Murray N. Rothbard, “Never Say ‘JAP’!” (1993)

Genre and scope: this is a single-authored February 1993 polemical culture-war essay. Its immediate subject is the public campaign against Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott after reports of offensive private language and Nazi memorabilia; its broader target is what Rothbard calls political correctness as a regime of linguistic surveillance.

Rothbard’s thesis is that Schott’s case illustrates a new moral order in which taboo words, even privately uttered, are treated as civic crimes. He frames the controversy not as accountability for racism or antisemitism but as a punitive spectacle directed at “Incorrect Words.” The opening conceptual move is inversion: Schott becomes the victim, while journalists, sports officials, and civil-rights organizations become predators enforcing ideological conformity.

Marge Schott’s sin, so unforgivable as to be beyond redemption, was to use a few Incorrect Words and phrases.

The essay’s structure moves from incident to diagnosis. Rothbard first reconstructs the Sabo lawsuit and the leaked deposition as an ambush, arguing that employment litigation became a route for exposing private speech. He then treats constitutional privacy rhetorically, not legally: the issue is not state prosecution, but the collapse of private indiscretion into public moral punishment. In this move, he converts criticism, suspension, and reputational sanction into a species of “thought” policing.

The Constitution may be held to guarantee the right of privacy in the bedroom, but never for Hate Thoughts.

From there Rothbard defends Schott’s explanations and minimizes the significance of the reported remarks. This is one of the essay’s most revealing maneuvers: ethnic slurs are reclassified as jokes, memorabilia as harmless collecting, and offensive generalizations as ordinary speech once tolerated. The argument depends on separating words from social power and treating offense as a recently manufactured sensitivity rather than as a claim about dignity or exclusion.

There are, of course, no longer any “joke terms” that violate the increasingly rigid canons of Political Incorrectness.

The central analogy comes through Rothbard’s recollection of the 1960s Free Speech and “Filthy Speech” milieu. He argues that older obscenity taboos have been replaced by anti-racist and anti-discriminatory speech taboos. The essay thus recasts hate-speech norms as the new obscenity law: not necessarily state censorship, but a culture in which words themselves become punishable.

Indeed, left-liberals have managed to redefine “obscenity,” urging taxpayers to subsidize art that used to be called obscene, while substituting a new category of the Verboten.

Rothbard’s most distinctive conceptual turn is linguistic economy. In addressing the anti-Japanese epithet named in the title, he denies its pejorative force by interpreting it as mere American contraction. This lets him shift the question from historical insult to everyday speech habit: what critics call a slur, he calls syllabic efficiency and popular custom.

Because here the PC brigade has Gone Too Far: they are interfering with a practice that every American stubbornly considers as his birthright: contraction.

The final section extends this argument to changing terms for Black Americans. Rothbard presents successive preferred names as arbitrary ideological fashion rather than as struggles over self-description. His mock chronology—“colored,” “Negro,” “black,” “African-American,” and “people of color”—is meant to show that political language reform is unstable, coercive, and hostile to ordinary usage.

Every ten or twenty years we have to learn a new term, because the older one has suddenly become “racist” and “Uncle Tom.”

The closing claim is not merely about one word, but about who controls public language. Rothbard grounds resistance in the habits of the “average American,” especially brevity and contraction, treating popular speech as a democratic counterforce against elite moral regulation.

There are still some verities that the average American holds to with great firmness; and contracting syllables is one of them.

The essay is relevant as a compact artifact of Rothbard’s early-1990s libertarian culture-war writing. Its force comes from collapsing distinctions between state censorship, workplace discipline, press criticism, and social disapproval into a single narrative of persecution. Its limits are equally central: it largely refuses to analyze why the words at issue wound, exclude, or recall histories of domination. As a result, the piece is less a study of Schott than a revealing polemic about Rothbard’s anti-PC framework, in which free speech, private property, anti-egalitarian populism, and contempt for linguistic reform converge.