The archive.

Somalia, Bosnia, Tajikistan, Iraq, Korea: the post-Cold War map, in this September 1993 commentary, reads to Washington's interventionists as a cornucopia of opportunities to feed, bomb, and occupy. Rothbard's thesis is that intervention is an appetite rather than a response to necessity, and that humanitarian rescue, democracy promotion, and anti-fundamentalism have become interchangeable warrants for force. Somalia is the central case: a relief mission that disrupted local food arrangements, cast General Aidid as the lone villain, and mutated into armed vengeance once American and UN troops became combatants. The recurring device he exposes is the 'Good Guys vs. Bad Guys' frame, a political technology that manufactures the enemy needed to authorize war. He notes the blowback of Afghan fighters recast overnight from freedom fighters to fanatics, and dismisses the whole crusade as Wilsonian quagmire.

But Uncle Sam will have a difficult time trying to figure out on which side to intervene. How is it going to sort out the Good Guys from the Bad Guys?

Free-market think tanks and pundits did not merely approve of NAFTA in 1993; they defended it, Rothbard observed, with a frantic passion they never mustered against the income tax or the Federal Reserve, and that disproportion is the puzzle this November polemic sets out to solve. His answer separates genuine free trade from a treaty administered by state-created bodies: NAFTA, he argues, is managed trade whose supranational commissions, unaccountable to any taxpayer, can 'upwardly harmonize' environmental and labor regulation against the wishes of citizens. Turning to public choice, he traces the fervor to concrete beneficiaries, Mexican state energy, Koch-linked interests, and lobbying money, and to the pattern by which private firms enlist the state to socialize their costs. Professed market principles, he insists, must be judged against the subsidies they conceal.

There is a vital lesson here: much of Big Government, much of the welfare-interventionist State, is pushed by private businesses in order to force the taxpayers to subsidize their own costs.

A genuine grassroots right-wing revolt against Washington, Rothbard announces in this October 1994 essay, has for the first time in years broken loose from the Beltway, and libertarian strategy must break with it. He sets the insurgency against the 'Official Conservative and Libertarian movement' of think tanks, direct-mail firms, and access-seeking reformers whose real product is donor reassurance, and he redefines 'access' itself as corruption: to court credibility inside Washington is already to concede its centrality. Cataloguing county militias, sheriff resistance to the Brady bill, Tenth Amendment campaigns, secessionist and land-rights activism, and hostility to the Federal Reserve, he reads them not as a finished doctrine but as an anti-centralist instinct that intellectuals should clarify rather than command. Hatred of the Clintons, he argues, fused personal disgust with anti-statism into a mass politics more radical than Perot's.

These heartland rebels are close to the spirit, not of blow-dried Beltway think-tankers, but of the patriots of the American Revolution.

Subsidize any condition and its incidence rises: that law of demand, Rothbard insists in this chapter from Making Economic Sense, governs behavior far outside the marketplace, from coffee consumption and subway ridership to childbirth and welfare dependency. The argument turns on marginal analysis, since blanket appeals to 'need' obscure the fact that consumers at the margin respond sharply to relative costs and benefits. His evidentiary center is a Change-NY estimate that the combined Medicaid, housing, food, and cash benefits of a New York single mother with two children equal a $45,000 pre-tax salary, more than entry-level municipal work returns after tax. From this he casts welfare not as a safety net but as a rival income system competing against low-skill employment, one that over time erodes the work ethic and the old stigma against the dole.

And yet, if welfare payments are far higher than any sum that a single teenager can make on the market, who can deny the powerful extra tug from the prospects of tax-subsidized moolah without any need to work?

Disney's plan for a 3,000-acre theme park beside the Manassas battlefield looked to many like free-market development colliding with historical preservation. Rothbard denies the premise. The project is no expression of capitalism at all, he argues, because Disney sought $163 million in Virginia taxpayer money for roads and infrastructure, forced subsidy dressed as enterprise. Market analysis, he insists, must ask whose ends are served and whether exchange is voluntary or coerced. From means he turns to content, attacking the park's planned pedagogy under Michael Eisner and the choice of a prominent Columbia revisionist as its historical consultant, a signal that the Civil War and Reconstruction would be narrated through a Marxist frame. What awaits, he warns, is corporate welfare and contested cultural authority borrowing the prestige of the market.

He is none other than the notorious Eric Foner, distinguished Marxist-Leninist historian at Columbia University, and the country's most famous Marxist historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Those who once denounced anti-Communist witch hunts, Rothbard charges in this August 1994 polemic, now conduct a 'Christian hunt' of their own, recasting ordinary Republican mobilization as sinister 'stealth' takeovers. He refuses the media's tidy split between acceptable economic conservatism and menacing social conservatism, arguing that Christian activists have come to see the state, public schooling, taxation, and liberal culture as one connected enemy. His church-state case is symmetry: if Martin Luther King and Catholic bishops could enter politics from moral premises, so may conservative Christians. Strategically he defines the Republican 'big tent' procedurally, battle for nominations and platforms, then back the winner against Democrats, and reads Oliver North in Virginia, Tom Pauken in Texas, and Allen Quist in Minnesota as populist victories over a country-club establishment, with home schooling as radical resistance to coercive public education.

It is pretty clear that the only separation of religion from the public schools that left-liberals are interested in is from Christianity, not from religion in general.

The 1994 Rwandan slaughter becomes, in this short June polemic, less an event to reconstruct than a lesson to extract against the 'New World Order' and its dream of imposing democracy and multiethnicity by force. Rothbard blames the catastrophe on European colonial borders that fused hostile peoples into artificial states, a pattern he links to Burundi, the Balkans, and the Caucasus, and rejects UN troops, air strikes, and imposed elections as imperial fantasy. His anti-interventionism is also anti-centralist: violence, he contends, is the predictable yield of forcing distinct peoples into shared political containers and then demanding they practice liberal universalism. The essay is disfigured by what accompanies that argument, speculation about Hutu-Tutsi intelligence and character that converts political history into ethnic destiny, even as he professes to wish the groups could coexist through free exchange.

In the Rwanda massacres, liberals are again unwilling to face the root causes: clashing tribes in a fairly small territorial area.

Cast as a mock 'Modest Proposal' to invade and permanently occupy the entire planet, this 1994 satire turns Swift's method on post-Cold War foreign policy. With the Soviet enemy gone, Rothbard argues, liberal and neoconservative elites preserved interventionism by inflating 'national interest' until every hunger, civil war, undemocratic regime, and stray 'Hate Thought' abroad became America's business. Sanctions he unmasks as war's preparatory form rather than a moderate alternative to it; UN and NATO approval, Security Council bargaining, and CNN spectacle he treats as rituals that consecrate imperial management. The joke is extrapolation, not fantasy: if nation-building requires armies, elections, and welfare, then withdrawal undoes the project and occupation must be permanent. He indicts both parties as interventionist and rests his hope in an antiwar, paleoconservative grassroots ferment.

The U.S. must, very soon, Invade the Entire World!

Behind a debate ostensibly about 'a few puny tariffs,' Rothbard finds in this 1994 chapter the real stakes of NAFTA: not free trade at all, but a constitution for managed globalization. The disproportionate intensity of the fight is his clue. He reclassifies the agreement as a state-capitalist and Wilsonian project, an economy 'governed by an oligarchic ruling coalition of Big Government, Big Business, and Big Intellectuals/Big Media,' coupled to the Keynesian goal of internationally coordinated fiat-money inflation. The Establishment's version of free trade, he charges, is Orwellian: export promotion subsidized by taxpayers, not the unilateral removal of barriers. Domestically he reads the contest as a war within business, exporters and their bankers defeating import-competing firms, and he ends by calling the New World Order a fragile utopian project that public exposure could still obstruct.

The truth can make us free; and the panic of the entire Establishment in the weeks before Nafta shows that they know what they will be up against once the public is on to their game.

With the Soviet enemy gone but the machinery of alarm still running, the Clinton administration needed a fresh Bad Guy—and in January 1994 it found one in Pyongyang. This antiwar commentary dismantles the North Korean nuclear scare as a politically convenient revival of Cold War mobilization, the "last good war" that once united liberals and conservatives. Leaning on historian Bruce Cumings, Rothbard answers each element of the panic: the "massed" troops have sat near the border since the 1970s, the inspection dispute concerns technical "special inspections," and Les Aspin himself conceded no evidence of plutonium production. The demonizing of Kim Jong Il, he notes, recycles a quarter-century of South Korean intelligence rumor. Threat inflation, he argues, is a bureaucratic ritual timed to defense appropriations.

For the new North Korean threat is, as usual, totally bogus.

As communism and Yugoslavia came apart, long-suppressed nationalities returned to the world stage—and with them a category libertarian thought had wrongly ignored, treating only individuals and states as real. The "nation-state," Rothbard argues, is itself the problem, its hyphen fusing coercive territorial rule with the inherited communities of language, religion, and place that Mises and Nock knew to distinguish. He turns that distinction against Wilsonian collective security, which sanctifies every existing border as property rather than the residue of conquest and dynastic bargaining, and offers secession as the remedy—any group free to leave one state and join another. A closing anarcho-capitalist thought experiment of total private ownership recasts open borders, citizenship, and voting as matters of consent, contract, and exit.

The genuine nation, or nationality, has made a dramatic reappearance on the world stage.

World poverty, Rothbard insists, is not caused by too many people—and the UN's population-control agenda is bureaucratic collectivism dressed as humanitarian concern. Against Zero Population Growth, compulsory sterilization, China's one-child policy, and Kenneth Boulding's scheme for marketable "baby-rights," he presses a reversal of causation: numbers track economic conditions rather than producing scarcity. Dense, prosperous Hong Kong and Western Europe stand against thinly settled, impoverished regions of Africa and the decline of Rome to show that density alone explains little. What poor countries lack, he argues, is not fewer births but private property, secure investment, and freedom from the production controls and foreign-aid dependency that crowd out capital.

A rising population is generally a sign of, and goes along with, prosperity and economic development.