1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Predicting a presidency before it begins, Rothbard reads the incoming Clinton administration from its advisers, slogans, and place in a long bipartisan pattern. This chapter from Making Economic Sense answers Ludwig Lachmann's claim that the future is unknowable by insisting that political incentives make broad direction plain: higher taxes and spending, industrial policy, regulation, deficit manipulation, and a drift toward socialized medicine, all dressed in the language of investment, care, and partnership. Democrats push the state forward, he argues, while Republicans—right-wing Keynesians from Eisenhower to Bush—merely slow the ratchet; Clinton's novelty is the Wall Street Left of Robert Reich, Felix Rohatyn, and Robert Rubin. His sharpest thrust falls on rebranding public spending as investment and schooling as human capital—coercive finance disguised, he warns, as productive market activity.
In general, we must batten down the hatches for another one of those periodic Great Leaps Forward into statism that have afflicted us since the New Deal (actually, since the Progressive Era).
Bill Clinton's 1993 swearing-in arrives here not as constitutional ritual but as cultural regime change, a week-long "Jacobin Festival" in which Rothbard watches the left-liberal coalition take public possession of America. Skimming newspapers for dissent and avoiding television except for Limbaugh, he ridicules the pageant's celebrities and its official piety: Barbra Streisand, Betty Friedan, Lauren Bacall, and above all Maya Angelou's inaugural poem, which he likens to the wartime Communist "Ballad for Americans." Fran Lebowitz's contempt for the cant confirms his suspicion that the ceremony has turned quasi-religious. Yet the invective closes on a populist wager rather than despair, weighing whether a debased public might still storm its way back to sanity. A compact specimen of Old Right culture-war polemic.
It was an Inaugural from Hell.
Whether the non-communist economies would return to multilateral liberal trade or settle into a managed world of controls, quotas, and currency blocs was, in 1954, the question convertibility decided. Haberler first clears the definitional ground, separating full from partial convertibility, resident from nonresident rights, and current from capital transactions, because governments can proclaim liberalization while preserving discrimination through licensing and blocked balances. His normative claim is that convertibility is the monetary form of free trade, letting countries specialize by comparative efficiency instead of matching imports to exports bilaterally. The failed 1947 sterling experiment serves as his warning: it collapsed not because convertibility is unworkable but because inflation and an overvalued pound made it so. Rejecting gold-standard deflation, he favors monetary discipline joined to freely floating rates over the speculation-prone Bretton Woods peg.
It cannot be repeated too often that any form of open or repressed inflation is incompatible with convertibility and stable exchange rates.
American trade policy of the 1950s contained a puzzle Haberler sets out to resolve: Washington condemned imperial preferences and discriminatory tariffs while applauding customs unions, even though a customs union discriminates against outsiders more sharply than a mere preference does. His resolution turns on economic effect rather than the degree of discrimination. A preferential regime keeps separate national tariffs and invites product-by-product bargaining and capture by protected interests; a complete customs union abolishes internal barriers wholesale, adopts a common external tariff, and is far likelier to create trade than to divert it. He judges genuine unions rare, Benelux being the modern instance, and insists Japan's viability depends on worldwide markets rather than an Asian bloc, holding throughout to multilateralism and the most-favoured-nation clause.
If tariff preferences are bad because they imply discrimination, then a customs union should be worse because it implies a higher degree of discrimination.
Before poverty can be relieved it must be defined, and this 1971 essay argues that loose, relative definitions turn a real but bounded problem into an endlessly expanding political claim. To call the bottom fifth or third 'poor' confuses inequality with poverty and guarantees the problem can never be solved, since some group is always comparatively worse off. Hazlitt dissects the Johnson-era war on poverty's shifting thresholds, leaning on Rose D. Friedman's recalculation that, adjusting for family size and food-spending patterns, roughly halved the official poverty rate. Applied backward to 1929 or outward to India, today's American thresholds redescribe historic abundance as mass want. Poverty, he concludes, should be pegged to subsistence sufficient for health and strength, not to median income, lest relief outrun what work can earn and dependency become rational.
It is obvious, however, that all merely relative definitions of poverty make the problem insoluble.
Ranging satirically across Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Abkhazians, Ossetians, Ingush, and Chechens, this 1993 commentary insists that Western observers badly underestimate how tangled the post-Soviet Caucasus really is. Eduard Shevardnadze appears less as a democratic reformer than as a media favorite rewarded for converting from Communism to Social Democracy, and much of the region's violence is laid at the door of Stalin's arbitrary nationalities policy, the Ossetian lands deliberately split between republics to wreck an insufficiently Stalinist people. The point is not that ethnic claims are frivolous but that they are historically serious and beyond any outsider's competence to resolve. The closing "sorting out" is pure irony, mocking the interventionist fantasy that half a million troops under UN direction might straighten the region out in twenty years.
OK, got it straight? Now all we need is for the United States to send about 500,000 troops to the Caucasus—under UN direction, of course—and in about twenty years we should be able to straighten it all out.
Sincere reformers and demagogues alike have reached for the same lever—state action—to abolish poverty, and in Hazlitt's telling they have mostly made it worse. This 1971 Freeman polemic dismantles a catalogue of political remedies: redistribution and the guaranteed income, union privilege and featherbedding, minimum-wage laws, welfare finance, price and wage controls, and finally socialism itself. His method is to look past the visible transfer to the hidden cost—who pays, whose incentives collapse, what output is never produced. A statutory wage floor, he insists, cannot conjure the productivity it names; it only prices the least-skilled out of work. Socialism's deeper failure is the calculation problem: without genuine prices for capital goods, planners cannot rank alternatives except by imitating the market they reject. Durable relief, he concludes, rests on productivity, not command.
We cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him less.
Two kinds of foreign money confront each other in this 1970 pamphlet: private investment that works through ownership, prices, and profit-and-loss discipline, and government aid allocated by political fiat. Hazlitt defends the first as an intensified form of trade—capital arrives with management, technical skill, and the market test of possible loss, and it answers the "taking money out" complaint by first creating the wages, purchases, and productive capacity that make any profit possible. Aid embodies the opposite principle. He treats the Marshall Plan as an emergency wrongly made permanent and Point Four as the globalization of that error, crediting West Germany's recovery to Erhard's currency reform rather than to grants. Financed by taxes, borrowing, or inflation, aid diverts capital, empowers planners, and pauperizes the recipients who come to depend on it.
We cannot grow rich by giving our goods or our dollars away. We can only grow poorer.
Rereading Herbert Spencer's The Man Versus the State from the vantage of 1969, Hazlitt recovers a thinker usually dismissed as a laissez-faire relic and finds instead an uncanny prophet of the welfare state. Two surprises drive the essay: how precisely Spencer foresaw coming state encroachments, and how many supposedly modern interventions, from compulsory insurance and nationalized railways to rent control and state education, had already begun by 1884. The engine of decline Spencer named is political momentum, in which each intervention becomes precedent for the next and every failure is read not as a verdict against coercion but as a reason to expand it. Following Spencer, Hazlitt argues that redistribution rests on the hidden premise that earnings are held only by the community's permission. Spencer's coming slavery finds its completed form, he suggests, in Orwell's 1984.
Failure does not destroy faith in the agencies employed, but merely suggests more stringent use of such agencies or wider ramifications of them.
There is no anti-war left left anymore, Rothbard declares, watching former peace activists back U.S. and UN intervention against the Serbs in Bosnia, proof, he charges, that their real loyalty was to world government rather than peace. Written during the Bosnian War, the essay holds that moderate intervention is a fiction, since timid first steps make escalation irresistible, and it swaps the language of recognized borders for that of ethnonational claims. Bosnia, on his account, is no more a nation than North Dakota, only a territory holding rival Serb, Croat, and Muslim communities among whom all sides practice ethnic cleansing when they can. His remedy is partition rather than federal reconciliation: dissolve the fictive state, lift the sanctions, and let local peoples fix their own borders while Washington keeps out entirely.
The answer, as repugnant as it is to this meddling age, is to stay the Hell out.
Because needs, supplies, and costs never stop shifting, any price a government fixes by law is soon an obsolete one — which is why Hazlitt's blunt answer to his title question, that the market should set prices, forecloses most schemes to raise, lower, or freeze them. No price stands alone; each is knotted to every other through joint production, substitution, and the competition of all goods for the consumer's dollar. Export supports for rubber or wheat must choke supply into quotas that breed bureaucracy and invite substitutes; wartime ceilings on necessities drain margins until controls metastasize across wages, imports, and inputs. Flexibility is the corrective, since a soaring price both rations scarce goods and summons new supply. He carries the case into monopoly and antitrust, doubting any court can price a competition that never existed.
Price control always reduces, unbalances, distorts, and discoordinates production.
A uniform tax on all imports plus an equal subsidy on all exports is, for commodity trade, identical to a currency devaluation, an equivalence Haberler accepts as an analytical benchmark and then spends the chapter refusing as policy. The device breaks the moment it meets institutions: it omits services and tourism, invites exemptions, and never stays uniform, sliding toward commodity-by-commodity and country-by-country discrimination and, eventually, exchange control. On the microeconomic side he wields Ricardo to reject the GATT distinction between border-adjustable indirect taxes and non-adjustable direct ones; what matters is whether a tax alters relative costs, not whether it is nominally shifted. Tracing the idea from Keynes's 1931 tariff-and-bounty proposal through Hicks, Triffin, and European VAT practice, he concludes that a valid model equivalence is no sound recommendation.
I conclude that the border tax on imports and tax refund on exports is an inferior, messy, wasteful, and inefficient substitute for exchange-rate adjustments.