The archive.

Predicting a presidency before it begins, Rothbard reads the incoming Clinton administration from its advisers, slogans, and place in a long bipartisan pattern. This chapter from Making Economic Sense answers Ludwig Lachmann's claim that the future is unknowable by insisting that political incentives make broad direction plain: higher taxes and spending, industrial policy, regulation, deficit manipulation, and a drift toward socialized medicine, all dressed in the language of investment, care, and partnership. Democrats push the state forward, he argues, while Republicans—right-wing Keynesians from Eisenhower to Bush—merely slow the ratchet; Clinton's novelty is the Wall Street Left of Robert Reich, Felix Rohatyn, and Robert Rubin. His sharpest thrust falls on rebranding public spending as investment and schooling as human capital—coercive finance disguised, he warns, as productive market activity.

In general, we must batten down the hatches for another one of those periodic Great Leaps Forward into statism that have afflicted us since the New Deal (actually, since the Progressive Era).

To the ordinary citizen the four-trillion-dollar federal debt feels as remote as another galaxy, and that indifference is exactly what lets it grow. Sennholz treats the debt as consumed wealth, a mortgage on the future, and a source of social conflict, then asks why Congress incurs it so readily. His answer reinterprets the two-party system as a functional three: a Parochial Party chasing district spending, a Vocational Party serving organized producer and occupational interests, and a small Consumer Party defending open markets, low prices, and the dispersed public against coercive redistribution. Concentrated beneficiaries speak louder than scattered consumers, which is why redistribution flows to electorally powerful blocs. The critique is public-choice in structure but moral in language: reelection incentives, he argues, have displaced political conscience.

There are 18.3 million civil servants with more than 30 million dependents living—and some feasting—on the taxes they extract.

Bill Clinton's 1993 swearing-in arrives here not as constitutional ritual but as cultural regime change, a week-long "Jacobin Festival" in which Rothbard watches the left-liberal coalition take public possession of America. Skimming newspapers for dissent and avoiding television except for Limbaugh, he ridicules the pageant's celebrities and its official piety: Barbra Streisand, Betty Friedan, Lauren Bacall, and above all Maya Angelou's inaugural poem, which he likens to the wartime Communist "Ballad for Americans." Fran Lebowitz's contempt for the cant confirms his suspicion that the ceremony has turned quasi-religious. Yet the invective closes on a populist wager rather than despair, weighing whether a debased public might still storm its way back to sanity. A compact specimen of Old Right culture-war polemic.

It was an Inaugural from Hell.

San Antonio's water supply becomes a test case for Rothbard's critique of socialized resource management. When drought threatens the Edwards Aquifer, litigation under the Endangered Species Act, brought by the Sierra Club, joined by the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, and blessed by Judge Lucius Bunton, would reserve enough spring flow to protect four obscure species, among them the Texas blind salamander and the fountain darter, even at the cost of the city's residents, farmers, and ranchers. Rothbard reads the classification fight over whether the aquifer is a "river" or a "lake" as a maneuver to shift control from Texas to federal courts, and detects institutional self-interest behind the ecological piety. His remedy is neither better regulation nor conservation but the privatization of water and water rights, so that markets, not judges, allocate a scarce resource.

"That's what this is all about," he warned bitterly. "It's not about fountain darters."

Ranging satirically across Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Abkhazians, Ossetians, Ingush, and Chechens, this 1993 commentary insists that Western observers badly underestimate how tangled the post-Soviet Caucasus really is. Eduard Shevardnadze appears less as a democratic reformer than as a media favorite rewarded for converting from Communism to Social Democracy, and much of the region's violence is laid at the door of Stalin's arbitrary nationalities policy, the Ossetian lands deliberately split between republics to wreck an insufficiently Stalinist people. The point is not that ethnic claims are frivolous but that they are historically serious and beyond any outsider's competence to resolve. The closing "sorting out" is pure irony, mocking the interventionist fantasy that half a million troops under UN direction might straighten the region out in twenty years.

OK, got it straight? Now all we need is for the United States to send about 500,000 troops to the Caucasus—under UN direction, of course—and in about twenty years we should be able to straighten it all out.

There is no anti-war left left anymore, Rothbard declares, watching former peace activists back U.S. and UN intervention against the Serbs in Bosnia, proof, he charges, that their real loyalty was to world government rather than peace. Written during the Bosnian War, the essay holds that moderate intervention is a fiction, since timid first steps make escalation irresistible, and it swaps the language of recognized borders for that of ethnonational claims. Bosnia, on his account, is no more a nation than North Dakota, only a territory holding rival Serb, Croat, and Muslim communities among whom all sides practice ethnic cleansing when they can. His remedy is partition rather than federal reconciliation: dissolve the fictive state, lift the sanctions, and let local peoples fix their own borders while Washington keeps out entirely.

The answer, as repugnant as it is to this meddling age, is to stay the Hell out.

Opponents of nationalized medicine, this introduction to Politicized Medicine warns, usually lose before they begin, because they accept government control everywhere else and protest only when it reaches their own profession. Sennholz presses for consistency: if public education, licensing, subsidies, and welfare are legitimate, health care cannot be exempt, since the difference between partial and comprehensive state provision is one of scale, not kind. He attacks the doctrine of social rights as disguised claims on the labor and property of others, turning cooperation into conflict as each declared benefit imposes a matching burden. His closing turn indicts professional licensing and accreditation not as neutral quality controls but as state-backed shelters from competition, for once a profession accepts the state as author of its credentials, it concedes the state's authority to author a national health system too.

They yield the very premise on which all tyranny rests: the right of some individuals to control others.

Barely more than a squib, this very short 1993 polemic seizes on a reported irregularity in Bill Clinton's parentage, his father allegedly still married to another woman when he wed Virginia Cassidy, and turns bigamy into an instrument of political delegitimation. Rothbard's method is compressed escalation: the announcement of "confirmation," the leap from bigamy to bastardy, then comic speculation about unknown half-siblings and paternal promiscuity. There is no argument in constitutional law here, only abrasive anti-Clinton invective that collapses the dignity of high office into a scandalous family narrative. Taboo-breaking and anti-reverence toward the presidency furnish the whole rhetorical force, the genealogical joke hardening at the last into an impeachment slogan. A specimen of the insult-driven paleo-libertarian style Rothbard cultivated in his final years.

Do we want a bastard in the White House? Impeach Clinton!

Widow, archivist, and combatant, Margit von Mises spent the two decades after her husband's death as an indefatigable one-woman 'Mises industry,' supervising translations, guarding his reputation, and refusing to let any slight against him pass unchastised. This 1993 memorial, written after her death at 102, honors her not as a self-effacing helpmeet but as one of the strongest-minded women her friends had known, whose memoir My Years with Ludwig von Mises kept a marriage and a movement alive at once. Rothbard makes her the last vestige of Old Vienna—elegance, formed character, and principled independence set against an age of conformity and politically correct status-seeking. To mourn her, he insists, is to preserve the persons, institutions, and loyalties through which Mises's legacy survived.

The death of Margit von Mises, yes even at age 102, leaves us all poorer and diminished in spirit.

Can an economist defend laissez-faire without claiming that economics supplies moral ends? In this chapter, Murray N. Rothbard examines that tension through Ludwig von Mises’s public commitments and Austrian advisory career. His openly admiring account shows how currency stabilization, political compromise, and the danger of precipitating a banking collapse complicated the passage from theory to policy. Rothbard’s distinctive claim is that market cooperation cannot safely rest on benefits people fail to understand: economists must explain why interventions may defeat their supporters’ own purposes. His contrast between Mises’s rational persuasion and what he portrays as Hayek’s reliance on evolved practices sharpens the stakes. The chapter offers a defense of public advocacy that distinguishes value-free analysis from the economist’s commitment to peace and prosperity, without claiming to settle the ethical foundations of liberalism.

Voluntary ethnic pluralism is one thing; the doctrine Sennholz calls contemporary multiculturalism is another, and his essay drives a wedge between them. Inherited languages, customs, and religions freely transmitted he defends without reservation; what he attacks is a creed that elevates race and gender above universal moral standards—'multi-morality,' he renames it, a counter-culture aimed at the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western society. Grounding morality in the Ten Commandments read as restraints on evil rather than a program of state virtue, he traces group-defined ethics through Marxism's class morality and Nazism's racial sovereign to present-day identity politics, arguing that each rejects any transcendent source of right. There is no black justice or feminine justice, he insists, only justice. The essay ends on providential confidence: immoral orders are self-destructive, and only the moral will endure.

There is one moral law for all humanity.

Political correctness, in Rothbard's telling, is a regime of linguistic surveillance, and the public condemnation of Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott in 1993, for racial and ethnic slurs and Nazi memorabilia, is his exhibit. He recasts Schott as victim rather than culprit, reclassifies slurs as jokes and memorabilia as harmless collecting, and reads hate-speech norms as the new obscenity law, successor to the 1960s "Filthy Speech" taboos. His most characteristic move is linguistic economy: the anti-Japanese epithet of the title is redescribed as mere American contraction, a birthright of syllabic efficiency. Extending the argument to the shifting accepted terms for Black Americans, the essay collapses state censorship, workplace discipline, and press criticism into one narrative of persecution, and pointedly declines to ask why the words at issue actually wound.

Marge Schott’s sin, so unforgivable as to be beyond redemption, was to use a few Incorrect Words and phrases.