The archive.

Primitive man invents rites to master dangers he cannot understand; the modern citizen, Sennholz argues, does much the same with the state, attributing magical powers to government whenever reason fails. Moderns do not openly believe in sorcery, but they preserve magical expectations dressed in the language of policy, theory, and planning. He runs the analogy through inflation, a willful monetary policy disguised as a war on rising prices; through unemployment worsened by minimum-wage laws; through protectionism that teaches the public to fear exchange; and through Keynesianism, which credits public spending with generating wealth rather than merely redirecting it. His sharpest move is linguistic: replace the reverential abstraction 'government' with legislators, regulators, tax collectors, judges, and jailers, and its mystical benevolence dissolves. Its power lies in confidence rather than argument, and naming its agents remains the only antidote.

Thriving in the darkness of irrationality, political magic is in a sense invulnerable to reason.

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.

No federal agency is more secretive or less accountable, and that opacity is exactly what Rothbard sets out to strip away. He argues that the Federal Reserve's celebrated independence merely shields the true engine of inflation, tracing money from its market origin in weights of gold and silver through the slow corruption of deposit banking into fractional-reserve warehousing he flatly calls fraud. Central banks, he contends, exist to cartelize the banks and finance the state; the Fed itself was engineered by Morgan- and Rockefeller-linked financiers and sold to the public as Progressive reform, culminating in the secret 1910 conclave at Jekyll Island. His remedy is not a reformed Fed but its liquidation and a return to gold-coin money.

The Federal Reserve System is accountable to no one; it has no budget; it is subject to no audit; and no Congressional committee knows of, or can truly supervise, its operations.

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.

Under the gold standard, fixed exchange rates were mere definitions—the dollar, pound, and mark were only different names for weights of a single commodity. Once Nixon severed that link in 1971, Rothbard argues, each national currency became a separate good and its exchange rate an ordinary market price; to peg it by fiat is therefore to impose a price control, with all the shortages, surpluses, and Gresham's Law effects that ceilings and floors produce. Floating fiat money is defective enough, he concedes, but pegging it by decree is worse still. His 1994 targets are the Clinton administration's dollar interventions and Nafta, which he reads as a back-channel toward international currency regulation and unaccountable supranational planning—no government, he maintains, can ever find the 'ideal' rate it pretends to seek.

What the world has failed to grasp is that there is one thing much worse than fluctuating fiat moneys: and that is fiat money where governments try to fix the exchange rates.

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.

Frank Knight's 1923 paper delivered what Kirzner calls the most powerful ethical critique of the market economy ever written — and its power, he contends, is also its flaw. Knight built the moral case against capitalism on the model of perfect competition, in which tastes, resources, and techniques are already given and rewards can be weighed against a fixed standard of desert. Against this closed-ended picture Kirzner sets the Austrian market as an open-ended discovery procedure, where competition reveals goods, methods, and needs no one had foreseen. The distributive complaint that incomes fail to track productive contribution then misses its mark, because much income is entrepreneurial profit — the gain from noticing what others overlooked. The quarrel with Knight, Kirzner argues, is finally economic rather than ethical: get the workings of competition right, and many familiar moral objections dissolve.

The ethics of competition, for Knight, boils down to an ethical analysis of the ethics of the perfectly competitive world, and of the extent to which real world markets approximate that model.