The archive.

A crime without a victim is how Rothbard characterizes insider trading, and from that provocation he builds a full libertarian defense of profiting from superior knowledge. The 1980s prosecutions of Wall Street financiers, he argues, are not justice but a punitive political campaign that treats speculators as worse than robbers while harming no one who was not already willing to sell. Trading on early information, in his account, is entrepreneurship: it moves capital toward the farsighted and improves the whole economic system. He reads the charge of unfairness as egalitarian resentment of any human superiority, warns that such enforcement chills speech and privacy, and contends that federal attacks on takeover financiers like Drexel Burnham Lambert shield old-line managerial elites against stockholders and market competition.

There is a veritable Reign of Terror rampant in the United States—and everyone’s cheering.

That an administration responsible for the largest deficits in American history should offer a constitutional balanced-budget amendment as the cure strikes Rothbard as image triumphing over substance. The amendment, he argues, would balance only projected budgets, never actual year-end spending, and would fall to accounting tricks, off-budget expenditures, and revenue limits pegged to national income, which he dismisses as a statistical artifact, not a real entity fit for fundamental law. Proposals to exempt government capital spending would simply relabel boondoggles as investment. Since the federal courts that would enforce it are themselves organs of the government being restrained, enforcement is a fiction. He likens the whole scheme to the supply-siders' phony gold standard: the rhetoric of discipline masking undiminished cheap money and deficit politics.

Second, balancing the budget by increasing taxes is like curing influenza by shooting the patient; the cure is worse than the disease.

"The consequences of human action, not human design"—the Ferguson-via-Hayek slogan that casts Austrian economics as the study of unintended outcomes—gets a pointed rebuttal here. Rothbard grants that the market coordinates beyond any single benevolent intention, as with Smith's butcher and baker, but insists the formula collapses once intention is taken seriously: if businessmen learn sound theory and consciously aim at serving consumers, the once-unintended becomes intended. Grounding his case in Misesian praxeology, he treats human action as purposive choice rather than blind response to stimuli. The stakes are political as well as methodological: to describe the growth of the state as nobody's design, he warns, is to disguise the special interests that consciously pursue privilege behind the rhetoric of the public good.

For if actions are largely always unintended, this means that government just grew like Topsy, and that no person or group ever willed the pernicious consequences of that growth.

Redistribution is not charity but coercion - so runs the moral axis of this compact essay, which defines entitlement programs as the state taking wealth from some citizens to hand it to others. Sennholz insists on a sharp line between the Good Samaritan, who gives his own property, and the welfare state, which commands the property of others. What egalitarians imagine as idle surplus, he argues, is mostly productive capital, so seizing and consuming it in the name of compassion weakens the very order the poor depend on. He rejects the Pigovian welfare-economics claim that transfers maximize total satisfaction, since utilities cannot be compared across persons, and defines justice as proportional reward rather than enforced sameness. Its blunt conclusion: the true beneficiary of redistribution is not the needy but government itself.

To be a helper in need is to lend a friendly hand to a needy person; it is personal effort and sacrifice.

Millions of tax dollars, mobilized by a propaganda campaign that has suddenly discovered the homeless: this is the spectacle Rothbard sets out to deflate. He argues that "the homeless" and "the hungry" are political labels manufactured in sequence, fracturing a single condition, poverty or lack of money, into discrete emergencies. The fragmentation is not innocent: separate needs create separate constituencies, funneling subsidies to construction firms, agriculture, food distributors, and the social-work bureaucracies that administer them. Concrete images of need, he notes, dramatize far better than cash income. Turning from rhetoric to incentives, he presses the uncomfortable questions the welfare framing avoids: why people lack money, and how permanent public aid erodes work effort, rehabilitation, and private charity.

Money does not have nearly the sentimental value of home and hearth and Christmas dinner.

Positivism, by reducing science to method and ruling metaphysical questions out of bounds as mere "values," had hollowed out political science at its root — such is the charge these six Walgreen lectures level before setting out to restore the discipline. Voegelin recovers a classical and Christian concern with the order of the soul, distinguishing the constitutional sense of representation from the deeper existential sense by which a society first becomes capable of action in history. His central diagnosis of modernity is that ideological movements from progressivism to National Socialism revive gnosticism, converting Joachim of Flora's three ages into an immanentized eschatology that promises salvation within time. Hobbes and Puritanism supply his cases; the recovery of experience against method and revolutionary fantasy supplies his guarded hope.

The existence of man in political society is historical existence; and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, must at the same time be a theory of history.

Unemployment, on this account, is not an inevitable calamity but a labor surplus manufactured by law - the predictable result of wage rates held above the level at which willing workers could be hired. Treating labor like any other market factor whose price clears supply and demand, Sennholz converts the moral language of jobs policy into price theory and turns it against the reformers, accusing minimum wages, the Davis-Bacon Act, benefit mandates, unemployment compensation, and union privilege of causing the very misery they claim to cure. He roots sustainable wages in productivity and the division of labor rather than political pressure, exposes the racist origins of Davis-Bacon, dismantles the natural-rate doctrine and the Phillips curve, and closes by arraigning the college textbooks - Samuelson's above all - that teach Keynesian orthodoxy as settled truth.

If they are set above the market rate they create surpluses, called unemployment.

Defending deregulation on the strength of whichever statistics happen to be convenient, Rothbard warns, invites disaster when the data turn against you. When bankruptcies, mergers, congestion, and delays revived calls to re-regulate the airlines in the late 1980s, he answered that these were the ordinary results of competition, not signs of failure. The old Civil Aeronautics Board, he reconstructs, was a state-enforced cartel that fixed fares far above market levels and rationed choice routes to favored incumbents; falling fares and crowded planes simply mark travel opened to students and families once priced out. The genuine bottlenecks, delays and airport congestion and air-traffic control, remain in government hands. His remedy is not nostalgia for the CAB but fuller deregulation: privatized airports and competitively priced runway space.

Empiricism without theory is a shaky reed on which to build a case for freedom.

It is the carrying out of new combinations, new goods, new methods, new markets, new forms of organization, rather than saving or shifting consumer tastes, that drives a stationary economy off its established path. Distinguishing the entrepreneur sharply from the capitalist, the manager, and the inventor, Schumpeter makes the banker the 'ephor' of the exchange economy, the producer of purchasing power whose credit creation pulls productive means from their old uses. From this he derives entrepreneurial profit as a temporary surplus soon eroded by imitation, capital interest as a kind of tax levied upon that profit, and the Konjunkturzyklus as the swarm-like clustering of innovations followed by the economy's painful absorption of them. Against Walrasian statics, here in the seventh German edition of the 1911 original, development is endogenous, discontinuous, and destructive.

Der Unternehmergewinn ist ein Kostenüberschuß.

English translation: “Entrepreneurial profit is a surplus over costs.”

Media applause for Bruce Babbitt's courage in demanding higher taxes to shrink the deficit provokes Rothbard to redefine the word. Courage, he insists, once meant battling the powers-that-be, not urging the state to intensify its parasitic plunder of productive citizens, which is precisely what Babbitt, like Walter Mondale in 1984, does. The essay's central move is a class distinction: politicians and bureaucrats are not genuine taxpayers but net tax-receivers, so a public employee who remits part of a tax-funded salary merely reduces his net transfer. Shared sacrifice, on this account, is an accounting fiction that puts officials and citizens on a false common footing. Rejecting both tax hikes and supply-side complacency about deficits, Rothbard prescribes the neglected alternative: drastic, across-the-board cuts in government spending.

The proper answer is: anywhere and everywhere; only wholesale flailing away with a meat axe could possibly do justice to the task.

Judged by their actual policies rather than their campaign imagery, George Bush and Michael Dukakis emerge in Rothbard's account as interchangeable establishment centrists, proof, he says, of George Wallace's jibe that there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the parties. Both are committed to Keynesian spending, deficits, higher taxes by semantic disguise, monetary inflation, and regulation. He marshals the governing record against partisan myth: Reagan's supposedly anti-government years left federal spending higher as a share of private product, complete with protectionism, farm subsidies, and an assault on insider trading. The essay's gravest warning targets James Baker's drive toward coordinated central-bank inflation, a European currency unit, and finally a world central bank issuing world paper money. The one real difference Rothbard allows is that a Dukakis victory might simply lack the connections to advance it.

There would be no remaining checks on any country’s inflation except the wisdom and the will of the World Central Bank.

The most fashionable new mathematics of the 1980s, Rothbard argues, quietly demolishes orthodox mathematical economics from within. Chaos theory cannot be waved off as anti-mathematical, since it comes from the cutting edge, yet its lessons cut against the neoclassical apparatus. Through Lorenz's Butterfly Effect and Mandelbrot's fractals, it shows that tiny causes yield vast effects and that smooth, continuous curves misrepresent a jagged world. Rothbard turns this against calculus-based equilibrium, rational expectations, and the random-walk theory of stock markets, which he finds absurd for making the market omniscient while denying that historical events are causally connected. Careful to reject claims that nature is random or undetermined, he endorses chaos theory only tactically: newer, more advanced mathematics now does to formal economics what Austrian critics long attempted from outside.

Calling it the Butterfly Effect, he pointed out that if a butterfly flapped its wings in Brazil, it could well produce a tornado in Texas.