The archive.

Strip away the reverent abstraction, and a government reduces to identifiable persons - legislators, tax collectors, judges, policemen - exercising coercive command over other people. This brief note turns that deflation into a libertarian critique of political worship, attacking the habit of treating the state as a sacred, benevolent being to be petitioned and idolized. For such command, Sennholz argues, no obvious moral foundation exists: those entrusted with protecting natural rights have repeatedly hardened into rulers, oligarchs, and tyrants. He sets Jefferson's jealousy of power against the modern appetite for state benefits, entitlements, and public works, in which questions of right dissolve into struggles over distribution. Political power, he concludes, feeds on its spoils and dies only when its victims refuse to be despoiled.

No man has ever seen a government.

How should a defeated Germany be brought back into the community of free nations? Writing in 1944, Hayek answers that its historians will decide, for nineteenth-century German scholarship had itself bred reverence for the power-state and expansionist nationalism. He rejects both imposed Allied textbooks and the fantasy of instant conversion, predicting instead a moral desert dotted with isolated 'oases' of sound thinking that private, non-governmental contacts must quietly sustain. Above all, he argues, Germans must recover a belief in objective historical truth and the historian's duty to moral judgment, to call Hitler bad, not merely explain him. Invoking Lord Acton, whose German training, Catholic faith, and early insight into power made him an ideal symbol, Hayek proposes an Acton Society to unite scholars committed to liberty, federalism, and opposition to totalitarianism of both Right and Left.

It is because, whether he wills it or not, the historian shapes the political ideals of the future, that he himself must be guided by the highest ideals and keep free from the political disputes of the day.

Knowledge and wisdom are not the same: a person may command many facts and still misuse them, for wisdom is the moral use of knowledge, not its mere possession. This short essay in moral political economy carries that distinction into economics, where theory can judge whether means suit chosen ends - prosperity, employment, health care - but never pronounces on the ends themselves. Most political quarrels, Sennholz observes, are disputes over means, not goals; communists, socialists, and fascists too promise prosperity while choosing destructive means. Yet economic wisdom refuses the value-neutral posture and asks whether a policy rests on justice or on vice, condemning forced redistribution as an attempt to steal by political vote. Its closing maxims defend thrift, self-reliance, and refusal of debt laid on future generations: wisdom, he writes, begins at home.

We cannot progress individually or nationally by spending more than we are earning. Thrift is an essential condition of all economic progress.

Hayek's claim that a society's knowledge exists only as scattered, incomplete fragments underwrites his account of markets, and he stretched it to explain how law, language, money, and measurement standards evolve without design. That extension is where Kirzner presses. He splits the dispersed-knowledge failure in two. Knowledge Problem A is disappointed optimism about what others will do, and it corrects itself through failed plans; Knowledge Problem B is the unnoticed mutually beneficial trade, revealed only by entrepreneurial alertness to pure profit. Markets solve both, because a missed opportunity is also a private profit opportunity. Institutions solve mainly Problem A: a stable rule needs only that everyone expect it, not that it be the best rule. A society may cling to feet and inches, no entrepreneur able to capture the social gain of the metric system. Hayek's analogy, Kirzner concludes, is only half right.

There appears no obvious way in which any private entrepreneur could be attracted to notice the superiority of the metric system – let alone any chance of it being within his power to effect its adoption.

Pat Buchanan's 1992 convention speech did not start a culture war, on Rothbard's reading — it merely named one the left had been winning for decades through schools, courts, media, and the therapeutic state. The essay's method is to take every liberal claim of neutrality — media objectivity, artistic autonomy, compassion for children — and recast it as an instrument of cultural power. Its sharpest distinction sets individual rights of person and property against the group and therapeutic "rights" administered by bureaucrats and social workers; its central battlefield is the family, where Rothbard casts Hillary Clinton's children's-rights advocacy as a New Class transfer of authority from parents to state-linked experts. Anti-statism and cultural conservatism fuse into one front.

Culture war? It was launched decades ago and liberals were almost into the mopping-up stage before the oppressed finally woke up.

A puzzle drives this October 1992 essay: why do left-liberals react with quasi-religious fury when conservatism threatens not to delay progressive causes but to reverse them? Rothbard's answer is that the left holds, in Whig or Marxoid fashion, a faith in history's inevitable march toward a socialist egalitarian order, so any rollback reads as heresy rather than mere defeat. He distinguishes Communist hard totalitarianism from Social Democratic soft totalitarianism — "Brave New World instead of 1984" — and interprets liberal panic over Franco, Pinochet, McCarthy, feminism, and Buchanan's culture-war rhetoric as fear of reaction. The piece closes as militant paleoconservative rhetoric, urging open reaction and the restoration of an older American order.

In other words: Brave New World instead of 1984.

Radical subjectivism was Ludwig Lachmann's lifelong thread: the conviction that economics must reckon not only with subjective valuations but with active, idiosyncratic minds interpreting a changing world and forming divergent expectations. Kirzner's memorial follows him from Berlin and Zurich into exile, through research under Hayek at the London School of Economics, a chair at Witwatersrand, and final years at New York University's Austrian program. The intellectual story is one of steady radicalization—a movement from Misesian praxeology toward Shackle's economics of imagined futures, which for Lachmann supplied the missing extension of subjectivism into expectations and unmoored human action from deterministic general equilibrium. Written by a friend who disagreed with him for decades, the tribute honors Lachmann as both a critic of equilibrium determinism and, against his own emphasis, a contributor to Austrian market-process thought.

We have lost a delightful, encyclopedic colleague who told us the truth with white hot passion discreetly clothed in the most elegant old-world courtesy.

Deep methodological differences separate the two men usually paired as modern Austrians: Mises grounds economics in a priori praxeology, Hayek in empirically discovered regularities, and their shared stands on socialist calculation and the business cycle do not by themselves make one the heir of the other. Kirzner locates their real unity in a deepening of subjectivism beyond given preferences. Against Lionel Robbins's economizer, who merely solves a pre-set maximization problem, Mises restores purposeful human action—futurity, uncertainty, the entrepreneurial appraisal of ends and means. Hayek then supplies the complementary insight: equilibrium as the mutual compatibility of plans, and the market as a procedure for communicating dispersed and tacit knowledge. Together, Kirzner argues, they carry Austrian economics past both mechanical equilibrium and radical indeterminism, furnishing it with an acting man and the knowledge problem that makes his discoveries necessary.

His imagination of these alternative futures is very much an intrinsic element of choice.

Max Lerner's "Civilization Watch" column becomes, in this April 1992 polemic, a stand-in for the whole interventionist consensus — Wilsonian collective security, the Marshall Plan, post-Soviet aid, and unconditional support for Israel. Rothbard rejects Lerner's proposed fusion of Wilsonian idealist ends with Hamiltonian means, naming both men as candidates for the most evil politician in American history, and offers a counter-fusion of his own: isolationist ends joined to decentralized, Jeffersonian means. He reads the call for bipartisan foreign-policy responsibility as a device to deny the electorate any real choice, and charges that Lerner's hostility to nationalism is selective — America First and Russia First are sinister, while Israeli nationalism demands maximal U.S. backing.

All nationalisms must be stamped out, it seems, but one.

Representation, Rothbard argues, was once a technological necessity — and Ross Perot's proposal for electronic town meetings exposes that the necessity is gone. Defending Perot against pollsters, journalists, and party professionals whose authority rests on managing opinion, he treats their hostility as more revealing than the plan itself: a class recoiling when participation might become binding. Since telephone, television, and interactive media make direct voting feasible, the only objection left is that voters would choose badly — an objection, he notes, that condemns electing officials no less than deciding issues. The libertarian payoff is fiscal: he backs Perot's amendment requiring popular ratification of any tax increase, and dismisses the establishment balanced-budget amendment as manipulable theater.

The only possible argument against direct democracy, now that the technological argument is obsolete, is that the public’s choices would be wrong.

Rothbard rejects all three stories Americans told about the 1980s during the 1992 recession: the Democratic indictment of greed and tax cuts, the Bush Republican excuse-making, and the anti-Bush nostalgia for an unblemished Reagan boom. Stripping away the moralized language of "greed," he defends Michael Milken as an agent who let shareholders challenge entrenched managers, and shows how Social Security taxes and the 1986 Tax Reform Act offset the advertised rate cuts. The decisive turn is monetary: boom and bust alike were driven by Federal Reserve credit expansion that flowed into real estate and stocks while consumer prices stayed subdued — the 1920s pattern repeating. The true villains, he concludes, wear central bankers' suits.

The arch-villains of the 1980s (and the '90s) are Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan, but they will never be treated as such so long as they remain two of the most beloved figures in American public life.

The 1992 Los Angeles riots draw from Rothbard not sympathy for structural causes but a linguistic charge: to condemn violence while rushing to its "real structural causes," he argues, is precisely to condone it. Even as an anti-statist, he grants government one minimal duty — to defend persons and property under assault — and finds it failed. Liberal remedies of welfare, set-asides, and affirmative action he redescribes as payoffs to violence; Jack Kemp's enterprise zones he calls welfare in market language; repealing minimum-wage and licensing laws he judges helpful but insufficient. Rejecting racial discrimination as the master cause by pointing to Korean-American victims, he lands on impunity: rioters looted because they saw they could get away with it.

Devotion to the sanctity of person and property is not part of their value-system. That’s why, in the short term, all we can do is shoot the looters and incarcerate the rioters.