The archive.

Planning fails, on the usual telling, because information is expensive to gather. Kirzner's target here is exactly that comfortable assumption. Hayek's knowledge problem, he argues, cannot be folded into standard welfare economics as a matter of higher search costs, because the ignorance that matters most is ignorance the planner does not know he suffers. Beginning from the Robbinsian model of the individual optimizing over given ends and means, he shows that a preliminary search plan cannot rescue it: search itself presupposes knowing what is missing and where to look. Scaled up to a central authority governing dispersed, locally held knowledge, the difficulty becomes crippling, and no allocation calculus can absorb unknown ignorance. What markets possess and planners cannot replicate is entrepreneurial alertness to the profit opportunities that disequilibrium prices throw off. The argument reaches industrial policy and piecemeal intervention alike.

The unknown ignorance that is the heart of the knowledge problem created by the dispersal of information defies its being able to be squeezed into the Procrustean bed of the allocation plan.

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.

San Antonio's water supply becomes a test case for Rothbard's critique of socialized resource management. When drought threatens the Edwards Aquifer, litigation under the Endangered Species Act, brought by the Sierra Club, joined by the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, and blessed by Judge Lucius Bunton, would reserve enough spring flow to protect four obscure species, among them the Texas blind salamander and the fountain darter, even at the cost of the city's residents, farmers, and ranchers. Rothbard reads the classification fight over whether the aquifer is a "river" or a "lake" as a maneuver to shift control from Texas to federal courts, and detects institutional self-interest behind the ecological piety. His remedy is neither better regulation nor conservation but the privatization of water and water rights, so that markets, not judges, allocate a scarce resource.

"That's what this is all about," he warned bitterly. "It's not about fountain darters."

When F.A. Hayek died in 1992, Rothbard marked the passing of the "Mises-Hayek era" with an obituary that both honors and litigates. He credits Hayek as the great transmitter of Mises's monetary theory of the boom-bust cycle to the English-speaking world, the elaboration of central-bank credit expansion that carried the Austrian account of capital into the London School of Economics and challenged Keynes before Keynesianism triumphed. He recalls Hayek's part in the socialist calculation debate, The Road to Serfdom, and the 1974 Nobel that revived Austrian economics. Yet the essay turns sharply on Hayek's postwar drift: his inconsistent monetary views and a philosophy of unconscious, rule-following man that Rothbard judges too weak to ground natural rights or a rational defense of laissez-faire.

Of all the Misesians who had been nurtured in Vienna and London, by the end of the 1930s only Mises and Hayek were left, as indomitable champions of the free market, and opponents of statism and deficit spending.

Should the ruin of fiat inflation ever open a path back to gold, Hazlitt argues in this 1979 essay, that path must not lead back to the nineteenth-century fractional standard but to a full 100 percent reserve. Fractional reserves, in his account, are not a clever economy on scarce gold but the very flaw that destroys every gold standard: they let banks pile multiple claims on a limited base, lower interest rates artificially, and finance booms that must end in liquidation. He tracks the pattern through the Federal Reserve's layered credit pyramid, dismisses the notion of self-liquidating business loans, and stages the open-economy version in an imagined Ruritania whose credit expansion drains its gold. The result fuses Austrian trade-cycle theory with a demand for monetary constitutionalism.

In short, the fractional gold standard tends almost inevitably to become more and more attenuated, and while it does so it permits and encourages progressive inflation.

When Nixon suspended the dollar's convertibility into gold in August 1971, most observers saw a diplomatic problem to be solved by renegotiated parities. Sennholz reads the collapse of Bretton Woods as something deeper: evidence that money managed by governments is inherently unstable. Writing from an Austrian, market-centered standpoint, he derives exchange rates not from national aggregates but from individual cash balances, expectations, and purchasing power, and contrasts the classical gold-coin standard—an international order requiring no treaties, since coins were valued by weight—with a managed system that concentrated discretion in central banks. Balance-of-payments crises, he argues, are simply people fleeing depreciating money; the dollar's fall traced to domestic deficits and credit expansion, not foreign malice. His remedy is a return to gold, beyond the reach of political manufacture.

Market forces tend to establish the parity between the purchasing powers and thus their exchange ratios.

Inflation never really left, it merely waited. Writing at the end of the 1980s, Rothbard explains the return of rising prices as the delayed harvest of earlier money-supply expansion, held back for a time by the collapse of OPEC and an expensive dollar and by the public's willingness to hold rather than spend its cash. Against the mechanical monetarism of the Chicago School, he insists that Austrians recognize no fixed leads and lags: money creation drives the cycle, but expectation and choice decide when its price effects surface. He faults the Federal Reserve for expanding in recession, mistaking the lag for success, then attempting gradual restraint under Alan Greenspan. Reading his preferred M-A aggregate, he sees recession already in motion, and refuses to call for the fresh expansion that would only postpone a necessary correction.

Whatever the Fed does, it unerringly makes matters worse.

Every time establishment economists announce a permanent boom, Rothbard writes, a big recession is just around the corner, and he offers that complacency as his one reliable leading indicator. The late-1920s "New Era," the Keynesian confidence of the 1960s, and Reaganite optimism each preceded a downturn; half a century of fine-tuning, he argues, has produced not stability but the hybrid of recession with continuing inflation. He mocks the National Bureau of Economic Research for taking so long to certify a recession that it is nearly over, and declares flatly, on housing and unemployment and debt liquidation, that one is already underway. Recession, in his Austrian reading, is the necessary cleansing of malinvestment. Against the reflex to raise taxes, he prescribes the opposite: halt Federal Reserve credit expansion, cut taxes, and cut spending harder still.

The one thing worse than a deficit, furthermore, is higher taxes; increasing taxes will only bring us more of both.

"It's the economy, stupid" gets the politics exactly backward, Rothbard contends. The Clintonian slogan reduces voting to macroeconomic mood and then reduces the economy to the business cycle, crude economic determinism he calls "vulgar Marxism." Public revolt, he argues, springs also from crime, immigration, broken promises, and distaste for the Clintons themselves, and its economic core is not cyclical recovery but secular decline: rising taxation, persistent inflation, falling real family income, and the need for married women to work simply to hold a household's standard of living in place. He trusts ordinary budgeting over official statistics and futurist cheer about computers and media, reading the public's anger as a rational response to the slow erosion of the postwar promise that each generation would surpass the last.

Instead, to capture the Clintonian meaning, the sentiment should be rephrased as “it’s the business cycle, stupid.”

Keynesians, on Rothbard's account, have the whole causal story backward. They treat idle labor and unused capacity as brute aggregate facts, then insist inflation cannot revive while slack persists, yet stagflation and the renewed inflation of later years refuted them. The missing piece, he argues, is the price system. Unemployment is a surplus like any other: resources go unused because their owners hold out for wages or prices above what buyers will pay, which makes idleness, in an analytical sense, voluntary. Drawing on William H. Hutt, he traces persistent mass unemployment to interventions, compulsory unionism, minimum-wage laws, welfare, and unemployment insurance, that keep wages above market-clearing levels. Monetary expansion can mobilize idle resources only by raising the returns paid for them, which is to say only through inflation. Idle capacity and rising prices, then, are no paradox at all.

The Keynesians themselves create the problem by leaving out the price system.

Eight years of free-market rhetoric under Reagan, Rothbard contends, accomplished the opposite of what they promised: the resurrection of a Keynesianism that the stagflation of the 1970s should have buried. Stripped of its algebraic jargon, the doctrine reduces to a simple political creed—recessions come from underspending, inflation from overspending, and 'Big Daddy government' stands ready to fine-tune both. But simultaneous recession and inflation, he argues, expose a contradiction at the model's heart, unmasking it as an economics of power rather than explanation. Tracing how Keynesians' promise of budgets balanced over the cycle dissolved into permanent deficits, and how the collapse of monetarism left Keynesians dominant in the Reagan and Bush teams, this 1989 essay reads macroeconomic management as inseparable from the growth of the state.

The stark fact of inflationary recession violates the fundamental assumptions of Keynesian theory and the crucial program of Keynesian policy.

Envy, once it enters politics, becomes for Sennholz the emotional engine of coercive redistribution, demagoguery, and social conflict. This 1995 “Notes” essay distinguishes natural human inequality—of ability, industry, and productivity—from the equal legal standing that lets unequal persons cooperate in peace. The demand for equal results, he argues, is not justice but force, requiring endless taxation and confiscation because the inequalities it targets keep reappearing; it opens the door to demagogues who convert resentment into electoral power. Against this he sets the market order as an envy-free arrangement in which income tracks service rendered. The deeper danger is capital consumption: confiscatory taxation, welfare transfers, and deficit spending divert savings from future production, pitting present beneficiaries against taxpayers and against generations not yet born.

All kinds of problems are solvable except those which spring from envy.