The archive.

The Clinton-era “White House Car Talks” floated higher minimum driving ages, forced license surrender by older drivers, limits on cars per household, and alternating driving days — and in these Rothbard sees not environmental administration but the rationing of everyday life. His conceptual move is to read incremental regulation as a political ratchet: concessions never satisfy, because the real target is private automotive freedom itself. The automobile matters precisely because it is ordinary, popular, and decentralized, an institution of autonomy that frees the individual from schedules, terminals, and collective routes. He traces the hostility back before pollution, to liberal contempt for 1950s tail-fins, and groups the war on the car with gun control, smoking bans, and attacks on speech as one collectivist project. If that isn’t totalitarianism, he asks, what would qualify?

Instead, the private automobile made each individual “King of the Road”; he could ride wherever and whenever he wanted, with no compulsion to clear it with his neighbors or his “community.”

On the rebellion’s bicentenary, Rothbard overturns the textbook story of a localized western Pennsylvania uprising crushed by Washington’s 13,000-man army. Recent research, he argues, shows that no one paid Hamilton’s whiskey excise across the entire American back-country — from Maryland and Virginia through Kentucky — in a non-violent, civil-disobedient refusal that no local jury would convict. He distinguishes hated internal taxation, with its intrusive revenue men, from external tariffs, and roots the resistance in the British cry of “liberty, property, and no excise!” The excise favored large distillers over small, struck at whiskey used as frontier money, and was eventually repealed under the Jeffersonians. Both rebels and officials, he adds, conspired to bury the scale of the revolt — the former to escape prosecution, the latter to hide federal weakness.

The Whiskey Rebellion, then, considered properly, was a victory for liberty and property rather than for federal taxation.

Vouchers failed in California, Rothbard insists, not because teachers’ unions outspent them but because the scheme itself was flawed. Proposition 174, the most ambitious voucher plan to date, lost overwhelmingly — and he reads that defeat as voters sensing that the certificate was another mechanism of state redistribution, not an escape from it. His decisive principle is that control always follows subsidy: funding private schools with tax money would extend government domination to the last more-or-less independent institutions, while forcing middle-class taxpayers to subsidize others’ choices. Shifting the debate from abstract “choice” to property and money honestly earned, he rejects education vouchers alongside food and housing subsidies. The alternative he offers is concrete: deregulate private schools, cut public-school budgets and taxes, and restore strictly local control.

By far the best "voucher," and the only voucher needed, is the dollar bill that you earn honestly, and don't grab from others, even if they are merely taxpayers.

Clinton’s pledge to end “welfare as we know it” would not shrink the welfare state, Rothbard argues, but enlarge it — swapping idle welfare for subsidized workfare that costs the taxpayer more. He redirects popular anger: the middle and working classes rage that recipients sit idle, when they ought to object to funding them at all. The proposed reform, he shows, hides a whole apparatus of wage subsidies, public make-work, child care, food stamps, housing, transportation, and a supervisory bureaucracy. His sharpest distinction is between productive service and state-sponsored motion: activity coerced from taxpayers and staged by government has no moral weight simply because it is no longer idleness. Workfare thus proves worse than welfare, normalizing dependency under the language of work — one more stage in a long march toward socialism.

It is, in other words, simply another part of the 20th century's Long March toward socialism.

A defense-secretary nominee greeted with near-unanimous acclaim collapsed within a month, and Rothbard refuses the press’s explanation that Bobby Ray Inman was merely thin-skinned or psychologically unstable. The withdrawal, he argues, was a coordinated media-political campaign. He runs through the pending controversies — the International Signal and Control and Tracor ties, and “Nannygate” — but treats them as ammunition rather than proof of guilt. The deeper root, he contends, lay in Inman’s 1981 decision to restrict Israeli access to U.S. satellite photographs after the bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor, which earned him the lasting hostility of William Safire and other pro-Israel commentators. Mapping CIA factions and “Big Media’s” power to define plausibility, he insists that “conspiracy” can name ordinary elite coordination, and laments that Inman fled rather than forcing the networks into the open.

To pundits, media people, politicians, and leading “well-informed sources” inside the Beltway, Bobby Ray Inman could walk on water.

Economic thought did not climb steadily from Smith to Ricardo to Mill; it discovered truths and then lost them. That wager governs this second volume of Rothbard's Misesian history, which demotes Adam Smith from founder to interrupter — the man who shunted a nearly complete proto-Austrian tradition of subjective value onto the dead end of labor and cost. Ricardo deepens the error with class-conflict distribution and abstract model-building, while Nassau Senior and a neglected Irish school of utility theorists mark the road not taken. Long chapters follow the bullionist controversy, Peel's Act, and the currency-versus-banking debate over fractional reserves, then reconstruct Marxism as heir to millenarian communism from Babeuf onward. Throughout, the reversal is the same: cost never creates value, and entrepreneurs spend only because they anticipate what consumers will pay.

‘Value does not spring from the labour of the producer, but from the desire of the consumer’.

Against the reigning story in which Adam Smith fathered economics, this first volume of Rothbard's Austrian history insists that economic thought can move backward as well as forward, and that Smith diverted a rich pre-classical tradition toward labor-value theory and equilibrium. Writing as an avowed Misesian, Rothbard reconstructs two millennia of neglected analysis: Aristotle on exchange as reverse inequality of valuations, the Spanish scholastics of Salamanca groping toward marginal utility, the medieval usury debates, Buridan's commodity theory of money, and the hard-money critique of royal debasement from Oresme to Mariana. He ties competing doctrines to Catholic-Thomist versus Calvinist culture and treats politics as inseparable from economic theory. The result recovers a proto-Austrian lineage buried by the Whig-progressive narrative.

Adam Smith (1723–90) is a mystery in a puzzle wrapped in an enigma.

Who acquires power when equality becomes an administrative task? In this 1995 article, Murray N. Rothbard connects the practical difficulties of equalizing incomes with the authority required to decide which differences count. Equal money incomes leave unequal wealth, local amenities, family circumstances, and personal preferences untouched; attempts to compensate for these differences, he argues, continually enlarge the administrator’s remit. His distinctive move is to connect this measurement problem to a theory of elite interests, distinguishing voluntary leadership based on competence from coercive hierarchy justified in egalitarian terms. Readers can examine how his defense of individual diversity becomes a polemical account of intellectuals and welfare professionals as beneficiaries of equalization—and assess the distance between identifying institutional incentives and establishing the motives of those who advocate equality.

"It's the economy, stupid" gets the politics exactly backward, Rothbard contends. The Clintonian slogan reduces voting to macroeconomic mood and then reduces the economy to the business cycle, crude economic determinism he calls "vulgar Marxism." Public revolt, he argues, springs also from crime, immigration, broken promises, and distaste for the Clintons themselves, and its economic core is not cyclical recovery but secular decline: rising taxation, persistent inflation, falling real family income, and the need for married women to work simply to hold a household's standard of living in place. He trusts ordinary budgeting over official statistics and futurist cheer about computers and media, reading the public's anger as a rational response to the slow erosion of the postwar promise that each generation would surpass the last.

Instead, to capture the Clintonian meaning, the sentiment should be rephrased as “it’s the business cycle, stupid.”

Even a genuine insurance crisis, Rothbard argues, would give insurers no claim on legislative rescue—and he doubts the crisis is genuine, reading its alarming anecdotes, unsupported by transparent industry data, as a device to deny injured parties fair recompense. Insurers are entrepreneurial firms whose losses reflect failed forecasting like anyone else's. Against the tort-reform campaign of insurers, manufacturers, and organized medicine, he defends contingency fees as the instrument that gives poorer plaintiffs their day in court, and the jury as an inherited safeguard against arbitrary caps on justice. His own reform is qualitative, not quantitative: liability should fall in full, but only on those who actually caused the harm—never on retailers or shareholders singled out for their deep pockets.

So there may well be no insurance crisis at all, and the entire hysteria may be trumped-up to gain benefits for the insurance industry at the expense of victims of injury to person or property who are entitled to just compensation.

Both the conservatives who would criminalize flag 'desecration' and the civil libertarians who defend it as 'symbolic speech' are convicted at once in this compact test case for Rothbard's theory of rights. To make the flag sacred, he argues, is to embrace statolatry and leave the police to divine intent—sparing reverent Legionnaires who ceremonially burn worn flags while jailing hippie-sneerers for the identical act. The opposing camp fares no better: treating flag burning as protected expression collapses the distinction between speech and conduct until any action can claim shelter. Both errors dissolve, he contends, once the question shifts from expression to ownership. One may fly, wear, bury, or burn a flag one owns; burning another's is not protest but arson—and private property, not free speech, is the ground on which dissent stands.

There is no way, then, that flag laws can be declared unconstitutional as violations of the First Amendment.

A grassroots revolt against Big Government swept Republicans into Congress in November 1994—and was betrayed, Rothbard charges, almost before the ballots cooled, when party leaders recalled defeated Democrats to a lame-duck session to pass Gatt and midwife the WTO. From that opening scandal he builds a diagnosis of American politics as rule by a bipartisan establishment of big business, high finance, media, and technocrats, arrayed against a public grown hostile to immigration restriction, foreign aid, welfare, gun control, and the Federal Reserve. Against Gingrich and Dole's balanced-budget theater he demands genuine rollback—abolished departments, not caps—and offers an acid test for every Republican: forget the rhetoric, and ask what they actually did. Hope, he ventures, rests with paleoconservative freshmen like Metcalf and Stockman.

The terrible news is that it took less than twenty-four hours for that revolution to be grievously betrayed.