The archive.

Traced back far enough, the monetary breakdown of the early 1970s begins not with Nixon but with the inflation of the First World War and the postwar myth of a gold 'shortage.' Hazlitt follows the wreckage forward through the gold-exchange standard of Genoa and Bretton Woods, where holding dollars and sterling as reserves multiplied paper claims on a shrinking gold base. Citing Jacques Rueff and John Exter, he dismisses Special Drawing Rights as politically minted paper and casts the IMF as a machine for pooling and disguising national inflation. His remedy is blunt: abolish SDRs, dismantle the Fund, halt Federal Reserve credit, balance the budget by cutting spending, and let a free gold market discover a workable conversion rate, assuming any government will abandon the ideology of perpetual inflation.

The IMF has served merely as a world inflation factory.

Fluent command of a subject is not the same as a capacity to change it. In this 1975 essay, Hayek draws on his own difficulties with recall and exposition to distinguish the accomplished scholarly “master” from the “puzzler,” who must reconstruct familiar arguments and may thereby uncover their hidden assumptions. His account makes intellectual awkwardness neither a virtue nor a disqualification: its value depends on what the struggle brings into view. This distinction leads to a provocative educational proposal—an alternative university route offering basic support and books to students willing to undertake years of austere study. The essay connects the intimate experience of finding one’s own words with the institutional question of how to recognize talent that examinations may miss.

What made Adam Smith great, Hayek maintains in this 1976 essay, was not technical originality about value, distribution, or money, much of which had been anticipated before him, but his grasp of how complex cooperation becomes possible without anyone directing it. Recast in modern terms, Smith's division of labour becomes a theory of dispersed knowledge: the individual, guided by prices toward the likely gain of receipts over outlay rather than toward visible wants, serves a great society he cannot survey. Hayek corrects the old libel that Smith preached selfishness, insisting the argument is institutional, not ethical. And he enlists Smith's man of system, who would arrange people like pieces on a chessboard, against the constructivism behind modern demands for social justice and centrally assigned shares.

The great society indeed became possible by the individual directing his own efforts not towards visible wants but towards what the signals of the market represented as the likely gain of receipts over outlay.

An institution can perform services that nobody designed and few can explain. In this published transcript of his 1976 address to the Institute of Public Affairs, Hayek asks what follows for those who would replace inherited practices with rationally planned alternatives. His target is “constructivism”: the presumption that conscious design confers superiority. Prices provide his clearest counterexample, coordinating knowledge dispersed beyond any planner’s reach. His defence of inherited moral restraints presses the argument into more contentious territory, especially in his response to psychiatrist Brock Chisholm’s call to displace traditional right and wrong. The address offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s reasoning about institutional evolution—and with the difficult question of how to distinguish informed reform from destruction of functions we do not yet understand.

Prosperity, in this compact Austrian essay, is nothing but accumulated productive capital — tools, machinery, inventories, and the savings that sustain them — and a nation can enlarge its consumption while quietly devouring the base on which future wages depend. Sennholz traces that hidden erosion through progressive taxation, deficit spending, inflation, regulation, and union privilege, each converting productive capital into present consumption. Estate taxes confiscate working businesses rather than luxury; inflation lets firms mistake nominal profits for real gains and pay their taxes out of capital; artificially cheap credit seeds the malinvestment a bust later writes off for good. His warning is as political as economic: once citizens grow accustomed to benefits, a shrinking base provokes louder demands rather than reform. The remedy is austere — sound money, lower taxes, market pricing, and restored thrift.

Government spending seems to be an all-purpose remedy for economic and social ills, the key to important political ends.

Governments will reach for inflation again and again, this 1976 lecture argues, because they answer to voters and organized interests, unless some mechanism restrains them. Hayek's remedy is radical in its simplicity: strip the state of its monopoly over money and legal tender, and let people contract, keep accounts, and hold balances in whatever currency they trust. He traces the disease to the Keynesian faith that expanding aggregate expenditure secures lasting prosperity, and contends that under free exchange rates good money would drive out bad, inverting Gresham's Law. Delivered for the Institute of Economic Affairs and reprinted here with commentaries from Ivor Pearce, Harold Rose, Douglas Jay, and Sir Keith Joseph, it closes with a historical appendix running from the French assignats to the German rentenmark.

Our only hope for a stable money is indeed now to find a way to protect money from politics.

Marx and Engels demanded the abolition of inheritance, and in John W. Robbins's framing that demand hovers over America's federal estate and gift taxes—the subject Sennholz dissects as a central symptom of the fiscal state. His argument is chiefly economic: death duties consume capital, not luxury hoards, since large fortunes are mostly farms, factories, inventories, and business organizations that serve consumers. Tracing the levy from temporary wartime measures to the permanent 1916 estate tax and its climb toward seventy-seven percent, he reads its survival as moralized resentment rather than fiscal necessity, nourished by Henry George, institutionalism, and progressive reform. Both predecessor and successor bear it—the one altering saving, risk, and succession in anticipation, the other forced to liquidate productive assets, with widows, family firms, and farms as casualties. Inflation silently compounds the damage, and progressive death taxation, he concludes, breeds class rigidity rather than equality.

Inflation and tax progression are pushing all estates towards the top rate of taxation.

Falling prices can signal greater abundance, not merely economic distress. In this 1976 contribution, republished in 2016, Murray N. Rothbard challenges both inflationary policy and the ideal of a stable price level, distinguishing productivity gains from increased demand for money and contraction of credit. Cheaper televisions and calculators make his initial case concrete: consumers can gain purchasing power without receiving higher money incomes. The sharper tension emerges when this defense of lower prices becomes an argument for liquidating unsound investments and withdrawing protections for banks and wages. Readers can examine where Rothbard’s account of consumer gains ends and his Austrian program of institutional reform begins—and why accepting one need not settle the other.

The textbook supply-and-demand cross, Kirzner charges, cannot actually explain how a market reaches equilibrium: Walrasian stories assume a single price already exists, Marshallian ones assume participants know the relevant demand and supply prices, when disequilibrium is by definition a condition of imperfect knowledge. Presented at the 1974 Austrian economics conference, the essay supplies the missing element—not another curve but a theory of learning. Its hinge is the contrast between Robbinsian allocation, which optimizes among known means and ends, and Misesian action, which adds alertness to opportunities no one has yet noticed. From this Kirzner reframes competition as discovery, treats advertising as part of the process by which consumers come to see what is available, and dissolves Chamberlin's line between production and selling costs, since producers always make in anticipation of selling.

The real economic problems in any society arise from the phenomenon of unperceived opportunities.

Intellectual influence need not begin with agreement. In this 1956 commemorative address, reprinted here in 2013, Hayek recalls how Mises’s Socialism unsettled the socialist hopes of young economists, including himself, and forced them to reconsider convictions they were reluctant to abandon. Speaking as both pupil and former subordinate, he pairs that testimony with memories of Mises’s administrative competence in inflation-stricken Austria. The resulting portrait turns on a tension between expertise and authority: a thinker whom Hayek regarded as exceptionally clear-sighted often lacked the recognition or power to shape events. Rather than a systematic exposition of Mises’s economics, this contribution, collected in Margit von Mises’s My Years with Ludwig von Mises, offers Hayek’s personal account of argument as an uncomfortable, enduring force in intellectual life.

But to arouse contradiction, to force others to think out for themselves the ideas which have led him, is the main function of the innovator.

Why did Mises’s critique of policies between a market economy and socialism provoke such hostility among German-speaking economists? In this introduction to the 1976 reissue of Mises’s Critique of Interventionism, presented in its 2013 English translation, Hayek connects that controversy to Mises’s practical advisory work in Vienna and his break with prevailing academic doctrines. His portrait makes classical liberalism an acquired conviction, not an inherited allegiance: Mises began with sympathies for social reform before changing direction through Böhm-Bawerk’s seminar. Hayek defends the sharpness of Mises’s polemics while distinguishing the achievements of his different books. Readers encounter not a substitute for Mises’s economic arguments, but a colleague’s account of the intellectual independence, professional antagonism, and disrupted reception that shaped them.

Generations of textbooks credit Barone, Lange, and Lerner with solving Mises's challenge to socialist planning; Rothbard denies they ever touched it. Their demonstrations that a planning board could solve equations of prices and production presuppose a static world of perfect knowledge—precisely the conditions under which calculation would pose no problem. Real production, for Mises and Hayek, unfolds amid uncertainty, dispersed knowledge, heterogeneous capital, and entrepreneurial judgment, and demands genuine markets in the factors of production. Lange-Lerner 'market socialism' only mimics competitive pricing while abolishing the capital markets that generate prices; Soviet planning survived parasitically, on external capitalist prices. Developing a subjectivist theory of cost as forward-looking and unmeasurable, Rothbard extends the argument beyond socialism to any 'One Big Firm' that would swallow the very markets it depends on.

The fact that in a changeless world of perfect knowledge and general equilibrium a socialist planning board could “solve” equations of prices and production was for Mises a worse than useless demonstration.