The archive.

Neither in its causes nor in its effects is inflation a purely monetary affair, this wide-ranging treatise maintains: it springs from the plain fact that too many people want everything at once. Kerschagl treats it as a fraud against savers, pensioners, and creditors and as the greatest economic revolution imaginable — expropriating money-holders, rewarding debtors including the state, and dissolving the accounting on which capitalist calculation rests. Across coin debasement in Rome, John Law's Banque Royale, the assignats, and the German, English, French, and American inflations of the twentieth century, he weighs quantity theory against Schumpeter and Keynes, dismisses gold as no reliable safeguard, and denies that full employment can ever be bought with fiduciary credit. Stable money, he concludes, is the precondition of democracy, welfare, and freedom alike.

Gold ist kein Heilmittel, auch nicht gegen Inflation.

English translation: “Gold is no remedy, not even against inflation.”

Did the alchemists ever truly make gold? Kerschagl's concise history answers no — not a single controlled specimen survives — while insisting that the quest was never mainly about gold at all: most adepts were physicians and apothecaries chasing elixirs, panaceas, and remedies. From Mesopotamian metallurgy and Alexandrian experiment through Arab transmission, Paracelsus's turn from speculation toward empirical medicine, and the frauds of Cagliostro, Casanova, and the gold-makers at Rudolf II's Prague court, the book separates genuine discovery — mercury, phosphorus, porcelain, mineral acids — from delusion and swindle. It closes with Franz Joseph's skeptical assay trials and the twentieth century's nuclear transmutation of mercury into gold, scientifically real yet economically pointless. Alchemy's failed quest, the verdict runs, nonetheless vastly enlarged human knowledge.

Nur ein kleiner Teil der Arbeit der Alchimisten war in Wirklichkeit der Suche nach dem künstlichen Gold gewidmet.

English translation: “Only a small part of the alchemists' work was in reality devoted to the search for artificial gold.”

After Nixon closed the gold window and Bretton Woods came apart, Sennholz set out the Austrian case in its starkest constitutional form: inflation is not high prices but the authorities' creation of new money, and rising prices merely its later, uneven effects. The true target is political power over money, which lets governments tax, borrow, and redistribute without open consent—financing a welfare state whose social programs are too popular to oppose while credit expansion breeds the boom-bust cycle and hidden transfers from savers to debtors. Against this he defends the gold-coin standard as the monetary constitution of a free society, distinguishing it from gold-bullion and gold-exchange arrangements that keep gold's name while centralizing reserves and inviting suspension. His reform is liberal, not technocratic: legal gold ownership, enforceable gold clauses, private minting, and competing monies rather than a parity decreed by the same state that destroyed convertibility.

It is not money, as is sometimes said, but the depreciation of money — the cruel and crafty destruction of money — that is the root of many evils.

Behind the fashionable slogan of “international liquidity,” Machlup finds a cluster of distinct problems the phrase conveniently blurs: reserve adequacy, exchange-rate adjustment, the status of gold, and the institutional meaning of Special Drawing Rights. Replying to Teschner in a tightly timed conference intervention, he refuses any single-cause story of the Bretton Woods collapse — rapid reserve growth let countries postpone adjustment, but shrinking American gold cover mattered too. He defends the original SDR as an unbacked reserve asset distributed gratis, warns against schemes that would smuggle back the notion of “coverage,” and turns his “Mrs. Machlup’s wardrobe” parable against simplistic reserve-demand estimates. The lecture’s force lies in dismantling the pseudo-precision of monetary reform and asking what its concepts actually measure.

Die Währungsbehörden sind in der Regel optimistisch und glauben immer, daß der gegenwärtige Kurs auch der richtige ist.

English translation: “The monetary authorities are as a rule optimistic and always believe that the prevailing rate is also the correct one.”

Forecasting the future balance of power tempts planners to mistake projection for knowledge, and this collaborative study sets out to discipline the temptation. Morgenstern, Knorr, and Heiss treat power as a composite of economic capacity, technological change, military organization, and political will, elements that resist extrapolation to very different degrees. Engineering development can be projected within wide error bounds; decisive scientific breakthroughs cannot. They dissect the methods of the day, from the Delphi technique and Wilhelm Fucks's physics-styled power indices to Kahn and Wiener's scenarios and the Limits to Growth simulation, faulting each for suppressing the historical turning points that dominate real outcomes. Energy dependence emerges as their one firm warning, leaving Japan and Western Europe strategically exposed, while China's trajectory hinges on unpredictable political persistence. Armed force, they insist, becomes power only through the will to use it.

Our work has impressed us with the inherent difficulties of forecasting although we realize that objects of forecasting vary greatly in their conjecturability.

Cambridge neo-Ricardians and neo-classical formalists conducted a 'grand debate' over capital and growth while sharing, Lachmann charges, the same fatal habit: treating aggregates like income, output, and capital as autonomous magnitudes whose composition can be ignored. This Hobart Paper diagnoses that habit as macro-economic formalism and insists that what most needs explaining—heterogeneous capital, divergent expectations, failed plans, entrepreneurial revision—vanishes into the totals. Profit is his sharpest case: not a Ricardian uniform rate nor Solow's social rate of return, but a shifting spread of price-cost discrepancies that competition never levels. Steady-state growth is impossible because the capital stock never assumes its equilibrium composition, and technical change becomes progress only after markets test it through loss and abandonment. Incomes policy, growth targets, and indicative planning follow as misguided attempts to command what only discovery reveals.

An equilibrium rate of profit is thus a contradiction in terms.

Can a growing economy outrun its supply of gold? The objection sounds practical, but Sennholz treats it as a conceptual confusion useful to governments seeking elastic finance. His reply separates money from wealth: people who demand more money usually mean more goods and capital, and multiplying units creates neither—any quantity of gold can serve as a medium of exchange, since fewer units simply gain purchasing power and more units lose it. The belief in the monetary needs of business, he argues, already concedes that some authority should manage money, a dogma Keynesians and monetarists share while quarreling only over method. Turning to the charge that mining gold is wasteful, he makes the law of costs a monetary virtue: gold's expensive production guards its value, whereas paper's negligible cost exposes fiat money to depreciation, redistribution, and the political incentives that keep the presses running.

There is no shortage of gold today and there has been no such shortage in the past.

Classical philology, in Wolf's old definition, is the study of human nature as it became manifest in the Greeks, a formula Voegelin finds has grown strange, because specialization and Western 'deculturation' have made the study of man's nature itself suspect. Against the modern faith in limitless historical transformation he restores the Greek movement from doxa to episteme, the metaleptic tension of existence toward the divine ground, and education as Platonic peri-agoge, a turning-around, over against a schooling that merely adjusts students to the reigning climate of opinion. Opinion does not stay harmless, he warns: it becomes the murderous reality of the gas chambers. The Greek differentiation of reason, he concludes, fixed standards for the exploration of consciousness behind which no one is permitted to fall back.

There is a nature of man, a definite structure of existence that puts limits on perfectibility.

Written as a memorial tribute to Ludwig von Mises, this short essay distills what Kirzner takes to be his teacher's single most consequential idea: that the market must be perceived exclusively in process terms. Against the twentieth-century habit of treating market theory as the derivation of an equilibrium already latent in the data—the market imagined as a computer grinding out solutions to simultaneous equations—Kirzner recovers Mises's picture of prices as emerging through the interplay of participants acting on limited, piecemeal knowledge. The stakes are political as well as technical: if the market is only a mechanism, a planner might simulate it, and the socialist calculation argument loses its force. Mises's answer, on this reading, lies in restless entrepreneurial alertness and the ceaseless, impartial court of active competition.

For Mises the market is not a computer grinding out equilibrium solutions to sets of simultaneous equations.

When the Bretton Woods system broke down in 1973, the pressing question was not which technical rule to adopt but why fixed parities had failed at all. Haberler's diagnosis is unsparing: under modern democratic conditions any fixed-rate regime, a resurrected gold standard included, carries an inflationary bias, because governments will not accept the deflation that adjustment requires. Agreeing with Otmar Emminger against gold-standard nostalgics, he argues that correction must then run through inflation in surplus countries, exchange controls, or repeated parity changes, and that the adjustable peg only invites one-way speculation. His remedy is managed floating, sharply distinguished from the 'dirty' floating of split markets and multiple rates. Rereading the competitive devaluations of the 1930s as products of rigidity rather than flexibility, he urges the IMF to police clean floating instead of resurrecting the par-value system.

Floating is here to stay even if a misguided attempt is made to return to “stable but adjustable” parities.

With neoclassical economics on the defensive, Hicks's Capital and Time reached for the label 'neo-Austrian'—and Lachmann's review asks whether the borrowing is earned. Hicks restores the time dimension of production associated with Böhm-Bawerk and Hayek, replacing timeless comparative statics with a sequential analysis in which each week's outcomes become the next week's data, and uses it to trace the Traverse from one steady growth path to another after technological change. Lachmann admires the construction's elegance but finds it bought too cheaply: a one-commodity world, static expectations, and thin substitution suppress precisely what an Austrian theory exists to explain. Static expectations betray the cause most of all, for an actor who merely expects tomorrow to resemble today loses the open-ended character of economic action. Temporality alone, he concludes, does not make a theory Austrian.

To "Austrian" thinking the diversity of expectations is a feature of the world no less significant than the diversity of preferences. They really belong together.

Between Keynesian fiscal management and monetarist money-supply tinkering, Rothbard insists, almost no one considers a third path: removing government from money and the economy altogether. This compact 1973 introduction presents Ludwig von Mises as that neglected alternative, tracing his thought across nine chapters from the Menger–Böhm-Bawerk roots of marginal utility and time preference through the regression theorem, the integration of money into price theory, and the Austrian theory of the business cycle, where credit expansion breeds the malinvestment later liquidated in depression. It follows Mises's calculation argument against socialism, his praxeological method against positivism, the achievement of Human Action, and his marginalized years of exile at New York University. Rothbard reads stagflation and monetary disorder as vindication, offering Mises as both economic theorist and remedy for a civilization in crisis.

Human Action is IT; it is economics whole, developed from sound praxeological axioms, based squarely on analysis of acting man, the purposive individual as he acts in the real world.