The archive.

Long before the diploma, Sennholz argues, comes the real work of education: moral formation, the apprenticeship for life. This short essay names five marks of the well-formed person, precise language, gentle manners, sound morals, reflective reason, and the capacity for work, treating each as a sign of inward character rather than technical skill. From that standard he mounts a libertarian-conservative indictment of state schooling. Good morals, he holds, are the basis of republican government and the private-property order; compulsory public education, resting on coercion and political control, usurps parental authority and displaces Judeo-Christian morality with a political religion. By its own civilizational measures the public school fails, as language decays, reflection hardens into political correctness, and work yields to entitlement, and only freedom, he concludes, opens the pathway to genuine education.

Language denotes the person. A refined character finds expression in refined language, a coarse character in coarse talk. Language shows the person; it springs from his or her innermost parts. Speak so that you may be seen!

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.

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.

Denounce deficits, then propose both major tax increases and major spending increases: Rothbard calls Clinton’s February 1993 budget schizoid, a program resting on the pretense that taxation, spending, deficits, and production sit in hermetically sealed compartments. Against that, he presses economic interconnectedness — taxes erode saving and raise business costs; only cutting spending can lower the deficit; and government “investment” is not private capital formation but resources diverted to political allocation. The rhetoric is the real target. Renaming taxes as “contributions” and spending as “investment” makes Clintonomics, he charges, Orwellian economics, coercion relabeled as social responsibility. Invoking Austrian business-cycle theory against Keynesian stimulus, and measuring the plan against Reaganomics and Bushonomics, he concludes that beneath the incoherence runs a consistent tendency: the expansion of government at the expense of the private market.

In short, Clintonomics is, in essence, a Great Leap Forward, American style, not toward Maoist communism but toward Democratic Socialism, toward Marxism without the Leninism.

Predicting a presidency before it begins, Rothbard reads the incoming Clinton administration from its advisers, slogans, and place in a long bipartisan pattern. This chapter from Making Economic Sense answers Ludwig Lachmann's claim that the future is unknowable by insisting that political incentives make broad direction plain: higher taxes and spending, industrial policy, regulation, deficit manipulation, and a drift toward socialized medicine, all dressed in the language of investment, care, and partnership. Democrats push the state forward, he argues, while Republicans—right-wing Keynesians from Eisenhower to Bush—merely slow the ratchet; Clinton's novelty is the Wall Street Left of Robert Reich, Felix Rohatyn, and Robert Rubin. His sharpest thrust falls on rebranding public spending as investment and schooling as human capital—coercive finance disguised, he warns, as productive market activity.

In general, we must batten down the hatches for another one of those periodic Great Leaps Forward into statism that have afflicted us since the New Deal (actually, since the Progressive Era).

To the ordinary citizen the four-trillion-dollar federal debt feels as remote as another galaxy, and that indifference is exactly what lets it grow. Sennholz treats the debt as consumed wealth, a mortgage on the future, and a source of social conflict, then asks why Congress incurs it so readily. His answer reinterprets the two-party system as a functional three: a Parochial Party chasing district spending, a Vocational Party serving organized producer and occupational interests, and a small Consumer Party defending open markets, low prices, and the dispersed public against coercive redistribution. Concentrated beneficiaries speak louder than scattered consumers, which is why redistribution flows to electorally powerful blocs. The critique is public-choice in structure but moral in language: reelection incentives, he argues, have displaced political conscience.

There are 18.3 million civil servants with more than 30 million dependents living—and some feasting—on the taxes they extract.

Bill Clinton's 1993 swearing-in arrives here not as constitutional ritual but as cultural regime change, a week-long "Jacobin Festival" in which Rothbard watches the left-liberal coalition take public possession of America. Skimming newspapers for dissent and avoiding television except for Limbaugh, he ridicules the pageant's celebrities and its official piety: Barbra Streisand, Betty Friedan, Lauren Bacall, and above all Maya Angelou's inaugural poem, which he likens to the wartime Communist "Ballad for Americans." Fran Lebowitz's contempt for the cant confirms his suspicion that the ceremony has turned quasi-religious. Yet the invective closes on a populist wager rather than despair, weighing whether a debased public might still storm its way back to sanity. A compact specimen of Old Right culture-war polemic.

It was an Inaugural from Hell.

San Antonio's water supply becomes a test case for Rothbard's critique of socialized resource management. When drought threatens the Edwards Aquifer, litigation under the Endangered Species Act, brought by the Sierra Club, joined by the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, and blessed by Judge Lucius Bunton, would reserve enough spring flow to protect four obscure species, among them the Texas blind salamander and the fountain darter, even at the cost of the city's residents, farmers, and ranchers. Rothbard reads the classification fight over whether the aquifer is a "river" or a "lake" as a maneuver to shift control from Texas to federal courts, and detects institutional self-interest behind the ecological piety. His remedy is neither better regulation nor conservation but the privatization of water and water rights, so that markets, not judges, allocate a scarce resource.

"That's what this is all about," he warned bitterly. "It's not about fountain darters."

Ranging satirically across Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Abkhazians, Ossetians, Ingush, and Chechens, this 1993 commentary insists that Western observers badly underestimate how tangled the post-Soviet Caucasus really is. Eduard Shevardnadze appears less as a democratic reformer than as a media favorite rewarded for converting from Communism to Social Democracy, and much of the region's violence is laid at the door of Stalin's arbitrary nationalities policy, the Ossetian lands deliberately split between republics to wreck an insufficiently Stalinist people. The point is not that ethnic claims are frivolous but that they are historically serious and beyond any outsider's competence to resolve. The closing "sorting out" is pure irony, mocking the interventionist fantasy that half a million troops under UN direction might straighten the region out in twenty years.

OK, got it straight? Now all we need is for the United States to send about 500,000 troops to the Caucasus—under UN direction, of course—and in about twenty years we should be able to straighten it all out.

There is no anti-war left left anymore, Rothbard declares, watching former peace activists back U.S. and UN intervention against the Serbs in Bosnia, proof, he charges, that their real loyalty was to world government rather than peace. Written during the Bosnian War, the essay holds that moderate intervention is a fiction, since timid first steps make escalation irresistible, and it swaps the language of recognized borders for that of ethnonational claims. Bosnia, on his account, is no more a nation than North Dakota, only a territory holding rival Serb, Croat, and Muslim communities among whom all sides practice ethnic cleansing when they can. His remedy is partition rather than federal reconciliation: dissolve the fictive state, lift the sanctions, and let local peoples fix their own borders while Washington keeps out entirely.

The answer, as repugnant as it is to this meddling age, is to stay the Hell out.

Opponents of nationalized medicine, this introduction to Politicized Medicine warns, usually lose before they begin, because they accept government control everywhere else and protest only when it reaches their own profession. Sennholz presses for consistency: if public education, licensing, subsidies, and welfare are legitimate, health care cannot be exempt, since the difference between partial and comprehensive state provision is one of scale, not kind. He attacks the doctrine of social rights as disguised claims on the labor and property of others, turning cooperation into conflict as each declared benefit imposes a matching burden. His closing turn indicts professional licensing and accreditation not as neutral quality controls but as state-backed shelters from competition, for once a profession accepts the state as author of its credentials, it concedes the state's authority to author a national health system too.

They yield the very premise on which all tyranny rests: the right of some individuals to control others.

Barely more than a squib, this very short 1993 polemic seizes on a reported irregularity in Bill Clinton's parentage, his father allegedly still married to another woman when he wed Virginia Cassidy, and turns bigamy into an instrument of political delegitimation. Rothbard's method is compressed escalation: the announcement of "confirmation," the leap from bigamy to bastardy, then comic speculation about unknown half-siblings and paternal promiscuity. There is no argument in constitutional law here, only abrasive anti-Clinton invective that collapses the dignity of high office into a scandalous family narrative. Taboo-breaking and anti-reverence toward the presidency furnish the whole rhetorical force, the genealogical joke hardening at the last into an impeachment slogan. A specimen of the insult-driven paleo-libertarian style Rothbard cultivated in his final years.

Do we want a bastard in the White House? Impeach Clinton!