The archive.

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 With Buchanan's primary challenge spent and Perot withdrawn, this short electoral polemic frames the Bush-Clinton contest as lesser-evil triage within a decayed two-party system.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?!

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.

'Plan or no plan?' is the wrong question, Hazlitt argues in this 1962 Mont Pelerin Society address; the real one is whose plan. Consumers, workers and entrepreneurs plan ceaselessly, and a government's master design becomes meaningful only when it coerces different outcomes than free choice would yield. From this premise he dismantles two cases for planning: Galbraith's claim that markets make the wrong goods, and the growth planners' faith that merely announcing a four or five percent target can produce it. His sharpest reversal renames the debate, since Galbraith's 'private sector' is really the voluntary sector and his 'public sector' the coercive one. Real growth, Hazlitt maintains, follows from sound money, secure property and rewarded production, not from bureaucratic command dressed up as statistics.

The welfare state, as Bastiat put it with uncanny clairvoyance more than a century ago, is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.

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.

Ricardo's wine-and-cloth doctrine, stripped of its labour theory of value and restated in general-equilibrium and welfare terms, still governs agriculture and primary exports, so Haberler argues against a mid-century development economics eager to bury it. He grants that perfect competition and the absence of externalities never fully hold, but denies that the sheer pervasiveness of such impurities refutes the theory. Point by point he dismantles the objections: the ECLA-Kaldor claim that farm exporters face monopolistic industrial sellers, the Prebisch-Singer thesis of secularly deteriorating terms of trade, which he shows unsupported by Lipsey's data, and the notion of agricultural labour with zero marginal product. His one real concession is the genuine external economy of training a skilled, supervisory, and entrepreneurial workforce, the only sound version of the infant-industry case.

But no theory, however complicated and refined, can offer more than a simplified or idealized picture of the infinite complexities of the real world.

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.

Hostility to capitalism recurs, Hazlitt insists, not because its defenders have argued badly but because it springs from durable human impulses. Written for The Freeman in 1973, this polemic anatomizes five of them—compassion for hardship, impatience for cures, envy, short-run thinking, and the habit of measuring real institutions against imagined ideals—and traces each to a familiar intervention: envy sustains graduated taxation, impatience breeds minimum wages and relief. At the argument's core stands the coordinating work of prices, which signal scarcity and demand, and the calculation problem that leaves socialist planners unable to know what they produce at a profit and what at a loss. Because error is politically attractive and endlessly renewed, Hazlitt concludes, the case for economic freedom must be remade in every generation.

Nine-tenths of what is written today on economic questions is either an implied or explicit attack on capitalism.

Prosperity, in this compact Austrian essay, is nothing but accumulated productive capital — tools, machinery, inventories, and the savings that sustain them — and a nation can enlarge its consumption while quietly devouring the base on which future wages depend. Sennholz traces that hidden erosion through progressive taxation, deficit spending, inflation, regulation, and union privilege, each converting productive capital into present consumption. Estate taxes confiscate working businesses rather than luxury; inflation lets firms mistake nominal profits for real gains and pay their taxes out of capital; artificially cheap credit seeds the malinvestment a bust later writes off for good. His warning is as political as economic: once citizens grow accustomed to benefits, a shrinking base provokes louder demands rather than reform. The remedy is austere — sound money, lower taxes, market pricing, and restored thrift.

Government spending seems to be an all-purpose remedy for economic and social ills, the key to important political ends.

The entitlement society, on Sennholz's diagnosis, is a conflict society - and the 1993 Clinton health-care plan is merely its latest battlefield. Reading universal coverage as one more episode in a redistributive war running from the New Deal through Kerr-Mills, Medicare, Medicaid, and catastrophic care, he argues that each intervention manufactures the deficiencies that justify the next, driving toward comprehensive command. The proposed National Health Board becomes the emblem of that drift, a body empowered to define benefits, cap spending, and discipline prices with the federal purse and federal judges behind it. His sharpest economic point targets the fiction of costless employer mandates: whatever the law assigns to employers, workers finally pay through lower wages, higher prices, or lost jobs. Entitlement politics, he insists, converts social problems into permanent struggles over government force.

In the end, every worker will pay one hundred percent of his insurance costs.