The archive.

Free-market advocates know what to do with state operations, privatize them, but what should be done in the meantime? Rothbard's answer divides government activity in two: coercive agencies like regulators and tax collectors should be abolished, not privatized or made efficient, while the services people actually use, schools, streets, libraries, police, should in the interim be run as efficiently and business-like as possible on shrinking budgets. Against the "equal access" doctrine embraced by courts, left-liberals, and some libertarians, he argues that stripping public institutions of the authority to exclude or set standards destroys their very purpose. His sharpest scorn falls on libertarians who welcome public-sector decay as a strategy to shock citizens into demanding reform, a tactic he calls deeply immoral and unlikely to work.

On the activities in Group B, what we want is not privatization but abolition.

Not battlefield analysis but network analysis answers the question of why the United States fought the 1991 Gulf War. Rothbard treats Kuwait's oil billions as illegitimate state extraction by the Sabah dynasty, wealth ready, he suspects, to purchase defenders in Washington, and then follows the money through consultancies and boardrooms. The hub is Henry Kissinger and Kissinger Associates, that euphemistic 'international consulting firm'; the decisive figure is Brent Scowcroft, its former vice chairman turned national security adviser with paid Kuwaiti ties. Midland Bank, Fluor, ARCO, Bechtel, William Simon, and Saudi royal interests thicken the web. The argument is cumulative rather than juridical: no single smoking gun, but a dense pattern of overlapping incentives among Gulf monarchies, oil infrastructure, banks, and revolving-door policymakers, evidence, he insists, that requires no conspiracy theory, only open eyes.

The Sabah tribe has no legitimate claim to the oil revenue; it did nothing to homestead or mix its labor or any other resource with the crude oil.

Personally pro-choice, Rothbard turns the 1991 Wichita Operation Rescue standoff away from abortion and toward a sharper question: who may legitimately wield coercion? Protecting the clinics, he argues, falls under Kansas's state and local police power, not the jurisdiction of federal courts and marshals, and a just end never validates the wrong sovereign instrument. Reviving a radical Jeffersonian constitutionalism, he pairs the Ninth Amendment's unenumerated rights with the Tenth Amendment's reserved powers, rejects Roe-era judicial supremacy by 'nine oligarchic hacks,' and repudiates precedents from Eisenhower's Little Rock intervention to the Reconstruction anti-Klan statute Judge Kelly invoked. Federal domestic coercion, in his most provocative move, becomes structurally identical to foreign intervention. 'Denationalizing the courts' thus folds a libertarian abortion-rights sympathy into a wider project of dismantling centralized power.

The slogan here should be “U.S. Out of Kansas,” or “Kansas for the Kansans”; let the Kansans settle their own affairs.

"Free and fair trade" — the Bush administration's phrase — is the target here: a slogan Rothbard treats as hypocrisy, contradicted by managed trade with Japan and a fixation on bilateral deficits he calls a fallacy the 17th-century mercantilists had already discarded. His larger move is to widen the definition of free trade beyond the mere absence of tariffs. Genuine freedom, he insists, must also be unregulated and unsubsidized, which turns three establishment favorites into protectionism by other routes: regional blocs like the European Community that raise external barriers, foreign aid as disguised export subsidy, and — the gravest danger — a coordinated world central bank issuing fiat money. His alternative is unilateral: cut the barriers, no treaties required.

The major point is that genuine free trade requires no negotiations, treaties, super-power creations, or presidential jetting abroad. All it requires is for the United States to cut tariffs and quotas, as well as taxes and regulations. Period.

Assembled as a dossier on the American right's lost genealogy, this Rothbard-centered collection asks how anti-New Deal constitutionalists, libertarians, and anti-interventionists were displaced by Cold War conservatism and neoconservative gatekeeping. The title chapter defines the 'Original' Right of 1933 to 1955 as radical rather than conservative: America First, anti-statist, bent on rollback of a regime the New Deal had already transformed. Ruling classes govern through manufactured legitimacy, Rothbard argues, invoking La Boetie, Mises, and Calhoun; so the movement cannot win through Hayekian elite persuasion or Fabian gradualism, but needs a confrontational right-wing populism with a social base outside managerial institutions. Memoir, interview, and polemic braid together: McCarthy and Buchanan as populist exemplars, Buckley and National Review as the purgers who narrowed the right, and a closing call to 'repeal the twentieth century.'

The Marxists, who have spent a great deal of time thinking about strategy for their movement, always pose the question: who is the agency of social change?

The most successful cartel in history was no advertisement for free-market monopoly. DeBeers seems to refute the Austrian claim that cartels are inherently unstable, having restricted supply through its Central Selling Organization and held prices above competitive levels for decades, yet Rothbard insists the market was never really free. South African nationalization, state licensing, and the criminalizing of 'illegal' independent miners supplied the coercion that private property and exchange never could; the Soviet Union, monopolist to monopolist, cooperated rather than competed. Then comes Angola: civil war's end, wildcat prospectors on the Cuango River, and drought-exposed alluvial deposits that no fence or patrol can enclose. Rising inventories, forced purchases, a dividend cut, and a 25 percent sales cutback reveal the fragility cartel theory predicts once the barriers to competition begin to fall.

If you fly a patrol over the province you can get shot down by a missile. And it's a 100-mile river. You can't put a fence around it.

Establishment economists who pronounced early-1990s America 'undertaxed' are Rothbard's quarry in this brief polemic from Making Economic Sense. Robert Solow, Benjamin Friedman, Charles Schultze, and the Galbraithian lament over 'private affluence and public squalor' all rest, he argues, on one fallacy: the idea that coerced government spending is a form of saving and investment, superior to the private kind. It is nothing of the sort. Higher taxes drain command over resources from individuals disciplined by profit, loss, and consumer choice, handing it to politicians and bureaucrats whose expenditure is political consumption disciplined only by political incentives. Comparisons to heavier European burdens beg the question; the Soviet Union, where the state took everything, is his reductio. The cure for public squalor is not more revenue but privatization, tested, he proposes, as a Great Social Experiment.

All government spending, far from deserving the term "investment," is in reality consumption spending by politicians and bureaucrats.

Twenty years after shattering Soviet dominance at the board, Bobby Fischer returned in 1992 to play Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia, and the American media that once lionized him turned savage. Rothbard reads the reversal as elite signaling, not independent criticism: charges of paranoia, eccentricity, and reclusiveness are inverted one by one into evidence of foresight, independence, or ordinary self-protection. The real offense, he contends, is political, Fischer's open defiance of United Nations sanctions and his heterodox views, punished under the rubric of Political Correctness. When Fischer spits on a Treasury warning and denies the UN's sovereignty, he becomes for Rothbard a dissident case study, a would-be political prisoner. The closing worry stretches from chess to every profession: must dentists, astronomers, and composers now pass an ideological test before their achievements can be honored?

Bobby met this challenge by heroically spitting on the Treasury letter, and declaring that he doesn’t recognize the sovereignty of the United Nations in fact, that the world would be a lot better without the UN.

A recession, in the Keynesian telling, is a collapse of confidence and spending to be cured by deficits, cheap money, and public reassurance. George H. W. Bush's response to the early-1990s slump was, Rothbard charges, Keynesian through and through, and blind to the prior inflationary credit expansion that Austrian theory identifies as the real cause. The essay tracks the administration's shifting language from 'no recession' to 'weak recovery' to 'double-dip' as morale-management, then dismantles Bush's and Senator D'Amato's pressure on credit-card rates as price-control thinking that misreads interest as a market price set by risk and demand. Against revenue-neutral tax cuts, which preserve the premise that state revenue must stay intact, Rothbard prescribes not stimulus but liquidation of the state burden: deep cuts in taxes and spending, and more private saving.

The real way to achieve freedom and prosperity is to hurl all three of these icons of the twentieth century into the dustbin of history.

Slightly undersized California peaches and nectarines, perfectly edible, must by federal law be destroyed — and in that absurdity Rothbard finds the whole logic of New Deal agriculture. Farm policy, he argues, is producer cartelization enforced by the state: minimum-size rules become a quality-control language for price maintenance, outlawing cheaper fruit because it threatens the margins of larger produce. His case is Gerawan Farming, prosecuted for selling smaller fruit through channels serving poorer consumers; the forbidden fruit is forbidden because it is affordable. A USDA official’s candid admission that the rules protect the grower’s higher-profit item exposes the truth beneath the consumer-protection rhetoric. Here, in miniature, is the welfare state as Rothbard sees it: coercive cartelization that cuts production, raises prices, and injures the poorest, all draped in humanitarian language.

One of the most horrifying features of the New Deal was its agricultural policy: in the name of “curing the depression,” the federal government organized a giant cartel of America’s farmers.

When a campaign narrows itself to "the issues," the terms have already been rigged: to qualify as a respectable topic, a question must accept that Washington is responsible for jobs, housing, and health care. Writing amid the 1992 recession, Rothbard turns his fire on the machinery of respectable debate — the policy wonks, the computerized forecasts, the false precision of tax projections that never predicted the downturn they now purport to fix. He rejects the establishment equation of tax hikes with spending cuts, insisting the deficit be closed only by shrinking the state, and sets a productive private sector against a parasitic public one. His blunt proposal: cap every federal agency at its 1979 budget.

In media lingo, in short, “discussing” the issues means accepting the media’s statist premises, and solemnly haggling over minute technicalities within those premises.

Czechoslovakia, on the eve of its 1992 split, gets no elegy here — only a welcome. Rothbard reads the country as an artificial "whelp of Versailles," a multinational state manufactured by great-power diplomacy to mask Czech domination over Slovaks, Sudeten Germans, Teschen Poles, Hungarians, and Carpatho-Ruthenians. Against Western opinion that romanticized Tomas Masaryk while denouncing Slovak nationalism, he traces the rapid history from Versailles through German occupation and postwar expulsions to Communist-era Czech predominance. The essay's argument is a case for peaceful secession as the libertarian answer to the post-Communist nationalities question — and its praise falls on the Czechs for letting Slovakia depart rather than holding the federation together by force.

So, farewell Czechoslovakia, what took you so long?