The archive.

Into a market order that has abolished legal caste, Marx's class-conflict doctrine smuggles the antagonisms of a vanished status society—and exposing that sleight of hand is Mises's aim in this 1961 essay. Caste conflict is intelligible, he grants: one estate's privilege is another's burden. But where citizens stand equal before the law, membership in a 'class' is a fluctuating market outcome, revised continually by consumer choice rather than fixed by inherited rank. Mises then turns textual critic, noting that Marx never defined 'class' and left the chapter bearing that title in Das Kapital unfinished—less an accident of death, he suggests, than a sign the doctrine had collapsed. The ideology doctrine, which dismisses critics by their social origins, he shows to condemn the bourgeois-born Marx by its own rule.

The essential dogma of the Marxian philosophy, the class conflict doctrine which he and his friend Engels had propagated for many decades, was unmasked as a flop.

The iron law of wages—pay must sink to bare subsistence because higher wages breed population growth and lower ones starve the labor supply—carries, in Mises's 1961 reading, Marx's entire indictment of capitalism on its back. Borrowed from earlier writers and already refuted when Marx adopted it, this premise is what makes exploitation theory work: if workers can never gain above subsistence, then reform, unions, and minimum-wage laws are futile and immiseration must deepen until revolution. Ordinary observation overturns it, Mises replies, since capitalism's mark is mass production for the masses, and wage earners spend their surplus on culture and comfort rather than mere reproduction. He drives the contradiction home—Marx cannot hold both that wages already sit at the physiological minimum and that the proletariat grows steadily poorer.

The pith of Marx's economic teachings is his "law" of wages. This alleged law that is at the bottom of his entire criticism of the capitalistic system is, of course, not of Marxian make.

The collapse of Communist authority across Eastern Europe in 1990 returned a suppressed problem to view: the claims of peoples whose languages, names, and borders had been overridden by empires and postwar settlements. National self-determination, Rothbard argues, is hollow unless it carries a robust right of secession — extending in principle down to the village or even the individual, and grounded not in the sanctity of existing borders but in property rights and voluntary consent. He answers four "hostile" reactions in turn — the American melting-pot faith, Marxist-Leninist universalism, liberal "global democracy," and vulgar libertarian individualism — and drives at the question majority rule can never settle: over what geographical area is the majority to rule. He favors partition referenda down to the parish, backs Croatian and Slovenian secession, and condemns Versailles for turning liberated nations into fresh rulers over others.

Only by boldly asserting the right of secession can the concept of national self-determination be anything more than a sham and a hoax.

Whether freedom or totalitarianism prevails, Mises writes in this 1948 memorandum to Leonard Read, will be settled in the democratic nations at the polls—but votes follow conviction, and conviction is formed long before any ballot. Anti-communism collapses, he warns, once its own spokesmen have absorbed socialist premises. The deeper obstacle is Marxian polylogism, the trick of judging an argument by the speaker's class instead of answering it, so that a defense of capitalism can be waved away as merely bourgeois. Economic education must therefore work first on intellectuals, whose ideas reach the masses only in simplified form. The essay ends by cataloguing ten dogmas of 'Progressivism'—abundance blocked by capitalism, depressions as inherent market failures, wealth endlessly taxable—that sound instruction has to unmask.

What matters is not to change the ideology of the masses, but to change first the ideology of the intellectual strata, the "highbrows," whose mentality determines the content of the simplifications which are held by the "lowbrows."

Ricardo's observation that insecurity drives capital to flee abroad sets the theme of this 1966 essay, which tracks how the nineteenth century's world trade in capital goods gave way to twentieth-century hostility toward saving itself. Foreign investment, Mises argues, was never conquest but a transfer of capital to lands unable to generate it; recast by socialist and nationalist doctrine as 'imperialism,' its expropriation gets dressed up as 'liberation,' and voluntary investment predictably vanishes. He then turns on union productivity statistics: output per worker reflects the capital equipment behind the worker, not effort alone, so crediting every gain to labor leaves nothing for the savers who financed the tools. Progressive income, corporate, and inheritance taxes complete the confiscation of 'unearned' returns—and the mechanism of accumulation quietly dies.

Saving, capital accumulation and investment will no longer pay and will come to an end.

To ask an economist for the date a boom will break is to ask for the one thing economics cannot deliver—yet businessmen, knowing an artificial boom must end, press for exactly that. The monetary theory of the cycle is 'irrefutable,' Mises grants in this 1956 essay: forcing interest rates below their market level through bank credit distorts production and guarantees an eventual depression. But economics is qualitative, not quantitative; it can say the boom will not last, never precisely when it will break, for human action offers none of the constant relations natural science exploits. Statistics only describe the past. And a correct public forecast would annul itself—if everyone believed it, they would sell at once and bring the crash forward on the spot.

At the very instant this forecast was uttered and accepted as correct, the crisis would already be consummated.

With the Soviet enemy gone, Rothbard warns, American interventionism would not disappear but hunt for new pretexts. Writing in April 1990, he borrows Garet Garrett's formula of "fear and vaunting" — fear supplied by replacement threats such as narco-terrorism, German reunification, and Irving Kristol's Islamic fundamentalism, vaunting supplied by Wilsonian democracy promotion, prized precisely because its goal can never be reached. The invasion of Panama is his test case: the first post-1945 use of force needing no anti-Communist alibi, its shifting rationales — democracy, drugs, the arrest of a former CIA asset — exposed one by one. In the sharpest reversal, he praises Gorbachev's restraint under the "Sinatra Doctrine" and sets it against Lincoln's war on Southern secession, judging states by coercion rather than by ideological camp.

So far, Gorbachev’s stance contrasts admirably with the policy of the sainted Abraham Lincoln, who used massive force and mass murder to force the seceding Southern states to remain in the Union.

The saver, in Mises's telling here—rendered into English from the 1957 German 'Der Sparer als Wähler'—is no marginal figure begging paternal favor but a structural pillar of capitalism, since to defend savings is to defend property, capital formation, and the rising real wages they finance. Genuine protection of savers, he insists, differs entirely from protectionist privilege: it means securing the legal and monetary order in which accumulated capital can survive. His sharpest move recasts the ordinary wage earner, with his savings account and life-insurance policy, as a creditor—one whom inflation quietly robs. The democratic danger is epistemic: voters mistake inflation for mere rising prices rather than an expansion of money and credit, and so demand the cheap-money policies that erode their own claims. Only patient explanation to the voter, he concludes, offers a way out.

The American "common man," as a saver and especially as an owner of life insurance policies, is a creditor to a much greater degree than was the average German of the Weimar Republic.

That the United States had become the world's most prosperous nation was, by 1955, a fact no one contested; what puzzled Mises was why so many treated that abundance as a crime to be redistributed rather than an achievement to be explained. Reviewing William E. Rappard's study, he accepts its four causes—mass production, applied science, the passion for productivity, competition—but drives them toward a single Austrian conclusion: American wealth was not extracted from poorer nations but built at home through capital accumulation. Better tools, plants, and mines raise the marginal productivity of labor, and technical know-how is worthless where saving is discouraged and property insecure. Against Marx, Keynes, and the anti-saving doctrines of the New Economics, he makes the secret plain—prosperity is accumulated, never seized.

America is prosperous because its people wanted prosperity and resorted to policies fitted to the purpose.

Behind the language of premiums, trust funds, and contributions, Rothbard finds a coercive transfer dressed as insurance. Social Security, he argues, is no annuity backed by accumulated capital but a pay-as-you-go arrangement: payroll taxes are spent at once on the general budget, and today's benefits are drawn from tomorrow's taxpayers. It is a compulsory Ponzi operation, he charges, whose "trust fund" is a paper accounting fiction, whose tax is regressive because it falls only on wages up to a ceiling, and whose Reagan-Greenspan "surplus" served to disguise the federal deficit. Crediting Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's proposed payroll-tax rollback with reopening the debate, he insists that genuine reform begins only when the public is told the plain truth about the system.

For the Social Security System is the biggest single racket in the entire panoply of welfare-state measures that have been fastened upon us by the New Deal and its successors.

Strip away the geopolitical alarmism, Mises urges, and the contest between socialism and capitalism reduces to a single measurable test: whether socialism raises the ordinary person's standard of living, as its advocates always promised. By that self-chosen standard, he argues, Soviet planning had already failed—decades of plans, purges, and boasts had left the common man far poorer than his counterpart in capitalist Western Europe or the United States. Capitalism, in this compressed Cold War essay, is nothing but mass production for the masses, a system that raises the worker toward the bourgeois level by serving him. The regime's censorship is itself the confession: it endures only by keeping its citizens from learning how ordinary people live under freedom.

Experience has belied all this empty boasting.

Reviewing R. F. Harrod's admiring life of John Maynard Keynes, Mises grows impatient with its chronicle of clubs, dinners, and distinguished acquaintances, and presses the question the biographer avoids: did Keynes truly shape the age, or merely flatter it? His verdict is deflationary. Governments had practiced inflation, credit expansion, and deficit finance long before The General Theory; Keynes did not inaugurate that policy but dressed it in scientific respectability for progressives who already scorned thrift, laissez faire, and capital accumulation. The title carries the argument: Keynes is symptomatic, not causal—the brilliant emblem of an age of decay that craved painless remedies. His fame, Mises insists, measures the decline of economic understanding rather than any revolution in it.

They longed for short cuts to an earthly paradise: a protective tariff, a cheap money policy, the closed shop, doles, and social security.