The archive.

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.

In October 1994, Rothbard writes, elite opinion executed a sudden reversal: the publication of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve broke a decades-long taboo on public discussion of race, intelligence, and heredity. Less interested in the book's data than in its reception, he reads the controversy as an exposure of intellectual policing—from Franz Boas onward, he claims, candid inquiry was smeared as proto-Nazism and quietly blacked out rather than rebutted. He is equally wary of who now embraces the topic: neoconservatives and liberals, he argues, want IQ research to justify a credentialed governing elite. His own paleolibertarian use is different and avowedly anti-statist—hereditarian claims as a shield for market outcomes against egalitarian redistribution, not a tool for planners to sort and subsidize populations.

Under the spell of a misplaced analogy from Darwinian theory, analysts for over a century liked to think of social change as necessarily gradual, minute, and glacial.

A secularized postmillennialism bent on building an egalitarian "Kingdom of God on Earth" through state power—this, not secular humanism, is the gravest cultural threat, this December 1994 polemic contends. Rothbard traces the impulse to 1820s Yankee Protestantism, whose reformers turned campaigns against sin and slavery into the Social Gospel and, ultimately, economic collectivism, with Methodism the leading carrier. That genealogy sets up the target: Hillary Clinton, whom he reads as the administration's true ideologue. Citing Kenneth Woodward's Newsweek profile, he treats her "old-fashioned Methodist" self-description not as pious biography but as evidence, linking her Park Ridge upbringing and the Social Gospel teaching of Rev. Donald Jones to a modern liberalism he casts as coercive salvationism.

But there is definitely a direct line of descent from the Methodist Social Gospelers of the nineteenth century to St. Hillary and the monstrous Clintonian left.

A figure-skating scandal becomes a culture-war parable in this 1994 column on the Lillehammer Winter Games. Rothbard begins by refusing the reflexive American chauvinism of Olympic television—praising Norway's cheerful hosting and its skiing sweep—then insists that sport should stand apart from state and nationalist spectacle. The heart of the essay recodes the Tonya Harding–Nancy Kerrigan affair: against the left's reading of it as class resentment, he makes it a question of character, reviving the nineteenth-century distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor and setting Harding's grievance and victimology against Kerrigan's discipline. His nostalgia settles on Avery Brundage, the crusty Old Rightist who once ruled the Games with an iron hand, whose austere amateur ideal he pits against a decline he blames on lawyers, endorsements, and athlete "rights."

Sports are supposed to be individual, or team, efforts, and should have nothing to do with government or politics, and what used to be hailed as the “Olympic ideal” was set against such emphasis on the State.

Establishment economists, politicians, and the financial press come in for withering treatment here, as Rothbard catalogs the contradictory stories Clinton-era commentators told about interest rates, unemployment, inflation, and recession. Against the reigning fetish for low rates, he explains that pushing interest below the market's time-preference level does not stimulate but distorts, seeding malinvestment; against the Keynesian inflation-unemployment tradeoff, he denies the bargain exists at all. The essay presses from these conceptual distinctions to a forecast: the credit expansion of the 1980s Federal Reserve inflated asset prices and misdirected capital, so that absent a genuine industrial recovery, stocks and bonds face a sharp fall. Austrian business-cycle theory here serves as a solvent for the establishment's reflexive optimism.

But Clinton's huge tax increase during a recession was an economic master-stroke, you see, because this will lower deficits, which in turn will lower interest rates, which in turn will bring us out of the recession.

Richard Nixon's death in 1994 occasions not an obituary but an assault on the ritual that sanctifies dead presidents. Rothbard reads the bipartisan funeral homage—Bill Clinton honoring a man his circle once opposed—as evidence of a "statolatry" in which the office is sacralized and even disgraced officeholders are ritually purified. Separating Nixon's conservative rhetoric from his governing substance, he presents him as the consummate example of Big Government Conservatism: welfare expansion, affirmative action, wage and price controls, OSHA, the EPA, and the abandonment of gold, with a Vietnam War lengthened rather than ended. The essay's sharpest inversion concerns Watergate, which he refuses to mourn: its value lay not in moral outrage but in the precedent that a president could be brought down.

The great thing about Watergate is that it made the unthinkable thinkable at long last, that it established the precedent for impeaching the Monster in the White House.

Sold as public safety, the Clinton administration's firearms proposals really teach, on Rothbard's account, a lesson in market structure. A policy advertised as crime control, he argues, operates through taxation, coercive licensing, and cartelization—warring against every entity except the actual criminals. The telling detail is the federal gun-dealer license fee, raised from $10 to $66 under the Brady Bill, with Lloyd Bentsen proposing $600 and welcoming its power to thin the retail trade. Because a fixed cost burdens small firms more than large, Rothbard joins Austrian price theory to public-choice analysis: the fee eliminates marginal dealers and rewards incumbents, forging a coalition of anti-gun ideologues and big dealers. His remedy is not cheaper licenses but abolishing licensing altogether.

First, a license “fee” is a euphemism for a tax, pure and simple.