The archive.

A federal gasoline-tax increase, revived at Clinton's 1992 economic summit, arrives dressed in every fashionable justification—conservation, fuel efficiency, energy independence, fairness, deficit reduction—and Rothbard strips each away in turn. Conservation, he argues, is already performed by market prices, which weigh present demand against future scarcity without dictatorial coercion; fuel efficiency is arbitrary single-factor planning that ignores the tradeoffs of time, safety, and comfort a car actually balances. The deficit rationale he treats as pretext, noting that liberals discover the deficit only when it excuses a tax. Beneath the economics lies a cultural animus: liberals, he charges, reserve a special hatred for the automobile, whose private, self-directed mobility rebukes the collective, timetabled discipline of mass transit.

In contrast to mass transport, which liberals find satisfyingly collective, egalitarian, and rigidly fixed to time and place schedules, the automobile is gloriously individualistic.

When the press crowned Bill Clinton's 1992 victory an election of 'change,' Rothbard read the word as ideological manufacture: not a democratic mandate but the consecration of a managerial-media elite. This January 1993 post-election polemic doubles as an obituary, pronouncing the modern conservative movement dead once anti-Communism, support for Israel, and Reagan-worship lost their glue, and the Libertarian Party dead beside it. He dismantles the 'Year of the Woman' and 'landslide' myths, noting Clinton drew barely 43 percent of votes and under a quarter of voting-age Americans, floats a half-satirical hypothesis that Bush deliberately threw the race for the Rockefeller interests, and rejects the 'worse the better' consolation as both false and corrupt. The closing summons a new Old Right pledged to roll back the Leviathan State.

We must build a new movement from under the rubble of the old.

A shoo-in for renomination at the year's start, Elizabeth Holtzman lost the 1993 Democratic runoff for New York City comptroller two-to-one, a collapse Rothbard reads not as an upset but as retribution. He rehearses his case against her: the Watergate prominence, the stern-avenger persona, above all her creation of the Office of Special Investigations, which hunted elderly Eastern European immigrants over half-century-old accusations. Then he traces the mechanics of her fall, from Geraldine Ferraro's lingering fury over Holtzman's 1992 attack ads to Hank Morris's craft in turning the obscure Alan Hevesi into an asset, to the decisively timed Department of Investigation report charging her with gross negligence in the Fleet Bank loan affair. In Rothbard's hands, politics becomes coalition vengeance, ethnic arithmetic, media timing, and the sudden collapse of a manufactured reputation.

It would be difficult to pick, out of an all-too-jammed field, the most repellent politician in American life, but surely Elizabeth Holtzman would run anyone a very close race for that honor.

"Looking like America" was the standard by which Clinton's cabinet was to be judged, and in this February 1993 polemic Rothbard turns it into a reductio ad absurdum. Grant that appointments should mirror the population, he says, and the accounting never stops: if white male, woman, and Hispanic are decisive labels, why not religion, region, skin shade, hair color, and height? Demographic bean-counting, he argues, has displaced even the lip service once paid to merit, converting selection into a public ledger of grievance. Beneath the diversity theater he detects unbroken elite continuity, the Rockefeller networks, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations still shaping foreign policy, so that changing the faces of power leaves its governing interests intact.

Let Willie slip once, and his media worshippers are on his neck in a minute, howling about betrayal.

Instead of shunning foreign entanglements, Bush normalized them, and his parting "December surprise," Rothbard charges, handed Clinton imperial commitments in Somalia, Bosnia, and Iraq. Somalia draws his sharpest fire as the most dangerous kind of war, one without a shred of national interest, waged with a machine gun in one hand and a CARE package in the other. Famine, he counters, is cured not by armed relief but by institutions: secure property, capital, and exchange. Drawing on Isabel Paterson's humanitarian with the guillotine, he warns that compulsory benevolence tends toward domination and that policy driven by television images of suffering can never be rational. Turning to the Balkans, he mocks Washington's threats against Milosevic and the vindictive prosecution of Bobby Fischer for playing chess in Serbia, reading the new world order as a more elastic rationale for war.

Only a George Bush could get us into a war after he has safely lost his election.

The technical debate over financing formulas and cost estimates is a trap, Rothbard warns: critics who haggle over the Clinton health plan's details have already conceded its collectivist premises. His indictment runs through eight principles, guaranteed universal access, coercion, egalitarianism, price controls, rationing, and insists the only true medium of access is not a voucher or ID card but the dollar, which preserves choice. Compulsory insurance makes health draftees of the uninsured; premium caps are price controls that must breed shortages and hence rationing; independent practice gives way to state-supervised alliances and HMOs. Why, he asks, should tiered medicine be uniquely intolerable when food and housing already vary by income? The proper alternative is not a rival technocratic scheme but dismantling the intervention already in place.

But the details of the Clintonian plan, however diabolic, are merely petty demons compared to the general principles, where Lucifer really lurks.

Liberal culture canonized Cesar Chavez even as his union disintegrated, and the collapse, Rothbard argues, followed from economics rather than insufficient zeal. The United Farm Workers fell from 70,000 members to 5,000 because migrant farm labor is abundant, mobile, low-skilled, and endlessly replaceable, exactly the conditions under which a union cannot secure monopoly power. He rejects the vocabulary of exploitation: low wages track productivity and replaceability, not employer guilt, and Mexican migrants take the work because it beats their alternatives at home. A triumphant UFW could have raised wages only by pricing many workers out of jobs; the honest way to help them, he insists, is to raise consumer demand for grapes, not to stage feel-good boycotts. Commemoration, in this reading, is ideological combat.

The real legacy of Cesar Chavez is negative: forget the charisma and the hype and learn some economics.

Political language does the work that arguments cannot, Rothbard contends: market socialism once seduced American elites while remaining socialism, and free trade now sells a treaty hostile to market freedom. Real liberalization would demand only that Washington unilaterally repeal its own tariffs, quotas, and anti-dumping laws; NAFTA instead entrenches neo-mercantilism, in which imports are merely the price government pays to win export markets for politically connected firms. He casts the pact as a North American Maastricht, an attempt to integrate and cartelize government through a supranational commission practicing upward harmonization. The Clinton side agreements on labor and the environment are the sharpest danger, locking welfare-state regulation in place forever, while demands that Americans rescue Carlos Salinas's reforms sit oddly beside Mexico's continued ban on private oil and gas.

Labels are often enough to nab the suckers.

Tolerable, for once, is Rothbard's verdict on the 1993 Academy Awards, where the ceremony ran longer and more politically correct than ever but the outcomes proved less disastrous than he feared. His relief turns on a single result: The Crying Game's loss of Best Picture, which he treats as the night's real victory. Reading films as moral evidence, he grants Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven a grudging pass for redeeming its guilt-ridden revisionism with a final burst of unembarrassed retribution, and champions Scent of a Woman as an old-fashioned movie-movie carried by Al Pacino's bravura. The column then broadens into a culture-war attack on Hollywood liberalism, avant-garde criticism, and what he decries as gender-bending, arguing that identity politics and sexual pluralism have crowded out heroic drama and moral clarity.

For once, the Academy Awards were tolerable—not the ceremony, which was longer, more boring, and more Politically Correct than ever—but the awards themselves.

A pro-choice libertarian welcoming Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority may seem a contradiction, yet Rothbard builds exactly that case in this February 1993 strategy essay. Christian conservatives, he argues, are not aspiring theocrats but people fighting a left-liberal elite that used government to assault Christian culture; the true battleground is not the bedroom but anti-discrimination law, which he condemns as an assault on property and freedom of association. He would return abortion to the states through radical decentralization and the Tenth Amendment, narrow the establishment clause to mere tax funding of churches, and replace public schools, those centers of ideological brainwashing, with unregulated private and home schooling. His conclusion is a call to abandon sectarian isolation: after the Cold War and amid political correctness, paleolibertarians belong in an anti-egalitarian coalition of the Right.

Establishing a religion has a specific meaning: paying for ministers and churches out of taxpayer funds.

Why did a man assassinated nearly thirty years earlier suddenly reappear on baseball caps and movie screens? Rothbard's brief 1993 polemic treats the early-1990s Malcolm X revival as cultural manufacture, media hype trailing Spike Lee's hagiography and elite political signaling, and folds it into his suspicion that public commemoration is a technique of ideological rule. Setting Malcolm against Martin Luther King's integrationist liberalism, he finds the icon's power less in doctrine than in the fact that his life ended unfinished, after the break with the Nation of Islam and before any faction could conclusively claim him. He reads black nationalism as preferable to state-enforced integration yet stranded by territorial reality, and closes on the man himself: intelligent, sardonic, disciplined, remembered from Rothbard's own hearing of him speak.

To paraphrase LBJ, seize control of a nation’s celebrations, and their hearts and minds will follow.

A memorial becomes an argument about memory. Recounting the career of V. Orval Watts, who died in 1993, Rothbard traces a life lived inside institutions rather than abstractions: the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, where Watts became the first full-time economist employed by a chamber in the United States; the Foundation for Economic Education, which he joined as Leonard Read's economic adviser in 1946; and Northwood University, where he resumed teaching at sixty-five. Watts's books against Keynesianism, union power, and the United Nations stand as evidence of a consistent educator against collectivism. But the tribute turns outward in its closing claim—that a movement forgetting its own leaders and heroes will not amount to much, and that remembrance is itself part of the free-market cause's survival.

Any movement that has no sense of its own history, that fails to acknowledge its own leaders and heroes, is not going to amount to very much, nor does it deserve a better fate.