The archive.

World poverty, Rothbard insists, is not caused by too many people—and the UN's population-control agenda is bureaucratic collectivism dressed as humanitarian concern. Against Zero Population Growth, compulsory sterilization, China's one-child policy, and Kenneth Boulding's scheme for marketable "baby-rights," he presses a reversal of causation: numbers track economic conditions rather than producing scarcity. Dense, prosperous Hong Kong and Western Europe stand against thinly settled, impoverished regions of Africa and the decline of Rome to show that density alone explains little. What poor countries lack, he argues, is not fewer births but private property, secure investment, and freedom from the production controls and foreign-aid dependency that crowd out capital.

A rising population is generally a sign of, and goes along with, prosperity and economic development.

In October 1994, Rothbard writes, elite opinion executed a sudden reversal: the publication of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve broke a decades-long taboo on public discussion of race, intelligence, and heredity. Less interested in the book's data than in its reception, he reads the controversy as an exposure of intellectual policing—from Franz Boas onward, he claims, candid inquiry was smeared as proto-Nazism and quietly blacked out rather than rebutted. He is equally wary of who now embraces the topic: neoconservatives and liberals, he argues, want IQ research to justify a credentialed governing elite. His own paleolibertarian use is different and avowedly anti-statist—hereditarian claims as a shield for market outcomes against egalitarian redistribution, not a tool for planners to sort and subsidize populations.

Under the spell of a misplaced analogy from Darwinian theory, analysts for over a century liked to think of social change as necessarily gradual, minute, and glacial.

A secularized postmillennialism bent on building an egalitarian "Kingdom of God on Earth" through state power—this, not secular humanism, is the gravest cultural threat, this December 1994 polemic contends. Rothbard traces the impulse to 1820s Yankee Protestantism, whose reformers turned campaigns against sin and slavery into the Social Gospel and, ultimately, economic collectivism, with Methodism the leading carrier. That genealogy sets up the target: Hillary Clinton, whom he reads as the administration's true ideologue. Citing Kenneth Woodward's Newsweek profile, he treats her "old-fashioned Methodist" self-description not as pious biography but as evidence, linking her Park Ridge upbringing and the Social Gospel teaching of Rev. Donald Jones to a modern liberalism he casts as coercive salvationism.

But there is definitely a direct line of descent from the Methodist Social Gospelers of the nineteenth century to St. Hillary and the monstrous Clintonian left.

A figure-skating scandal becomes a culture-war parable in this 1994 column on the Lillehammer Winter Games. Rothbard begins by refusing the reflexive American chauvinism of Olympic television—praising Norway's cheerful hosting and its skiing sweep—then insists that sport should stand apart from state and nationalist spectacle. The heart of the essay recodes the Tonya Harding–Nancy Kerrigan affair: against the left's reading of it as class resentment, he makes it a question of character, reviving the nineteenth-century distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor and setting Harding's grievance and victimology against Kerrigan's discipline. His nostalgia settles on Avery Brundage, the crusty Old Rightist who once ruled the Games with an iron hand, whose austere amateur ideal he pits against a decline he blames on lawyers, endorsements, and athlete "rights."

Sports are supposed to be individual, or team, efforts, and should have nothing to do with government or politics, and what used to be hailed as the “Olympic ideal” was set against such emphasis on the State.

Establishment economists, politicians, and the financial press come in for withering treatment here, as Rothbard catalogs the contradictory stories Clinton-era commentators told about interest rates, unemployment, inflation, and recession. Against the reigning fetish for low rates, he explains that pushing interest below the market's time-preference level does not stimulate but distorts, seeding malinvestment; against the Keynesian inflation-unemployment tradeoff, he denies the bargain exists at all. The essay presses from these conceptual distinctions to a forecast: the credit expansion of the 1980s Federal Reserve inflated asset prices and misdirected capital, so that absent a genuine industrial recovery, stocks and bonds face a sharp fall. Austrian business-cycle theory here serves as a solvent for the establishment's reflexive optimism.

But Clinton's huge tax increase during a recession was an economic master-stroke, you see, because this will lower deficits, which in turn will lower interest rates, which in turn will bring us out of the recession.

Richard Nixon's death in 1994 occasions not an obituary but an assault on the ritual that sanctifies dead presidents. Rothbard reads the bipartisan funeral homage—Bill Clinton honoring a man his circle once opposed—as evidence of a "statolatry" in which the office is sacralized and even disgraced officeholders are ritually purified. Separating Nixon's conservative rhetoric from his governing substance, he presents him as the consummate example of Big Government Conservatism: welfare expansion, affirmative action, wage and price controls, OSHA, the EPA, and the abandonment of gold, with a Vietnam War lengthened rather than ended. The essay's sharpest inversion concerns Watergate, which he refuses to mourn: its value lay not in moral outrage but in the precedent that a president could be brought down.

The great thing about Watergate is that it made the unthinkable thinkable at long last, that it established the precedent for impeaching the Monster in the White House.

The official price of crime is radically understated, this 1994 essay contends, because statistics count offenses while missing fear, lost production, defensive spending, and the diversion of police and courts toward regulatory enforcement. Sennholz sorts illegality into three kinds—violent crime, property crime, and violations of government rules—arguing that the third often criminalizes mutually beneficial exchange and manufactures the caseloads that agencies then cite to demand larger budgets. American crime control, he estimates, exceeds $150 billion a year yet grows more expensive without producing security. Fear itself becomes a social tax that suppresses movement, work, and investment. Behind the inefficiency he sees a welfare-transfer state that, by normalizing coercive redistribution, teaches private criminals to imitate its logic on a smaller scale.

A fearful society is a poor society that is crippled by fear and burdened by high costs of defense.

Sold as public safety, the Clinton administration's firearms proposals really teach, on Rothbard's account, a lesson in market structure. A policy advertised as crime control, he argues, operates through taxation, coercive licensing, and cartelization—warring against every entity except the actual criminals. The telling detail is the federal gun-dealer license fee, raised from $10 to $66 under the Brady Bill, with Lloyd Bentsen proposing $600 and welcoming its power to thin the retail trade. Because a fixed cost burdens small firms more than large, Rothbard joins Austrian price theory to public-choice analysis: the fee eliminates marginal dealers and rewards incumbents, forging a coalition of anti-gun ideologues and big dealers. His remedy is not cheaper licenses but abolishing licensing altogether.

First, a license “fee” is a euphemism for a tax, pure and simple.

Reverse the usual alarm about the Christian right, Rothbard urges: the real menace is a "Religious Left" whose lineage runs from medieval millenarian heresy to the Clinton White House. He builds a typological genealogy—Joachim of Fiore as prototype, then the Brethren of the Free Spirit, Thomas Muntzer and the Anabaptists, the English Civil War sects—reading each as a vanguard of "saints" abolishing private property under a messianic leader. The decisive move is secularization: Marxism, he argues, is Anabaptism atheized, substituting material forces for Providence as the engine of redemption, with Ernst Bloch and the Social Gospel confirming the shared salvific grammar. The essay ends on the Clintons as the tradition's latest exponents, indicting any politics—welfare, community, morality—that expands state power toward a coercive earthly kingdom.

He said that the goal of his “ministry” was to bring about no less than the “Kingdom of God on Earth”!

Ballot access, not ideology, is where New York politics begins — convention thresholds and petition requirements let party organizations decide who is even viable. Rothbard reads the 1994 statewide season as a managed electoral cartel, a “circus” of fusion tickets, ethnic blocs, and patronage in which nominations and cross-endorsements discipline every candidate. He tracks Al D’Amato’s machine clearing George Pataki’s path while blocking Herb London’s convention access, the Conservative Party’s chronic struggle between principle and pragmatism, and a Mario Cuomo grown vulnerable on crime, taxes, and urban decay. Betsy McCaughey draws special scorn for a health-care critique that still concedes universal access to state planning. The recurring question, applied to every office, is unity at what price — how much principle must be surrendered to beat Cuomo.

Mario, however, has palled in office; New Yorkers are tired of Mario, of his lousy performance, the rampant crime, the high taxes and spending, the visible decay of New York in his twelve years of office.

One week after the 1994 Republican sweep, in a confidential memo published here for the first time, Rothbard reads the midterms not as anti-incumbency but as a “November Revolution” against Clintonism and the Leviathan state. The danger, he warns, is that Republican elites will capture anti-state energy and convert it into preservation — as Reagan did, turning free-market rhetoric into a cover for continuity in taxes, spending, and intervention. He anatomizes the ruling coalition of privilege-seekers, bureaucrats, and opinion-makers, cites the courts’ overturning of Proposition 187 and the lame-duck GATT/WTO vote as elite shell games, and demands Congress strip federal judicial jurisdiction. His remedy is speed, dispossession, and relentless education — with the Mises Institute the one independent force he trusts.

Since World War II, and especially since the 1950s, the function of the Republican Party has been to be the "loyal," "moderate," "bi-partisan," pseudo-opposition to the collectivist and leftist program of the Democratic Party.

A reform can sound market-oriented, even anti-deficit, and still deepen the very power it claims to check. Turning Hazlitt’s lesson of unseen effects against his own side, Rothbard attacks the conservative appetite for politically catchy “quick fixes” that isolate one abuse while ignoring the wider machinery of taxation and control. School vouchers, welfare reform, and the 1986 Tax Reform Act all fail this test, but the Balanced Budget Amendment is his central target: a hoax, he argues, easily evaded through projections and off-budget devices, and worse still because it would shift the power of the purse from an elected Congress to unelected judges. A closing warning about privatized tax collection — a revival of the hated pre-modern tax farmers — shows that redesigning coercion is not the same as reducing it.

The one fiscal thing worse than a deficit is higher taxes; imposing a BBA and raising taxes in order to combat deficits is akin to curing a patient of bronchitis by shooting him in the chest.