The archive.

Cast as a mock 'Modest Proposal' to invade and permanently occupy the entire planet, this 1994 satire turns Swift's method on post-Cold War foreign policy. With the Soviet enemy gone, Rothbard argues, liberal and neoconservative elites preserved interventionism by inflating 'national interest' until every hunger, civil war, undemocratic regime, and stray 'Hate Thought' abroad became America's business. Sanctions he unmasks as war's preparatory form rather than a moderate alternative to it; UN and NATO approval, Security Council bargaining, and CNN spectacle he treats as rituals that consecrate imperial management. The joke is extrapolation, not fantasy: if nation-building requires armies, elections, and welfare, then withdrawal undoes the project and occupation must be permanent. He indicts both parties as interventionist and rests his hope in an antiwar, paleoconservative grassroots ferment.

The U.S. must, very soon, Invade the Entire World!

Behind a debate ostensibly about 'a few puny tariffs,' Rothbard finds in this 1994 chapter the real stakes of NAFTA: not free trade at all, but a constitution for managed globalization. The disproportionate intensity of the fight is his clue. He reclassifies the agreement as a state-capitalist and Wilsonian project, an economy 'governed by an oligarchic ruling coalition of Big Government, Big Business, and Big Intellectuals/Big Media,' coupled to the Keynesian goal of internationally coordinated fiat-money inflation. The Establishment's version of free trade, he charges, is Orwellian: export promotion subsidized by taxpayers, not the unilateral removal of barriers. Domestically he reads the contest as a war within business, exporters and their bankers defeating import-competing firms, and he ends by calling the New World Order a fragile utopian project that public exposure could still obstruct.

The truth can make us free; and the panic of the entire Establishment in the weeks before Nafta shows that they know what they will be up against once the public is on to their game.

With the Soviet enemy gone but the machinery of alarm still running, the Clinton administration needed a fresh Bad Guy—and in January 1994 it found one in Pyongyang. This antiwar commentary dismantles the North Korean nuclear scare as a politically convenient revival of Cold War mobilization, the "last good war" that once united liberals and conservatives. Leaning on historian Bruce Cumings, Rothbard answers each element of the panic: the "massed" troops have sat near the border since the 1970s, the inspection dispute concerns technical "special inspections," and Les Aspin himself conceded no evidence of plutonium production. The demonizing of Kim Jong Il, he notes, recycles a quarter-century of South Korean intelligence rumor. Threat inflation, he argues, is a bureaucratic ritual timed to defense appropriations.

For the new North Korean threat is, as usual, totally bogus.

Theft remains theft even when a majority blesses it—the austere charge at the heart of Sennholz's essay on democratic redistribution. Beginning from cooperation as the basic fact of economic life, he contrasts the market's contractual order of private property with command systems that direct labor by official decree, then argues that each rests on a distinct ethical order. His decisive move applies the commandments against theft, violence, and fraud not only to private persons but to democratic majorities: people who would never steal individually endorse tariffs, transfer payments, and compulsory benefits collectively. Inflation earns special scorn as hidden redistribution enriching politicians while robbing savers and pensioners, and public debt as a promise the spenders mean to inflate away. Two souls, he writes, contend in every breast—one honest, one eager to plunder by ballot.

A very popular form of thievery is inflation. It takes property away from millions of unsuspecting individuals and enriches politicians and their favorites by printing and emitting ever-new quantities of money.

As communism and Yugoslavia came apart, long-suppressed nationalities returned to the world stage—and with them a category libertarian thought had wrongly ignored, treating only individuals and states as real. The "nation-state," Rothbard argues, is itself the problem, its hyphen fusing coercive territorial rule with the inherited communities of language, religion, and place that Mises and Nock knew to distinguish. He turns that distinction against Wilsonian collective security, which sanctifies every existing border as property rather than the residue of conquest and dynastic bargaining, and offers secession as the remedy—any group free to leave one state and join another. A closing anarcho-capitalist thought experiment of total private ownership recasts open borders, citizenship, and voting as matters of consent, contract, and exit.

The genuine nation, or nationality, has made a dramatic reappearance on the world stage.

Free trade is the banner NAFTA raises, Sennholz argues, and then quietly lowers with side accords, labor provisions, environmental restrictions, and a thicket of regulation. This 1994 essay treats the agreement not as liberalization but as managed trade dressed in liberal rhetoric. Against popular fears of mass relocation, he insists that firms follow productivity, infrastructure, and institutions rather than nominal wages, and that Mexico remains burdened by corruption, union militancy, the unproductive ejido system, and PEMEX oil kept in political hands. Economic law, he maintains, will override political design, but the agreement itself cannot improve business conditions on either side of the border. What it most resembles, he concludes, is mercantilist policy—promoting exports while limiting imports and empowering commissions and bureaucrats.

NAFTA officially raises the beautiful flag of free trade and peaceful exchange, but then quietly takes it down again with numerous qualifications, regulations, side accords, sequels, and supplements.

Christian churches have always shaped the economic affairs of their believers, but two modern movements trouble Sennholz precisely because they pursue mercy and justice through political coercion rather than charity: the Social Gospel and liberation theology. Separating ends from means, he grants their humanitarian language while arguing that their programs hand moral authority to legislators, regulators, and expropriating states. Liberation theology, in his reading, smuggles the Marxian doctrine of class struggle and Leninist dependency theory into Christian ethics, then blames Latin American poverty on a capitalism that scarcely exists there, the region's economic life being interventionist and bureaucratic rather than free. Against clerical appeals to equality he sets differences in ability, industry, and responsibility, warning that the rhetoric of justice curdles into a politics of envy. Compassion divorced from economic reasoning, he concludes, becomes an apology for coercion and violence.

While the churchmen are speaking of peace, they are sowing the seeds of violence.

Primitive man invents rites to master dangers he cannot understand; the modern citizen, Sennholz argues, does much the same with the state, attributing magical powers to government whenever reason fails. Moderns do not openly believe in sorcery, but they preserve magical expectations dressed in the language of policy, theory, and planning. He runs the analogy through inflation, a willful monetary policy disguised as a war on rising prices; through unemployment worsened by minimum-wage laws; through protectionism that teaches the public to fear exchange; and through Keynesianism, which credits public spending with generating wealth rather than merely redirecting it. His sharpest move is linguistic: replace the reverential abstraction 'government' with legislators, regulators, tax collectors, judges, and jailers, and its mystical benevolence dissolves. Its power lies in confidence rather than argument, and naming its agents remains the only antidote.

Thriving in the darkness of irrationality, political magic is in a sense invulnerable to reason.

World poverty, Rothbard insists, is not caused by too many people—and the UN's population-control agenda is bureaucratic collectivism dressed as humanitarian concern. Against Zero Population Growth, compulsory sterilization, China's one-child policy, and Kenneth Boulding's scheme for marketable "baby-rights," he presses a reversal of causation: numbers track economic conditions rather than producing scarcity. Dense, prosperous Hong Kong and Western Europe stand against thinly settled, impoverished regions of Africa and the decline of Rome to show that density alone explains little. What poor countries lack, he argues, is not fewer births but private property, secure investment, and freedom from the production controls and foreign-aid dependency that crowd out capital.

A rising population is generally a sign of, and goes along with, prosperity and economic development.

In October 1994, Rothbard writes, elite opinion executed a sudden reversal: the publication of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve broke a decades-long taboo on public discussion of race, intelligence, and heredity. Less interested in the book's data than in its reception, he reads the controversy as an exposure of intellectual policing—from Franz Boas onward, he claims, candid inquiry was smeared as proto-Nazism and quietly blacked out rather than rebutted. He is equally wary of who now embraces the topic: neoconservatives and liberals, he argues, want IQ research to justify a credentialed governing elite. His own paleolibertarian use is different and avowedly anti-statist—hereditarian claims as a shield for market outcomes against egalitarian redistribution, not a tool for planners to sort and subsidize populations.

Under the spell of a misplaced analogy from Darwinian theory, analysts for over a century liked to think of social change as necessarily gradual, minute, and glacial.

A secularized postmillennialism bent on building an egalitarian "Kingdom of God on Earth" through state power—this, not secular humanism, is the gravest cultural threat, this December 1994 polemic contends. Rothbard traces the impulse to 1820s Yankee Protestantism, whose reformers turned campaigns against sin and slavery into the Social Gospel and, ultimately, economic collectivism, with Methodism the leading carrier. That genealogy sets up the target: Hillary Clinton, whom he reads as the administration's true ideologue. Citing Kenneth Woodward's Newsweek profile, he treats her "old-fashioned Methodist" self-description not as pious biography but as evidence, linking her Park Ridge upbringing and the Social Gospel teaching of Rev. Donald Jones to a modern liberalism he casts as coercive salvationism.

But there is definitely a direct line of descent from the Methodist Social Gospelers of the nineteenth century to St. Hillary and the monstrous Clintonian left.

A figure-skating scandal becomes a culture-war parable in this 1994 column on the Lillehammer Winter Games. Rothbard begins by refusing the reflexive American chauvinism of Olympic television—praising Norway's cheerful hosting and its skiing sweep—then insists that sport should stand apart from state and nationalist spectacle. The heart of the essay recodes the Tonya Harding–Nancy Kerrigan affair: against the left's reading of it as class resentment, he makes it a question of character, reviving the nineteenth-century distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor and setting Harding's grievance and victimology against Kerrigan's discipline. His nostalgia settles on Avery Brundage, the crusty Old Rightist who once ruled the Games with an iron hand, whose austere amateur ideal he pits against a decline he blames on lawyers, endorsements, and athlete "rights."

Sports are supposed to be individual, or team, efforts, and should have nothing to do with government or politics, and what used to be hailed as the “Olympic ideal” was set against such emphasis on the State.