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.

Can an economist defend laissez-faire without claiming that economics supplies moral ends? In this chapter, Murray N. Rothbard examines that tension through Ludwig von Mises’s public commitments and Austrian advisory career. His openly admiring account shows how currency stabilization, political compromise, and the danger of precipitating a banking collapse complicated the passage from theory to policy. Rothbard’s distinctive claim is that market cooperation cannot safely rest on benefits people fail to understand: economists must explain why interventions may defeat their supporters’ own purposes. His contrast between Mises’s rational persuasion and what he portrays as Hayek’s reliance on evolved practices sharpens the stakes. The chapter offers a defense of public advocacy that distinguishes value-free analysis from the economist’s commitment to peace and prosperity, without claiming to settle the ethical foundations of liberalism.

Voluntary ethnic pluralism is one thing; the doctrine Sennholz calls contemporary multiculturalism is another, and his essay drives a wedge between them. Inherited languages, customs, and religions freely transmitted he defends without reservation; what he attacks is a creed that elevates race and gender above universal moral standards—'multi-morality,' he renames it, a counter-culture aimed at the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western society. Grounding morality in the Ten Commandments read as restraints on evil rather than a program of state virtue, he traces group-defined ethics through Marxism's class morality and Nazism's racial sovereign to present-day identity politics, arguing that each rejects any transcendent source of right. There is no black justice or feminine justice, he insists, only justice. The essay ends on providential confidence: immoral orders are self-destructive, and only the moral will endure.

There is one moral law for all humanity.

Political correctness, in Rothbard's telling, is a regime of linguistic surveillance, and the public condemnation of Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott in 1993, for racial and ethnic slurs and Nazi memorabilia, is his exhibit. He recasts Schott as victim rather than culprit, reclassifies slurs as jokes and memorabilia as harmless collecting, and reads hate-speech norms as the new obscenity law, successor to the 1960s "Filthy Speech" taboos. His most characteristic move is linguistic economy: the anti-Japanese epithet of the title is redescribed as mere American contraction, a birthright of syllabic efficiency. Extending the argument to the shifting accepted terms for Black Americans, the essay collapses state censorship, workplace discipline, and press criticism into one narrative of persecution, and pointedly declines to ask why the words at issue actually wound.

Marge Schott’s sin, so unforgivable as to be beyond redemption, was to use a few Incorrect Words and phrases.

Less an arena of ideas than a theater of ethnic balancing, patronage, and racial antagonism, that is how Rothbard reads the 1993 New York mayoral cycle in this abrasive August election essay. Primaries, he argues, dissolved the old bosses' smoke-filled-room compromises and left group conflict naked, and Dinkins survives as favorite chiefly for lack of an attractive alternative. The sharpest analysis follows consultant David Garth's revival of the New York "fusion" tradition, attaching Giuliani to Liberal and Republican lines and balancing the ticket by borough, religion, and ethnicity through Susan Alter and Herman Badillo, against a fragmented Democratic side with no coordinated slate. Roy Innis appears as a black conservative useful for saying what Giuliani cannot, and the Crown Heights fight over "riot" versus "pogrom" becomes the essay's emblem of symbolic classification displacing real dispute.

Talk of politics as the triumph of symbolism over substance!

Those who once recognized collectivism, socialism, egalitarianism, nihilism, and statism as evil, Rothbard insists in this September 1993 essay, owe a duty to their families, posterity, and country to keep fighting, and neither defeatism nor purity excuses desertion. Against Schumpeter's thesis that socialism is inevitable, he answers that apparent hopelessness is no warrant for surrender, citing the recent collapse of Communism. His central typology names two forms of abandonment: the Beltway "sellout," the young radical absorbed by Washington's incentives until his face and the enemy's grow indistinguishable, and the "retreatist," who flees to Galt's Gulch-style enclaves in search of purity. Both vacate the real battlefield. Drawing on Randolph Bourne to separate country from State, Rothbard demands that liberty be defended in the external world of property and public life, not merely within.

Let’s put it this way: we must not abandon our lives, our properties, our America, the real world, to the barbarians. Never.

Environmental law, in this 1993 essay, has quietly become a vehicle for political control over private economic life. Beginning with NEPA's environmental-impact requirement and the EPA, Sennholz argues that what looks like procedural prudence is in fact a standing license for federal agencies to supervise investment, construction, and enterprise through permits and purse strings. The visible costs of cleanup, he contends, are the smallest part; the real burden hides in delayed projects, lost jobs, higher prices, and diminished living standards that never appear as a single budget line. As overt socialism retreats, he claims, global-warming and ozone alarms hand the old regulatory impulse a new name - the production czar now is an environmental czar - and, lacking market prices, environmental planning repeats the socialist calculation problem: command without coordination, waste dressed as rescue.

Without the help of market prices, which reflect the value judgments of all the participants in the economic process, he cannot calculate, that is, rationally compare the value of input with that of output.

The federal government, Sennholz observes, was not always in the health-care business; its legitimate work was defense against foreign aggression and domestic crime, not the forced redistribution of income. From that narrow standard he tracks the cumulative politicization of American medicine, from Truman's proposed national insurance and Eisenhower's Kerr-Mills aid to the decisive year 1965, when Medicare and Medicaid embedded medical care in Social Security financing. His diagnosis is that entitlement follows a logic of escalation: the state promises benefits, then taxes, then regulates eligibility and provider costs, and finally threatens to jail those who withdraw. Spending and regulation do not close the gap between cost and access; they widen it, driving prices to double and treble the inflation rate. The road ends not in abundance but in price controls and rationing, reversible, he insists, only by restoring medicine to voluntary exchange and the Eighth Commandment.

Politicized medicine is a formidable system built on political expedience and public immorality.

Why do whole societies remain trapped in low productivity, short lives, and weak institutions? Sennholz answers that collective poverty springs less from scarce resources than from moral, religious, and political ideas hostile to production, dogmas against saving, investment, private ownership, and monetary gain. Contrasting prosperous nations with Ethiopia, Somalia, and Bangladesh, he insists development is always difficult but never impossible, provided a society abandons inherited teachings that slander the private-property order as exploitation. Capitalism, in his redefinition, is not predation but a moral system resting on truthfulness, reliability, and voluntary cooperation, disciplined by every party's freedom to withdraw. Where theft, confiscation, and envy-driven redistribution are commonplace, communities become economic wastelands, because even the fear of expropriation smothers investment. The wealth of nations, he concludes, is decided finally in the realm of moral imagination.

Moral, social, and economic ideas that guide human action are the key to human well-being. They make all the difference between wealth and poverty.

From Diocletian's Rome to the French Revolution to Nixon's 1971 wage-price freeze, the same policy keeps returning under the same false promise, and, in Rothbard's telling, keeps failing for the same reason. A legal ceiling set below the market-clearing price cannot cure inflation; it only suppresses the signals that coordinate supply and demand, breeding shortages, rationing, black markets, and coercive enforcement. His central exhibit is the 1946 meat crisis, when controls emptied the butchers' counters and even choked off insulin, only for supply to return within days of decontrol, proof, he argues, that the shortage was manufactured by the controls themselves. Written as the FCC rolled back cable rates and the Clinton administration floated health-care controls, this compact Austrian brief treats prices as social coordinators and ceilings as political violence.

In every age, in every culture, price controls have never worked. They have always been a disaster.

To raise men and women capable of living peaceably and productively, honest, prudent, courageous, charitable, is for Sennholz the true aim of education, a formative task that state schooling converts into an instrument of political direction financed by compulsion. He reads American schooling historically, from the plural order of church schools, academies, and denominational colleges to the mercantilist, Hegelian, Owenite, and Deweyan currents that recast education as social organization from above, with the Dartmouth College case of 1819 standing as a defense of private institutional rights against state absorption. Public schools, he argues, habituate students to taxation and bureaucracy, dulling their critical sense and normalizing a life of political provision. School choice remains incomplete, he insists, while dissenting parents must still fund the state system through taxes; genuine educational freedom rests on voluntary payment and competitive markets, not coercion.

Government education from kindergarten to the university has paved the way for armies of legislators, regulators, tax collectors, assessors, inspectors, policemen, judges, and jailers.

Strip away the slogan and NAFTA is not free trade at all but treaty-based mercantilism, government-directed commerce that builds a supranational apparatus with power over domestic law. Genuine free trade, Rothbard insists, needs no years of negotiation, only the unilateral repeal of the tariffs, quotas, and anti-dumping laws Washington imposed itself. Writing in October 1993, he scolds the free-market think tanks seduced by the phrase, dismisses both the protectionist low-wage-Mexico objection and the libertarian defense, and warns that tri-national commissions charged with harmonizing labor, health, and environmental rules would level them upward toward the welfare state, as in the European Community. The real menace, he argues, is not lower barriers but the march toward regional and eventually world super-government.

What the Establishment wants is government-directed, government-negotiated trade, which is mercantilism not free trade.