The archive.

A trace of benzene in bottled water, a projected one death in a million — Reisman seizes the everyday vocabulary of environmental risk and turns it against the movement that wields it, diagnosing environmentalism as a moral poison rather than a body of policy. His central target is the doctrine of nature's intrinsic value, which he equates with nihilism: once wilderness is prized apart from human use, industry, energy, and agriculture can only appear as crimes. He recasts the environment as the material surroundings of human life, so that production improves rather than destroys it, and reads the movement as socialism turned green — anti-energy, anti-industrial, hostile to reason. Against it he sets capitalism, private property, and the writings of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises.

Environmentalism is the leading manifestation of the rising tide of irrationalism that is engulfing our culture.

Booms and busts, on the popular account, are the market's own disease; Mises answers that they are inflicted—produced by the very banks and governments that claim to cure them. This 1951 essay defends the monetary, or circulation-credit, theory: credit expansion artificially lowers the rate of interest, ignites an unsustainable boom, and guarantees the depression that follows, because bank credit cannot conjure the real capital goods the boom pretends to command. Against Marxian tales of capitalist 'anarchy' and against Alvin Hansen's case for countercyclical management, he redefines the terms of debate—whoever explains the slump controls the remedies thought available. The only safeguard, he concludes, is to let the market rather than the state set interest rates and to refuse credit expansion and deficit spending through the commercial banks.

They fail to realize that it is impossible to substitute additional bank credit for nonexistent capital goods and that therefore an artificially created boom must collapse and turn into a slump.

"There are no ivory towers to house economists": the essay opens by denying the economist any refuge from public conflict, since every policy, however 'practical,' rests on some underlying theory. Written in 1949 as a retrospective apologia for his life's work and the just-published Human Action, Mises marshals his central doctrines in miniature—that inflation and credit expansion redistribute wealth rather than create it, that interest is a category of action itself, that a socialist commonwealth cannot calculate once market prices for the factors of production vanish, and that interventionism is no durable compromise but a slide toward comprehensive controls. Economics, he argues, admits no breaking up into isolated branches, because money, prices, interest, and production condition one another. Mistaken theory, for him, is a causal force in civilization's decline.

There is no middle way. Control is indivisible.

Ridicule, not reportage, sets the tone as Rothbard turns to Mills College, the women-only Oakland institution that announced in 1990 it would admit men for financial reasons, then reversed course under a student strike, campus takeover, and alumnae fundraising. The episode, he argues, exposes two feminist double standards: colleges damned as sexist when all-male are prized as uniquely valuable when all-female, and women declared identical to men in ability yet superior in nurturing whenever either claim serves. These are not stray inconsistencies, he contends, but the logic of a politics that casts men as victimizers and women as victims, deploying sameness and difference by turns. He closes with the students who "corrected" their president's boast of making history by shouting "herstory."

Don’t worry about such “objective” qualities as fairness, logic, truth, or non-contradiction; remember, all’s fair in hate and war.

Public opinion imagines wages as the prize in a tug-of-war between employers and workers; Mises dismantles that picture by placing the consumer at its center. Entrepreneurs, disciplined by profit and loss, can pay only what buyers will indirectly reimburse, so the market becomes a daily plebiscite in which each purchase helps assign incomes—modest for the welder, lavish for the entertainer. Wages rise, in this 1961 essay, only as capital accumulation lifts the marginal productivity of labor; poverty in underdeveloped nations reflects bad policy and insecure property, not natural scarcity. Force wages above the market-clearing level, and employers curtail production until mass unemployment becomes lasting. Keynesian inflation, Mises adds, is merely a disguised cut in real wages that an 'index conscious' public can no longer be fooled by.

The consumers are sovereign and the businessmen are their servants.

In a world built on conquest and land seizure, one man's riches really did explain another's want—and there, Mises concedes, the logic of class conflict held. This short radio address argues that a market economy overturns that logic entirely: the gifted can no longer command tribute but must serve the masses better than their rivals, so profit becomes the reward for satisfying consumers rather than plunder taken from labor. Saved and reinvested, that profit raises the capital per worker, lifts the marginal productivity of labor, and cheapens goods for everyone. Mises presses the point further—the typical American wage earner is himself a saver and investor, bound to business prosperity through bonds, insurance, and savings. Employers and employees, he concludes, do not face off across a divide; prosperity carries them together.

In those days the affluence of the rich was the cause of the poverty of the poor.

The so-called right to strike, Mises argues, is nothing of the kind: it is a state-granted license for striking workers to use violence against those who would take their place, a suspension of the equal legal protection every other citizen enjoys. From this legal-political indictment the essay, reprinted from Christian Economics, builds its economic case. Governments accept abroad, in foreign aid, the classical truth they deny at home—that wages rise only as capital accumulates faster than population. Fix wages above the market-clearing rate by decree or union compulsion, and marginal workers are priced out: firms either raise prices and lose sales or absorb losses and close. Since the working masses are themselves the main consumers of what capitalism produces, no coercive wage can lift the class as a whole; only saving and new capital can.

What is today euphemistically called the right to strike is in fact the right of striking workers, by recourse to violence, to prevent people who want to work from working.

Two arms of the state close on California's Vietnamese fishermen at once, and Rothbard reads their plight as a parable of how power protects incumbents. The Jones Act — a maritime protectionist statute long dormant — is revived under a national-security pretext against legal permanent residents who fled Communism and built a thriving fishery by pooling resources and serving Asian markets. Their success, not any danger, is what draws state action: inefficient Anglo competitors invoke the law against more productive newcomers. And when officials suggest smaller near-shore boats as an alternative, environmental rules banning the necessary gill nets spring the trap shut — a governmental Catch-22 that layers conservation restraint atop economic protection, victimizing by collectivism a people who had already fled it once.

The Jones Act had long ago become a dead letter, but let a law remain on the books, and it can always be trotted out to be used as a club for protectionism.

Adam Smith did not lay the foundation stone of political economy but its keystone: with this revision Mises opens his 1953 introduction to a selection from The Wealth of Nations, recasting Smith less as a solitary inventor than as the synthesizer who gave the liberal tradition durable architecture and impeccable literary form. Smith's importance, he argues, is civilizational—his laissez-faire principles dismantled mercantilism and secured even the less industrious a standard of living above the well-to-do of earlier days, all under the discipline of consumer sovereignty. Against socialist caricatures of Smith as an apologist for greed, Mises enlists Buckle and Bagehot. Yet the essay ends in warning: read Smith for the origins of freedom, never as a substitute for studying modern economics, any more than reading Euclid replaces mathematics.

Its publication date—1776, the year of the American Declaration of Independence—marks the dawn of freedom both political and economic.

Rothbard wrote "Why the Intervention in Arabia?" during Operation Desert Shield, as the Bush administration's stated aim slid among defending Saudi Arabia, liberating Kuwait, punishing Saddam Hussein, protecting democracy, and averting a nuclear threat. His method is sequential demolition. The "big guy, little guy" slogan, he argues, smuggles a police metaphor into world politics and then breaks its own rule, since cops do not blockade or bomb whole populations. Government borders, unlike private property, are not productive acquisitions and deserve no automatic military enforcement. Each rationale falls to its own inconsistency — Washington's own invasion of Panama, its tolerance of Israeli and Pakistani bombs, its record of raising fuel costs. The real stake, he concludes, is not cheap oil but control of it, shielding an entrenched Western and Saudi-Kuwaiti financial order against a disruptive regional power.

Iraq, on the other hand, has long been a rogue oil country, in the sense of being outside the Rockefeller-Wall Street ambit.

Rape, for a libertarian, admits of exactly one definition, Rothbard insists, coercion, and nothing subtler. From that binary of coercion versus non-coercion, his February 1991 polemic attacks the early-1990s campus discourse around "date rape": the Koss study, a New York Times report, and university re-education sessions he likens to Orwellian self-criticism. He treats the absence of a spoken refusal or physical resistance as implicit mutual consent, casts feminist accounts of alcohol and ambiguity as machinery for transferring guilt from women onto men, and defends the tacit, nonverbal character of courtship against demands for affirmative consent. The essay pushes its opponents' logic toward prohibition, chaperonage, and what he calls "Left Puritanism", less a measured analysis of assault than a compressed artifact of libertarian backlash against political correctness.

To a libertarian, or indeed to any sensible person, there is no problem: if the sex was coercive, and took place against the will of one of the parties, then it was rape and if not, not.

Behind the fashionable libertarian cult of 'tolerance,' Rothbard detects a plainer failure: bad manners dressed up as philosophy. The essay skewers the 'Modal Libertarians' who use tolerance-talk to license boorishness, unsolicited correction, and doctrinal harassment, mistaking adolescent rebellion against bourgeois civility for principle. His counterclaim relocates libertarian social theory below the level of rights: freedom of association depends not only on liberty from coercion but on the informal discipline of manners, a nonstatist civilizing institution that regulates conduct without law. Political correctness and feminist language-policing, he argues, invert the courtesy they claim to enforce, wielding 'sensitivity' as a club. Against both crude offensiveness and hypersensitive denunciation, he defends rebuke, exclusion, and common-sense reciprocity: the right, in short, to resist rude people rather than indulge them in tolerance's name.

For there is no obligation of any sort to be polite to rude people.