This March 1993 polemical essay is Rothbard’s libertarian indictment of the U.S. intervention in Somalia, framed as both a historical critique of American crusading foreign policy and an economic critique of humanitarian aid. Its central thesis is that the Somalia mission was not an exceptional act of mercy but a predictable extension of a long American habit: moralized state power, sanctified by religious or quasi-religious language, producing coercion, dependency, and political disaster.
Rothbard opens from George H. W. Bush’s claim that U.S. troops were “doing God’s work,” then broadens the issue into a genealogy of what he calls post-millennial pietism. For him, American interventionism begins in domestic reform movements that made government the agent of salvation and later, under Woodrow Wilson, exported that mission abroad.
In short, a permanent global Crusade.
The conceptual move is characteristic: Rothbard treats humanitarian rhetoric not as benign moral language but as an ideological engine that converts suffering into a mandate for power. The essay argues that once the state is imagined as redemptive, foreign policy becomes a campaign to stamp out evil wherever it is found.
It was essentially a “today the U.S., tomorrow the world” credo.
The middle of the essay shifts from ideological history to Somalia’s political economy, relying heavily on Michael Maren’s experience as an American aid worker. Rothbard recounts Somalia’s postcolonial formation, its Greater Somalia ambitions, Siad Barre’s dictatorship, Cold War patronage, and the Ogaden war. This history is used to show that U.S. policy repeatedly backed coercive regimes when they served strategic purposes, then recoded the resulting crisis as a humanitarian emergency.
Maren’s testimony supplies the essay’s most concrete evidence. Rothbard presents aid not simply as wasted but as structurally harmful: stolen by soldiers, used by guerrillas, manipulated by rulers, and destructive of nomadic life. Refugee camps become instruments for settling and controlling populations that had previously been difficult to tax, draft, or govern.
“African leaders like to settle nomads. Nomads make it hard to build a modern state, and even harder to build a socialist state. Nomads can’t be taxed, they can’t be drafted, and they can’t be controlled. They also can’t be used to attract foreign aid, unless you can get them to stay in one place.
Rothbard’s argument depends on reversing the conventional image of relief. Food aid, in this account, does not merely fail to solve famine; it creates incentives for rulers, agencies, and recipients that deepen dependency. Camps attract people, disease spreads in settlement patterns alien to nomadic ecology, and free food undercuts local production.
“Expanded services to the refugees will only aggravate the problem by encouraging them to stay, and more refugees to arrive. It will spread more thinly the resource base leaving the door open for a real emergency situation in the future. The future for refugees in the camps holds only years of relief.”
The essay’s sharpest institutional target is the aid industry. Rothbard follows Maren in portraying private voluntary organizations as bureaucratic enterprises sustained by failure, media attention, government contracts, and donor sentiment. Humanitarianism becomes a market in dependency, where the “client” is the starving person whose continued need justifies institutional expansion.
“Aid,” Maren declares, “is a business. It is a business in which people make careers, earn a good living, get to see interesting places, and have great stories to tell when they get stateside.
This leads to the essay’s core economic claim: famine relief can cause famine by depressing prices, discouraging production, empowering predatory authorities, and perpetuating emergency conditions. Rothbard’s final move is to translate the Somalia case into “natural law—economic law”: intervention produces consequences opposite to its stated intentions.
The crucial point, Maren concludes, is that “reckless use of food aid causes famine. It depresses local market prices and provides disincentive for farmers to grow crops.”
The relevance of the essay lies in its fusion of anti-imperial, libertarian, and political-economic critique. Rothbard opposes the Somalia intervention not only because it is military intervention abroad, but because it rests on a salvific theory of politics that mistakes state action for moral action. His recommended solution is deliberately austere: stop the aid, end the dependency, and withdraw the troops and agencies. The essay closes by insisting that Somalia is not a paradox but a lesson in intervention itself: when government and humanitarian bureaucracy override local economies and social systems, they intensify the very misery they claim to cure.
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