1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
There are, quite simply, too many laws, and for Hazlitt their sheer number is itself the harm, regardless of whether any single statute is wise. Defining law operationally as command rather than sentimental reform, he separates the rare rules that coordinate conduct, like traffic regulations, from the flood of prohibitions and compulsions that direct private choice. He reaches back to Herbert Spencer's 1854 attack on 'overlegislation' to show that even laissez-faire England groaned under statutes, then buries the reader in an inventory: state legislatures passing thousands of laws, agencies generating regulations that dwarf formal statutes, compliance costs Gene Taylor puts above sixty billion dollars a year. Citing Gustav Cassel's warning about cumulative control, he treats the torrent not as inconvenience but as a slide toward comprehensive direction of citizens by the state.
Every unnecessary law is itself bound to be pernicious.
Why did a man assassinated nearly thirty years earlier suddenly reappear on baseball caps and movie screens? Rothbard's brief 1993 polemic treats the early-1990s Malcolm X revival as cultural manufacture, media hype trailing Spike Lee's hagiography and elite political signaling, and folds it into his suspicion that public commemoration is a technique of ideological rule. Setting Malcolm against Martin Luther King's integrationist liberalism, he finds the icon's power less in doctrine than in the fact that his life ended unfinished, after the break with the Nation of Islam and before any faction could conclusively claim him. He reads black nationalism as preferable to state-enforced integration yet stranded by territorial reality, and closes on the man himself: intelligent, sardonic, disciplined, remembered from Rothbard's own hearing of him speak.
To paraphrase LBJ, seize control of a nation’s celebrations, and their hearts and minds will follow.
Why do socialist economies, for all their proclaimed internationalism, trade so little and so cautiously? Haberler's answer, offered as candid speculations of a theorist, is that comparative cost identifies gains from trade but never realizes them; someone must go looking. Marginal analysis and shadow pricing can aid socialist calculation, yet they cannot supply the entrepreneurial discovery that foreign markets demand: unfamiliar demand, currency risk, contractual hazard, the real possibility of loss. Private merchants chase profit across borders; plan-bound managers, rewarded for fulfilment and punished for failure, stay inward-looking and nationalistic. The predicted result is trade aversion and undertrading, volumes far below the comparative-cost optimum, together with bilateralism, barter, and imports confined to unavoidable necessities. It is comparative advantage recast from a static doctrine into an institutional argument.
Nationalism has proved to be an extremely hardy plant.
How does a country saddled with reparations actually hand real resources across its borders, and must its export prices fall to do so? That question, sharpened by Germany's post-Versailles burden, sets Haberler against Bertil Ohlin in these two essays, translated from the 1930 article and its 1931 rejoinder. Endorsing the Thornton-Mill view that price movements are almost always needed to force the required export surplus, he nonetheless refuses the standard conclusion that the terms of trade must turn against the payer, showing that they can conceivably improve. Against Keynes's transfer pessimism he judges a demand elasticity of one or less for German exports highly improbable, given Germany's competitive industries and small share of world markets, while carefully separating the international transfer problem from the domestic fiscal task of raising the sums.
One could say, therefore, that Keynes was right in theory but his opponents in practice.
Small, literate, European in origin and once counted among Latin America's prosperous nations, Uruguay is Hazlitt's chosen exhibit of a country needlessly ruined by welfare policy. Rather than build a model, this 1969 essay assembles six chronological snapshots from firsthand observers between 1956 and 1969, letting their repetition become the argument: the same deficits, swollen state payrolls, pension claims, strikes, and collapsing peso recur in every report. His central move is to show how a subsidy or pension, once granted, hardens into a "right" that becomes politically impossible to reduce whatever the fiscal crisis. A statistical appendix translates the dossier into monetary collapse, with consumer prices rising 88, then 49, then 136 percent in successive years. Uruguay becomes his universal caution against a welfarism easy to launch and nearly impossible to reverse.
No politician here can hope to get a majority by advocating austerity, harder work, and the sacrifice of even some of the Welfare State features.
Sold in 1935 as the programs that would finally end emergency relief, Social Security and unemployment compensation instead became permanent additions to it—the governing irony of this libertarian survey of American welfare through 1971. Hazlitt reads caseloads, expenditure tables, and press reports as proof of an institutional tendency to expand: national welfare rolls, he tallies, climbed from about six million in 1950 to over fourteen million by 1971. The mechanism he isolates is fiscal federalism—when a city pays only a small share of each relief dollar, it dispenses political favors cheaply and polices fraud loosely. Beneath the accounting lies a philosophical claim: once the poor are granted a right to others' income, no logical stopping place exists short of equalized incomes. The rest is a jungle of overlapping programs whose true cost no taxpayer can see.
Both Social Security and unemployment compensation were proposed in large part on the argument of Franklin D. Roosevelt and others in 1935 that they would enable the government to "quit this business of relief."
Minimum-wage floors, union seniority rules, and the Davis-Bacon Act present themselves as worker protections; here they are recast as barriers that price the least-skilled out of employment. Writing in a classical-liberal register, Sennholz separates the inequalities that arise from differing service and productivity in free markets from those manufactured by coercive policy. He concedes the historical weight of Jim Crow and the real gains of civil-rights law, yet insists the remaining obstacle is state-created: a legal wage floor forbids hiring the low-productivity beginner, seniority layoffs reproduce old exclusions, and prevailing-wage mandates he traces to racial protectionism. His remedy joins anti-racist language to anti-interventionist economics—wages and jobs set by productivity rather than statute or union rank.
The Act was spawned by racism and continues to sow the evils of racism.
Somalia, Bosnia, Tajikistan, Iraq, Korea: the post-Cold War map, in this September 1993 commentary, reads to Washington's interventionists as a cornucopia of opportunities to feed, bomb, and occupy. Rothbard's thesis is that intervention is an appetite rather than a response to necessity, and that humanitarian rescue, democracy promotion, and anti-fundamentalism have become interchangeable warrants for force. Somalia is the central case: a relief mission that disrupted local food arrangements, cast General Aidid as the lone villain, and mutated into armed vengeance once American and UN troops became combatants. The recurring device he exposes is the 'Good Guys vs. Bad Guys' frame, a political technology that manufactures the enemy needed to authorize war. He notes the blowback of Afghan fighters recast overnight from freedom fighters to fanatics, and dismisses the whole crusade as Wilsonian quagmire.
But Uncle Sam will have a difficult time trying to figure out on which side to intervene. How is it going to sort out the Good Guys from the Bad Guys?
Handed ten stock objections to capitalism by a young defender of free enterprise, Hazlitt answers each in turn in this 1983 reply—on resource depletion, monopoly and discriminatory pricing, corporate power, access to capital, workplace injury, unequal wages and housing, and the charge that the system is simply inhuman. His recurring move is to accept the factual complaint while denying the inference: scarcity, error, and self-interest exist under every order, and government coercion usually worsens what it means to repair. Comparison, not utopia, is his standard—capitalism judged against feasible socialism, not against imagined abundance and perfect virtue. The title's diagnosis comes last: Americans live not under real capitalism but under what Mises called "sabotaged" capitalism, whose interventions breed unemployment and shortages that are then blamed on the market, generating demands for still more intervention.
The number of faults that have been alleged against capitalism are without limit.
Mass poverty, Hazlitt reminds his readers, was the normal human condition until roughly the mid-eighteenth century, when capital accumulation and a run of inventions launched the Industrial Revolution and largely abolished it in advanced economies. What remains are pockets and cases of individual poverty, and here he resists every single-cause story, endorsing neither the conservative's shiftless poor nor the reformer's pure victims but a tangle of conduct, health, skill, family and luck that defeats clean moral accounting. He weighs A. G. Warner's nineteenth-century tables of 'misconduct' and 'misfortune', Edward Banfield's account of present-oriented class cultures, and modern federal correlations of poverty with age and education. The governing test for any relief, he argues, is its effect on incentives, because poverty is finally a problem of production rather than distribution.
The lower-class individual lives from moment to moment. If he has any awareness of a future, it is of something fixed, fated, beyond his control: things happen to him, he does not make them happen.
Free-market think tanks and pundits did not merely approve of NAFTA in 1993; they defended it, Rothbard observed, with a frantic passion they never mustered against the income tax or the Federal Reserve, and that disproportion is the puzzle this November polemic sets out to solve. His answer separates genuine free trade from a treaty administered by state-created bodies: NAFTA, he argues, is managed trade whose supranational commissions, unaccountable to any taxpayer, can 'upwardly harmonize' environmental and labor regulation against the wishes of citizens. Turning to public choice, he traces the fervor to concrete beneficiaries, Mexican state energy, Koch-linked interests, and lobbying money, and to the pattern by which private firms enlist the state to socialize their costs. Professed market principles, he insists, must be judged against the subsidies they conceal.
There is a vital lesson here: much of Big Government, much of the welfare-interventionist State, is pushed by private businesses in order to force the taxpayers to subsidize their own costs.
A genuine grassroots right-wing revolt against Washington, Rothbard announces in this October 1994 essay, has for the first time in years broken loose from the Beltway, and libertarian strategy must break with it. He sets the insurgency against the 'Official Conservative and Libertarian movement' of think tanks, direct-mail firms, and access-seeking reformers whose real product is donor reassurance, and he redefines 'access' itself as corruption: to court credibility inside Washington is already to concede its centrality. Cataloguing county militias, sheriff resistance to the Brady bill, Tenth Amendment campaigns, secessionist and land-rights activism, and hostility to the Federal Reserve, he reads them not as a finished doctrine but as an anti-centralist instinct that intellectuals should clarify rather than command. Hatred of the Clintons, he argues, fused personal disgust with anti-statism into a mass politics more radical than Perot's.
These heartland rebels are close to the spirit, not of blow-dried Beltway think-tankers, but of the patriots of the American Revolution.