1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A group of reformers, impatient with the patchwork of anti-poverty measures, proposed to abolish poverty at a stroke: guarantee every citizen an income sufficient to live "with dignity," worked for or not. Assembling his 1966 reply alongside the proposals of Robert Theobald's circle and the federal automation commission, Hazlitt treats the guaranteed income not as administrative tidying but as a new theory of rights—one enforced against producers and taxpayers. His counter is to translate "income" back into goods and services that someone must still produce. Fears that cybernation would soon erase jobs he dismisses as a recurring fallacy; static cost estimates he faults for assuming behavior would not change. Even Friedman's negative income tax, he warns, would swell under political pressure into an unconditional floor, severing reward from effort and eroding the surplus relief depends on.
Nearly all of them seem to share the belief, for example, that the growth of automation and "cybernation" is eliminating jobs so fast (or soon will be) that there soon just won't be jobs for even the most industrious.
Opponents of nationalized medicine, this introduction to Politicized Medicine warns, usually lose before they begin, because they accept government control everywhere else and protest only when it reaches their own profession. Sennholz presses for consistency: if public education, licensing, subsidies, and welfare are legitimate, health care cannot be exempt, since the difference between partial and comprehensive state provision is one of scale, not kind. He attacks the doctrine of social rights as disguised claims on the labor and property of others, turning cooperation into conflict as each declared benefit imposes a matching burden. His closing turn indicts professional licensing and accreditation not as neutral quality controls but as state-backed shelters from competition, for once a profession accepts the state as author of its credentials, it concedes the state's authority to author a national health system too.
They yield the very premise on which all tyranny rests: the right of some individuals to control others.
Barely more than a squib, this very short 1993 polemic seizes on a reported irregularity in Bill Clinton's parentage, his father allegedly still married to another woman when he wed Virginia Cassidy, and turns bigamy into an instrument of political delegitimation. Rothbard's method is compressed escalation: the announcement of "confirmation," the leap from bigamy to bastardy, then comic speculation about unknown half-siblings and paternal promiscuity. There is no argument in constitutional law here, only abrasive anti-Clinton invective that collapses the dignity of high office into a scandalous family narrative. Taboo-breaking and anti-reverence toward the presidency furnish the whole rhetorical force, the genealogical joke hardening at the last into an impeachment slogan. A specimen of the insult-driven paleo-libertarian style Rothbard cultivated in his final years.
Do we want a bastard in the White House? Impeach Clinton!
Keynes was, at bottom, an inflationist, and this compact essay works to convert that charge from insult into mechanism. Keynesian stimulus, Hazlitt argues, cannot rest on spending financed by taxation, since taxes cancel the purchasing power the spending was meant to add; what matters is the deficit. Once government spends beyond its revenue, the gap must be closed either by borrowing, which merely postpones contraction, or by creating new money, which means inflation. Every downturn thus becomes an argument for another dose of the same expedient, making Keynesianism less a theory of demand than a political technology for normalizing permanent fiscal imbalance. Reaching back to Roman debasement and John Law's paper schemes, Hazlitt warns that no inflation on record produced sound expansion, only depreciation, arbitrary redistribution and economic demoralization.
The lessons of inflation are soon forgotten.
Development is ordinary economics practised under difficult conditions, not a separate discipline licensing illiberal policy. From that premise Haberler, writing as a trade theorist, prosecutes the anti-market doctrines that captured the postwar field: import substitution, exchange control, the big push, and chronic trade pessimism. He traces their appeal to a fatal misreading of the Great Depression, which he insists was a monetary catastrophe rather than proof of capitalist stagnation, and to an aggregation that lumped unlike countries together. The Prebisch-Singer terms-of-trade thesis he rejects with Lipsey's evidence; the demonstration effect he calls patronizing; disguised unemployment he answers with Viner and Schultz. His comparisons, West Germany against East, South Korea against North, Taiwan against China, turn the chapter into a broad indictment of planning, defending monoeconomics throughout.
The best policy would be to let free markets, in other words, capitalism, do what they do best – develop new industries.
Pure free trade is politically rare and even theory admits exceptions to it, so the question Haberler pursues is not whether governments intervene but how. The form decides everything. A tariff is visible, general, price-based, and pours revenue into the treasury; a quota fixes volume by fiat and mints scarcity rents for whoever holds the license; worse still, a voluntary export restraint, like the one pressed on Japanese carmakers, ships that rent abroad. Around the surviving GATT core of most-favoured-nation treatment he charts a proliferating tangle of preferences, origin rules, and discretionary licensing, with agricultural protection, above all the self-contradicting sugar program, as his sharpest case. Where quotas cannot be abolished he would auction the licenses. His liberalism is institutional: rules and transparency against the administrative sprawl of managed trade.
But the élan of trade liberalization of the first 15 or 20 years of the postwar period has evaporated.
Why did a regime that boasted of scientific planning keep buying grain from the capitalist countries it denounced? From that puzzle of chronic Soviet crop failures, Hazlitt reconstructs the socialist calculation argument in miniature. In a market the farmer need grasp none of the whole; profit and loss and a shifting structure of prices condense dispersed knowledge of scarcity, demand, weather, and transport into signals he can act on locally. Planners command rather than discover, and where they lean on foreign quotations or black-market indications they parasitically borrow the very mechanism they reject — otherwise they work in the dark, issuing quotas that harden into compulsory error. The core is explicitly Misesian: without genuine prices formed by the exchange of privately held resources, rational allocation is impossible. Marx's labor theory, he adds, survives on resentment, not analysis.
Without a set of previous real and recent market prices, without informed expectations, the bureaucracy would have to make 64 trillion blind guesses.
Political correctness, in Rothbard's telling, is a regime of linguistic surveillance, and the public condemnation of Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott in 1993, for racial and ethnic slurs and Nazi memorabilia, is his exhibit. He recasts Schott as victim rather than culprit, reclassifies slurs as jokes and memorabilia as harmless collecting, and reads hate-speech norms as the new obscenity law, successor to the 1960s "Filthy Speech" taboos. His most characteristic move is linguistic economy: the anti-Japanese epithet of the title is redescribed as mere American contraction, a birthright of syllabic efficiency. Extending the argument to the shifting accepted terms for Black Americans, the essay collapses state censorship, workplace discipline, and press criticism into one narrative of persecution, and pointedly declines to ask why the words at issue actually wound.
Marge Schott’s sin, so unforgivable as to be beyond redemption, was to use a few Incorrect Words and phrases.
Less an arena of ideas than a theater of ethnic balancing, patronage, and racial antagonism, that is how Rothbard reads the 1993 New York mayoral cycle in this abrasive August election essay. Primaries, he argues, dissolved the old bosses' smoke-filled-room compromises and left group conflict naked, and Dinkins survives as favorite chiefly for lack of an attractive alternative. The sharpest analysis follows consultant David Garth's revival of the New York "fusion" tradition, attaching Giuliani to Liberal and Republican lines and balancing the ticket by borough, religion, and ethnicity through Susan Alter and Herman Badillo, against a fragmented Democratic side with no coordinated slate. Roy Innis appears as a black conservative useful for saying what Giuliani cannot, and the Crown Heights fight over "riot" versus "pogrom" becomes the essay's emblem of symbolic classification displacing real dispute.
Talk of politics as the triumph of symbolism over substance!
Envy, in Hazlitt's diagnosis, is not the mere desire for what one lacks but resentment of another's advantage—and because its object is comparative status rather than need, no concession can satisfy it. This 1972 essay argues that redistributive politics is often driven either by envy or by the fear of it, and that forced equalization can only level downward, destroying the abundance from which wages and relief flow. Steep progressive and confiscatory inheritance taxes, he contends, punish the rich symbolically while injuring the poor by starving capital accumulation. His objective test asks not whether a policy favors equality but whether it pursues equality at the expense of abundance. Reaching for Tocqueville on pre-revolutionary France, he warns that appeasing resentment provokes more of it, and that a government paying social blackmail invites the collapse it fears.
Envy is implacable. Concessions merely whet its appetite for more concessions.
Those who once recognized collectivism, socialism, egalitarianism, nihilism, and statism as evil, Rothbard insists in this September 1993 essay, owe a duty to their families, posterity, and country to keep fighting, and neither defeatism nor purity excuses desertion. Against Schumpeter's thesis that socialism is inevitable, he answers that apparent hopelessness is no warrant for surrender, citing the recent collapse of Communism. His central typology names two forms of abandonment: the Beltway "sellout," the young radical absorbed by Washington's incentives until his face and the enemy's grow indistinguishable, and the "retreatist," who flees to Galt's Gulch-style enclaves in search of purity. Both vacate the real battlefield. Drawing on Randolph Bourne to separate country from State, Rothbard demands that liberty be defended in the external world of property and public life, not merely within.
Let’s put it this way: we must not abandon our lives, our properties, our America, the real world, to the barbarians. Never.
Environmental law, in this 1993 essay, has quietly become a vehicle for political control over private economic life. Beginning with NEPA's environmental-impact requirement and the EPA, Sennholz argues that what looks like procedural prudence is in fact a standing license for federal agencies to supervise investment, construction, and enterprise through permits and purse strings. The visible costs of cleanup, he contends, are the smallest part; the real burden hides in delayed projects, lost jobs, higher prices, and diminished living standards that never appear as a single budget line. As overt socialism retreats, he claims, global-warming and ozone alarms hand the old regulatory impulse a new name - the production czar now is an environmental czar - and, lacking market prices, environmental planning repeats the socialist calculation problem: command without coordination, waste dressed as rescue.
Without the help of market prices, which reflect the value judgments of all the participants in the economic process, he cannot calculate, that is, rationally compare the value of input with that of output.