The archive.

Less an arena of ideas than a theater of ethnic balancing, patronage, and racial antagonism, that is how Rothbard reads the 1993 New York mayoral cycle in this abrasive August election essay. Primaries, he argues, dissolved the old bosses' smoke-filled-room compromises and left group conflict naked, and Dinkins survives as favorite chiefly for lack of an attractive alternative. The sharpest analysis follows consultant David Garth's revival of the New York "fusion" tradition, attaching Giuliani to Liberal and Republican lines and balancing the ticket by borough, religion, and ethnicity through Susan Alter and Herman Badillo, against a fragmented Democratic side with no coordinated slate. Roy Innis appears as a black conservative useful for saying what Giuliani cannot, and the Crown Heights fight over "riot" versus "pogrom" becomes the essay's emblem of symbolic classification displacing real dispute.

Talk of politics as the triumph of symbolism over substance!

Those who once recognized collectivism, socialism, egalitarianism, nihilism, and statism as evil, Rothbard insists in this September 1993 essay, owe a duty to their families, posterity, and country to keep fighting, and neither defeatism nor purity excuses desertion. Against Schumpeter's thesis that socialism is inevitable, he answers that apparent hopelessness is no warrant for surrender, citing the recent collapse of Communism. His central typology names two forms of abandonment: the Beltway "sellout," the young radical absorbed by Washington's incentives until his face and the enemy's grow indistinguishable, and the "retreatist," who flees to Galt's Gulch-style enclaves in search of purity. Both vacate the real battlefield. Drawing on Randolph Bourne to separate country from State, Rothbard demands that liberty be defended in the external world of property and public life, not merely within.

Let’s put it this way: we must not abandon our lives, our properties, our America, the real world, to the barbarians. Never.

Environmental law, in this 1993 essay, has quietly become a vehicle for political control over private economic life. Beginning with NEPA's environmental-impact requirement and the EPA, Sennholz argues that what looks like procedural prudence is in fact a standing license for federal agencies to supervise investment, construction, and enterprise through permits and purse strings. The visible costs of cleanup, he contends, are the smallest part; the real burden hides in delayed projects, lost jobs, higher prices, and diminished living standards that never appear as a single budget line. As overt socialism retreats, he claims, global-warming and ozone alarms hand the old regulatory impulse a new name - the production czar now is an environmental czar - and, lacking market prices, environmental planning repeats the socialist calculation problem: command without coordination, waste dressed as rescue.

Without the help of market prices, which reflect the value judgments of all the participants in the economic process, he cannot calculate, that is, rationally compare the value of input with that of output.

The federal government, Sennholz observes, was not always in the health-care business; its legitimate work was defense against foreign aggression and domestic crime, not the forced redistribution of income. From that narrow standard he tracks the cumulative politicization of American medicine, from Truman's proposed national insurance and Eisenhower's Kerr-Mills aid to the decisive year 1965, when Medicare and Medicaid embedded medical care in Social Security financing. His diagnosis is that entitlement follows a logic of escalation: the state promises benefits, then taxes, then regulates eligibility and provider costs, and finally threatens to jail those who withdraw. Spending and regulation do not close the gap between cost and access; they widen it, driving prices to double and treble the inflation rate. The road ends not in abundance but in price controls and rationing, reversible, he insists, only by restoring medicine to voluntary exchange and the Eighth Commandment.

Politicized medicine is a formidable system built on political expedience and public immorality.

Why do whole societies remain trapped in low productivity, short lives, and weak institutions? Sennholz answers that collective poverty springs less from scarce resources than from moral, religious, and political ideas hostile to production, dogmas against saving, investment, private ownership, and monetary gain. Contrasting prosperous nations with Ethiopia, Somalia, and Bangladesh, he insists development is always difficult but never impossible, provided a society abandons inherited teachings that slander the private-property order as exploitation. Capitalism, in his redefinition, is not predation but a moral system resting on truthfulness, reliability, and voluntary cooperation, disciplined by every party's freedom to withdraw. Where theft, confiscation, and envy-driven redistribution are commonplace, communities become economic wastelands, because even the fear of expropriation smothers investment. The wealth of nations, he concludes, is decided finally in the realm of moral imagination.

Moral, social, and economic ideas that guide human action are the key to human well-being. They make all the difference between wealth and poverty.

From Diocletian's Rome to the French Revolution to Nixon's 1971 wage-price freeze, the same policy keeps returning under the same false promise, and, in Rothbard's telling, keeps failing for the same reason. A legal ceiling set below the market-clearing price cannot cure inflation; it only suppresses the signals that coordinate supply and demand, breeding shortages, rationing, black markets, and coercive enforcement. His central exhibit is the 1946 meat crisis, when controls emptied the butchers' counters and even choked off insulin, only for supply to return within days of decontrol, proof, he argues, that the shortage was manufactured by the controls themselves. Written as the FCC rolled back cable rates and the Clinton administration floated health-care controls, this compact Austrian brief treats prices as social coordinators and ceilings as political violence.

In every age, in every culture, price controls have never worked. They have always been a disaster.

To raise men and women capable of living peaceably and productively, honest, prudent, courageous, charitable, is for Sennholz the true aim of education, a formative task that state schooling converts into an instrument of political direction financed by compulsion. He reads American schooling historically, from the plural order of church schools, academies, and denominational colleges to the mercantilist, Hegelian, Owenite, and Deweyan currents that recast education as social organization from above, with the Dartmouth College case of 1819 standing as a defense of private institutional rights against state absorption. Public schools, he argues, habituate students to taxation and bureaucracy, dulling their critical sense and normalizing a life of political provision. School choice remains incomplete, he insists, while dissenting parents must still fund the state system through taxes; genuine educational freedom rests on voluntary payment and competitive markets, not coercion.

Government education from kindergarten to the university has paved the way for armies of legislators, regulators, tax collectors, assessors, inspectors, policemen, judges, and jailers.

Strip away the slogan and NAFTA is not free trade at all but treaty-based mercantilism, government-directed commerce that builds a supranational apparatus with power over domestic law. Genuine free trade, Rothbard insists, needs no years of negotiation, only the unilateral repeal of the tariffs, quotas, and anti-dumping laws Washington imposed itself. Writing in October 1993, he scolds the free-market think tanks seduced by the phrase, dismisses both the protectionist low-wage-Mexico objection and the libertarian defense, and warns that tri-national commissions charged with harmonizing labor, health, and environmental rules would level them upward toward the welfare state, as in the European Community. The real menace, he argues, is not lower barriers but the march toward regional and eventually world super-government.

What the Establishment wants is government-directed, government-negotiated trade, which is mercantilism not free trade.

A federal gasoline-tax increase, revived at Clinton's 1992 economic summit, arrives dressed in every fashionable justification—conservation, fuel efficiency, energy independence, fairness, deficit reduction—and Rothbard strips each away in turn. Conservation, he argues, is already performed by market prices, which weigh present demand against future scarcity without dictatorial coercion; fuel efficiency is arbitrary single-factor planning that ignores the tradeoffs of time, safety, and comfort a car actually balances. The deficit rationale he treats as pretext, noting that liberals discover the deficit only when it excuses a tax. Beneath the economics lies a cultural animus: liberals, he charges, reserve a special hatred for the automobile, whose private, self-directed mobility rebukes the collective, timetabled discipline of mass transit.

In contrast to mass transport, which liberals find satisfyingly collective, egalitarian, and rigidly fixed to time and place schedules, the automobile is gloriously individualistic.

When the press crowned Bill Clinton's 1992 victory an election of 'change,' Rothbard read the word as ideological manufacture: not a democratic mandate but the consecration of a managerial-media elite. This January 1993 post-election polemic doubles as an obituary, pronouncing the modern conservative movement dead once anti-Communism, support for Israel, and Reagan-worship lost their glue, and the Libertarian Party dead beside it. He dismantles the 'Year of the Woman' and 'landslide' myths, noting Clinton drew barely 43 percent of votes and under a quarter of voting-age Americans, floats a half-satirical hypothesis that Bush deliberately threw the race for the Rockefeller interests, and rejects the 'worse the better' consolation as both false and corrupt. The closing summons a new Old Right pledged to roll back the Leviathan State.

We must build a new movement from under the rubble of the old.

A shoo-in for renomination at the year's start, Elizabeth Holtzman lost the 1993 Democratic runoff for New York City comptroller two-to-one, a collapse Rothbard reads not as an upset but as retribution. He rehearses his case against her: the Watergate prominence, the stern-avenger persona, above all her creation of the Office of Special Investigations, which hunted elderly Eastern European immigrants over half-century-old accusations. Then he traces the mechanics of her fall, from Geraldine Ferraro's lingering fury over Holtzman's 1992 attack ads to Hank Morris's craft in turning the obscure Alan Hevesi into an asset, to the decisively timed Department of Investigation report charging her with gross negligence in the Fleet Bank loan affair. In Rothbard's hands, politics becomes coalition vengeance, ethnic arithmetic, media timing, and the sudden collapse of a manufactured reputation.

It would be difficult to pick, out of an all-too-jammed field, the most repellent politician in American life, but surely Elizabeth Holtzman would run anyone a very close race for that honor.

"Looking like America" was the standard by which Clinton's cabinet was to be judged, and in this February 1993 polemic Rothbard turns it into a reductio ad absurdum. Grant that appointments should mirror the population, he says, and the accounting never stops: if white male, woman, and Hispanic are decisive labels, why not religion, region, skin shade, hair color, and height? Demographic bean-counting, he argues, has displaced even the lip service once paid to merit, converting selection into a public ledger of grievance. Beneath the diversity theater he detects unbroken elite continuity, the Rockefeller networks, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations still shaping foreign policy, so that changing the faces of power leaves its governing interests intact.

Let Willie slip once, and his media worshippers are on his neck in a minute, howling about betrayal.