The archive.

Reverse the usual alarm about the Christian right, Rothbard urges: the real menace is a "Religious Left" whose lineage runs from medieval millenarian heresy to the Clinton White House. He builds a typological genealogy—Joachim of Fiore as prototype, then the Brethren of the Free Spirit, Thomas Muntzer and the Anabaptists, the English Civil War sects—reading each as a vanguard of "saints" abolishing private property under a messianic leader. The decisive move is secularization: Marxism, he argues, is Anabaptism atheized, substituting material forces for Providence as the engine of redemption, with Ernst Bloch and the Social Gospel confirming the shared salvific grammar. The essay ends on the Clintons as the tradition's latest exponents, indicting any politics—welfare, community, morality—that expands state power toward a coercive earthly kingdom.

He said that the goal of his “ministry” was to bring about no less than the “Kingdom of God on Earth”!

Ballot access, not ideology, is where New York politics begins — convention thresholds and petition requirements let party organizations decide who is even viable. Rothbard reads the 1994 statewide season as a managed electoral cartel, a “circus” of fusion tickets, ethnic blocs, and patronage in which nominations and cross-endorsements discipline every candidate. He tracks Al D’Amato’s machine clearing George Pataki’s path while blocking Herb London’s convention access, the Conservative Party’s chronic struggle between principle and pragmatism, and a Mario Cuomo grown vulnerable on crime, taxes, and urban decay. Betsy McCaughey draws special scorn for a health-care critique that still concedes universal access to state planning. The recurring question, applied to every office, is unity at what price — how much principle must be surrendered to beat Cuomo.

Mario, however, has palled in office; New Yorkers are tired of Mario, of his lousy performance, the rampant crime, the high taxes and spending, the visible decay of New York in his twelve years of office.

One week after the 1994 Republican sweep, in a confidential memo published here for the first time, Rothbard reads the midterms not as anti-incumbency but as a “November Revolution” against Clintonism and the Leviathan state. The danger, he warns, is that Republican elites will capture anti-state energy and convert it into preservation — as Reagan did, turning free-market rhetoric into a cover for continuity in taxes, spending, and intervention. He anatomizes the ruling coalition of privilege-seekers, bureaucrats, and opinion-makers, cites the courts’ overturning of Proposition 187 and the lame-duck GATT/WTO vote as elite shell games, and demands Congress strip federal judicial jurisdiction. His remedy is speed, dispossession, and relentless education — with the Mises Institute the one independent force he trusts.

Since World War II, and especially since the 1950s, the function of the Republican Party has been to be the "loyal," "moderate," "bi-partisan," pseudo-opposition to the collectivist and leftist program of the Democratic Party.

A reform can sound market-oriented, even anti-deficit, and still deepen the very power it claims to check. Turning Hazlitt’s lesson of unseen effects against his own side, Rothbard attacks the conservative appetite for politically catchy “quick fixes” that isolate one abuse while ignoring the wider machinery of taxation and control. School vouchers, welfare reform, and the 1986 Tax Reform Act all fail this test, but the Balanced Budget Amendment is his central target: a hoax, he argues, easily evaded through projections and off-budget devices, and worse still because it would shift the power of the purse from an elected Congress to unelected judges. A closing warning about privatized tax collection — a revival of the hated pre-modern tax farmers — shows that redesigning coercion is not the same as reducing it.

The one fiscal thing worse than a deficit is higher taxes; imposing a BBA and raising taxes in order to combat deficits is akin to curing a patient of bronchitis by shooting him in the chest.

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.

A bank run, in this compact polemic, is no irrational panic but a market test that exposes fractional-reserve banking for what it is: a system holding a fraction of the cash it has promised depositors on demand. Taking the Ohio and Maryland runs of the 1980s as his occasion, Rothbard asks why federal deposit insurance inspires confidence where private and state insurers failed, and answers that the FDIC and FSLIC are credible only because the Federal Reserve can print legal tender without limit. Insurance can cover calculable risks; it cannot make a structurally insolvent industry solvent. What passes for banking soundness, he argues, is a confidence trick that would be prosecuted as fraud in any other business. His remedy is abolition: end the Fed, the FDIC, and the FSLIC.

Fractional reserve banks, being inherently insolvent, are uninsurable.

Slightly undersized California peaches and nectarines, perfectly edible, must by federal law be destroyed — and in that absurdity Rothbard finds the whole logic of New Deal agriculture. Farm policy, he argues, is producer cartelization enforced by the state: minimum-size rules become a quality-control language for price maintenance, outlawing cheaper fruit because it threatens the margins of larger produce. His case is Gerawan Farming, prosecuted for selling smaller fruit through channels serving poorer consumers; the forbidden fruit is forbidden because it is affordable. A USDA official’s candid admission that the rules protect the grower’s higher-profit item exposes the truth beneath the consumer-protection rhetoric. Here, in miniature, is the welfare state as Rothbard sees it: coercive cartelization that cuts production, raises prices, and injures the poorest, all draped in humanitarian language.

One of the most horrifying features of the New Deal was its agricultural policy: in the name of “curing the depression,” the federal government organized a giant cartel of America’s farmers.

Denounce deficits, then propose both major tax increases and major spending increases: Rothbard calls Clinton’s February 1993 budget schizoid, a program resting on the pretense that taxation, spending, deficits, and production sit in hermetically sealed compartments. Against that, he presses economic interconnectedness — taxes erode saving and raise business costs; only cutting spending can lower the deficit; and government “investment” is not private capital formation but resources diverted to political allocation. The rhetoric is the real target. Renaming taxes as “contributions” and spending as “investment” makes Clintonomics, he charges, Orwellian economics, coercion relabeled as social responsibility. Invoking Austrian business-cycle theory against Keynesian stimulus, and measuring the plan against Reaganomics and Bushonomics, he concludes that beneath the incoherence runs a consistent tendency: the expansion of government at the expense of the private market.

In short, Clintonomics is, in essence, a Great Leap Forward, American style, not toward Maoist communism but toward Democratic Socialism, toward Marxism without the Leninism.