The archive.

The gasoline price spikes that followed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 were no sudden outbreak of corporate greed, Rothbard argues; what changed overnight was not the moral character of oilmen but the expectations of everyone anticipating disrupted supply. Prices, he reminds a public he finds economically illiterate, emerge from demand, supply, and speculative anticipation—not from the will of sellers or from cost plus a 'reasonable' markup. Speculation becomes an intertemporal coordinating device, rationing scarce oil before the crisis fully arrives. His closing warning is drawn from the 1970s, when controls produced shortages and gas lines: suppressing a price creates no new oil and clears no market, and the lines to come will be the officials' doing, not Big Oil's.

Imposing controls to stop a price increase is like trying to cure a fever by pushing down the mercury on a thermometer.

The real menace, Rothbard argues, is not a rising hatred of Jews but an organized apparatus for branding dissenters — what he names "Organized Anti-Anti-Semitism," a reputational weapon centered on the ADL. Writing in December 1990 as Pat Buchanan drew fire for opposing war with Iraq and criticizing Israel's American supporters, he charges that the accusation, once attached, invites not reply but exclusion, apology, or silence. He tracks a shifting "shell game" through critics from A.M. Rosenthal to William F. Buckley, likens "objective" antisemitism to Stalinist "objective" crimes, and closes by demanding stable criteria: subjective hatred of Jews, or advocacy of legal and economic disabilities against them. By either test, he insists, Buchanan does not qualify — and the charge stands revealed as a tool for suppressing foreign-policy dissent.

Since the end of World War II, the key strategy of the ADL has been to broaden its definition of anti-Semitism to include any robust criticisms of the State of Israel.

Presented by the world's press as Peru's inevitable free-market savior, Mario Vargas Llosa lost — and Rothbard reads the collapse as a lesson in what "free market" actually names. Vargas Llosa had been converted by the economist Hernando de Soto, whose "The Other Path" called for a popular market of small entrepreneurs; but de Soto broke with him, denouncing a drift toward the state capitalism of Peru's white Criollo elite. Rothbard sharpens the point by rejecting the label pinned on Fernando Collor de Mello's Brazilian "shock treatment," which froze bank accounts and contracted the money supply — inflation followed by confiscation, not reform. The unknown, storefront-funded Alberto Fujimori rose instead, he contends, on grassroots ethnic resentment of Criollo rule rather than on any economic doctrine.

If Vargas loses, it will be because he deserves it.

Selfish, amoral, hyper-logical: the caricature of economic man has drawn fire since Ruskin, and late-twentieth-century critics—Robert Frank, the Davidsons, Amitai Etzioni with his call for a socio-economics—revive charges more than a century old. Kirzner grants that economists invited them, sometimes defending selfishness as realistic psychology, sometimes exporting rational choice into every domain. His own defense narrows economics to its strongest claim. Rationality is not egoism or omniscience but orientation toward one's own perceived ends, altruistic or moral as readily as selfish; the core of the discipline is a theory of markets as spontaneous learning. Purposeful agents grow alert to disappointed plans and to unexploited price gaps, and this alertness, not greed, drives prices toward coordination. The renewed attack becomes, in Kirzner's hands, an occasion to separate mainstream overstatement from the Austrian account of discovery.

The learning process which drives the forces of the market is made up primarily of disappointments and discoveries.

"The personal is the political": to Rothbard the left's slogan is not liberating but totalitarian, a license for ideological supervision of private conduct, speech, and association. His libertarian counter inverts it — politics itself should be demystified and shrunk, the state reduced to individuals wielding coercive privilege, and personal life defended from regimentation. He tests the claim on sports, where he thinks such policing most intrusive, from the ruined careers of Al Campaneris and Jimmy the Greek to the 1990 locker-room controversy over female reporters and Bengals coach Sam Wyche. Judge Constance Baker Motley's ruling that women hold a constitutional right to enter male locker rooms he treats as judicial activism and a back-door Equal Rights Amendment — professional convenience recast in the language of rights.

For the essence of the libertarian creed is the reverse slogan: “No, dammit, the political is the personal.”

Everyday life goes on during a federal shutdown — and for Rothbard that quiet continuity is exactly what the rhetoric of budget crisis exists to bury. Treating the 1990 standoff as an unintended experiment in limited government, he floats a "modest proposal": suspend all federal taxes and borrowing for one year and let citizens contribute anonymously to whichever departments they value. It is a test of revealed preference, not a budget plan; if the programs are worth their cost, taxpayers will fund them without compulsion. He then interrogates the language of "pain" in fiscal debate, asking why only government is cast as an institution that allocates suffering, and reads establishment demands for tax increases in recession as an argument for a larger public sector dressed up as deficit concern.

Has it occurred to many citizens that, for the few blessed days of federal shutdown, the world does not come to an end?

Equilibrium models can display plans in mutual harmony, but they assume away the very adjustment that needs explaining—how mistaken, incompatible, and incomplete plans ever come to be revised. Reclaiming that neglected question, Kirzner defines a market process as the endogenous sequence of discoveries set off by prior discoordination, distinguishing underlying variables like preferences and resources from the induced prices and outputs that respond to them. His pivotal move concerns ignorance: entrepreneurial discovery is not deliberate search, which presupposes knowing what one lacks, but the sudden noticing of a previously unsuspected opportunity—the fruit selling for two dollars beside a stall charging one. Pure profit is the lure attached to such overlooked gaps. Freedom, he argues, is not something market coordination merely survives but its precondition, the open entry that lets people test conjectures and act on what they alone perceive.

The collapse of Communist authority across Eastern Europe in 1990 returned a suppressed problem to view: the claims of peoples whose languages, names, and borders had been overridden by empires and postwar settlements. National self-determination, Rothbard argues, is hollow unless it carries a robust right of secession — extending in principle down to the village or even the individual, and grounded not in the sanctity of existing borders but in property rights and voluntary consent. He answers four "hostile" reactions in turn — the American melting-pot faith, Marxist-Leninist universalism, liberal "global democracy," and vulgar libertarian individualism — and drives at the question majority rule can never settle: over what geographical area is the majority to rule. He favors partition referenda down to the parish, backs Croatian and Slovenian secession, and condemns Versailles for turning liberated nations into fresh rulers over others.

Only by boldly asserting the right of secession can the concept of national self-determination be anything more than a sham and a hoax.

With the Soviet enemy gone, Rothbard warns, American interventionism would not disappear but hunt for new pretexts. Writing in April 1990, he borrows Garet Garrett's formula of "fear and vaunting" — fear supplied by replacement threats such as narco-terrorism, German reunification, and Irving Kristol's Islamic fundamentalism, vaunting supplied by Wilsonian democracy promotion, prized precisely because its goal can never be reached. The invasion of Panama is his test case: the first post-1945 use of force needing no anti-Communist alibi, its shifting rationales — democracy, drugs, the arrest of a former CIA asset — exposed one by one. In the sharpest reversal, he praises Gorbachev's restraint under the "Sinatra Doctrine" and sets it against Lincoln's war on Southern secession, judging states by coercion rather than by ideological camp.

So far, Gorbachev’s stance contrasts admirably with the policy of the sainted Abraham Lincoln, who used massive force and mass murder to force the seceding Southern states to remain in the Union.

Behind the language of premiums, trust funds, and contributions, Rothbard finds a coercive transfer dressed as insurance. Social Security, he argues, is no annuity backed by accumulated capital but a pay-as-you-go arrangement: payroll taxes are spent at once on the general budget, and today's benefits are drawn from tomorrow's taxpayers. It is a compulsory Ponzi operation, he charges, whose "trust fund" is a paper accounting fiction, whose tax is regressive because it falls only on wages up to a ceiling, and whose Reagan-Greenspan "surplus" served to disguise the federal deficit. Crediting Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's proposed payroll-tax rollback with reopening the debate, he insists that genuine reform begins only when the public is told the plain truth about the system.

For the Social Security System is the biggest single racket in the entire panoply of welfare-state measures that have been fastened upon us by the New Deal and its successors.

A trace of benzene in bottled water, a projected one death in a million — Reisman seizes the everyday vocabulary of environmental risk and turns it against the movement that wields it, diagnosing environmentalism as a moral poison rather than a body of policy. His central target is the doctrine of nature's intrinsic value, which he equates with nihilism: once wilderness is prized apart from human use, industry, energy, and agriculture can only appear as crimes. He recasts the environment as the material surroundings of human life, so that production improves rather than destroys it, and reads the movement as socialism turned green — anti-energy, anti-industrial, hostile to reason. Against it he sets capitalism, private property, and the writings of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises.

Environmentalism is the leading manifestation of the rising tide of irrationalism that is engulfing our culture.

Ridicule, not reportage, sets the tone as Rothbard turns to Mills College, the women-only Oakland institution that announced in 1990 it would admit men for financial reasons, then reversed course under a student strike, campus takeover, and alumnae fundraising. The episode, he argues, exposes two feminist double standards: colleges damned as sexist when all-male are prized as uniquely valuable when all-female, and women declared identical to men in ability yet superior in nurturing whenever either claim serves. These are not stray inconsistencies, he contends, but the logic of a politics that casts men as victimizers and women as victims, deploying sameness and difference by turns. He closes with the students who "corrected" their president's boast of making history by shouting "herstory."

Don’t worry about such “objective” qualities as fairness, logic, truth, or non-contradiction; remember, all’s fair in hate and war.