The archive.

Everyday life goes on during a federal shutdown — and for Rothbard that quiet continuity is exactly what the rhetoric of budget crisis exists to bury. Treating the 1990 standoff as an unintended experiment in limited government, he floats a "modest proposal": suspend all federal taxes and borrowing for one year and let citizens contribute anonymously to whichever departments they value. It is a test of revealed preference, not a budget plan; if the programs are worth their cost, taxpayers will fund them without compulsion. He then interrogates the language of "pain" in fiscal debate, asking why only government is cast as an institution that allocates suffering, and reads establishment demands for tax increases in recession as an argument for a larger public sector dressed up as deficit concern.

Has it occurred to many citizens that, for the few blessed days of federal shutdown, the world does not come to an end?

The collapse of Communist authority across Eastern Europe in 1990 returned a suppressed problem to view: the claims of peoples whose languages, names, and borders had been overridden by empires and postwar settlements. National self-determination, Rothbard argues, is hollow unless it carries a robust right of secession — extending in principle down to the village or even the individual, and grounded not in the sanctity of existing borders but in property rights and voluntary consent. He answers four "hostile" reactions in turn — the American melting-pot faith, Marxist-Leninist universalism, liberal "global democracy," and vulgar libertarian individualism — and drives at the question majority rule can never settle: over what geographical area is the majority to rule. He favors partition referenda down to the parish, backs Croatian and Slovenian secession, and condemns Versailles for turning liberated nations into fresh rulers over others.

Only by boldly asserting the right of secession can the concept of national self-determination be anything more than a sham and a hoax.

With the Soviet enemy gone, Rothbard warns, American interventionism would not disappear but hunt for new pretexts. Writing in April 1990, he borrows Garet Garrett's formula of "fear and vaunting" — fear supplied by replacement threats such as narco-terrorism, German reunification, and Irving Kristol's Islamic fundamentalism, vaunting supplied by Wilsonian democracy promotion, prized precisely because its goal can never be reached. The invasion of Panama is his test case: the first post-1945 use of force needing no anti-Communist alibi, its shifting rationales — democracy, drugs, the arrest of a former CIA asset — exposed one by one. In the sharpest reversal, he praises Gorbachev's restraint under the "Sinatra Doctrine" and sets it against Lincoln's war on Southern secession, judging states by coercion rather than by ideological camp.

So far, Gorbachev’s stance contrasts admirably with the policy of the sainted Abraham Lincoln, who used massive force and mass murder to force the seceding Southern states to remain in the Union.

Behind the language of premiums, trust funds, and contributions, Rothbard finds a coercive transfer dressed as insurance. Social Security, he argues, is no annuity backed by accumulated capital but a pay-as-you-go arrangement: payroll taxes are spent at once on the general budget, and today's benefits are drawn from tomorrow's taxpayers. It is a compulsory Ponzi operation, he charges, whose "trust fund" is a paper accounting fiction, whose tax is regressive because it falls only on wages up to a ceiling, and whose Reagan-Greenspan "surplus" served to disguise the federal deficit. Crediting Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's proposed payroll-tax rollback with reopening the debate, he insists that genuine reform begins only when the public is told the plain truth about the system.

For the Social Security System is the biggest single racket in the entire panoply of welfare-state measures that have been fastened upon us by the New Deal and its successors.

Ridicule, not reportage, sets the tone as Rothbard turns to Mills College, the women-only Oakland institution that announced in 1990 it would admit men for financial reasons, then reversed course under a student strike, campus takeover, and alumnae fundraising. The episode, he argues, exposes two feminist double standards: colleges damned as sexist when all-male are prized as uniquely valuable when all-female, and women declared identical to men in ability yet superior in nurturing whenever either claim serves. These are not stray inconsistencies, he contends, but the logic of a politics that casts men as victimizers and women as victims, deploying sameness and difference by turns. He closes with the students who "corrected" their president's boast of making history by shouting "herstory."

Don’t worry about such “objective” qualities as fairness, logic, truth, or non-contradiction; remember, all’s fair in hate and war.

Two arms of the state close on California's Vietnamese fishermen at once, and Rothbard reads their plight as a parable of how power protects incumbents. The Jones Act — a maritime protectionist statute long dormant — is revived under a national-security pretext against legal permanent residents who fled Communism and built a thriving fishery by pooling resources and serving Asian markets. Their success, not any danger, is what draws state action: inefficient Anglo competitors invoke the law against more productive newcomers. And when officials suggest smaller near-shore boats as an alternative, environmental rules banning the necessary gill nets spring the trap shut — a governmental Catch-22 that layers conservation restraint atop economic protection, victimizing by collectivism a people who had already fled it once.

The Jones Act had long ago become a dead letter, but let a law remain on the books, and it can always be trotted out to be used as a club for protectionism.

Rothbard wrote "Why the Intervention in Arabia?" during Operation Desert Shield, as the Bush administration's stated aim slid among defending Saudi Arabia, liberating Kuwait, punishing Saddam Hussein, protecting democracy, and averting a nuclear threat. His method is sequential demolition. The "big guy, little guy" slogan, he argues, smuggles a police metaphor into world politics and then breaks its own rule, since cops do not blockade or bomb whole populations. Government borders, unlike private property, are not productive acquisitions and deserve no automatic military enforcement. Each rationale falls to its own inconsistency — Washington's own invasion of Panama, its tolerance of Israeli and Pakistani bombs, its record of raising fuel costs. The real stake, he concludes, is not cheap oil but control of it, shielding an entrenched Western and Saudi-Kuwaiti financial order against a disruptive regional power.

Iraq, on the other hand, has long been a rogue oil country, in the sense of being outside the Rockefeller-Wall Street ambit.

Rape, for a libertarian, admits of exactly one definition, Rothbard insists, coercion, and nothing subtler. From that binary of coercion versus non-coercion, his February 1991 polemic attacks the early-1990s campus discourse around "date rape": the Koss study, a New York Times report, and university re-education sessions he likens to Orwellian self-criticism. He treats the absence of a spoken refusal or physical resistance as implicit mutual consent, casts feminist accounts of alcohol and ambiguity as machinery for transferring guilt from women onto men, and defends the tacit, nonverbal character of courtship against demands for affirmative consent. The essay pushes its opponents' logic toward prohibition, chaperonage, and what he calls "Left Puritanism", less a measured analysis of assault than a compressed artifact of libertarian backlash against political correctness.

To a libertarian, or indeed to any sensible person, there is no problem: if the sex was coercive, and took place against the will of one of the parties, then it was rape and if not, not.

Behind the fashionable libertarian cult of 'tolerance,' Rothbard detects a plainer failure: bad manners dressed up as philosophy. The essay skewers the 'Modal Libertarians' who use tolerance-talk to license boorishness, unsolicited correction, and doctrinal harassment, mistaking adolescent rebellion against bourgeois civility for principle. His counterclaim relocates libertarian social theory below the level of rights: freedom of association depends not only on liberty from coercion but on the informal discipline of manners, a nonstatist civilizing institution that regulates conduct without law. Political correctness and feminist language-policing, he argues, invert the courtesy they claim to enforce, wielding 'sensitivity' as a club. Against both crude offensiveness and hypersensitive denunciation, he defends rebuke, exclusion, and common-sense reciprocity: the right, in short, to resist rude people rather than indulge them in tolerance's name.

For there is no obligation of any sort to be polite to rude people.

The bank run was supposed to be a relic of old movies and the pre-1933 order, until the savings-and-loan collapse brought the night-long lines and shuttered doors back in force. Rothbard reads this return not as a failure of confidence or bad management but as the disclosure of a structural insolvency: demand deposits are contractual promises payable at par and on demand, while the reserves behind them are only fractional. Hence the domino effect peculiar to banking, where one failure annihilates its neighbors, and hence his verdict that no bank, commercial, savings, or credit union, is inherently sound. He dismisses FDIC guarantees and private insurance alike as devices for sustaining belief, warns that a Federal Reserve rescue would court hyperinflation, and argues that only 100 percent reserves can end the contradiction.

Banking is not a legitimate industry, providing legitimate service, so long as it continues to be a system of fractional-reserve banking: that is, the fraudulent making of contracts that it is impossible to honor.

What the single word "deflation" conceals, Rothbard argues in this chapter of Making Economic Sense, is a distinction on which everything turns: between voluntary market processes and coercive state contraction. Deflation-phobia, shared by Keynesians, monetarists, and even some hard-money economists, rests on ignoring it. He catalogues three benign forms of free-market price decline: rising productivity, an increased demand for cash balances, and the corrective contraction of bank credit after an inflationary boom, defending each as healthy. Against these he sets the genuinely destructive kind, the account freezes of Collor de Mello's Brazil and Gorbachev's withdrawal of large-ruble notes, which he condemns as a second violation of property rights committed in the name of fighting inflation. Inflation ends, he insists, only by halting monetary expansion, not by freezing accounts or voiding currency.

Few occurrences have been more dreaded and reviled in the history of economic thought than deflation.

Behind the Bush administration's "Education President" agenda Rothbard sees not decentralizing reform but a neoconservative expansion of the state into the family, with Lamar Alexander, Chester Finn, and Diane Ravitch presented as managers dressing centralization as choice. School vouchers he rejects outright as tax-financed welfare that makes private schooling dependent on public money. The essay's pivot is a public reversal: having once defended tuition tax credits as merely letting parents keep their own earnings, he now accepts Gary North's warning that any credit or voucher scheme forces the state to certify which schools qualify, and thus to rule over them. Choice so defined becomes a regulatory trap. What survives is a narrower transitional program, abolishing compulsory schooling, opposing school bonds, cutting budgets, and decentralizing control, all pointed toward the eventual end of public education itself.

So the problem with tax credits is not the Subsidy Question, but granting the State any right to rule over our choices.