The archive.

Victory abroad, Rothbard warns, does not restore normal life; it whets the appetite to govern the nation as though it were still at war. Written just after the 1991 Gulf War, this chapter of Making Economic Sense reads American history as a ratchet in which each conflict, from the War of 1812 through the Civil War, the World Wars, and Korea, enlarged federal power and left institutional residues peacetime never fully undid. His central mechanism is transfer: the War Industries Board and War Finance Corporation reappear as New Deal agencies, and war becomes the governing metaphor for campaigns against poverty, crime, and injustice. Successful wars, he argues, are the most dangerous, breeding nostalgia for command; and he reads Bush's call to bring wartime urgency and hundred-day timetables to domestic policy as exactly that conversion.

Every war in American history has been the occasion for a Great Leap Forward in the power of the State, a leap which, at best, could only be partly rolled back after the war.

Disowning the nominee from the outset, no admirer of a Straussian jurist who prized civil rights over property, Rothbard turns the December 1991 Clarence Thomas confirmation fight into an assault on what he brands the Monstrous Regiment of organized feminism and its media allies. Anita Hill's charges, unsupported and belatedly leaked, become his test case for a politics that would swap the presumption of innocence for automatic belief in accusation. From there he mounts the legal core: sexual harassment is no genuine crime, since assault and rape are already punishable and speech is not, and its whole apparatus descends from Title VII and EEOC regulation trampling employer property rights. Framing the outcome as a class revolt of ordinary viewers against elite opinion, he reads Thomas's survival as a rare defeat for victimological politics.

The goal of the Regiment is power, and a social revolution.

Ninety percent is how far America's infant-mortality rate had fallen since 1915, hardly the record to justify the alarm that greeted early-1990s talk of a national crisis, and Rothbard's short chapter dismantles that talk through disaggregation. Cross-national and racial comparisons dissolve, he argues, once one isolates the operative variable: low birth weight, and behind it prematurity rather than poverty or malnutrition. The distinction lets him attack federal nutrition programs such as WIC as costly and misdirected, built on the left-liberal syllogism that poverty breeds hunger and hunger breeds sickly infants. The genuine causes, in his account, are behavioral, from smoking and cocaine to prior abortions and infection, an argument he presses while insisting he blames not the babies but the reasoning that federal spending can cure every social ill.

A 90% drop in the infant mortality rate since 1915 does not seem to be a record calculated to induce an orgy of breast-beating and collective guilt among the American people.

Commentators cried foul when NBC and the New York Times named the accuser in the 1991 Palm Beach case of William Kennedy Smith; Rothbard defends the press. Its business is to report public events, he argues, and once an accusation reaches the police it ceases to be private, so that demanding a victim's consent to publication would hand everyone a veto over the news. He presses the point against feminist inconsistency: if rape is merely violence, its victims should be named like any other, yet he rejects that slogan too, defining rape as sex joined to coercion. His sharper claim concerns credibility and degree; a victim's past cannot exculpate coercion, but in a crime that rarely leaves witnesses it may bear on believability and punishment, and it separates date rape from stranger rape.

Rape is sex plus violence

Manufactured reverence is the real subject here: each Federal Reserve chairman, from Paul Volcker to Alan Greenspan, is instantly anointed indispensable to the dollar and the economy, though the awe belongs to the office, not the man. Prompted by Greenspan's 1991 reappointment, this Austrian polemic reads that cult as a confidence trick masking an insolvent system. Honest firms like Sony or Honda earn trust through consumer satisfaction; central banking must demand confidence precisely because full scrutiny would sink it. Beneath the mystique Rothbard finds a government-enforced banking cartel that creates money from thin air, buying Treasury bonds with checkbook entries conjured from nothing and seeding reserves on which banks pyramid far larger deposits. Regional Fed presidents split over inflation, he adds, and calls it no accident but a map of the cartel's competing interests.

Mystery, appeals to confidence, lauding the alleged qualities of the head: all this amounts to a con-game.

Strip away consent, Rothbard argues, and the right to die becomes indistinguishable from a right to kill. His 1991 polemic against the euthanasia movement turns on the case of Helga Wanglie, an elderly woman in a persistent vegetative state whose living will, spunky instead of spineless, insisted she be kept alive, and whose care was privately funded, removing any appeal to taxpayer burden. When doctors, ethicists, and economists invoke prognosis, resources, and quality of life to withdraw support against her expressed wish, he sees not mercy but the substitution of professional judgment for individual will, which is to say homicide. Naming Steven Miles, Harry Schwartz, and Derek Humphry among his targets, he recasts death with dignity as a euphemism for rule by experts who claim benevolence while deciding another person is better off dead.

No, the mask is off, and Doctor Assisted Death and Mr. Liberal Death With Dignity, and all the rest of the crew turn out to be simply Doctor and Mister Murder.

Financial scandals make juicy theater, and the 1991 Salomon Brothers affair had every prop, from arrogant Wall Street lions toppled to Warren Buffett riding in as rescuer, yet Rothbard reverses the moral. The firm's evasion of Treasury-auction limits was trivial, he argues, beside the single real fraud of signing customers' names to bond orders without consent; and both pale before the scandal no one denounced, the Treasury's decades-old privilege for a handful of anointed primary dealers, a state-chartered cartel that shuts out smaller houses. Beneath even that lies the swelling public debt, siphoning private savings into what he calls the rathole of government spending. His remedies escalate from British-style perpetual consols to outright Jeffersonian repudiation, a Treasury no one trusts being, in his telling, a polity inoculated against statism.

Once again, the best way for government to benefit the economy is to disappear.

Two strikes at the New York Daily News and Greyhound frame Rothbard's compact anti-New-Deal labor theory, chapter 37 of Making Economic Sense: union power, he argues, rests less on ordinary bargaining than on coercion against employers, customers, property, and the replacement workers derided as 'scabs.' Everyone may quit or strike, but no one 'owns' a job, and picketing that blocks entry to a workplace is intimidation dressed as free expression rather than communication. Recasting the familiar pro-union history of Pullman and Homestead, he traces effective strikes to violence and, above all, to state-created privilege: the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932, which disarmed injunctions, and the Wagner Act of 1935, which turned voluntary bargaining into compulsory collective representation under the NLRB. Restore property rights, he concludes, by repealing both.

In short, the use of violence is the key to the winning of strikes.

In September 1991, as Slovene units drove back a Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, Rothbard read the small republic's secession as a test case in national self-determination. Slovenia, he argues, is a genuine nation, coherent in language, religion, culture, and free of one ethnic group lording over another, unlike the artificial post-Versailles constructions he distrusts; Western, Catholic, bourgeois, and market-minded, it had long chafed under Yugoslav centralism. His deeper move is anti-imperial and anti-statist: independence came not from abstract justice or Western diplomacy but from armed resistance and near-unanimous popular support, the classical guerrilla pattern of terrain and legitimacy defeating an unwilling conscript force. Scorning Washington's and Europe's reverence for 'territorial integrity' as a ruling-class defense of existing borders, he welcomes Slovenia into the West, no thanks to George Bush.

What did it was the force of Slovenian arms.

Not battlefield analysis but network analysis answers the question of why the United States fought the 1991 Gulf War. Rothbard treats Kuwait's oil billions as illegitimate state extraction by the Sabah dynasty, wealth ready, he suspects, to purchase defenders in Washington, and then follows the money through consultancies and boardrooms. The hub is Henry Kissinger and Kissinger Associates, that euphemistic 'international consulting firm'; the decisive figure is Brent Scowcroft, its former vice chairman turned national security adviser with paid Kuwaiti ties. Midland Bank, Fluor, ARCO, Bechtel, William Simon, and Saudi royal interests thicken the web. The argument is cumulative rather than juridical: no single smoking gun, but a dense pattern of overlapping incentives among Gulf monarchies, oil infrastructure, banks, and revolving-door policymakers, evidence, he insists, that requires no conspiracy theory, only open eyes.

The Sabah tribe has no legitimate claim to the oil revenue; it did nothing to homestead or mix its labor or any other resource with the crude oil.

Personally pro-choice, Rothbard turns the 1991 Wichita Operation Rescue standoff away from abortion and toward a sharper question: who may legitimately wield coercion? Protecting the clinics, he argues, falls under Kansas's state and local police power, not the jurisdiction of federal courts and marshals, and a just end never validates the wrong sovereign instrument. Reviving a radical Jeffersonian constitutionalism, he pairs the Ninth Amendment's unenumerated rights with the Tenth Amendment's reserved powers, rejects Roe-era judicial supremacy by 'nine oligarchic hacks,' and repudiates precedents from Eisenhower's Little Rock intervention to the Reconstruction anti-Klan statute Judge Kelly invoked. Federal domestic coercion, in his most provocative move, becomes structurally identical to foreign intervention. 'Denationalizing the courts' thus folds a libertarian abortion-rights sympathy into a wider project of dismantling centralized power.

The slogan here should be “U.S. Out of Kansas,” or “Kansas for the Kansans”; let the Kansans settle their own affairs.

"Free and fair trade" — the Bush administration's phrase — is the target here: a slogan Rothbard treats as hypocrisy, contradicted by managed trade with Japan and a fixation on bilateral deficits he calls a fallacy the 17th-century mercantilists had already discarded. His larger move is to widen the definition of free trade beyond the mere absence of tariffs. Genuine freedom, he insists, must also be unregulated and unsubsidized, which turns three establishment favorites into protectionism by other routes: regional blocs like the European Community that raise external barriers, foreign aid as disguised export subsidy, and — the gravest danger — a coordinated world central bank issuing fiat money. His alternative is unilateral: cut the barriers, no treaties required.

The major point is that genuine free trade requires no negotiations, treaties, super-power creations, or presidential jetting abroad. All it requires is for the United States to cut tariffs and quotas, as well as taxes and regulations. Period.