The archive.

Instead of shunning foreign entanglements, Bush normalized them, and his parting "December surprise," Rothbard charges, handed Clinton imperial commitments in Somalia, Bosnia, and Iraq. Somalia draws his sharpest fire as the most dangerous kind of war, one without a shred of national interest, waged with a machine gun in one hand and a CARE package in the other. Famine, he counters, is cured not by armed relief but by institutions: secure property, capital, and exchange. Drawing on Isabel Paterson's humanitarian with the guillotine, he warns that compulsory benevolence tends toward domination and that policy driven by television images of suffering can never be rational. Turning to the Balkans, he mocks Washington's threats against Milosevic and the vindictive prosecution of Bobby Fischer for playing chess in Serbia, reading the new world order as a more elastic rationale for war.

Only a George Bush could get us into a war after he has safely lost his election.

The technical debate over financing formulas and cost estimates is a trap, Rothbard warns: critics who haggle over the Clinton health plan's details have already conceded its collectivist premises. His indictment runs through eight principles, guaranteed universal access, coercion, egalitarianism, price controls, rationing, and insists the only true medium of access is not a voucher or ID card but the dollar, which preserves choice. Compulsory insurance makes health draftees of the uninsured; premium caps are price controls that must breed shortages and hence rationing; independent practice gives way to state-supervised alliances and HMOs. Why, he asks, should tiered medicine be uniquely intolerable when food and housing already vary by income? The proper alternative is not a rival technocratic scheme but dismantling the intervention already in place.

But the details of the Clintonian plan, however diabolic, are merely petty demons compared to the general principles, where Lucifer really lurks.

Liberal culture canonized Cesar Chavez even as his union disintegrated, and the collapse, Rothbard argues, followed from economics rather than insufficient zeal. The United Farm Workers fell from 70,000 members to 5,000 because migrant farm labor is abundant, mobile, low-skilled, and endlessly replaceable, exactly the conditions under which a union cannot secure monopoly power. He rejects the vocabulary of exploitation: low wages track productivity and replaceability, not employer guilt, and Mexican migrants take the work because it beats their alternatives at home. A triumphant UFW could have raised wages only by pricing many workers out of jobs; the honest way to help them, he insists, is to raise consumer demand for grapes, not to stage feel-good boycotts. Commemoration, in this reading, is ideological combat.

The real legacy of Cesar Chavez is negative: forget the charisma and the hype and learn some economics.

Political language does the work that arguments cannot, Rothbard contends: market socialism once seduced American elites while remaining socialism, and free trade now sells a treaty hostile to market freedom. Real liberalization would demand only that Washington unilaterally repeal its own tariffs, quotas, and anti-dumping laws; NAFTA instead entrenches neo-mercantilism, in which imports are merely the price government pays to win export markets for politically connected firms. He casts the pact as a North American Maastricht, an attempt to integrate and cartelize government through a supranational commission practicing upward harmonization. The Clinton side agreements on labor and the environment are the sharpest danger, locking welfare-state regulation in place forever, while demands that Americans rescue Carlos Salinas's reforms sit oddly beside Mexico's continued ban on private oil and gas.

Labels are often enough to nab the suckers.

Tolerable, for once, is Rothbard's verdict on the 1993 Academy Awards, where the ceremony ran longer and more politically correct than ever but the outcomes proved less disastrous than he feared. His relief turns on a single result: The Crying Game's loss of Best Picture, which he treats as the night's real victory. Reading films as moral evidence, he grants Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven a grudging pass for redeeming its guilt-ridden revisionism with a final burst of unembarrassed retribution, and champions Scent of a Woman as an old-fashioned movie-movie carried by Al Pacino's bravura. The column then broadens into a culture-war attack on Hollywood liberalism, avant-garde criticism, and what he decries as gender-bending, arguing that identity politics and sexual pluralism have crowded out heroic drama and moral clarity.

For once, the Academy Awards were tolerable—not the ceremony, which was longer, more boring, and more Politically Correct than ever—but the awards themselves.

Why should the owner of a tree, a machine, or any capital asset continue to draw net income when competition ought to bid the asset's price up until no surplus remains? The pure time-preference theory — a doctrine moderns often dismiss as absurd — answers that interest is no 'fruit' of physical productivity at all, but an expression of the premium people place on attaining goals sooner rather than later. Defending Fetter and Mises, Kirzner disarms the productivity counterexamples — Fisher's sheep, Knight's Crusonia plant, Samuelson's growing rice — by showing they establish only commodity own-rates, never the Böhm-Bawerkian phenomenon of a present value generating a greater future value. Interest's essence, he insists in Menger's essentialist spirit, is value-productivity rooted in time preference, even as physical productivity may still shape the observed rate.

‘A theory of interest must be essentially a value-theory.’

A pro-choice libertarian welcoming Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority may seem a contradiction, yet Rothbard builds exactly that case in this February 1993 strategy essay. Christian conservatives, he argues, are not aspiring theocrats but people fighting a left-liberal elite that used government to assault Christian culture; the true battleground is not the bedroom but anti-discrimination law, which he condemns as an assault on property and freedom of association. He would return abortion to the states through radical decentralization and the Tenth Amendment, narrow the establishment clause to mere tax funding of churches, and replace public schools, those centers of ideological brainwashing, with unregulated private and home schooling. His conclusion is a call to abandon sectarian isolation: after the Cold War and amid political correctness, paleolibertarians belong in an anti-egalitarian coalition of the Right.

Establishing a religion has a specific meaning: paying for ministers and churches out of taxpayer funds.

Why did a man assassinated nearly thirty years earlier suddenly reappear on baseball caps and movie screens? Rothbard's brief 1993 polemic treats the early-1990s Malcolm X revival as cultural manufacture, media hype trailing Spike Lee's hagiography and elite political signaling, and folds it into his suspicion that public commemoration is a technique of ideological rule. Setting Malcolm against Martin Luther King's integrationist liberalism, he finds the icon's power less in doctrine than in the fact that his life ended unfinished, after the break with the Nation of Islam and before any faction could conclusively claim him. He reads black nationalism as preferable to state-enforced integration yet stranded by territorial reality, and closes on the man himself: intelligent, sardonic, disciplined, remembered from Rothbard's own hearing of him speak.

To paraphrase LBJ, seize control of a nation’s celebrations, and their hearts and minds will follow.

Citizens fleeing oppressive taxes into black markets have a public-sector mirror image, and it is the real subject here: the off-budget enterprise, through which officials expand spending and debt beyond any voter's scrutiny. Authorities, boards, corporations, and trusts, formally outside normal government accounting, lack taxing power yet wield vast spending power, borrowing without debt limits or voter approval, monopolizing services, accumulating losses, and passing them to taxpayers. Sennholz walks from municipal airport and sewer authorities to New York, where repeated rejection of bond issues merely prompted the legislature to invent new off-budget entities, and on to federal loan guarantees that redirect private credit. Each device makes the state appear smaller than it is. His warning is constitutional: balanced-budget rules and debt ceilings are futile so long as these legal backdoors let government reorganize its costs out of sight.

The possibilities for concealment, deception, pretext, sophistry, stratagem, and plain trickery are endless.

A memorial becomes an argument about memory. Recounting the career of V. Orval Watts, who died in 1993, Rothbard traces a life lived inside institutions rather than abstractions: the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, where Watts became the first full-time economist employed by a chamber in the United States; the Foundation for Economic Education, which he joined as Leonard Read's economic adviser in 1946; and Northwood University, where he resumed teaching at sixty-five. Watts's books against Keynesianism, union power, and the United Nations stand as evidence of a consistent educator against collectivism. But the tribute turns outward in its closing claim—that a movement forgetting its own leaders and heroes will not amount to much, and that remembrance is itself part of the free-market cause's survival.

Any movement that has no sense of its own history, that fails to acknowledge its own leaders and heroes, is not going to amount to very much, nor does it deserve a better fate.

Minimum-wage floors, union seniority rules, and the Davis-Bacon Act present themselves as worker protections; here they are recast as barriers that price the least-skilled out of employment. Writing in a classical-liberal register, Sennholz separates the inequalities that arise from differing service and productivity in free markets from those manufactured by coercive policy. He concedes the historical weight of Jim Crow and the real gains of civil-rights law, yet insists the remaining obstacle is state-created: a legal wage floor forbids hiring the low-productivity beginner, seniority layoffs reproduce old exclusions, and prevailing-wage mandates he traces to racial protectionism. His remedy joins anti-racist language to anti-interventionist economics—wages and jobs set by productivity rather than statute or union rank.

The Act was spawned by racism and continues to sow the evils of racism.

Somalia, Bosnia, Tajikistan, Iraq, Korea: the post-Cold War map, in this September 1993 commentary, reads to Washington's interventionists as a cornucopia of opportunities to feed, bomb, and occupy. Rothbard's thesis is that intervention is an appetite rather than a response to necessity, and that humanitarian rescue, democracy promotion, and anti-fundamentalism have become interchangeable warrants for force. Somalia is the central case: a relief mission that disrupted local food arrangements, cast General Aidid as the lone villain, and mutated into armed vengeance once American and UN troops became combatants. The recurring device he exposes is the 'Good Guys vs. Bad Guys' frame, a political technology that manufactures the enemy needed to authorize war. He notes the blowback of Afghan fighters recast overnight from freedom fighters to fanatics, and dismisses the whole crusade as Wilsonian quagmire.

But Uncle Sam will have a difficult time trying to figure out on which side to intervene. How is it going to sort out the Good Guys from the Bad Guys?