1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Today's self-styled liberals, Hazlitt notes with relish, would be astonished to learn that the father of the welfare state they admire was Otto von Bismarck, the antiliberal apostle of blood and iron. That genealogy opens this 1972 essay's account of how relief and social insurance never stay within their original bounds—expanding in coverage, benefits, taxes, deficits, and expectations. His sharpest charge is semantic: Social Security was presented as old-age insurance, yet it redistributes across generations and income groups while preserving the language of earned entitlement, leaving OASDI an unstable hybrid that is neither honest welfare nor genuine insurance. Because beneficiaries are concentrated and costs dispersed, expansion always outpaces restraint; unfunded promises are covered by fresh paper money, making inflation a concealed tax. Unemployment compensation, he adds, blunts the incentive to keep an old job or find a new one.
This has led to chronic deficits that are met by printing more irredeemable paper money, and so to the almost universal chronic inflation that marks the present age.
A shoo-in for renomination at the year's start, Elizabeth Holtzman lost the 1993 Democratic runoff for New York City comptroller two-to-one, a collapse Rothbard reads not as an upset but as retribution. He rehearses his case against her: the Watergate prominence, the stern-avenger persona, above all her creation of the Office of Special Investigations, which hunted elderly Eastern European immigrants over half-century-old accusations. Then he traces the mechanics of her fall, from Geraldine Ferraro's lingering fury over Holtzman's 1992 attack ads to Hank Morris's craft in turning the obscure Alan Hevesi into an asset, to the decisively timed Department of Investigation report charging her with gross negligence in the Fleet Bank loan affair. In Rothbard's hands, politics becomes coalition vengeance, ethnic arithmetic, media timing, and the sudden collapse of a manufactured reputation.
It would be difficult to pick, out of an all-too-jammed field, the most repellent politician in American life, but surely Elizabeth Holtzman would run anyone a very close race for that honor.
Aid to poor countries is laudable; producing it by attaching international reserve creation to development finance is not. That is the disciplined case Haberler mounts against the "Link" between IMF special drawing rights and assistance to less developed countries. Reserve allocation answers to payments, trade variability, and liquidity, he argues, while aid answers to income, wealth, and welfare; fusing the two would rationalize neither and turn every SDR decision into a distributive struggle. The Link is inherently inflationary, since reserves allocated for development are designed to be spent, and even the subtler non-inflationary version proposed by Karlik and Scitovsky would yield little. Aid should instead be voted openly through the budget, its burden made explicit rather than scattered by IMF quotas and balance-of-payments accidents - a tax lottery in place of a tax system.
This argument again mixes reserves and aid.
Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia had revived the case for a state confined to protecting against force, theft, fraud, and broken contracts — and Hazlitt's review both cheers the destination and quarrels with the road to it. He accepts Nozick's derivation of a minimal state from competing protective associations, and admires the entitlement theory that treats holdings as the historical residue of labor, exchange, gift, and inheritance rather than a central stock for the state to pattern. But he rejects the natural-rights scaffolding beneath it, judging natural law too contradictory to ground politics, and offers a rule-utilitarian defense instead: rules against violence and fraud are justified because their general observance makes cooperation possible. Brilliant against anarchism and Marxian exploitation, the book strikes him as digressive and, by its author's own admission, unfinished.
Two noteworthy implications are that the state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others, or in order to prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection.
"Looking like America" was the standard by which Clinton's cabinet was to be judged, and in this February 1993 polemic Rothbard turns it into a reductio ad absurdum. Grant that appointments should mirror the population, he says, and the accounting never stops: if white male, woman, and Hispanic are decisive labels, why not religion, region, skin shade, hair color, and height? Demographic bean-counting, he argues, has displaced even the lip service once paid to merit, converting selection into a public ledger of grievance. Beneath the diversity theater he detects unbroken elite continuity, the Rockefeller networks, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations still shaping foreign policy, so that changing the faces of power leaves its governing interests intact.
Let Willie slip once, and his media worshippers are on his neck in a minute, howling about betrayal.
Poverty can be conquered but never abolished—that distinction governs this brief 1972 essay, since some dependency is inseparable from childhood, sickness, age, and misfortune. From it Hazlitt draws his Paradox of Relief: the richer a community, the less it needs relief yet the more it can provide; the poorer, the greater the need yet the smaller the means. Relief therefore presupposes a productive surplus it cannot itself create, and government relief, he argues, prolongs the very disease it treats by dulling the incentives to work and save. Against a roster of false remedies—land reform, guaranteed income, minimum wages, union privilege, steep progressivity, socialism—he sets the individual cure of work and saving, generalized through property, prices, profit and loss, and competition into the capitalism he credits with lifting mankind out of mass poverty.
Those who truly want to help the poor will not spend their days in organizing protest marches or relief riots, or even in repeated protestations of sympathy.
Instead of shunning foreign entanglements, Bush normalized them, and his parting "December surprise," Rothbard charges, handed Clinton imperial commitments in Somalia, Bosnia, and Iraq. Somalia draws his sharpest fire as the most dangerous kind of war, one without a shred of national interest, waged with a machine gun in one hand and a CARE package in the other. Famine, he counters, is cured not by armed relief but by institutions: secure property, capital, and exchange. Drawing on Isabel Paterson's humanitarian with the guillotine, he warns that compulsory benevolence tends toward domination and that policy driven by television images of suffering can never be rational. Turning to the Balkans, he mocks Washington's threats against Milosevic and the vindictive prosecution of Bobby Fischer for playing chess in Serbia, reading the new world order as a more elastic rationale for war.
Only a George Bush could get us into a war after he has safely lost his election.
Two charges anchor the socialist case against capitalism: that it produces too little and distributes what it makes unjustly. Answering both, Hazlitt insists that nominal-dollar comparisons mislead, deflating U.S. output from 1939 to 1969 to show real income climbing across every quintile, with electricity, plumbing, automobiles and telephones passing from luxuries into ordinary working-class possessions. Against the exploitation thesis he shows payrolls dwarfing after-tax profits and argues that wages and profits rise and fall together rather than warring over a fixed fund. His sharpest move is linguistic: the very phrase 'distribution of income' falsely implies that goods are first produced and then parceled out, when in a market they are owned throughout continuous production and exchange. The cure for poverty, he concludes, is greater earning power, not redistribution.
When profits are large, it does not mean that they are at the expense of the workers. The opposite is more likely to be true.
The technical debate over financing formulas and cost estimates is a trap, Rothbard warns: critics who haggle over the Clinton health plan's details have already conceded its collectivist premises. His indictment runs through eight principles, guaranteed universal access, coercion, egalitarianism, price controls, rationing, and insists the only true medium of access is not a voucher or ID card but the dollar, which preserves choice. Compulsory insurance makes health draftees of the uninsured; premium caps are price controls that must breed shortages and hence rationing; independent practice gives way to state-supervised alliances and HMOs. Why, he asks, should tiered medicine be uniquely intolerable when food and housing already vary by income? The proper alternative is not a rival technocratic scheme but dismantling the intervention already in place.
But the details of the Clintonian plan, however diabolic, are merely petty demons compared to the general principles, where Lucifer really lurks.
By the time the IMF's Interim Committee met at Kingston in 1976, floating exchange rates were already the reality; Jamaica and the Manila assembly merely legalized and disciplined them while easing the Fund away from gold-centered convertibility toward surveillance of national policy. Haberler reads the collapse of Bretton Woods not as a descent into disorder but as the predictable end of an adjustable peg undone by inflation differentials and one-way speculative bets. Against Manila's critics he denies that floating causes inflation - it merely exposes domestic monetary excess sooner - and he sharply distinguishes legitimate smoothing of disorderly markets from "dirty floating," the split rates and multiple-currency schemes that mimic controls. Skeptical of reference rates and target zones, and of pressure on Germany and Japan to inflate away their surpluses, he defends managed but disciplined floating.
The conclusion is that widespread floating is here to stay.
Wide swings in the dollar and mounting protectionist pressure had, by the mid-1980s, revived the dream of governments steering exchange rates by agreement - a dream Haberler treats as more dangerous than the volatility it means to cure. The American trade deficit, he insists, is the counterpart of capital inflows financing federal borrowing when domestic saving falls short, not the product of foreign refusal to expand; the cure lies at home. Using an asset-market approach, he reads the Plaza Agreement and Baker-era activism as politicization of expectations rather than technical correction, since sterilized intervention moves rates only when it signals durable policy change. He rejects a return to fixed parities, target zones, and Group of Seven fine-tuning alike, holding that markets, though they err, err less persistently than politically committed states.
Inflation forced floating on reluctant policy-makers.
Liberal culture canonized Cesar Chavez even as his union disintegrated, and the collapse, Rothbard argues, followed from economics rather than insufficient zeal. The United Farm Workers fell from 70,000 members to 5,000 because migrant farm labor is abundant, mobile, low-skilled, and endlessly replaceable, exactly the conditions under which a union cannot secure monopoly power. He rejects the vocabulary of exploitation: low wages track productivity and replaceability, not employer guilt, and Mexican migrants take the work because it beats their alternatives at home. A triumphant UFW could have raised wages only by pricing many workers out of jobs; the honest way to help them, he insists, is to raise consumer demand for grapes, not to stage feel-good boycotts. Commemoration, in this reading, is ideological combat.
The real legacy of Cesar Chavez is negative: forget the charisma and the hype and learn some economics.