The archive.

Financial scandals make juicy theater, and the 1991 Salomon Brothers affair had every prop, from arrogant Wall Street lions toppled to Warren Buffett riding in as rescuer, yet Rothbard reverses the moral. The firm's evasion of Treasury-auction limits was trivial, he argues, beside the single real fraud of signing customers' names to bond orders without consent; and both pale before the scandal no one denounced, the Treasury's decades-old privilege for a handful of anointed primary dealers, a state-chartered cartel that shuts out smaller houses. Beneath even that lies the swelling public debt, siphoning private savings into what he calls the rathole of government spending. His remedies escalate from British-style perpetual consols to outright Jeffersonian repudiation, a Treasury no one trusts being, in his telling, a polity inoculated against statism.

Once again, the best way for government to benefit the economy is to disappear.

Two strikes at the New York Daily News and Greyhound frame Rothbard's compact anti-New-Deal labor theory, chapter 37 of Making Economic Sense: union power, he argues, rests less on ordinary bargaining than on coercion against employers, customers, property, and the replacement workers derided as 'scabs.' Everyone may quit or strike, but no one 'owns' a job, and picketing that blocks entry to a workplace is intimidation dressed as free expression rather than communication. Recasting the familiar pro-union history of Pullman and Homestead, he traces effective strikes to violence and, above all, to state-created privilege: the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932, which disarmed injunctions, and the Wagner Act of 1935, which turned voluntary bargaining into compulsory collective representation under the NLRB. Restore property rights, he concludes, by repealing both.

In short, the use of violence is the key to the winning of strikes.

In September 1991, as Slovene units drove back a Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, Rothbard read the small republic's secession as a test case in national self-determination. Slovenia, he argues, is a genuine nation, coherent in language, religion, culture, and free of one ethnic group lording over another, unlike the artificial post-Versailles constructions he distrusts; Western, Catholic, bourgeois, and market-minded, it had long chafed under Yugoslav centralism. His deeper move is anti-imperial and anti-statist: independence came not from abstract justice or Western diplomacy but from armed resistance and near-unanimous popular support, the classical guerrilla pattern of terrain and legitimacy defeating an unwilling conscript force. Scorning Washington's and Europe's reverence for 'territorial integrity' as a ruling-class defense of existing borders, he welcomes Slovenia into the West, no thanks to George Bush.

What did it was the force of Slovenian arms.

Free-market advocates know what to do with state operations, privatize them, but what should be done in the meantime? Rothbard's answer divides government activity in two: coercive agencies like regulators and tax collectors should be abolished, not privatized or made efficient, while the services people actually use, schools, streets, libraries, police, should in the interim be run as efficiently and business-like as possible on shrinking budgets. Against the "equal access" doctrine embraced by courts, left-liberals, and some libertarians, he argues that stripping public institutions of the authority to exclude or set standards destroys their very purpose. His sharpest scorn falls on libertarians who welcome public-sector decay as a strategy to shock citizens into demanding reform, a tactic he calls deeply immoral and unlikely to work.

On the activities in Group B, what we want is not privatization but abolition.

Not battlefield analysis but network analysis answers the question of why the United States fought the 1991 Gulf War. Rothbard treats Kuwait's oil billions as illegitimate state extraction by the Sabah dynasty, wealth ready, he suspects, to purchase defenders in Washington, and then follows the money through consultancies and boardrooms. The hub is Henry Kissinger and Kissinger Associates, that euphemistic 'international consulting firm'; the decisive figure is Brent Scowcroft, its former vice chairman turned national security adviser with paid Kuwaiti ties. Midland Bank, Fluor, ARCO, Bechtel, William Simon, and Saudi royal interests thicken the web. The argument is cumulative rather than juridical: no single smoking gun, but a dense pattern of overlapping incentives among Gulf monarchies, oil infrastructure, banks, and revolving-door policymakers, evidence, he insists, that requires no conspiracy theory, only open eyes.

The Sabah tribe has no legitimate claim to the oil revenue; it did nothing to homestead or mix its labor or any other resource with the crude oil.

Personally pro-choice, Rothbard turns the 1991 Wichita Operation Rescue standoff away from abortion and toward a sharper question: who may legitimately wield coercion? Protecting the clinics, he argues, falls under Kansas's state and local police power, not the jurisdiction of federal courts and marshals, and a just end never validates the wrong sovereign instrument. Reviving a radical Jeffersonian constitutionalism, he pairs the Ninth Amendment's unenumerated rights with the Tenth Amendment's reserved powers, rejects Roe-era judicial supremacy by 'nine oligarchic hacks,' and repudiates precedents from Eisenhower's Little Rock intervention to the Reconstruction anti-Klan statute Judge Kelly invoked. Federal domestic coercion, in his most provocative move, becomes structurally identical to foreign intervention. 'Denationalizing the courts' thus folds a libertarian abortion-rights sympathy into a wider project of dismantling centralized power.

The slogan here should be “U.S. Out of Kansas,” or “Kansas for the Kansans”; let the Kansans settle their own affairs.

"Free and fair trade" — the Bush administration's phrase — is the target here: a slogan Rothbard treats as hypocrisy, contradicted by managed trade with Japan and a fixation on bilateral deficits he calls a fallacy the 17th-century mercantilists had already discarded. His larger move is to widen the definition of free trade beyond the mere absence of tariffs. Genuine freedom, he insists, must also be unregulated and unsubsidized, which turns three establishment favorites into protectionism by other routes: regional blocs like the European Community that raise external barriers, foreign aid as disguised export subsidy, and — the gravest danger — a coordinated world central bank issuing fiat money. His alternative is unilateral: cut the barriers, no treaties required.

The major point is that genuine free trade requires no negotiations, treaties, super-power creations, or presidential jetting abroad. All it requires is for the United States to cut tariffs and quotas, as well as taxes and regulations. Period.

The early-1990s downturn was no temporary relapse, Sennholz argues, but a crisis of profit, capital, and investment concealed beneath financial inflation. He refuses the reassurance of Keynesian stimulus and Federal Reserve ease: business profitability is the mainspring of a private-enterprise order, and its savage contraction, sharpest in manufacturing, makes stagnation and unemployment predictable. Cheap money cures none of it; it drives savers out of deposits and into equities, inflating bubbles of value even as thrifts and banks fail by the thousands. Sennholz compares the moment to the 1920s, when price stability masked deep capital-market distortion, and warns that the real danger is not a 1970s-style inflationary outbreak but hidden malinvestment and depleted profitability. His conclusion is guarded rather than apocalyptic: no exact repeat of the Depression, if trade barriers and business taxes fall.

An old error is always more popular than a new truth.

Assembled as a dossier on the American right's lost genealogy, this Rothbard-centered collection asks how anti-New Deal constitutionalists, libertarians, and anti-interventionists were displaced by Cold War conservatism and neoconservative gatekeeping. The title chapter defines the 'Original' Right of 1933 to 1955 as radical rather than conservative: America First, anti-statist, bent on rollback of a regime the New Deal had already transformed. Ruling classes govern through manufactured legitimacy, Rothbard argues, invoking La Boetie, Mises, and Calhoun; so the movement cannot win through Hayekian elite persuasion or Fabian gradualism, but needs a confrontational right-wing populism with a social base outside managerial institutions. Memoir, interview, and polemic braid together: McCarthy and Buchanan as populist exemplars, Buckley and National Review as the purgers who narrowed the right, and a closing call to 'repeal the twentieth century.'

The Marxists, who have spent a great deal of time thinking about strategy for their movement, always pose the question: who is the agency of social change?

Americans condemn federal deficits in principle while resisting nearly every specific cut that would touch their own families' benefits—and that contradiction, not the venality of politicians, is where Sennholz locates the roots of the entitlement state. Broadening the category of beneficiary far beyond formal recipients—Social Security relieves children of supporting parents, Medicare relieves families, student subsidies help spouses—he argues that visible benefits obscure hidden costs to character, productivity, and republican institutions. Invoking Jefferson on public debt and Madison on majority tyranny, the essay reframes fiscal imbalance as a moral rather than budgetary problem: majority rule cannot legitimate taking from minorities, and a republic dependent on forced redistribution drifts toward despotism unless the majority voluntarily limits its own numerical power.

Although most people readily support reduction in federal spending, they balk at virtually every proposal of specific cuts.

The most successful cartel in history was no advertisement for free-market monopoly. DeBeers seems to refute the Austrian claim that cartels are inherently unstable, having restricted supply through its Central Selling Organization and held prices above competitive levels for decades, yet Rothbard insists the market was never really free. South African nationalization, state licensing, and the criminalizing of 'illegal' independent miners supplied the coercion that private property and exchange never could; the Soviet Union, monopolist to monopolist, cooperated rather than competed. Then comes Angola: civil war's end, wildcat prospectors on the Cuango River, and drought-exposed alluvial deposits that no fence or patrol can enclose. Rising inventories, forced purchases, a dividend cut, and a 25 percent sales cutback reveal the fragility cartel theory predicts once the barriers to competition begin to fall.

If you fly a patrol over the province you can get shot down by a missile. And it's a 100-mile river. You can't put a fence around it.

Establishment economists who pronounced early-1990s America 'undertaxed' are Rothbard's quarry in this brief polemic from Making Economic Sense. Robert Solow, Benjamin Friedman, Charles Schultze, and the Galbraithian lament over 'private affluence and public squalor' all rest, he argues, on one fallacy: the idea that coerced government spending is a form of saving and investment, superior to the private kind. It is nothing of the sort. Higher taxes drain command over resources from individuals disciplined by profit, loss, and consumer choice, handing it to politicians and bureaucrats whose expenditure is political consumption disciplined only by political incentives. Comparisons to heavier European burdens beg the question; the Soviet Union, where the state took everything, is his reductio. The cure for public squalor is not more revenue but privatization, tested, he proposes, as a Great Social Experiment.

All government spending, far from deserving the term "investment," is in reality consumption spending by politicians and bureaucrats.