The archive.

When F.A. Hayek died in 1992, Rothbard marked the passing of the "Mises-Hayek era" with an obituary that both honors and litigates. He credits Hayek as the great transmitter of Mises's monetary theory of the boom-bust cycle to the English-speaking world, the elaboration of central-bank credit expansion that carried the Austrian account of capital into the London School of Economics and challenged Keynes before Keynesianism triumphed. He recalls Hayek's part in the socialist calculation debate, The Road to Serfdom, and the 1974 Nobel that revived Austrian economics. Yet the essay turns sharply on Hayek's postwar drift: his inconsistent monetary views and a philosophy of unconscious, rule-following man that Rothbard judges too weak to ground natural rights or a rational defense of laissez-faire.

Of all the Misesians who had been nurtured in Vienna and London, by the end of the 1930s only Mises and Hayek were left, as indomitable champions of the free market, and opponents of statism and deficit spending.

Movement conservatives who had defended George H. W. Bush against Pat Buchanan turned on him the moment Clinton surged — and Rothbard reads the reversal not as principle but as an unlovely scramble. He layers three explanations: Sam Francis's "venality" thesis, that conservative organizations thrive on fundraising panic under Democratic presidents; a power-elite analysis built around the "Rockefeller World Empire," the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission, an Eastern Establishment content with Bush or Clinton alike; and the neoconservatives, whose overriding concern he locates in Israel and foreign aid, and whose break with Bush over Shamir and loan guarantees pushed them toward Clinton. Elite continuity, he argues, decides more than elections.

At the very least, it's an unlovely spectacle: rats scurrying off a sinking ship.

Behind The General Theory, Rothbard argues, stands a man best understood through egotism, a sense of elite destiny, and open contempt for bourgeois morality, thrift, and the long run. This polemical portrait follows Keynes from the patronage of Cambridge economics and the secret society of the Apostles into Bloomsbury's avant-garde revolt against Victorian values, then reads his economics as an extension of that temperament: anti-principle, opportunistic, and hungry for policy power. Rothbard charges him with misrepresenting classical economics and Pigou, dismissing Mises's monetary work he could barely read in German, and dressing old mercantilist and inflationist fallacies in impenetrable new jargon. He ends by calling Keynes a charismatic, power-driven statist rather than the scientific revolutionary his admirers proclaim.

We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists.

Pat Buchanan's 1992 convention speech did not start a culture war, on Rothbard's reading — it merely named one the left had been winning for decades through schools, courts, media, and the therapeutic state. The essay's method is to take every liberal claim of neutrality — media objectivity, artistic autonomy, compassion for children — and recast it as an instrument of cultural power. Its sharpest distinction sets individual rights of person and property against the group and therapeutic "rights" administered by bureaucrats and social workers; its central battlefield is the family, where Rothbard casts Hillary Clinton's children's-rights advocacy as a New Class transfer of authority from parents to state-linked experts. Anti-statism and cultural conservatism fuse into one front.

Culture war? It was launched decades ago and liberals were almost into the mopping-up stage before the oppressed finally woke up.

A puzzle drives this October 1992 essay: why do left-liberals react with quasi-religious fury when conservatism threatens not to delay progressive causes but to reverse them? Rothbard's answer is that the left holds, in Whig or Marxoid fashion, a faith in history's inevitable march toward a socialist egalitarian order, so any rollback reads as heresy rather than mere defeat. He distinguishes Communist hard totalitarianism from Social Democratic soft totalitarianism — "Brave New World instead of 1984" — and interprets liberal panic over Franco, Pinochet, McCarthy, feminism, and Buchanan's culture-war rhetoric as fear of reaction. The piece closes as militant paleoconservative rhetoric, urging open reaction and the restoration of an older American order.

In other words: Brave New World instead of 1984.

Max Lerner's "Civilization Watch" column becomes, in this April 1992 polemic, a stand-in for the whole interventionist consensus — Wilsonian collective security, the Marshall Plan, post-Soviet aid, and unconditional support for Israel. Rothbard rejects Lerner's proposed fusion of Wilsonian idealist ends with Hamiltonian means, naming both men as candidates for the most evil politician in American history, and offers a counter-fusion of his own: isolationist ends joined to decentralized, Jeffersonian means. He reads the call for bipartisan foreign-policy responsibility as a device to deny the electorate any real choice, and charges that Lerner's hostility to nationalism is selective — America First and Russia First are sinister, while Israeli nationalism demands maximal U.S. backing.

All nationalisms must be stamped out, it seems, but one.

Representation, Rothbard argues, was once a technological necessity — and Ross Perot's proposal for electronic town meetings exposes that the necessity is gone. Defending Perot against pollsters, journalists, and party professionals whose authority rests on managing opinion, he treats their hostility as more revealing than the plan itself: a class recoiling when participation might become binding. Since telephone, television, and interactive media make direct voting feasible, the only objection left is that voters would choose badly — an objection, he notes, that condemns electing officials no less than deciding issues. The libertarian payoff is fiscal: he backs Perot's amendment requiring popular ratification of any tax increase, and dismisses the establishment balanced-budget amendment as manipulable theater.

The only possible argument against direct democracy, now that the technological argument is obsolete, is that the public’s choices would be wrong.

Rothbard rejects all three stories Americans told about the 1980s during the 1992 recession: the Democratic indictment of greed and tax cuts, the Bush Republican excuse-making, and the anti-Bush nostalgia for an unblemished Reagan boom. Stripping away the moralized language of "greed," he defends Michael Milken as an agent who let shareholders challenge entrenched managers, and shows how Social Security taxes and the 1986 Tax Reform Act offset the advertised rate cuts. The decisive turn is monetary: boom and bust alike were driven by Federal Reserve credit expansion that flowed into real estate and stocks while consumer prices stayed subdued — the 1920s pattern repeating. The true villains, he concludes, wear central bankers' suits.

The arch-villains of the 1980s (and the '90s) are Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan, but they will never be treated as such so long as they remain two of the most beloved figures in American public life.

The 1992 Los Angeles riots draw from Rothbard not sympathy for structural causes but a linguistic charge: to condemn violence while rushing to its "real structural causes," he argues, is precisely to condone it. Even as an anti-statist, he grants government one minimal duty — to defend persons and property under assault — and finds it failed. Liberal remedies of welfare, set-asides, and affirmative action he redescribes as payoffs to violence; Jack Kemp's enterprise zones he calls welfare in market language; repealing minimum-wage and licensing laws he judges helpful but insufficient. Rejecting racial discrimination as the master cause by pointing to Korean-American victims, he lands on impunity: rioters looted because they saw they could get away with it.

Devotion to the sanctity of person and property is not part of their value-system. That’s why, in the short term, all we can do is shoot the looters and incarcerate the rioters.

Long before the left owned the phrase, Rothbard insists, it was the neoconservatives who pioneered political correctness, wielding accusations of anti-Semitism, racism, and nativism to discipline the American right. Written in June 1992, this polemic reads two coordinated assaults on Pat Buchanan—Richard John Neuhaus in First Things, Norman Podhoretz in Commentary—as boundary enforcement rather than argument. Rothbard recasts the neocons as displaced Cold War liberals occupying conservative space, offers his own narrow definition of anti-Semitism, personal versus political, to strip the charge of its elastic menace, and translates Neuhaus's talk of democracy and civitas into a demand for ideological submission. His quarrel is finally with gatekeeping itself: no faction, he argues, should hold the power to excommunicate heretics from the conservative movement.

It is important to realize that, for all their complaints about left Political Correctness, it was the neocons who pioneered in that odious practice.

The uproar over Oliver Stone's JFK, Rothbard argues, revealed more than the film did. The vehemence with which liberal, centrist, and conservative commentators rushed to discredit Stone betrayed not confidence in the Warren Commission but fear that a mass audience might be persuaded. This May 1992 review-essay defends assassination revisionism as dissident historical knowledge—decades of books, tapes, and archival research synthesized on screen—and endorses its broad conclusions: shots from the front, a conspiracy reaching into the CIA's right wing and Mafia connections, Lyndon Johnson's possible foreknowledge. Answering the objection that too many would have had to keep the secret, Rothbard distinguishes the small circle that executes an operation from the vast bureaucracy that buries it afterward. He backs opening the files while doubting the most damning would ever emerge.

The most fascinating thing about JFK, as exciting and well-done as it is, is not the movie itself but the hysterical attempt to marginalize, if not to suppress it.

How does the welfare state survive its own failures? By redefining each failure as a reason for more spending, more bureaucracy, more taxation. Rothbard's diagnosis, drawn from Making Economic Sense, describes a cyclical machine: liberals dramatize a social problem, prescribe federal intervention, and Republicans—complaining all the while—conserve and enlarge what they inherit. His sharper target here is the conservative welfare state of the Bush-era neoconservatives, which he judges more dangerous than ordinary liberalism precisely because conservative language disarms conservative voters. He reads the education reforms of Lamar Alexander, Chester Finn, and Diane Ravitch as a federalizing seizure of children, and Jack Kemp's enterprise zones as subsidy dressed as free enterprise, all to be financed by deficits and new taxes. Spend, tax, elect—and, he adds, control.

Neocons are the most enthusiastic fans of the federal deficit since the Left-Keynesians of the 1930s.