The archive.

With De Gaulle challenging the dollar, Rueff calling for a return to gold at double its price, and sterling under siege in 1964, Haberler enters the Bretton Woods debate to attack two opposite errors: treating gold as monetary discipline and treating reserve creation as a substitute for adjustment. Money, he insists, is machinery for coordinating exchange, not a sacred parity; international arrangements earn their keep by preserving trade, convertibility, and price stability. The heart of the argument shifts the quarrel from liquidity to adjustment, showing how downward wage rigidity gives fixed exchange rates an inflationary bias and how the adjustable peg invites one-way speculation. His prescription is limited exchange-rate flexibility and conditional, ad hoc cooperation rather than automatic reserve creation.

As the 1963 BIS report remarked, liquidity must not only be sufficient but must also be capable of running out, because the ultimate sanction, a liquidity crisis, may be needed to bring governments to their senses.

When anticapitalism gave up Marx's prophecy of ever-deepening proletarian misery, it fell back on a newer charge: that free competition inevitably breeds cartels that fleece the masses. Mises answers by prising monopoly apart from monopoly price, since mere exclusivity, whether a patent or a unique resource, yields no profit unless demand permits it, and then locating the real source of durable monopoly pricing in state action, in the tariffs that wall off national markets, the subsidies, and the enforced production quotas. His central exhibit is American farm policy, a public cartel for food and cotton that still founders on the question of quotas, while antitrust law becomes a covert substitute for general price control. The international coffee agreement, he argues, is conspiracy renamed diplomacy once governments assign the shares.

Die angeblich unaufhaltsame Tendenz zur Verdrängung der Wettbewerbspreise des freien Marktes durch Monopolpreise gibt es nicht.

English translation: “The supposedly irresistible tendency for monopoly prices to supplant the competitive prices of the free market does not exist.”

Two words—adjustment and financing—have been used in so many senses that the confusion hides genuine disagreement over what governments facing a payments imbalance should actually do. Machlup imposes order by carving out a third category. Real adjustment is narrowed to the classical mechanism of relative costs, prices, incomes, and resource allocation; financing is confined to short-term funds that tide over an imbalance; and between them sits what he names compensatory corrections—measures such as tariffs, subsidies, and lasting capital-flow shifts that reduce the need for adjustment without being either. The taxonomy carries a policy sting: because real adjustment is painful and financing a mere stopgap, authorities reach for corrective measures that so often fail through retaliation, offsetting trade effects, and induced import demand.

Rationing a scarce supply of foreign exchange under direct controls does not reduce the demand, but merely leaves part of it unsatisfied.

Recall the old "cloakroom theory" of banking, in which a bank merely stores money and hands it back like a coat checked at the door—a fiction long since exploded for commercial banks, which plainly manufacture deposits by lending. Machlup's essay asks why the same superstition still binds international institutions, keeping the IMF a warehouse of member currencies rather than a creator of reserve money. He recounts how the United States rejected Keynes's Clearing Union at Bretton Woods for fear that international money creation would siphon real resources from creditor nations to overspenders, then presses the question reserve creation cannot escape: whoever spends newly created money first commands real goods at others' expense. Costless reserve deposits, unlike gold mined at great cost, could hand that saving to developing countries—if the world will decide who ought to benefit.

In the opinion of an increasing number of experts, the required reform or necessary evolution will take the form of extending the functions of the IMF and, especially, of allowing its liabilities to become reserve assets for national monetary authorities.

Three days after de Gaulle's February 1965 press conference demanded that international payments rest once more on gold, Fred Hirsch put the objections to Jacques Rueff, and this Princeton interview records the exchange. Rueff denies being the General's scriptwriter but presses his long-standing argument that the gold-exchange standard is structurally absurd: dollars paid to creditor central banks flow straight back to New York, so the United States never feels its deficit and no corrective discipline bites. He defends a one-time rise in the gold price—modeled on Roosevelt's 1934 revaluation—not as an end but as the means to liquidate accumulated dollar balances without deflation, while Hirsch challenges him on arbitrariness, gold supply, international credit institutions, the CRU proposal, and British policy.

And the main consequence is that there is no reason whatever for the deficit to disappear, because it does not appear.

Rothbard's method here is selective inheritance: keep Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker's stateless politics, discard their economics. He honors the pair for carrying individualist anarchism from anti-state protest into a positive model of voluntary society—Spooner's likening of taxation to a highwayman's threat crystallizes the shared premise—yet parts from them on two political points and one economic core. Ad hoc jury-made law, he insists, must yield to an objective libertarian legal code; occupancy-and-use land tenure must yield to Lockean acquisition and free transfer. The heart of the critique is monetary: their mutualism, inheriting the labor theory of value, wrongly treats rent, interest, and profit as exploitation. Drawing on time preference, Rothbard argues that interest would persist even in barter, and that genuine free banking would yield harder money rather than endless credit.

The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: “Your money or your life.”

Ludwig von Mises appears here as both systematic economist and uncompromising defender of liberty, surveyed book by book in a 1965 American Opinion cover profile. Sennholz moves from Human Action—which Rose Wilder Lane ranked beside The Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital—through Socialism and its proof that planners lacking the guidance of prices cannot allocate resources or reckon profit and loss, to The Theory of Money and Credit, where sound money and the gold standard become restraints on political power. Theory and History, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, and The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science extend the case from calculation to epistemology, grounding economics in purposeful human action against positivism. Each volume adds a layer to one thesis: that Mises's economics cannot be severed from his defense of freedom.

Without the common denominator for economic calculation, which is the market price, a socialist society cannot rationally allocate its labor, capital, land and other resources, and fairly distribute the yields of production.

The gold standard did not fail of its own defects; it was disabled, and then blamed for failing. First published in 1932 and reissued here with two supplements because the same misunderstandings still shaped policy, Hayek's report pins the interwar monetary collapse on central banks, above all the Bank of England, that refused to let gold outflows force the domestic credit contraction and wage adjustment the system demanded. Britain's 1925 return to prewar parity left costs too high; cheap money and appeals for central-bank cooperation masked the weakness rather than curing it. Behind the crisis lies his attack on price-level stabilization: propping up prices that ought to fall with rising productivity is inflation by another name, breeding the misdirected production that made 1929 unavoidable.

All this means that there has not been too little but too much cooperation between central banks, and that not the gold standard, but efforts aimed at making the gold standard inoperative are the causes of the present monetary troubles.

Before one can say what is right by nature, a prior question must be answered: what is nature at all? Pursuing it as a digression from his study of natural right, Voegelin argues that Aristotle still preserves a broad sense of nature as the order and movement of being, only to watch Greek metaphysics narrow it into nature as form. The form-matter schema of Metaphysics Delta collapses when applied to the polis, where every revolution would make a new city, and to the soul, whose conversion, rebirth, and transformation by grace elude any stable form. Tracing the Ionian dissociation of a god-filled cosmos into a de-divinized order of things and an obscure divine, he locates the narrowing in the demiurgic experience of God as craftsman, and recovers human nature as noetic openness, a questioning knowledge of the ground of being.

Die Gottesbeweise können diesem Erfahrungskomplex nichts hinzufügen.

English translation: “The proofs of God's existence can add nothing to this complex of experience.”

Kirzner rebuilds capital theory on the logic of individual choice, treating capital goods not as produced means of production or a homogeneous productive fund but as the tangible interim results of unfinished multiperiod plans. Robinson Crusoe supplies the opening: an intermediate object means nothing by its physical description alone, only by reference to the past plan that made it and the future use intended for it. From this ex ante vantage he dismantles Knight's vision of capital as a self-perpetuating permanent fund, recasts Böhm-Bawerk's waiting and period of production as intertemporal exchange considered within plans, and exposes why capital resists measurement: the heterogeneous sacrifices embodied in capital goods, made at different dates, cannot be summed into a single quantity, whether one looks backward to cost or forward to yield.

The fact is that a dollar sacrificed at one date can no more be added to a dollar sacrificed at a different date than a carrot can be added to a potato.

An oversized house in Döbling's Hofzeile, with its garden statues and imperial loyalties, becomes the whole vanished world of the Viennese bourgeoisie in this memoir-essay. Engel-Janosi reads his family's home as a miniature Austria—grand, eccentric, faithful, and quietly unstable—where the recurring dread of rotting ceiling beams, the Dippelbäume, stands for a class that sensed structural weakness without grasping its political danger. His father, a respected manufacturer whose heart belonged to scholarship and Ibsen, held a loyalty so absolute he would don black-and-yellow trousers if a decree required it, yet foreign affairs never entered the salon of Mahler and Bruno Walter. War arrived as an undefined great experience, the brother died at Koniuchy, the fortune vanished with inflation, and the beams held on until the bombed house was finally razed in 1963.

„Von einem kannst du überzeugt sein: ein Wien wird und muß es immer geben.“

English translation: “Of one thing you may be certain: a Vienna there will always be, and must always be.”

Daniel Defoe foretold what Robert Owen would later attempt to complete: this essay pairs the mercantilist pamphleteer with the cooperative experimenter across more than a century of English social thought. Defoe the writer and projector favored state intervention, wage and price regulation, workhouses, and insurance; Owen the experimenter staked his fortune on New Lanark, New Harmony, labour-exchange banks, and semi-autarkic commonwealths, seeking to abolish the money economy itself. Kerschagl reads both as forerunners of the concern with full employment later crowned by Keynes, then widens the frame to a third figure, John Law, arguing that differing social origins — petty trade, banking, early industry — shaped each man's remedies. Defoe survives in memory chiefly as the author of Robinson Crusoe; Owen's so-called utopias, the essay contends, have become realities.

Aus einer objektiven und echten Geschichte der sozialen Ideen sind aber beide Männer gleichermaßen nicht wegzudenken.

English translation: “From any objective and genuine history of social ideas, however, neither of the two men can be omitted.”