The archive.

Rape, for a libertarian, admits of exactly one definition, Rothbard insists, coercion, and nothing subtler. From that binary of coercion versus non-coercion, his February 1991 polemic attacks the early-1990s campus discourse around "date rape": the Koss study, a New York Times report, and university re-education sessions he likens to Orwellian self-criticism. He treats the absence of a spoken refusal or physical resistance as implicit mutual consent, casts feminist accounts of alcohol and ambiguity as machinery for transferring guilt from women onto men, and defends the tacit, nonverbal character of courtship against demands for affirmative consent. The essay pushes its opponents' logic toward prohibition, chaperonage, and what he calls "Left Puritanism", less a measured analysis of assault than a compressed artifact of libertarian backlash against political correctness.

To a libertarian, or indeed to any sensible person, there is no problem: if the sex was coercive, and took place against the will of one of the parties, then it was rape and if not, not.

Behind the fashionable libertarian cult of 'tolerance,' Rothbard detects a plainer failure: bad manners dressed up as philosophy. The essay skewers the 'Modal Libertarians' who use tolerance-talk to license boorishness, unsolicited correction, and doctrinal harassment, mistaking adolescent rebellion against bourgeois civility for principle. His counterclaim relocates libertarian social theory below the level of rights: freedom of association depends not only on liberty from coercion but on the informal discipline of manners, a nonstatist civilizing institution that regulates conduct without law. Political correctness and feminist language-policing, he argues, invert the courtesy they claim to enforce, wielding 'sensitivity' as a club. Against both crude offensiveness and hypersensitive denunciation, he defends rebuke, exclusion, and common-sense reciprocity: the right, in short, to resist rude people rather than indulge them in tolerance's name.

For there is no obligation of any sort to be polite to rude people.

The bank run was supposed to be a relic of old movies and the pre-1933 order, until the savings-and-loan collapse brought the night-long lines and shuttered doors back in force. Rothbard reads this return not as a failure of confidence or bad management but as the disclosure of a structural insolvency: demand deposits are contractual promises payable at par and on demand, while the reserves behind them are only fractional. Hence the domino effect peculiar to banking, where one failure annihilates its neighbors, and hence his verdict that no bank, commercial, savings, or credit union, is inherently sound. He dismisses FDIC guarantees and private insurance alike as devices for sustaining belief, warns that a Federal Reserve rescue would court hyperinflation, and argues that only 100 percent reserves can end the contradiction.

Banking is not a legitimate industry, providing legitimate service, so long as it continues to be a system of fractional-reserve banking: that is, the fraudulent making of contracts that it is impossible to honor.

What the single word "deflation" conceals, Rothbard argues in this chapter of Making Economic Sense, is a distinction on which everything turns: between voluntary market processes and coercive state contraction. Deflation-phobia, shared by Keynesians, monetarists, and even some hard-money economists, rests on ignoring it. He catalogues three benign forms of free-market price decline: rising productivity, an increased demand for cash balances, and the corrective contraction of bank credit after an inflationary boom, defending each as healthy. Against these he sets the genuinely destructive kind, the account freezes of Collor de Mello's Brazil and Gorbachev's withdrawal of large-ruble notes, which he condemns as a second violation of property rights committed in the name of fighting inflation. Inflation ends, he insists, only by halting monetary expansion, not by freezing accounts or voiding currency.

Few occurrences have been more dreaded and reviled in the history of economic thought than deflation.

Behind the Bush administration's "Education President" agenda Rothbard sees not decentralizing reform but a neoconservative expansion of the state into the family, with Lamar Alexander, Chester Finn, and Diane Ravitch presented as managers dressing centralization as choice. School vouchers he rejects outright as tax-financed welfare that makes private schooling dependent on public money. The essay's pivot is a public reversal: having once defended tuition tax credits as merely letting parents keep their own earnings, he now accepts Gary North's warning that any credit or voucher scheme forces the state to certify which schools qualify, and thus to rule over them. Choice so defined becomes a regulatory trap. What survives is a narrower transitional program, abolishing compulsory schooling, opposing school bonds, cutting budgets, and decentralizing control, all pointed toward the eventual end of public education itself.

So the problem with tax credits is not the Subsidy Question, but granting the State any right to rule over our choices.

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.

Every time establishment economists announce a permanent boom, Rothbard writes, a big recession is just around the corner, and he offers that complacency as his one reliable leading indicator. The late-1920s "New Era," the Keynesian confidence of the 1960s, and Reaganite optimism each preceded a downturn; half a century of fine-tuning, he argues, has produced not stability but the hybrid of recession with continuing inflation. He mocks the National Bureau of Economic Research for taking so long to certify a recession that it is nearly over, and declares flatly, on housing and unemployment and debt liquidation, that one is already underway. Recession, in his Austrian reading, is the necessary cleansing of malinvestment. Against the reflex to raise taxes, he prescribes the opposite: halt Federal Reserve credit expansion, cut taxes, and cut spending harder still.

The one thing worse than a deficit, furthermore, is higher taxes; increasing taxes will only bring us more of both.

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.