The archive.

Delivered as an address in Brussels in 1974, this brief tribute remembers Ludwig von Mises less through doctrine than through bearing—the teacher who, in his New York seminar, still urged students to read German and who carried, for younger admirers, a last breath of the noble atmosphere of pre-1914 Vienna. Rothbard's estimate of the achievement is exact: Mises built an integrated structure of economics, methodology, philosophy, and history at a time when such architectonic systems had grown unfashionable, and it was precisely that scale the narrowing academy could not recognize. Neglect, on this reading, indicts the age rather than the man. From intellectual scale Rothbard turns to moral character—the courage to keep producing unfashionable truth without trimming principle for status—and closes by observing that Mises's influence was accelerating among younger scholars even after his death.

Every person is in some sense unique and irreplaceable, but I think it is fair to say that Ludwig von Mises was uniquely unique.

The paradox is stark: the liberal market order had just delivered West Germany's soziale Marktwirtschaft and a quarter-century of prosperity, yet Hayek, in this 1975 Zurich lecture, judged its future bleak. Credit expansion, he argues, has trapped governments, since halting inflation would bring politically unbearable unemployment, so they suppress symptoms through price and wage controls that disable the very price mechanism and push society toward central direction. Behind the monetary danger lies an institutional one: legislatures of unlimited power that assemble majorities by dispensing privileges, eroding the older Lockean conception of law as general rules of just conduct. Distributive justice he calls a wholly empty notion outside a command organization; his remedy is a constitution that severs lawmaking from government direction.

Er kann sich Sonderwünschen nicht versagen, solange er die Macht hat, sie zu befriedigen.

English translation: “He cannot refuse special demands so long as he has the power to satisfy them.”

A one-year moratorium is all Rothbard asks for in this comic New Year's reprimand to the libertarian movement: no more survivalists urging flight to the hills with stockpiles of dried beans, no more escapist schemes to found liberty on offshore platforms and islands like Minerva, Abaco, or Atlantis, no more therapeutic chatter about open relationships and getting in touch with one's feelings, and, for good measure, a year without science fiction. Behind the satire runs a serious demand: liberty is won by disciplined engagement with actual institutions, not by fantasies of purity, withdrawal, or self-expression. Rothbard writes as an irritated insider who prefers a crippled market and urban comfort to any private Eden, insisting the movement come back and fight for freedom at home.

I know it's a hopeless fantasy, but I can dream, can't I?

Should national currencies float freely against one another like any other market price? Milton Friedman and the Chicago School said yes; Rothbard's answer is that the question rests on a false analogy. A market makes sense between different goods, not between different units of the same good, and the dollar, pound, and franc were once merely names for definite weights of gold. Written after the collapse of Bretton Woods, this essay recasts the classical gold standard not as arbitrary price-fixing but as a monetary order in which exchange rates follow from fixed definitions, the way pounds and ounces do. Fluctuating fiat money, Rothbard argues, fractures the unit of account, works like a hidden tariff, invites inflation and exchange controls, and drifts back toward barter.

It is virtually a law of politics that government will use the power that it is given.

Ludwig von Mises tested a young university student in 1921 by demanding he read English, assigning the major economics books, and admitting him to the seminar only when he returned having read most of them. From that scene Machlup builds a commemorative portrait of Mises as teacher, political seer, and exemplar of liberal conviction. He distinguishes the selective private Privatseminar at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce from the university course, recalls Mises’s foresight about the Kreditanstalt collapse, and frames the emigrations of Hayek, Haberler, and himself as heeding the master’s warning. Defending Mises’s apriorism as theory that still requires judgment in application, he reports socialist economists privately conceding the calculation argument: without genuine markets, prices become administrative fictions rather than guides to allocation.

IT WAS in 1921 that I met my master.

What defines the State, on Rothbard's account, is not the provision of defense, courts, or law, but two things only: revenue extracted through coerced taxation and a compulsory territorial monopoly over protection. Strip those away and anarchism becomes not the absence of order but the absence of legalized aggression against person and property. Delivered in 1974, this compact statement of polycentric legal theory imagines disputes resolved through competing private courts, arbitration bodies, and insurance-linked protection agencies, drawing on William Wooldridge's history of merchant law and on the thousands of arbitrations already conducted outside state compulsion. The Jones family thought experiment turns the standard case for monopoly government into a reductio, while a shared libertarian law code forbidding aggression holds the whole framework together.

Pay us for your 'protection' or else.

Delivered in 1974 as a tribute to Ludwig von Mises, this address casts him not as a surviving nineteenth-century liberal but as a thinker who independently rediscovered classical liberalism after outgrowing the mild Fabian socialism of his Viennese youth. Hayek traces the arc: the early theory of money, the Chamber of Commerce years, the wartime turn to social order in Nation, State and the Economy, and the critique of socialist calculation that crowned his vision of a free society. He dwells on the cost, the ridicule and academic marginalization in Vienna that denied Mises a full professorship, and on the renewal that exile to Geneva and then America brought. Against Knight, Eucken, and Cannan, only Mises, he insists, supplied a comprehensive guiding philosophy.

He knew. He suffered. But he persevered because what he expounded were his profound convictions.

Reformers who chase an 'ideal money,' Hazlitt argues, divide into four camps, discretionary and rule-bound versions of both paper and gold, and the disorder of the mid-1970s is no accident but the fruit of the first. Discretionary fiat draws his sharpest fire: by tethering weak currencies to the dollar, Bretton Woods exported inflation across the world. Monetarism fares only marginally better, since a legislated money-growth rule would become a political football the instant recession loomed. Gold earns his defense not as nostalgia but because it cannot be conjured by statute; even so, he faults the classical fractional-reserve standard for breeding the cycle of boom and slump, and points instead toward enforceable private contracts payable in gold and a full, 100 percent reserve standard growing up beside state paper.

The great merit of gold is precisely that it is scarce; that its quantity is limited by nature; that it is costly to discover, to mine, and to process; and that it cannot be created by political fiat or caprice.

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.

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.

Before Prices and Production made him famous in London, Hayek laid the foundations of his business-cycle theory in this 1929 monograph, here reissued with Kurt Leube's bibliography. Empirical research and statistics, he insists, can raise problems but never generate the causal laws of economics; only theory grounded in price, production, and interest can explain the cycle. Non-monetary accounts, whether technical, psychological, or built on disproportionality, fail because they smuggle in elastic credit while denying it any explanatory role. The engine is the Wicksell-Mises divergence between the money rate and the natural rate of interest: bank credit pushes lending below the equilibrium rate, lengthening the higher stages of production beyond what voluntary saving can sustain, until the boom's distorted capital structure collapses into crisis.

Solange wir uns des Mittels des Bankkredites bedienen, um die Entwicklung zu fördern, werden wir auch die Konjunkturschwankungen mit in Kauf nehmen müssen, die durch ihn verursacht werden.

English translation: “As long as we make use of bank credit as a means of promoting economic development, we shall also have to accept the cyclical fluctuations that it causes.”

Suppose the molecules in a physics laboratory suddenly began to speak — disputing the textbook account of Brownian motion, offering their own versions of events. Machlup’s parable dramatizes the one methodological difference he thinks genuinely separates social from natural science: the social scientist studies beings who talk, interpret, theorize, and lie about themselves. Rejecting both a wholly separate logic for social inquiry and the claim that no real difference exists, he refines Verstehen into the disciplined construction of models of purpose and belief that must also treat actors’ own testimony as data — data that may mislead. Bankers deny they create credit; businessmen reject profit-maximization; yet economics, he insists, cannot be learned by watching or interviewing, only through abstract constructs of purposeful action.

It is one of the characteristics of the natural sciences that their subjects of investigation do not talk about themselves.