The archive.

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.

Under the gentle aegis of the New York Times, Rothbard marvels, seventy-five years of Communist butchery, despotism, and mass murder simply wash away. His November 1992 commentary reads Bill Keller's admiring Sunday profile of the South African Communist Party—its intelligence, its idealism, its lovability—as a case study in post-Cold War amnesia, turning Communist influence within the ANC into a tale of youthful anti-racism. He sets Keller in the lineage of Walter Duranty and older fellow-traveling myth, refuses the separation of personal heroism from ideology, and mocks the assurances that Mandela is no Communist and the ANC newly respectful of property. Three morals follow: anti-Communist vigilance outlives the Soviet collapse, elite journalism still romanticizes the creed, and social democracy shares more with Communism than either cares to admit.

No mention, of course, of murdering dissenters, totalitarianism, slave labor camps, and all the rest.

Condemning Serbian conduct is one thing; committing American soldiers to a Balkan war is another—and Rothbard means to keep the two apart. This September 1992 antiwar polemic attacks the post-Cold War premise that U.S. power should police humanitarian disasters and answer televised outrage with force. What he calls government by TV clip converts suffering into pressure for intervention before feasibility, authority, or aftermath are weighed. He credits Bush and the Pentagon for caution learned in Vietnam and Lebanon, dismantles territorial integrity as an automatic trigger for war, and rejects the promise that air power can secure Sarajevo cheaply without occupation. Behind every call to arms he hears the same tired analogy—each new adversary a Hitler—substituting moral theater for analysis of what intervention would actually cost.

No country or people get bombed into submission.

No publication had savaged George Bush more bitterly, yet by late July 1992 Rothbard found himself, grudgingly, working his way back to the president. With Buchanan's primary challenge spent and Perot withdrawn, this short electoral polemic frames the Bush-Clinton contest as lesser-evil triage within a decayed two-party system. The case for Bush is thin by design—chiefly that he is not Clinton, plus the Bush-Baker firmness on Israeli settlements and loan guarantees, and a dithering caution that kept America out of Bosnia. Against Clinton, Rothbard broadens from policy to culture: the leftest-ever Democratic convention, Gore's ties to organized Zionism, and Hillary Clinton's children's-rights advocacy recast as an assault on parental jurisdiction. A defensive vote, he concludes—while longing for a total counterrevolution against left-liberalism in government, economy, and culture.

Holding back the hordes may be important, but it's not exactly soul-satisfying.

Speculative attacks on a national currency are not predation but price discovery—markets correcting fiat money that governments have inflated while commanding a value the market will not pay. Turning to the 1993 pressure on the French franc within Europe's exchange-rate system, Rothbard strips the media melodrama of its heroes and villains and reduces it to elementary price theory: since gold redeemability vanished, each national money floats as an independent fiat commodity priced by supply and demand. Fixed parities, he argues, are simply price controls—a floor under weak money guaranteeing speculators a one-way bet. From the franc he widens to the European Monetary System, Maastricht, and the proposed ECU, reading a single currency and central bank not as free trade but as centralized inflation and political control routed through Brussels.

Blaming speculators for these crises is as absurd as blaming “black marketeers” for higher prices under price controls.

Off-duty drunkenness and convention excess, Rothbard argues, were being retroactively criminalized by feminism, bureaucracy, and a new puritanism, and the naval aviators of the 1991 Tailhook convention, not the women who accused them, are the affair's true casualties. Mocking Inspector General Derek Vander Schaaf's report and Lt. Paula Coughlin's public accusations, he redescribes institutional scandal as ordinary adult misconduct in a predictable setting, then converts known "tradition" into consent. The wider target is what he calls the assault on the military's "macho culture": sensitivity training, gender-blind integration, and the therapeutic state closing in on normal masculine heterosexuality. Openly hostile to feminism and gay rights, the essay stands as a period document of early-1990s right-libertarian culture war, recoding a scandal of abuse into an emblem of cultural defeat.

But since when has debauchery been a high crime, or drunkenness off the job for that matter?!

Behind George H.W. Bush's claim that U.S. troops in Somalia were "doing God's work," Rothbard finds an old American reflex: a post-millennial pietism that casts the state as God's instrument for stamping out sin, secularized into the Social Gospel and then Wilsonian global reform. From this genealogy the March 1993 essay turns to political economy, leaning on aid worker Michael Maren's testimony that relief was stolen by soldiers and guerrillas while refugee camps sedentarized nomads who could not otherwise be taxed, drafted, or controlled. Humanitarianism, on this account, is a business sustained by its own failures; free food depresses local prices and manufactures the dependency it claims to relieve. Tracing Siad Barre's Cold War patronage into civil war, Rothbard reaches an austere conclusion, stop the aid and withdraw the marines, framed as economic law against intervention.

In short, a permanent global Crusade.

Whenever politicians invoke "fairness" in trade, Rothbard warns, an American had better guard his wallet, since the word is camouflage for coercion, cartelization, and subsidy. The steel industry supplies his case study: a two-century habit of protection running from War of 1812 tariffs and Pennsylvania iron interests through postwar import quotas Orwellically named "voluntary restraint agreements," anti-dumping claims, and proposed Bush-era tariffs. The nineteenth-century "infant industry" plea, he notes, simply flipped after 1945 into a plea for an aged industry needing breathing space, while the demand for shelter stayed constant. Protection preserves inefficiency rather than curing it, taxing appliance makers, automakers, builders, and consumers alike. Even foreign dumping, he insists, rewards the buyer and injures only the subsidizing seller, in a compact libertarian anatomy of protectionism as rent-seeking dressed in moral language.

“Dumping” can harm only the dumper; it always benefits the dumpee.

Braced to despise a slow, dark, nearly wordless French period film, Rothbard instead walked out converted—and turned the surprise into cultural argument. His 1993 review contends that the austerity of Alain Corneau's Tous Les Matins du Monde is precisely what lets seventeenth-century French Baroque music, voiced by the viola da gamba, replace ordinary cinematic exposition. The rivalry between the withdrawn purist Sainte-Colombe, who spurns Louis XIV's court, and his gifted but careerist pupil Marin Marais becomes a parable of the master-disciple bond that reaches, he writes, into scholarship and science. He defends the film's invented history as legitimate fiction, cheers a soundtrack outselling Michael Jackson and Madonna, and reads the Baroque as the highest pinnacle human civilization has yet reached.

Instead, to the stunned surprise of myself and my wife, I found a genuine masterpiece, one of the best and most notable pictures in years.

Apply the logic of self-determination consistently, Rothbard demands, and one nation stands out as its most neglected casualty: the Hungarians stranded outside Hungary since 1920. His March 1993 essay treats territorial integrity as a selective doctrine and borders as moral claims open to ethnic scrutiny, making the Treaty of Trianon its hinge—morally parallel, he says, to the Versailles settlement that shattered Germany. He surveys the disputed lands of southern Slovakia, northern Vojvodina, Transylvania, and Carpatho-Ruthenia, then presses a maximalist prescription: Hungary's territory should be expanded, its irredentism vindicated against a pro-Western establishment that blesses some nationalisms and demonizes others. Even Bela Kiraly's startling verdict on a wartime Transylvanian boundary serves his insistence that a regime's evil need not settle where a border belongs.

Poor Hungary was shorn of fully one-third of its ethnic and linguistic brethren.

Predicting a presidency before it begins, Rothbard reads the incoming Clinton administration from its advisers, slogans, and place in a long bipartisan pattern. This chapter from Making Economic Sense answers Ludwig Lachmann's claim that the future is unknowable by insisting that political incentives make broad direction plain: higher taxes and spending, industrial policy, regulation, deficit manipulation, and a drift toward socialized medicine, all dressed in the language of investment, care, and partnership. Democrats push the state forward, he argues, while Republicans—right-wing Keynesians from Eisenhower to Bush—merely slow the ratchet; Clinton's novelty is the Wall Street Left of Robert Reich, Felix Rohatyn, and Robert Rubin. His sharpest thrust falls on rebranding public spending as investment and schooling as human capital—coercive finance disguised, he warns, as productive market activity.

In general, we must batten down the hatches for another one of those periodic Great Leaps Forward into statism that have afflicted us since the New Deal (actually, since the Progressive Era).