Murray N. Rothbard’s “Eisnerizing Manassas” is a short polemical essay of political economy and cultural criticism. Its scope is narrow: the controversy over Disney Corporation’s proposed 3,000-acre theme park near the Manassas battlefield. Rothbard uses that case to challenge a familiar division of the American right: the assumption that free-market development necessarily collides with historical preservation and conservative cultural memory.
Many conservatives and free-marketeers believe that an inherent conflict exists between profits, free-markets, and “soulless capitalism,” and money-making on the one hand, as against traditional values, devotion to older culture, and historical landmarks on the other.
The essay’s central thesis is that Manassas poses no genuine contradiction between free markets and conservatism because the Disney project is not an expression of free enterprise at all. Rothbard first stages the apparent dilemma—economic growth and jobs, backed by Virginia officials, against historians, environmentalists, preservationists, and paleoconservatives—and then denies its premise. His Austrian-libertarian conceptual move is to refuse to treat aggregate growth or profit as a freestanding moral trump. Market analysis, for him, must ask whose ends are being served and whether exchange is voluntary or coerced.
Economic "efficiency" and "economic growth" are not goods in themselves, nor do they exist for their own sake.
From this principle Rothbard separates capitalism from corporate-statist development. The decisive fact is not that Disney would build on privately acquired land, but that the corporation seeks public financing for infrastructure. Taxation turns what might be called development into forced support for a favored firm, and therefore into the opposite of laissez-faire.
On the contrary, Disney is calling for the state of Virginia to fork over $163 million in taxpayer money for roads and other "infrastructure" for the Disney park. Hence, this proposal constitutes not free-market growth, but state-subsidized growth.
Rothbard’s second major movement turns from means to content. Since the planned park is to be adjacent to a Civil War battlefield and presented as historical education, he asks not only who pays but what narrative will be subsidized. Here the essay becomes a cultural polemic against post-Walt Disney under Michael Eisner. Rothbard contrasts the older Disney image—charming, wholesome, broadly pro-American, if childish—with what he sees as a later decline into vulgarized entertainment and politicized historical pedagogy.
It is going to be debased history, multicultural history, Politically Correct history.
The figure through whom Rothbard concentrates this complaint is Eric Foner, named as Disney’s major historical consultant. Rothbard’s language is openly combative: Foner is not treated as merely a scholarly choice with a revisionist interpretation, but as an ideological signal that the theme park will narrate the Civil War and Reconstruction through an anti-Southern, Marxist framework.
He is none other than the notorious Eric Foner, distinguished Marxist-Leninist historian at Columbia University, and the country’s most famous Marxist historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
The essay’s structure is therefore tripartite. It opens by describing an apparent ideological clash; it answers by redefining the economic issue as subsidy rather than market exchange; and it closes by exposing, as Rothbard sees it, the cultural and historiographical stakes of the proposed park. The final conceptual move is diagnostic: labels such as free market, development, or infrastructure cannot be accepted at face value. They must be tested against property rights, taxpayer coercion, and the ideological uses of state-backed projects.
Eisnerizing and Fonerizing Manassas has nothing to do, on any level, with free-market ideology or free-market economic development.
The essay’s relevance lies less in the particular Disney-Manassas proposal than in its argument about corporate welfare and cultural authority. Rothbard offers Manassas as an instance of how business interests can borrow the prestige of capitalism while relying on government privilege, and how public-private development can smuggle contested cultural narratives into taxpayer-funded institutions. His conclusion is not preservationism against markets, but preservationism and genuine markets against a subsidized corporate-cultural alliance.
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