The archive.

Can an economist defend laissez-faire without claiming that economics supplies moral ends? In this chapter, Murray N. Rothbard examines that tension through Ludwig von Mises’s public commitments and Austrian advisory career. His openly admiring account shows how currency stabilization, political compromise, and the danger of precipitating a banking collapse complicated the passage from theory to policy. Rothbard’s distinctive claim is that market cooperation cannot safely rest on benefits people fail to understand: economists must explain why interventions may defeat their supporters’ own purposes. His contrast between Mises’s rational persuasion and what he portrays as Hayek’s reliance on evolved practices sharpens the stakes. The chapter offers a defense of public advocacy that distinguishes value-free analysis from the economist’s commitment to peace and prosperity, without claiming to settle the ethical foundations of liberalism.

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!

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.

From Diocletian's Rome to the French Revolution to Nixon's 1971 wage-price freeze, the same policy keeps returning under the same false promise, and, in Rothbard's telling, keeps failing for the same reason. A legal ceiling set below the market-clearing price cannot cure inflation; it only suppresses the signals that coordinate supply and demand, breeding shortages, rationing, black markets, and coercive enforcement. His central exhibit is the 1946 meat crisis, when controls emptied the butchers' counters and even choked off insulin, only for supply to return within days of decontrol, proof, he argues, that the shortage was manufactured by the controls themselves. Written as the FCC rolled back cable rates and the Clinton administration floated health-care controls, this compact Austrian brief treats prices as social coordinators and ceilings as political violence.

In every age, in every culture, price controls have never worked. They have always been a disaster.

Strip away the slogan and NAFTA is not free trade at all but treaty-based mercantilism, government-directed commerce that builds a supranational apparatus with power over domestic law. Genuine free trade, Rothbard insists, needs no years of negotiation, only the unilateral repeal of the tariffs, quotas, and anti-dumping laws Washington imposed itself. Writing in October 1993, he scolds the free-market think tanks seduced by the phrase, dismisses both the protectionist low-wage-Mexico objection and the libertarian defense, and warns that tri-national commissions charged with harmonizing labor, health, and environmental rules would level them upward toward the welfare state, as in the European Community. The real menace, he argues, is not lower barriers but the march toward regional and eventually world super-government.

What the Establishment wants is government-directed, government-negotiated trade, which is mercantilism not free trade.

A federal gasoline-tax increase, revived at Clinton's 1992 economic summit, arrives dressed in every fashionable justification—conservation, fuel efficiency, energy independence, fairness, deficit reduction—and Rothbard strips each away in turn. Conservation, he argues, is already performed by market prices, which weigh present demand against future scarcity without dictatorial coercion; fuel efficiency is arbitrary single-factor planning that ignores the tradeoffs of time, safety, and comfort a car actually balances. The deficit rationale he treats as pretext, noting that liberals discover the deficit only when it excuses a tax. Beneath the economics lies a cultural animus: liberals, he charges, reserve a special hatred for the automobile, whose private, self-directed mobility rebukes the collective, timetabled discipline of mass transit.

In contrast to mass transport, which liberals find satisfyingly collective, egalitarian, and rigidly fixed to time and place schedules, the automobile is gloriously individualistic.

When the press crowned Bill Clinton's 1992 victory an election of 'change,' Rothbard read the word as ideological manufacture: not a democratic mandate but the consecration of a managerial-media elite. This January 1993 post-election polemic doubles as an obituary, pronouncing the modern conservative movement dead once anti-Communism, support for Israel, and Reagan-worship lost their glue, and the Libertarian Party dead beside it. He dismantles the 'Year of the Woman' and 'landslide' myths, noting Clinton drew barely 43 percent of votes and under a quarter of voting-age Americans, floats a half-satirical hypothesis that Bush deliberately threw the race for the Rockefeller interests, and rejects the 'worse the better' consolation as both false and corrupt. The closing summons a new Old Right pledged to roll back the Leviathan State.

We must build a new movement from under the rubble of the old.

A shoo-in for renomination at the year's start, Elizabeth Holtzman lost the 1993 Democratic runoff for New York City comptroller two-to-one, a collapse Rothbard reads not as an upset but as retribution. He rehearses his case against her: the Watergate prominence, the stern-avenger persona, above all her creation of the Office of Special Investigations, which hunted elderly Eastern European immigrants over half-century-old accusations. Then he traces the mechanics of her fall, from Geraldine Ferraro's lingering fury over Holtzman's 1992 attack ads to Hank Morris's craft in turning the obscure Alan Hevesi into an asset, to the decisively timed Department of Investigation report charging her with gross negligence in the Fleet Bank loan affair. In Rothbard's hands, politics becomes coalition vengeance, ethnic arithmetic, media timing, and the sudden collapse of a manufactured reputation.

It would be difficult to pick, out of an all-too-jammed field, the most repellent politician in American life, but surely Elizabeth Holtzman would run anyone a very close race for that honor.

"Looking like America" was the standard by which Clinton's cabinet was to be judged, and in this February 1993 polemic Rothbard turns it into a reductio ad absurdum. Grant that appointments should mirror the population, he says, and the accounting never stops: if white male, woman, and Hispanic are decisive labels, why not religion, region, skin shade, hair color, and height? Demographic bean-counting, he argues, has displaced even the lip service once paid to merit, converting selection into a public ledger of grievance. Beneath the diversity theater he detects unbroken elite continuity, the Rockefeller networks, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations still shaping foreign policy, so that changing the faces of power leaves its governing interests intact.

Let Willie slip once, and his media worshippers are on his neck in a minute, howling about betrayal.

Instead of shunning foreign entanglements, Bush normalized them, and his parting "December surprise," Rothbard charges, handed Clinton imperial commitments in Somalia, Bosnia, and Iraq. Somalia draws his sharpest fire as the most dangerous kind of war, one without a shred of national interest, waged with a machine gun in one hand and a CARE package in the other. Famine, he counters, is cured not by armed relief but by institutions: secure property, capital, and exchange. Drawing on Isabel Paterson's humanitarian with the guillotine, he warns that compulsory benevolence tends toward domination and that policy driven by television images of suffering can never be rational. Turning to the Balkans, he mocks Washington's threats against Milosevic and the vindictive prosecution of Bobby Fischer for playing chess in Serbia, reading the new world order as a more elastic rationale for war.

Only a George Bush could get us into a war after he has safely lost his election.

The technical debate over financing formulas and cost estimates is a trap, Rothbard warns: critics who haggle over the Clinton health plan's details have already conceded its collectivist premises. His indictment runs through eight principles, guaranteed universal access, coercion, egalitarianism, price controls, rationing, and insists the only true medium of access is not a voucher or ID card but the dollar, which preserves choice. Compulsory insurance makes health draftees of the uninsured; premium caps are price controls that must breed shortages and hence rationing; independent practice gives way to state-supervised alliances and HMOs. Why, he asks, should tiered medicine be uniquely intolerable when food and housing already vary by income? The proper alternative is not a rival technocratic scheme but dismantling the intervention already in place.

But the details of the Clintonian plan, however diabolic, are merely petty demons compared to the general principles, where Lucifer really lurks.