The archive.

Behind George H.W. Bush's claim that U.S. troops in Somalia were "doing God's work," Rothbard finds an old American reflex: a post-millennial pietism that casts the state as God's instrument for stamping out sin, secularized into the Social Gospel and then Wilsonian global reform. From this genealogy the March 1993 essay turns to political economy, leaning on aid worker Michael Maren's testimony that relief was stolen by soldiers and guerrillas while refugee camps sedentarized nomads who could not otherwise be taxed, drafted, or controlled. Humanitarianism, on this account, is a business sustained by its own failures; free food depresses local prices and manufactures the dependency it claims to relieve. Tracing Siad Barre's Cold War patronage into civil war, Rothbard reaches an austere conclusion, stop the aid and withdraw the marines, framed as economic law against intervention.

In short, a permanent global Crusade.

Whenever politicians invoke "fairness" in trade, Rothbard warns, an American had better guard his wallet, since the word is camouflage for coercion, cartelization, and subsidy. The steel industry supplies his case study: a two-century habit of protection running from War of 1812 tariffs and Pennsylvania iron interests through postwar import quotas Orwellically named "voluntary restraint agreements," anti-dumping claims, and proposed Bush-era tariffs. The nineteenth-century "infant industry" plea, he notes, simply flipped after 1945 into a plea for an aged industry needing breathing space, while the demand for shelter stayed constant. Protection preserves inefficiency rather than curing it, taxing appliance makers, automakers, builders, and consumers alike. Even foreign dumping, he insists, rewards the buyer and injures only the subsidizing seller, in a compact libertarian anatomy of protectionism as rent-seeking dressed in moral language.

“Dumping” can harm only the dumper; it always benefits the dumpee.

Braced to despise a slow, dark, nearly wordless French period film, Rothbard instead walked out converted—and turned the surprise into cultural argument. His 1993 review contends that the austerity of Alain Corneau's Tous Les Matins du Monde is precisely what lets seventeenth-century French Baroque music, voiced by the viola da gamba, replace ordinary cinematic exposition. The rivalry between the withdrawn purist Sainte-Colombe, who spurns Louis XIV's court, and his gifted but careerist pupil Marin Marais becomes a parable of the master-disciple bond that reaches, he writes, into scholarship and science. He defends the film's invented history as legitimate fiction, cheers a soundtrack outselling Michael Jackson and Madonna, and reads the Baroque as the highest pinnacle human civilization has yet reached.

Instead, to the stunned surprise of myself and my wife, I found a genuine masterpiece, one of the best and most notable pictures in years.

Apply the logic of self-determination consistently, Rothbard demands, and one nation stands out as its most neglected casualty: the Hungarians stranded outside Hungary since 1920. His March 1993 essay treats territorial integrity as a selective doctrine and borders as moral claims open to ethnic scrutiny, making the Treaty of Trianon its hinge—morally parallel, he says, to the Versailles settlement that shattered Germany. He surveys the disputed lands of southern Slovakia, northern Vojvodina, Transylvania, and Carpatho-Ruthenia, then presses a maximalist prescription: Hungary's territory should be expanded, its irredentism vindicated against a pro-Western establishment that blesses some nationalisms and demonizes others. Even Bela Kiraly's startling verdict on a wartime Transylvanian boundary serves his insistence that a regime's evil need not settle where a border belongs.

Poor Hungary was shorn of fully one-third of its ethnic and linguistic brethren.

Denounce deficits, then propose both major tax increases and major spending increases: Rothbard calls Clinton’s February 1993 budget schizoid, a program resting on the pretense that taxation, spending, deficits, and production sit in hermetically sealed compartments. Against that, he presses economic interconnectedness — taxes erode saving and raise business costs; only cutting spending can lower the deficit; and government “investment” is not private capital formation but resources diverted to political allocation. The rhetoric is the real target. Renaming taxes as “contributions” and spending as “investment” makes Clintonomics, he charges, Orwellian economics, coercion relabeled as social responsibility. Invoking Austrian business-cycle theory against Keynesian stimulus, and measuring the plan against Reaganomics and Bushonomics, he concludes that beneath the incoherence runs a consistent tendency: the expansion of government at the expense of the private market.

In short, Clintonomics is, in essence, a Great Leap Forward, American style, not toward Maoist communism but toward Democratic Socialism, toward Marxism without the Leninism.

Predicting a presidency before it begins, Rothbard reads the incoming Clinton administration from its advisers, slogans, and place in a long bipartisan pattern. This chapter from Making Economic Sense answers Ludwig Lachmann's claim that the future is unknowable by insisting that political incentives make broad direction plain: higher taxes and spending, industrial policy, regulation, deficit manipulation, and a drift toward socialized medicine, all dressed in the language of investment, care, and partnership. Democrats push the state forward, he argues, while Republicans—right-wing Keynesians from Eisenhower to Bush—merely slow the ratchet; Clinton's novelty is the Wall Street Left of Robert Reich, Felix Rohatyn, and Robert Rubin. His sharpest thrust falls on rebranding public spending as investment and schooling as human capital—coercive finance disguised, he warns, as productive market activity.

In general, we must batten down the hatches for another one of those periodic Great Leaps Forward into statism that have afflicted us since the New Deal (actually, since the Progressive Era).

Bill Clinton's 1993 swearing-in arrives here not as constitutional ritual but as cultural regime change, a week-long "Jacobin Festival" in which Rothbard watches the left-liberal coalition take public possession of America. Skimming newspapers for dissent and avoiding television except for Limbaugh, he ridicules the pageant's celebrities and its official piety: Barbra Streisand, Betty Friedan, Lauren Bacall, and above all Maya Angelou's inaugural poem, which he likens to the wartime Communist "Ballad for Americans." Fran Lebowitz's contempt for the cant confirms his suspicion that the ceremony has turned quasi-religious. Yet the invective closes on a populist wager rather than despair, weighing whether a debased public might still storm its way back to sanity. A compact specimen of Old Right culture-war polemic.

It was an Inaugural from Hell.

San Antonio's water supply becomes a test case for Rothbard's critique of socialized resource management. When drought threatens the Edwards Aquifer, litigation under the Endangered Species Act, brought by the Sierra Club, joined by the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, and blessed by Judge Lucius Bunton, would reserve enough spring flow to protect four obscure species, among them the Texas blind salamander and the fountain darter, even at the cost of the city's residents, farmers, and ranchers. Rothbard reads the classification fight over whether the aquifer is a "river" or a "lake" as a maneuver to shift control from Texas to federal courts, and detects institutional self-interest behind the ecological piety. His remedy is neither better regulation nor conservation but the privatization of water and water rights, so that markets, not judges, allocate a scarce resource.

"That's what this is all about," he warned bitterly. "It's not about fountain darters."

Ranging satirically across Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Abkhazians, Ossetians, Ingush, and Chechens, this 1993 commentary insists that Western observers badly underestimate how tangled the post-Soviet Caucasus really is. Eduard Shevardnadze appears less as a democratic reformer than as a media favorite rewarded for converting from Communism to Social Democracy, and much of the region's violence is laid at the door of Stalin's arbitrary nationalities policy, the Ossetian lands deliberately split between republics to wreck an insufficiently Stalinist people. The point is not that ethnic claims are frivolous but that they are historically serious and beyond any outsider's competence to resolve. The closing "sorting out" is pure irony, mocking the interventionist fantasy that half a million troops under UN direction might straighten the region out in twenty years.

OK, got it straight? Now all we need is for the United States to send about 500,000 troops to the Caucasus—under UN direction, of course—and in about twenty years we should be able to straighten it all out.

There is no anti-war left left anymore, Rothbard declares, watching former peace activists back U.S. and UN intervention against the Serbs in Bosnia, proof, he charges, that their real loyalty was to world government rather than peace. Written during the Bosnian War, the essay holds that moderate intervention is a fiction, since timid first steps make escalation irresistible, and it swaps the language of recognized borders for that of ethnonational claims. Bosnia, on his account, is no more a nation than North Dakota, only a territory holding rival Serb, Croat, and Muslim communities among whom all sides practice ethnic cleansing when they can. His remedy is partition rather than federal reconciliation: dissolve the fictive state, lift the sanctions, and let local peoples fix their own borders while Washington keeps out entirely.

The answer, as repugnant as it is to this meddling age, is to stay the Hell out.

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!

Widow, archivist, and combatant, Margit von Mises spent the two decades after her husband's death as an indefatigable one-woman 'Mises industry,' supervising translations, guarding his reputation, and refusing to let any slight against him pass unchastised. This 1993 memorial, written after her death at 102, honors her not as a self-effacing helpmeet but as one of the strongest-minded women her friends had known, whose memoir My Years with Ludwig von Mises kept a marriage and a movement alive at once. Rothbard makes her the last vestige of Old Vienna—elegance, formed character, and principled independence set against an age of conformity and politically correct status-seeking. To mourn her, he insists, is to preserve the persons, institutions, and loyalties through which Mises's legacy survived.

The death of Margit von Mises, yes even at age 102, leaves us all poorer and diminished in spirit.