The archive.

When Clara Rising had Zachary Taylor's body exhumed on the suspicion that his 1850 death after a bowl of cherries and milk was poisoning, Rothbard found his occasion. The test returned only normal trace arsenic, yet he treats the failure as beside the point. His real quarry is what he calls the Establishment's rule of interpretation, that a president not visibly shot must have died of natural causes, and the taboo that brands conspiracy inquiry disreputable while shielding official narratives. Importing ordinary murder-investigation logic, he asks who benefits, always, at minimum, the vice president, and runs the same test across Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Roosevelt, and Kennedy. Comic, combative, and deliberately outrageous, the essay argues for a civic posture of skepticism toward official closure wherever sudden death transfers sovereign power.

The invariable rule has been: if a president is not visibly shot, then his death, though sudden, must have been by natural causes.

Whatever Thatcherism's reputation beside Labour, measured against libertarian standards it was a mixed bag, so Rothbard argues at the moment of her fall. He credits Margaret Thatcher with restoring free-market language to respectability, with denationalization, council-house sales, and the defeat of union power, then indicts her for leaving the state a heavier parasitic burden than she found it. The National Health Service went untouched; early gains against inflation dissolved into deficits, inflation, and unemployment; and the poll tax, an equal per-person levy imposed without the drastic spending cuts that alone could have justified it, sealed her fate. On Europe he grants her more, praising her resistance to a European Central Bank while faulting its nationalist framing, and warning that a regional fiat currency could advance the Keynesian dream of coordinated central banking toward a world paper money.

For example, she never dared touch the sacred cow of socialized medicine, the National Health Service.

By making anti-communism rather than anti-statism the organizing principle of the American Right, Frank Meyer's fusionism carried, in this January 1991 essay, a fatal flaw. Rothbard reads Meyer with real ambivalence, praising his decentralism, his markets, his resistance to National Review's purges, before arguing that the crusade against Moscow left the door open for anti-Stalinist socialists, and through it walked the neoconservatives, social democrats in conservative dress. With Soviet communism collapsing, he names the durable enemy as social democracy itself: welfare-warfare statism, the United Nations, the new world order. Sidney Hook becomes his litmus test, a lifelong self-described Marxist canonized by conservatives, proof of a movement that traded every principle for anti-communist respectability. Against it he proposes a New Fusionism of paleolibertarians and paleoconservatives united against statism at home.

In short, on all crucial issues, social democrats stand against liberty and tradition, and in favor of statism and Big Government.

Freedom, inequality, and the division of labor are not separable social accidents but mutually supporting conditions of civilization, so runs the thesis of an essay first delivered to a 1970 symposium and reissued in 1991 with a combative new introduction. Because each person is a unique, non-interchangeable individual, Rothbard argues, liberty is the precondition of human development; and only a developed division of labor, rooted in the natural diversity Mises made central, gives individuality the scope to flourish. Egalitarianism, Marxist, Romantic, primitivist, he treats as a single anti-differentiating impulse, from Marx's fantasy of hunting, fishing, and criticizing at will to the lookism and quotas of what the new introduction calls political correctness. Equality taken literally means sameness; against it he defends the older liberal equality of liberty, and natural aristocracies that rise through voluntary excellence rather than force.

He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human.

Cast as seven numbered "lessons" in the solemn voice of civic instruction, this April 1991 polemic derives from the Gulf War a deliberately monstrous set of conclusions, that war is wonderful, that the enemy must never be allowed to surrender, that the media should be licensed, Congress abolished, parties merged, and George Bush made president for life. The irony is the argument. By treating triumphalism as if it were serious doctrine, Rothbard exposes how high technology, low American casualties, and enemy demonization make war seem clean and morally effortless, while wartime language narrows legitimate speech until every opponent is a traitor. His deepest fear is the fusion of foreign war and domestic statism: the same executive that commands abroad taxes, censors, and rules at home, its unrestrained power falsely presented as freedom for all.

From now on, the only opponents of an American war will be traitors, yellow-bellies, Commies, neo-Nazis, and anti-Semites.

Only after the public had long since known did the National Bureau of Economic Research certify the 1990-91 recession, an episode Rothbard seizes on as proof that official expertise had substituted Baconian data-gathering for causal understanding. Across seven lessons he presses the Austrian alternative: booms are built on inflationary bank credit, recessions the corrective liquidation of the malinvestment that credit induced. He deflates "new era" optimism as itself a leading sign of the next slump, separates the contingent symptom of inventory accumulation from the essential cause, and distinguishes debt drawn from genuine saving from money manufactured by fractional-reserve banking. He rejects the deflationist claim that the Fed cannot inflate, allowing only a run on banks and deposit insurance as a real deflationary threat, and dismisses the 54-year Kondratieff cycle as numerology.

As often happens in economic theory, a contingent symptom was mislabeled as an essential cause.

When Thurgood Marshall announced his retirement from the Supreme Court in 1991, the bipartisan praise that followed struck Rothbard as an occasion for attack rather than eulogy. This August essay uses the moment to indict the whole edifice of civil-rights jurisprudence, arguing that anti-discrimination law, however moderate its original guise, necessarily breeds affirmative action and quotas, since once discrimination is outlawed the state must decide where it exists. Property, in this account, is the only fundamental natural right, and freedom must include an owner's freedom to exclude, hire, rent, and sell on chosen terms. From Brown v. Board through forced busing he traces a single premise, then turns on mainstream conservatives and left-libertarians alike for accepting it. He closes by fusing property absolutism to a Jeffersonian decentralism that would dismantle the Court's oligarchic power.

Once admit that principle, and everything else follows as the night the day.

The 1991 debate over subsidizing Mikhail Gorbachev's collapsing Soviet Union proceeded, in Rothbard's reading, entirely inside a false paradigm: America as parent, doling out rewards and punishments to correct an unruly child. Against that conceit he sets a two-nations model in which every country holds a productive society and a parasitic state, and insists that Western prosperity flowed from property, contract, saving, and investment, never from foreign subsidy. Aid routed through the Kremlin, he argues, cannot be neutral humanitarianism; it strengthens the ruling apparatus while crippling the emerging private economy, a reward for the nomenklatura and a punishment for the ruled. Uncertainty about who might succeed Gorbachev, he concludes, is no license to do what is plainly wrong; the West's gift to Russia should be example, not cash.

If you want to prosper, follow our forefathers: privatize and deregulate.

There is no Cypriot nation, only a geography, and that blunt premise drives Rothbard's 1991 commentary, prompted by George Bush's offer to help settle the island's division. Greeks and Turks on Cyprus identify with their motherlands, he argues, not with a shared statehood invented at British decolonization in 1960; the unitary republic was an imperial contrivance doomed from the start. Tracing the pull toward enosis, the 1974 coup, Turkey's invasion, and the 1983 birth of Northern Cyprus, he treats formal partition as more honest than any reimposed unity. Yet he refuses the Turkish position wholesale, holding that Ankara seized excess territory and expelled Greek residents, so that justice demands their return, compensation, and a redrawn border. Outside powers engineering constitutional settlements over local identities, he warns, will only blunder on.

In the first place, even though there are now two Cyprus Republics, there is no such thing as a Cypriot nation or language or culture.

Victory abroad, Rothbard warns, does not restore normal life; it whets the appetite to govern the nation as though it were still at war. Written just after the 1991 Gulf War, this chapter of Making Economic Sense reads American history as a ratchet in which each conflict, from the War of 1812 through the Civil War, the World Wars, and Korea, enlarged federal power and left institutional residues peacetime never fully undid. His central mechanism is transfer: the War Industries Board and War Finance Corporation reappear as New Deal agencies, and war becomes the governing metaphor for campaigns against poverty, crime, and injustice. Successful wars, he argues, are the most dangerous, breeding nostalgia for command; and he reads Bush's call to bring wartime urgency and hundred-day timetables to domestic policy as exactly that conversion.

Every war in American history has been the occasion for a Great Leap Forward in the power of the State, a leap which, at best, could only be partly rolled back after the war.

Disowning the nominee from the outset, no admirer of a Straussian jurist who prized civil rights over property, Rothbard turns the December 1991 Clarence Thomas confirmation fight into an assault on what he brands the Monstrous Regiment of organized feminism and its media allies. Anita Hill's charges, unsupported and belatedly leaked, become his test case for a politics that would swap the presumption of innocence for automatic belief in accusation. From there he mounts the legal core: sexual harassment is no genuine crime, since assault and rape are already punishable and speech is not, and its whole apparatus descends from Title VII and EEOC regulation trampling employer property rights. Framing the outcome as a class revolt of ordinary viewers against elite opinion, he reads Thomas's survival as a rare defeat for victimological politics.

The goal of the Regiment is power, and a social revolution.

Ninety percent is how far America's infant-mortality rate had fallen since 1915, hardly the record to justify the alarm that greeted early-1990s talk of a national crisis, and Rothbard's short chapter dismantles that talk through disaggregation. Cross-national and racial comparisons dissolve, he argues, once one isolates the operative variable: low birth weight, and behind it prematurity rather than poverty or malnutrition. The distinction lets him attack federal nutrition programs such as WIC as costly and misdirected, built on the left-liberal syllogism that poverty breeds hunger and hunger breeds sickly infants. The genuine causes, in his account, are behavioral, from smoking and cocaine to prior abortions and infection, an argument he presses while insisting he blames not the babies but the reasoning that federal spending can cure every social ill.

A 90% drop in the infant mortality rate since 1915 does not seem to be a record calculated to induce an orgy of breast-beating and collective guilt among the American people.