When US unemployment ticked up to 4.6 percent in November 2025, the Financial Times declared that the Federal Reserve should cut rates to rescue workers. From the Keynesian view, if jobs falter, you throw more money at the problem. Yet those policies create short‑term bubbles and long‑term pain. An Austrian assessment shows why cutting rates merely delays the needed adjustment and why the real cure is higher, market‑driven rates and fiscal restraint.

[Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory by Crispin Sartwell (SUNY Press, 2008; 123pp.)]

We often scoff at supposedly how cheap things cost in decades gone by. For example, my wife and I recently watched a stage play of Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story, set in 1940’s America. (The lead character, Ralphie, wanted a Daisy Red Ryder Air Rifle, but all the adults warned him “you’ll shoot your eye out”). In the stage play, Ralphie’s dad complains to the mother that he had to buy a new car battery at the outrageous price of $6 dollars. This low price got a big laugh, as was intended.

After the failures of socialism—economically, historically, and ethically—the Left-liberal intellectuals, not wanting to abandon socialism, employed several new strategies. It has been suggested that these several manifestations can be subsumed under one general category—postmodernism.

[Editor’s note: Vilfredo Pareto is best known for his work as an economist. Pareto was not of the Austrian School, but Rothbard notes that Pareto was also a radical political theorist who was influenced by Gustave de Molinari and Herbert Spencer. As such, he is worth noting, especially for his excellent work on the “circulation of elites” and classical liberal exploitation theory. The text below is a minor text by Pareto, written for The Living Age in 1925 as part of a group of columns on the direction Europe was heading in the decade following the Great War.

“Let’s be clear: President Trump’s claim that the U.S. government collected $600 billion from tariffs in 2025 is incorrect,” The true amount is closer to $289 billion.