The archive.

The real menace, Rothbard argues, is not a rising hatred of Jews but an organized apparatus for branding dissenters — what he names "Organized Anti-Anti-Semitism," a reputational weapon centered on the ADL. Writing in December 1990 as Pat Buchanan drew fire for opposing war with Iraq and criticizing Israel's American supporters, he charges that the accusation, once attached, invites not reply but exclusion, apology, or silence. He tracks a shifting "shell game" through critics from A.M. Rosenthal to William F. Buckley, likens "objective" antisemitism to Stalinist "objective" crimes, and closes by demanding stable criteria: subjective hatred of Jews, or advocacy of legal and economic disabilities against them. By either test, he insists, Buchanan does not qualify — and the charge stands revealed as a tool for suppressing foreign-policy dissent.

Since the end of World War II, the key strategy of the ADL has been to broaden its definition of anti-Semitism to include any robust criticisms of the State of Israel.

Presented by the world's press as Peru's inevitable free-market savior, Mario Vargas Llosa lost — and Rothbard reads the collapse as a lesson in what "free market" actually names. Vargas Llosa had been converted by the economist Hernando de Soto, whose "The Other Path" called for a popular market of small entrepreneurs; but de Soto broke with him, denouncing a drift toward the state capitalism of Peru's white Criollo elite. Rothbard sharpens the point by rejecting the label pinned on Fernando Collor de Mello's Brazilian "shock treatment," which froze bank accounts and contracted the money supply — inflation followed by confiscation, not reform. The unknown, storefront-funded Alberto Fujimori rose instead, he contends, on grassroots ethnic resentment of Criollo rule rather than on any economic doctrine.

If Vargas loses, it will be because he deserves it.

Keynesianism as doctrine may be dead, but its slogans still cloud economic understanding—so runs the argument of this 1964 Freeman review of W. H. Hutt's Keynesianism—Retrospect and Prospect. The General Theory succeeded, in Mises's reading, not by advancing theory but by lending scientific respectability to policies governments already wanted: deficit finance, currency devaluation, price intervention, and the coercive privileges of labor unions, the whole machinery of the New Deal. Hutt's value lies in clearing the air, restating the elementary price theory that Keynesian vocabulary had buried. For Mises the decisive charge is that Keynes and his followers simply do not grasp what prices are or how they arise; treating them as administrative quantities to be set by authority replaces voluntary coordination with force and conceals the resulting dislocations beneath a fog of terminology.

The main failure of Keynes and all his disciples and admirers is to be seen in the fact that they simply do not know what prices are, how they originate, and what they bring about.

Animosity against business runs through the policies of every not-quite-socialist nation, and this 1961 Mont Pelerin Society paper sets out to expose it as intellectually confused. Firms grow large, Mises argues, not by decree but by serving mass demand better than rivals under the discipline of profit and loss; the moral center of the market is therefore consumer sovereignty, not the entrepreneur's dignity. He punctures the sentimental war between plucky small business and predatory bigness—small firms are typically interwoven with large-scale production—and warns that measures to shield small producers and family farms turn their beneficiaries into wards of the administration. Tracing nationalization's retreat into planning, from wartime Zwangswirtschaft to the soziale Marktwirtschaft, he closes on a democratic paradox: as consumers people build great enterprises, yet as voters they punish them.

The "common man" enjoys in the capitalistic countries amenities of which the richest people of ages gone by did not even dream.

The gravest danger to American freedom, this 1960 essay warns, is neither military conquest nor open revolution but the interventionist policies embraced by mainstream parties that denounce communism while cherishing planning. Mises collapses the distinction between socialism, communism, and planning—each substitutes one government plan for the plans of individual citizens—and insists economic control cannot be walled off from press, employment, and assembly. Inflation is planning's most insidious ally: the expansion of money and money substitutes creates no wealth, only a hidden redistribution toward first receivers. Its subtlest victim is the thrifty householder, whom capitalism had deproletarianized into a creditor through savings, insurance, and pensions, and whom inflation reproletarianizes by dissolving those very claims. Sound money thus becomes a constitutional safeguard—and, Mises argues, a frontline defense against the appeal of communism.

If somebody says he is opposed to communism, but cherishes socialism, he is no more consistent or logical than a man who declares that he is opposed to murder but cherishes assassination.

"The personal is the political": to Rothbard the left's slogan is not liberating but totalitarian, a license for ideological supervision of private conduct, speech, and association. His libertarian counter inverts it — politics itself should be demystified and shrunk, the state reduced to individuals wielding coercive privilege, and personal life defended from regimentation. He tests the claim on sports, where he thinks such policing most intrusive, from the ruined careers of Al Campaneris and Jimmy the Greek to the 1990 locker-room controversy over female reporters and Bengals coach Sam Wyche. Judge Constance Baker Motley's ruling that women hold a constitutional right to enter male locker rooms he treats as judicial activism and a back-door Equal Rights Amendment — professional convenience recast in the language of rights.

For the essence of the libertarian creed is the reverse slogan: “No, dammit, the political is the personal.”

For a hundred years the interventionists foretold capitalism's final collapse; Mises answers, in this 1953 essay, that the crisis actually underway belongs to the welfare state itself. He traces its doctrine to Ferdinand Lassalle's exalted image of the state and to Bismarckian Sozialpolitik, then presses a single arithmetical objection: government can spend only what it taxes, borrows, or inflates away, and the wealth of the 'nabobs' cannot fund mass benefits forever. From confiscatory taxation he moves to nationalized railroads, telegraphs, and New York's subway deficits—enterprises that devour revenue instead of yielding it. Low fares and generous programs are politically irresistible, but scarcity, he insists, returns as chronic deficits and decaying service. The essay ends less as treatise than as an object lesson addressed to the American voter.

They are not taxpayers, but tax-eaters.

Everyday life goes on during a federal shutdown — and for Rothbard that quiet continuity is exactly what the rhetoric of budget crisis exists to bury. Treating the 1990 standoff as an unintended experiment in limited government, he floats a "modest proposal": suspend all federal taxes and borrowing for one year and let citizens contribute anonymously to whichever departments they value. It is a test of revealed preference, not a budget plan; if the programs are worth their cost, taxpayers will fund them without compulsion. He then interrogates the language of "pain" in fiscal debate, asking why only government is cast as an institution that allocates suffering, and reads establishment demands for tax increases in recession as an argument for a larger public sector dressed up as deficit concern.

Has it occurred to many citizens that, for the few blessed days of federal shutdown, the world does not come to an end?

A moral command means nothing addressed to a slave: this premise opens Mises's 1960 argument that freedom is a postulate not only of politics but of every morality, since only an agent who can weigh alternatives and restrain impulse can be held responsible. From moral anthropology the essay builds outward to the market, where the consumer is sovereign and private property functions as a revocable public mandate rather than feudal privilege. Its decisive claim is the indivisibility of freedom: because every human act requires material means, a state that controls production also controls the paper, presses, halls, and broadcasting through which conscience and dissent must speak. Constitutional liberties, Mises warns, become empty once economic independence from government disappears.

He who monopolizes all media of communication has full power to keep a tight hand on the individuals' minds and souls.

Wealth springs from nature and human labor alone, the popular doctrine holds, so that profit, interest, and rent are parasitic deductions from what workers produce. Against this exploitation thesis, shared by revolutionary socialists and mild reformists alike, Mises reconstructs production as the coordination of three factors, natural resources, labor, and capital goods, directed by reason and entrepreneurial judgment. Capital goods, he insists, come into being only through saving, the withholding of goods from immediate consumption to sustain longer and more productive processes, and the capitalist who owns them is disciplined by consumer demand rather than freed from it. From this follows his verdict on wages: union bargaining and minimum-wage decrees cannot lift real pay, which rises only as investment per worker grows. India serves as his cautionary case of capital starved by policy.

There is no other method to make wage rates rise than by investing more capital per worker.

Grant that people are born unequal in body and mind—Mises does, taking the fact as his starting point and then turning it against the hierarchies usually built upon it. In status and warlike orders the stronger conquer, enslave, and rule; under capitalism, this 1962 essay argues, superior ability can profit only by serving consumers, so that ownership of the means of production becomes a public mandate withdrawn the moment buyers judge others would use it better. Much of the argument dismantles the phrase 'economic power': governmental power beats the disobedient into submission, whereas market 'power' amounts to no more than an invitation to a bargain either party may refuse. The closing pages assign the gifted not a right to command but a duty to persuade toward higher standards.

It is not business, but the consumers who ultimately determine what should be produced.

Scarcity sets the members of a species at odds, yet human beings escape that antagonism through the division of labor and peaceful exchange, so that the market becomes the standard form of interhuman relations. Against both anarchism and socialism, this 1968 essay argues that the market cannot defend itself and therefore needs the state—'a grim apparatus of coercion'—to restrain those who break the peace. But no middle sphere exists: talk of a friendly 'public sector' cannot fuse the two opposed principles of voluntary agreement and command. Planning does not merely administer production differently; it transfers the individual's power of choice to a central authority, demanding obedience from cradle to coffin. Mises ends categorically—the market economy is the only order tending toward the cheapest provisioning of consumers.

There is no conciliation between constraint and spontaneity.