The archive.

Liberal culture canonized Cesar Chavez even as his union disintegrated, and the collapse, Rothbard argues, followed from economics rather than insufficient zeal. The United Farm Workers fell from 70,000 members to 5,000 because migrant farm labor is abundant, mobile, low-skilled, and endlessly replaceable, exactly the conditions under which a union cannot secure monopoly power. He rejects the vocabulary of exploitation: low wages track productivity and replaceability, not employer guilt, and Mexican migrants take the work because it beats their alternatives at home. A triumphant UFW could have raised wages only by pricing many workers out of jobs; the honest way to help them, he insists, is to raise consumer demand for grapes, not to stage feel-good boycotts. Commemoration, in this reading, is ideological combat.

The real legacy of Cesar Chavez is negative: forget the charisma and the hype and learn some economics.

Political language does the work that arguments cannot, Rothbard contends: market socialism once seduced American elites while remaining socialism, and free trade now sells a treaty hostile to market freedom. Real liberalization would demand only that Washington unilaterally repeal its own tariffs, quotas, and anti-dumping laws; NAFTA instead entrenches neo-mercantilism, in which imports are merely the price government pays to win export markets for politically connected firms. He casts the pact as a North American Maastricht, an attempt to integrate and cartelize government through a supranational commission practicing upward harmonization. The Clinton side agreements on labor and the environment are the sharpest danger, locking welfare-state regulation in place forever, while demands that Americans rescue Carlos Salinas's reforms sit oddly beside Mexico's continued ban on private oil and gas.

Labels are often enough to nab the suckers.

Tolerable, for once, is Rothbard's verdict on the 1993 Academy Awards, where the ceremony ran longer and more politically correct than ever but the outcomes proved less disastrous than he feared. His relief turns on a single result: The Crying Game's loss of Best Picture, which he treats as the night's real victory. Reading films as moral evidence, he grants Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven a grudging pass for redeeming its guilt-ridden revisionism with a final burst of unembarrassed retribution, and champions Scent of a Woman as an old-fashioned movie-movie carried by Al Pacino's bravura. The column then broadens into a culture-war attack on Hollywood liberalism, avant-garde criticism, and what he decries as gender-bending, arguing that identity politics and sexual pluralism have crowded out heroic drama and moral clarity.

For once, the Academy Awards were tolerable—not the ceremony, which was longer, more boring, and more Politically Correct than ever—but the awards themselves.

A pro-choice libertarian welcoming Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority may seem a contradiction, yet Rothbard builds exactly that case in this February 1993 strategy essay. Christian conservatives, he argues, are not aspiring theocrats but people fighting a left-liberal elite that used government to assault Christian culture; the true battleground is not the bedroom but anti-discrimination law, which he condemns as an assault on property and freedom of association. He would return abortion to the states through radical decentralization and the Tenth Amendment, narrow the establishment clause to mere tax funding of churches, and replace public schools, those centers of ideological brainwashing, with unregulated private and home schooling. His conclusion is a call to abandon sectarian isolation: after the Cold War and amid political correctness, paleolibertarians belong in an anti-egalitarian coalition of the Right.

Establishing a religion has a specific meaning: paying for ministers and churches out of taxpayer funds.

Why did a man assassinated nearly thirty years earlier suddenly reappear on baseball caps and movie screens? Rothbard's brief 1993 polemic treats the early-1990s Malcolm X revival as cultural manufacture, media hype trailing Spike Lee's hagiography and elite political signaling, and folds it into his suspicion that public commemoration is a technique of ideological rule. Setting Malcolm against Martin Luther King's integrationist liberalism, he finds the icon's power less in doctrine than in the fact that his life ended unfinished, after the break with the Nation of Islam and before any faction could conclusively claim him. He reads black nationalism as preferable to state-enforced integration yet stranded by territorial reality, and closes on the man himself: intelligent, sardonic, disciplined, remembered from Rothbard's own hearing of him speak.

To paraphrase LBJ, seize control of a nation’s celebrations, and their hearts and minds will follow.

A memorial becomes an argument about memory. Recounting the career of V. Orval Watts, who died in 1993, Rothbard traces a life lived inside institutions rather than abstractions: the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, where Watts became the first full-time economist employed by a chamber in the United States; the Foundation for Economic Education, which he joined as Leonard Read's economic adviser in 1946; and Northwood University, where he resumed teaching at sixty-five. Watts's books against Keynesianism, union power, and the United Nations stand as evidence of a consistent educator against collectivism. But the tribute turns outward in its closing claim—that a movement forgetting its own leaders and heroes will not amount to much, and that remembrance is itself part of the free-market cause's survival.

Any movement that has no sense of its own history, that fails to acknowledge its own leaders and heroes, is not going to amount to very much, nor does it deserve a better fate.

Somalia, Bosnia, Tajikistan, Iraq, Korea: the post-Cold War map, in this September 1993 commentary, reads to Washington's interventionists as a cornucopia of opportunities to feed, bomb, and occupy. Rothbard's thesis is that intervention is an appetite rather than a response to necessity, and that humanitarian rescue, democracy promotion, and anti-fundamentalism have become interchangeable warrants for force. Somalia is the central case: a relief mission that disrupted local food arrangements, cast General Aidid as the lone villain, and mutated into armed vengeance once American and UN troops became combatants. The recurring device he exposes is the 'Good Guys vs. Bad Guys' frame, a political technology that manufactures the enemy needed to authorize war. He notes the blowback of Afghan fighters recast overnight from freedom fighters to fanatics, and dismisses the whole crusade as Wilsonian quagmire.

But Uncle Sam will have a difficult time trying to figure out on which side to intervene. How is it going to sort out the Good Guys from the Bad Guys?

Free-market think tanks and pundits did not merely approve of NAFTA in 1993; they defended it, Rothbard observed, with a frantic passion they never mustered against the income tax or the Federal Reserve, and that disproportion is the puzzle this November polemic sets out to solve. His answer separates genuine free trade from a treaty administered by state-created bodies: NAFTA, he argues, is managed trade whose supranational commissions, unaccountable to any taxpayer, can 'upwardly harmonize' environmental and labor regulation against the wishes of citizens. Turning to public choice, he traces the fervor to concrete beneficiaries, Mexican state energy, Koch-linked interests, and lobbying money, and to the pattern by which private firms enlist the state to socialize their costs. Professed market principles, he insists, must be judged against the subsidies they conceal.

There is a vital lesson here: much of Big Government, much of the welfare-interventionist State, is pushed by private businesses in order to force the taxpayers to subsidize their own costs.

A genuine grassroots right-wing revolt against Washington, Rothbard announces in this October 1994 essay, has for the first time in years broken loose from the Beltway, and libertarian strategy must break with it. He sets the insurgency against the 'Official Conservative and Libertarian movement' of think tanks, direct-mail firms, and access-seeking reformers whose real product is donor reassurance, and he redefines 'access' itself as corruption: to court credibility inside Washington is already to concede its centrality. Cataloguing county militias, sheriff resistance to the Brady bill, Tenth Amendment campaigns, secessionist and land-rights activism, and hostility to the Federal Reserve, he reads them not as a finished doctrine but as an anti-centralist instinct that intellectuals should clarify rather than command. Hatred of the Clintons, he argues, fused personal disgust with anti-statism into a mass politics more radical than Perot's.

These heartland rebels are close to the spirit, not of blow-dried Beltway think-tankers, but of the patriots of the American Revolution.

Can entrepreneurial alertness explain profit if it does not also explain exposure to loss? This question gives a concrete edge to Murray N. Rothbard’s 1994 review of the collection edited by Bruce Caldwell and Stephan Boehm. Rothbard argues that the volume marginalizes Misesian praxeology while treating the Hayek–Kirzner approach as representative of Austrian economics. His criticism becomes a compact defence of the capitalist entrepreneur: someone who commits resources, forecasts uncertain events, and can lose as well as gain. Readers can discover why Rothbard regards ownership and uncertainty-bearing as indispensable to entrepreneurship, and how this position informs his objections to the collection’s methodological emphasis and historical framing. The review offers a partisan but sharply defined account of divisions within the Austrian school.

Subsidize any condition and its incidence rises: that law of demand, Rothbard insists in this chapter from Making Economic Sense, governs behavior far outside the marketplace, from coffee consumption and subway ridership to childbirth and welfare dependency. The argument turns on marginal analysis, since blanket appeals to 'need' obscure the fact that consumers at the margin respond sharply to relative costs and benefits. His evidentiary center is a Change-NY estimate that the combined Medicaid, housing, food, and cash benefits of a New York single mother with two children equal a $45,000 pre-tax salary, more than entry-level municipal work returns after tax. From this he casts welfare not as a safety net but as a rival income system competing against low-skill employment, one that over time erodes the work ethic and the old stigma against the dole.

And yet, if welfare payments are far higher than any sum that a single teenager can make on the market, who can deny the powerful extra tug from the prospects of tax-subsidized moolah without any need to work?

Disney's plan for a 3,000-acre theme park beside the Manassas battlefield looked to many like free-market development colliding with historical preservation. Rothbard denies the premise. The project is no expression of capitalism at all, he argues, because Disney sought $163 million in Virginia taxpayer money for roads and infrastructure, forced subsidy dressed as enterprise. Market analysis, he insists, must ask whose ends are served and whether exchange is voluntary or coerced. From means he turns to content, attacking the park's planned pedagogy under Michael Eisner and the choice of a prominent Columbia revisionist as its historical consultant, a signal that the Civil War and Reconstruction would be narrated through a Marxist frame. What awaits, he warns, is corporate welfare and contested cultural authority borrowing the prestige of the market.

He is none other than the notorious Eric Foner, distinguished Marxist-Leninist historian at Columbia University, and the country's most famous Marxist historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction.