3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Representation, Rothbard argues, was once a technological necessity — and Ross Perot's proposal for electronic town meetings exposes that the necessity is gone. Defending Perot against pollsters, journalists, and party professionals whose authority rests on managing opinion, he treats their hostility as more revealing than the plan itself: a class recoiling when participation might become binding. Since telephone, television, and interactive media make direct voting feasible, the only objection left is that voters would choose badly — an objection, he notes, that condemns electing officials no less than deciding issues. The libertarian payoff is fiscal: he backs Perot's amendment requiring popular ratification of any tax increase, and dismisses the establishment balanced-budget amendment as manipulable theater.
The only possible argument against direct democracy, now that the technological argument is obsolete, is that the public’s choices would be wrong.
Rothbard rejects all three stories Americans told about the 1980s during the 1992 recession: the Democratic indictment of greed and tax cuts, the Bush Republican excuse-making, and the anti-Bush nostalgia for an unblemished Reagan boom. Stripping away the moralized language of "greed," he defends Michael Milken as an agent who let shareholders challenge entrenched managers, and shows how Social Security taxes and the 1986 Tax Reform Act offset the advertised rate cuts. The decisive turn is monetary: boom and bust alike were driven by Federal Reserve credit expansion that flowed into real estate and stocks while consumer prices stayed subdued — the 1920s pattern repeating. The true villains, he concludes, wear central bankers' suits.
The arch-villains of the 1980s (and the '90s) are Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan, but they will never be treated as such so long as they remain two of the most beloved figures in American public life.
The 1992 Los Angeles riots draw from Rothbard not sympathy for structural causes but a linguistic charge: to condemn violence while rushing to its "real structural causes," he argues, is precisely to condone it. Even as an anti-statist, he grants government one minimal duty — to defend persons and property under assault — and finds it failed. Liberal remedies of welfare, set-asides, and affirmative action he redescribes as payoffs to violence; Jack Kemp's enterprise zones he calls welfare in market language; repealing minimum-wage and licensing laws he judges helpful but insufficient. Rejecting racial discrimination as the master cause by pointing to Korean-American victims, he lands on impunity: rioters looted because they saw they could get away with it.
Devotion to the sanctity of person and property is not part of their value-system. That’s why, in the short term, all we can do is shoot the looters and incarcerate the rioters.
Long before the left owned the phrase, Rothbard insists, it was the neoconservatives who pioneered political correctness, wielding accusations of anti-Semitism, racism, and nativism to discipline the American right. Written in June 1992, this polemic reads two coordinated assaults on Pat Buchanan—Richard John Neuhaus in First Things, Norman Podhoretz in Commentary—as boundary enforcement rather than argument. Rothbard recasts the neocons as displaced Cold War liberals occupying conservative space, offers his own narrow definition of anti-Semitism, personal versus political, to strip the charge of its elastic menace, and translates Neuhaus's talk of democracy and civitas into a demand for ideological submission. His quarrel is finally with gatekeeping itself: no faction, he argues, should hold the power to excommunicate heretics from the conservative movement.
It is important to realize that, for all their complaints about left Political Correctness, it was the neocons who pioneered in that odious practice.
The uproar over Oliver Stone's JFK, Rothbard argues, revealed more than the film did. The vehemence with which liberal, centrist, and conservative commentators rushed to discredit Stone betrayed not confidence in the Warren Commission but fear that a mass audience might be persuaded. This May 1992 review-essay defends assassination revisionism as dissident historical knowledge—decades of books, tapes, and archival research synthesized on screen—and endorses its broad conclusions: shots from the front, a conspiracy reaching into the CIA's right wing and Mafia connections, Lyndon Johnson's possible foreknowledge. Answering the objection that too many would have had to keep the secret, Rothbard distinguishes the small circle that executes an operation from the vast bureaucracy that buries it afterward. He backs opening the files while doubting the most damning would ever emerge.
The most fascinating thing about JFK, as exciting and well-done as it is, is not the movie itself but the hysterical attempt to marginalize, if not to suppress it.
How does the welfare state survive its own failures? By redefining each failure as a reason for more spending, more bureaucracy, more taxation. Rothbard's diagnosis, drawn from Making Economic Sense, describes a cyclical machine: liberals dramatize a social problem, prescribe federal intervention, and Republicans—complaining all the while—conserve and enlarge what they inherit. His sharper target here is the conservative welfare state of the Bush-era neoconservatives, which he judges more dangerous than ordinary liberalism precisely because conservative language disarms conservative voters. He reads the education reforms of Lamar Alexander, Chester Finn, and Diane Ravitch as a federalizing seizure of children, and Jack Kemp's enterprise zones as subsidy dressed as free enterprise, all to be financed by deficits and new taxes. Spend, tax, elect—and, he adds, control.
Neocons are the most enthusiastic fans of the federal deficit since the Left-Keynesians of the 1930s.
Under the gentle aegis of the New York Times, Rothbard marvels, seventy-five years of Communist butchery, despotism, and mass murder simply wash away. His November 1992 commentary reads Bill Keller's admiring Sunday profile of the South African Communist Party—its intelligence, its idealism, its lovability—as a case study in post-Cold War amnesia, turning Communist influence within the ANC into a tale of youthful anti-racism. He sets Keller in the lineage of Walter Duranty and older fellow-traveling myth, refuses the separation of personal heroism from ideology, and mocks the assurances that Mandela is no Communist and the ANC newly respectful of property. Three morals follow: anti-Communist vigilance outlives the Soviet collapse, elite journalism still romanticizes the creed, and social democracy shares more with Communism than either cares to admit.
No mention, of course, of murdering dissenters, totalitarianism, slave labor camps, and all the rest.
Reviving after the 1970s—propelled by the collapse of Keynesian macroeconomics and Hayek's 1974 Nobel—Austrian economics had also splintered, and Rothbard writes to declare only one strand legitimate. Against Hayekian knowledge theory and Lachmann's radical uncertainty, which he says dissolves economics into institutional history, he insists that the whole discipline stands or falls with Misesian praxeology, the logic of human action. He recasts the entrepreneur as an active owner-appraiser who forecasts and risks resources, not a passive figure merely 'alert' to price signals; defends equilibrium constructs as tools of causal reasoning; and, following Salerno, roots the socialist calculation problem in appraisement rather than dispersed information. Fractional-reserve banking he brands legalized counterfeiting. The paper is less survey than manifesto for a Misesian renaissance.
The purpose of human action is not to “know” but to employ means to achieve goals.
Condemning Serbian conduct is one thing; committing American soldiers to a Balkan war is another—and Rothbard means to keep the two apart. This September 1992 antiwar polemic attacks the post-Cold War premise that U.S. power should police humanitarian disasters and answer televised outrage with force. What he calls government by TV clip converts suffering into pressure for intervention before feasibility, authority, or aftermath are weighed. He credits Bush and the Pentagon for caution learned in Vietnam and Lebanon, dismantles territorial integrity as an automatic trigger for war, and rejects the promise that air power can secure Sarajevo cheaply without occupation. Behind every call to arms he hears the same tired analogy—each new adversary a Hitler—substituting moral theater for analysis of what intervention would actually cost.
No country or people get bombed into submission.
No publication had savaged George Bush more bitterly, yet by late July 1992 Rothbard found himself, grudgingly, working his way back to the president. With Buchanan's primary challenge spent and Perot withdrawn, this short electoral polemic frames the Bush-Clinton contest as lesser-evil triage within a decayed two-party system. The case for Bush is thin by design—chiefly that he is not Clinton, plus the Bush-Baker firmness on Israeli settlements and loan guarantees, and a dithering caution that kept America out of Bosnia. Against Clinton, Rothbard broadens from policy to culture: the leftest-ever Democratic convention, Gore's ties to organized Zionism, and Hillary Clinton's children's-rights advocacy recast as an assault on parental jurisdiction. A defensive vote, he concludes—while longing for a total counterrevolution against left-liberalism in government, economy, and culture.
Holding back the hordes may be important, but it's not exactly soul-satisfying.
Speculative attacks on a national currency are not predation but price discovery—markets correcting fiat money that governments have inflated while commanding a value the market will not pay. Turning to the 1993 pressure on the French franc within Europe's exchange-rate system, Rothbard strips the media melodrama of its heroes and villains and reduces it to elementary price theory: since gold redeemability vanished, each national money floats as an independent fiat commodity priced by supply and demand. Fixed parities, he argues, are simply price controls—a floor under weak money guaranteeing speculators a one-way bet. From the franc he widens to the European Monetary System, Maastricht, and the proposed ECU, reading a single currency and central bank not as free trade but as centralized inflation and political control routed through Brussels.
Blaming speculators for these crises is as absurd as blaming “black marketeers” for higher prices under price controls.
Off-duty drunkenness and convention excess, Rothbard argues, were being retroactively criminalized by feminism, bureaucracy, and a new puritanism, and the naval aviators of the 1991 Tailhook convention, not the women who accused them, are the affair's true casualties. Mocking Inspector General Derek Vander Schaaf's report and Lt. Paula Coughlin's public accusations, he redescribes institutional scandal as ordinary adult misconduct in a predictable setting, then converts known "tradition" into consent. The wider target is what he calls the assault on the military's "macho culture": sensitivity training, gender-blind integration, and the therapeutic state closing in on normal masculine heterosexuality. Openly hostile to feminism and gay rights, the essay stands as a period document of early-1990s right-libertarian culture war, recoding a scandal of abuse into an emblem of cultural defeat.
But since when has debauchery been a high crime, or drunkenness off the job for that matter?!