This file is a short single-author political polemic, appearing as a chapter-like essay in the “Enterprise Under Attack” section of Making Economic Sense. Its scope is deliberately narrow—Clinton-era environmental and regulatory proposals concerning automobiles—but Rothbard treats the car as a larger symbol of private mobility, consumer sovereignty, and resistance to collectivist administration.
The essay opens by situating automobile policy within what Rothbard sees as a broader political crisis: popular hostility toward the Clinton administration, met not by moderation but by intensified federal control. He links proposed automobile regulation to earlier controversies over lobbying rules and HUD actions against neighborhood opponents of public housing, presenting them as part of a pattern of suppressing opposition rather than answering it.
Response of the Clinton administration has been to try to suppress, literally, the freedom of speech of its opponents.
From there, the essay turns to the “White House Car Talks” committee, which Rothbard portrays as the latest stage in an expanding regulatory campaign. He notes that lead had already been removed from gasoline and that fuel-efficiency mandates had already reshaped cars, but argues that environmental policy operates by escalation rather than satisfaction. His core conceptual move is to read incremental regulation as a political ratchet: concessions do not end demands, because the real target is not one pollutant or one design feature but private automotive freedom itself.
It is impossible to appease an aggressive movement bent on full-scale collectivism: gains or concessions simply encourage them and whet their appetite for escalating their demands.
The middle of the essay catalogs proposed restrictions—higher minimum driving ages, forced surrender of licenses by older drivers, limits on the number of cars per household, and alternating driving days. Rothbard interprets these not as technical environmental measures but as rationing of everyday life. The automobile matters because it is ordinary, popular, and decentralized; state control over it would therefore reach deeply into the habits of millions.
If that isn’t totalitarianism, what exactly would qualify? If the American public is enraged about “gun-grabbers,” and they indeed are, wait until they realize that Leviathan is coming to grab their cars!
Rothbard then broadens the historical frame. He insists that the anti-car impulse predates environmentalism, recalling liberal hostility to tail-fins in the 1950s as an early aesthetic and moral attack on automotive culture. Pollution, in this account, is a later justification for an older antagonism toward private consumption, comfort, and individual mobility.
We should realize that the war against the car did not begin with the discovery of pollution.
The essay’s most important argumentative turn is its contrast between the private automobile and mass transit. For Rothbard, the car is not merely a machine but an institution of autonomy: it frees individuals from schedules, terminals, crowds, and collective routes. His defense of the automobile is therefore a defense of unsupervised movement and personal choice.
What they hate, with a purple passion, is the private car as a deeply individualistic, comfortable, and even luxurious mode of transportation.
Against the railroad and bus, Rothbard casts the car as a privatized space of decision. This is the essay’s central symbolic claim: the struggle over cars is a struggle over whether individuals may direct their own movement without communal permission.
Instead, the private automobile made each individual “King of the Road”; he could ride wherever and whenever he wanted, with no compulsion to clear it with his neighbors or his “community.”
The closing paragraphs connect the war on cars to Rothbard’s broader libertarian critique of the Clinton administration, grouping it with gun control, smoking restrictions, health policy, and attacks on speech. The relevance of the essay lies in this fusion of policy analysis and political rhetoric: Rothbard reads regulatory proposals as symptoms of a comprehensive collectivist project. Its alarmist force comes from treating what might appear as environmental administration as a decisive encroachment on private life.
Yesterday, the slogan: “If you let them come for our cigarettes or for our guns, next they will come for our cars,” would have seemed like absurd hyperbole. Now, that prospect is becoming all too much a sober portrayal of political reality.
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