The archive.

Max Lerner's "Civilization Watch" column becomes, in this April 1992 polemic, a stand-in for the whole interventionist consensus — Wilsonian collective security, the Marshall Plan, post-Soviet aid, and unconditional support for Israel. Rothbard rejects Lerner's proposed fusion of Wilsonian idealist ends with Hamiltonian means, naming both men as candidates for the most evil politician in American history, and offers a counter-fusion of his own: isolationist ends joined to decentralized, Jeffersonian means. He reads the call for bipartisan foreign-policy responsibility as a device to deny the electorate any real choice, and charges that Lerner's hostility to nationalism is selective — America First and Russia First are sinister, while Israeli nationalism demands maximal U.S. backing.

All nationalisms must be stamped out, it seems, but one.

Representation, Rothbard argues, was once a technological necessity — and Ross Perot's proposal for electronic town meetings exposes that the necessity is gone. Defending Perot against pollsters, journalists, and party professionals whose authority rests on managing opinion, he treats their hostility as more revealing than the plan itself: a class recoiling when participation might become binding. Since telephone, television, and interactive media make direct voting feasible, the only objection left is that voters would choose badly — an objection, he notes, that condemns electing officials no less than deciding issues. The libertarian payoff is fiscal: he backs Perot's amendment requiring popular ratification of any tax increase, and dismisses the establishment balanced-budget amendment as manipulable theater.

The only possible argument against direct democracy, now that the technological argument is obsolete, is that the public’s choices would be wrong.

Rothbard rejects all three stories Americans told about the 1980s during the 1992 recession: the Democratic indictment of greed and tax cuts, the Bush Republican excuse-making, and the anti-Bush nostalgia for an unblemished Reagan boom. Stripping away the moralized language of "greed," he defends Michael Milken as an agent who let shareholders challenge entrenched managers, and shows how Social Security taxes and the 1986 Tax Reform Act offset the advertised rate cuts. The decisive turn is monetary: boom and bust alike were driven by Federal Reserve credit expansion that flowed into real estate and stocks while consumer prices stayed subdued — the 1920s pattern repeating. The true villains, he concludes, wear central bankers' suits.

The arch-villains of the 1980s (and the '90s) are Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan, but they will never be treated as such so long as they remain two of the most beloved figures in American public life.

The 1992 Los Angeles riots draw from Rothbard not sympathy for structural causes but a linguistic charge: to condemn violence while rushing to its "real structural causes," he argues, is precisely to condone it. Even as an anti-statist, he grants government one minimal duty — to defend persons and property under assault — and finds it failed. Liberal remedies of welfare, set-asides, and affirmative action he redescribes as payoffs to violence; Jack Kemp's enterprise zones he calls welfare in market language; repealing minimum-wage and licensing laws he judges helpful but insufficient. Rejecting racial discrimination as the master cause by pointing to Korean-American victims, he lands on impunity: rioters looted because they saw they could get away with it.

Devotion to the sanctity of person and property is not part of their value-system. That’s why, in the short term, all we can do is shoot the looters and incarcerate the rioters.

Behind the closed doors of the Austrian Cabinet Council on 8 July 1919, the finance secretary laid out how a bankrupt young republic might actually pay for its ambitions. Circulated as a strictly secret appendix, this memorandum tackles the financing of the Vermoegensabgabe, socialization, and industrial promotion not as slogans but as a single problem of credit. A brand-new state credit institute is rejected as too slow, too costly, and too weak in emission credit, in favor of converting an existing emission-capable house, the Austrian Credit-Institut fuer Verkehrs-Unternehmungen und oeffentliche Arbeiten, into a mixed-economy bank under state majority control. The ideological quarrel between public and private finance is thereby recast as a question of institutional form: private capital mobilized quietly, without alarming the public, through a vehicle the state commands.

In letzter Linie wird man daher doch gezwungen sein, wieder an das private Kapital zu appellieren, und es wird sich im Wesentlichen darum handeln, eine möglichst glückliche Form für diesen Appell zu finden.

English translation: “In the last analysis one will therefore be compelled once again to appeal to private capital, and it will essentially be a matter of finding as felicitous a form as possible for this appeal.”

Bankruptcy, narrowly defined as the repudiation of state debt, would wreck banks, enterprises, welfare institutions, and households alike, and still leave the budget unsolved. Written as a confidential financial plan appended to a cabinet protocol, this memorandum confronts postwar Deutschoesterreich's six-billion-kronen gap, its collapsing crown, and its exhausted credit. Its guiding principle is austere: not one further note is to be printed, yet any attempt to restore the prewar value of money would bleed the country dry. The real loss already inflicted by depreciation must fall on rentiers and public-debt holders while wages climb toward the new price level. The Vermoegensabgabe becomes the hinge, an instrument for cutting debt and compelling capitalists to place foreign assets at the state's disposal, and orderly socialization is postponed until a balanced budget exists.

Keine Hilfe gibt es für den Rentner.

English translation: “There is no help for the rentier.”

If human decisions are genuinely free from determination by external circumstances, how can economics claim any lawlike regularity at all? Delivered as the inaugural Ludwig Lachmann Memorial Lecture, this essay turns that threat into a foundation. Kirzner argues that subjectivist freedom is not fatal to economic law but indispensable to it. Mainstream microeconomics buys its determinacy cheaply, by draining choice of imagination, error, and surprise and assuming plans already reconciled in equilibrium. Recovering Mises and Shackle, he shows action to be purposeful, future-oriented, and uncertain—and uncertainty, rather than merely obstructing choice, calls forth entrepreneurial alertness. Price convergence and the disappearance of pure-profit opportunities depend on that alertness, since profit exists only where something has not yet been noticed. Freedom, Kirzner concludes against neoclassical and ultra-subjectivist critics alike, is what makes market order intelligible.

Markets do work. They work so obviously well that our scientific curiosity is aroused to seek understanding of the counter-intuitive phenomenon of this success.

Long before the left owned the phrase, Rothbard insists, it was the neoconservatives who pioneered political correctness, wielding accusations of anti-Semitism, racism, and nativism to discipline the American right. Written in June 1992, this polemic reads two coordinated assaults on Pat Buchanan—Richard John Neuhaus in First Things, Norman Podhoretz in Commentary—as boundary enforcement rather than argument. Rothbard recasts the neocons as displaced Cold War liberals occupying conservative space, offers his own narrow definition of anti-Semitism, personal versus political, to strip the charge of its elastic menace, and translates Neuhaus's talk of democracy and civitas into a demand for ideological submission. His quarrel is finally with gatekeeping itself: no faction, he argues, should hold the power to excommunicate heretics from the conservative movement.

It is important to realize that, for all their complaints about left Political Correctness, it was the neocons who pioneered in that odious practice.

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.

Politics once demanded judgment about law and principle; it has decayed, this polemic charges, into a science of self-interest and logrolling - the trading of votes and influence to pass laws that favor organized claimants on the treasury. Sennholz anatomizes the machinery of capture: lobbyists, pressure groups, and party hierarchies through which even corporate representatives seek advantage rather than defend free markets. The compassionate politician draws his sharpest scorn, a figure who wages theatrical wars on poverty and disease with other people's money, dressing legal plunder as benevolence. Invoking Tocqueville's warning about majorities voting themselves largesse, he treats such men as immune to economic reasoning and therefore answerable only on moral ground. His remedy is not another bargain but withdrawal: cease worshiping political saviors, and lead others by walking upright.

Special interests, grasping, self-serving, narrow private interests, are the moving force for much of government activity today.