberation by withdrawal — not tyrannicide but collective refusal to cooperate. Rothbard reconstructs why so simple a remedy is rarely taken: habit deforms the memory of freedom, spectacle and mystification manufacture consent, and a hierarchy of favorites and officials profits from despotism and passes it downward. He closes by turning the analysis on the modern state, whose mystique a perceptive minority must demystify and desanctify.

Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed.

Only actual choice reveals preference, and only at the instant it is made — this principle of 'demonstrated preference' is the lever with which Rothbard rebuilds utility and welfare economics. Utility is ordinal, never measurable; he rejects both Samuelson's revealed preference, which smuggles in stable orderings across time, and the indifference curves of Hicks and Allen, since indifference is never enacted in action. Turning to welfare, he grants that economics can make no interpersonal utility comparisons, then shows that voluntary exchange itself demonstrates mutual gain: each party acts to benefit, so the free market raises social utility without measurement. Coercion reverses the verdict. Because the state rests on taxation, which injures some against their demonstrated consent, no government act can be shown to raise social utility — a conclusion he presses against democratic consent, public goods, and the free-rider argument.

Individual valuation is the keystone of economic theory.

Can the historical record ever yield laws that govern future action? Mises's answer, worked out across these essays - first published in German in 1933 as Grundprobleme der Nationalokonomie and offered here in English translation - is an emphatic no. Economics, he insists, is a branch of praxeology, an a priori science whose theorems about choice, means, ends, value, and cost are grasped from within and can be neither confirmed nor refuted by statistics. Writing as Menger's heir in the Methodenstreit, he takes on the Historical School, positivism, and historicism, and reconstructs Max Weber's ideal type only to deny that economic concepts are one-sided historical intensifications. Value is ordinal rather than measurable; socialism, without market prices, cannot calculate; and liberalism follows not as a creed but as theory applied to shared human ends.

Conception is reasoning; understanding is beholding.

The label "Austrian School" began as a term of abuse flung by Berlin's Historical School, and only later became a badge of honor. Tracing the movement to Carl Menger's 1871 Grundsatze, Mises argues that Menger's marginal-utility breakthrough owed nothing to any Viennese circle - he likens him to isolated Austrians such as Bolzano, Mendel, and Freud - and that Bohm-Bawerk and Wieser learned from the book rather than at his feet. The heart of the essay is the Methodenstreit, the clash with Gustav Schmoller over whether a theoretical science of human action, distinct from history, could exist at all. Mises reads Germany's rejection of economic theory as politically motivated, a servant of protectionism and Sozialpolitik, and follows Werner Sombart's drift from Schmollerite historicism to open apologetics for Hitler.

Until the end of the Seventies there was no "Austrian School." There was only Carl Menger.

As old as government itself, the hidden economy springs, in this 1984 pamphlet, from human nature choosing among the alternatives that taxation and regulation leave open. Sennholz's first move is to separate the underground producer from the criminal underworld: the latter preys on persons and property, the former supplies wanted goods and services outside official permission, reporting, or taxation. Minimum wages, overtime mandates, building codes, licensing, union privileges, taxi medallions, and Social Security earnings limits all price willing workers out of lawful jobs, so informal work becomes a labor market for people whom law has excluded, students, retirees, moonlighting teachers, gypsy cabs, barter networks, undocumented field hands. Even the unemployment rate, he shows, dissolves once hidden workers misreport themselves idle. The verdict is libertarian: the underground is no anomaly but the shadow cast by intervention itself.

There is no doubt that the underground economy is essentially an employment phenomenon. Where government causes disemployment the underground offers ample opportunities for employment. It offers jobs to the officially unemployable.

Written in the shock after September 11, this essay treats the attacks as a declaration of war not on the United States alone but on civilization itself, on the peaceful exchange and association Sennholz equates with civilized life. The enemy is new because he is faceless and stateless, linked to regimes yet fighting as none. Sennholz traces the anger to Islam's fusion of faith and rule, to the Taliban, and pointedly to American blowback: the money and intelligence that once armed anti-Soviet jihad, a bitter harvest whose seeds Washington helped sow. He roots much of the hatred in U.S. support for Israel and prescribes a libertarian peace of secure property, privatization, and open land markets. Against calls for expeditionary war he warns of another Vietnam, rejects nuclear vengeance absolutely, and urges intelligence-led self-defense: detection, pursuit, arrest, and trial.

To wreak a nuclear holocaust on any Muslim city would be a crime against humanity and the start of a hundred-year-war between Islam and the West.

April 1999: the dollar is slipping against the yen and the euro, and Sennholz reads that weakness as a symptom of a credit disease hidden beneath the era's celebrated low consumer-price inflation. Subdued CPI figures, he insists, prove nothing when the real action lies in asset prices, credit aggregates, and the world dollar standard. He widens the meaning of inflation from narrowly measured money to the expansion of credit and claims, securitization multiplying leverage outside conventional statistics, Long Term Capital Management, asset-backed paper approaching four trillion dollars, a Wall Street bubble fed by the very institutions the Fed oversees. Real saving meanwhile collapses as borrowing accelerates, and foreign capital and mercantilist central banks prop up the whole edifice. The Fed, he concludes, is trapped: cut rates and the dollar flees, raise them and the bubble bursts into deflationary recession.

Unfortunately, the popular faith in sophisticated computer systems and speculation models is no substitute for basic economic knowledge.

Beneath America's rhetoric of surpluses and fiscal restraint, Sennholz finds chronic deficit spending disguised by raided Social Security trust funds and debt ceilings suspended through Treasury maneuver, creative financing, as he dryly names it. His method is demystification: surplus becomes hidden deficit, the dollar safe haven becomes a mortgaged harbor carrying the biggest debt on earth, and Treasury wealth becomes capital already consumed. The reserve currency, unlike gold, costs almost nothing to issue and rests entirely on belief; on that base banks, offshore lenders, and foreign central banks pile expanding layers of dollar credit. Low Federal Reserve rates inflate housing and tempt owners to extract equity, the domestic face of the wider pyramid. Should confidence break, liquidation could sink the dollar and equities alike, leaving military overreach after September 11, and a looming Iraq war, resting on a fragile financial base.

Many a victory has been suicidal.

A brief 2002 tour of a few Russian towns becomes the occasion for an Austrian diagnosis of why the passage from command socialism to markets stayed slow, painful, and morally confused. Sennholz reads post-Soviet Russia through Ludwig von Mises's socialist-calculation argument: without private ownership and market prices, the USSR was not merely mismanaged but structurally incoherent, and seventy years of institutional and psychological habit could not be shed by decree. He follows Yeltsin's price liberalization, voucher privatization, and land and housing reform against the resistance of the Duma, subsidy expectations, and inflationary finance, distinguishing formal ownership from real capitalism. The economy, he argues, hovers between command, market, and black-market orders, while oligarchs gain wealth through political connection. Prosperity, he concludes, waits on a change in economic thought toward freedom.

The distance from Communism to democratic freedom and a market order is greater by far than the distance from the poorest market economy to the most productive and prosperous country.

Ancient Mesopotamia gave the world law, commerce, and art; modern Iraq, in Sennholz's telling, has produced mainly bloody revolution, coups, and war. Writing weeks after American and British forces toppled Saddam Hussein, he warns that military victory is not the same as liberal reconstruction: a centralized apparatus can be shattered far faster than a free order can be built. Saddam's rule figures here as the culmination of militarized Arab socialism, its shortages, black markets, and inflation the predictable fruit of political control over economic life. Against triumphalism, he cautions that occupation may inflame Islamic and nationalist resentment, and that immediate national elections would only turn office into the prize of sectarian struggle among Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. His prescription is decentralized: local self-government, secure property, free speech, and open markets as peace-making institutions.

Only the market order, which has no borders and makes no ethnic or religious distinctions, would bring peace and prosperity to Iraqi society.

When the dot-com boom collapsed, Alan Greenspan pleaded that no central banker could know a bubble existed or prick one without triggering recession. Sennholz reverses both claims. The 1990s, he argues, furnished abundant warning—extreme price-earnings ratios, debt-financed mergers, stock buybacks, collapsing savings, swelling consumer debt—and the Fed held concrete instruments to restrain the mania: margin requirements, reserve requirements, the discount rate, open-market operations. Greenspan preferred popularity and accommodation to discipline. But the polemic reaches past one man to the institution itself: a politically created fiat-money monopoly that, by holding interest rates below market levels, inevitably breeds speculation, malinvestment, and cyclical collapse. Sennholz extends the postmortem to housing, Treasuries, and precious metals, warning that fresh rate cuts merely relocate the fever rather than permit the liquidation recovery requires.

Economic bubbles have plagued the American economy ever since the First United States Bank opened its doors in Philadelphia in 1791.

Executive pay had become a public scandal by the early 2000s, and this compact essay enters the fray by refusing both the egalitarian outrage and the blanket defense. Compensation genuinely paid for scarce managerial ability, Sennholz argues, obeys the same law of supply and demand as any wage; he decomposes executive income into three parts—managerial labor, interest on invested capital, and entrepreneurial profit—and applies a property-rights test, since a firm that overpays gives away stockholder wealth while one that underpays loses the best manager. Most large-company CEOs, he insists, are not entrepreneurs in the Rockefeller or Ford mold but trained organization men. What deserves censure is the 1990s windfall: Federal Reserve credit expansion inflated equity prices far past corporate earnings, turning stock options into unearned "bubble lucre" and tempting some executives into accounting fraud.

Nothing sharpens the sight like envy.