The archive.

Beneath the questions of money, banking, and policy technique lies a deeper subject—human action itself. Framing Percy L. Greaves's Buenos Aires lectures on the dollar crisis, Mises grounds monetary economics in a broader anthropology of purposeful conduct, dividing the world into events action can influence and those beyond its reach, and rejecting alike fatalism and the fantasy of technocratic omnipotence. Growing knowledge enlarges human power, he insists, without ever making man omniscient. The section on gold treats it not as an arbitrary convention but as the historically evolved medium whose supply is fixed by nature rather than political discretion—a standing check on the interested parties who would manipulate purchasing power. Neither inflation nor deflation, on this account, can serve as a lasting policy; the dollar crisis is the wage of abandoning that discipline.

The gold standard made the marvelous evolution of modern capitalism technically possible.

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.

When Washington suspended the dollar's convertibility into gold in August 1971, it exposed how deeply American inflation had become the world's problem, the theme of this 1973 essay, collected in Haberler's volume on inflation and business cycles. Because the dollar served as reserve and intervention currency, U.S. price rises under Vietnam and Great Society financing were transmitted abroad in amplified form, forcing Germany, Switzerland, and Austria to resist inflation they had not created. Haberler distinguishes a pure dollar crisis from a mark or yen crisis, locates the fundamental defect in the adjustable peg, and defends greater exchange-rate flexibility through managed floating. Only domestic monetary restraint, he insists, can end inflation itself, but floating spares the system disruptive one-way speculation.

But let me repeat, the compulsion to submit to imported inflation arises only under a regime of fixed exchanges and convertibility.

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.”

Between the grown order that no one designed and the made order that serves a chosen purpose lies the whole of Hayek's mature legal and political theory. Across three volumes gathered here in the one-volume form he originally intended, he distinguishes cosmos from taxis, the judge-discovered law of liberty (nomos) from legislative command (thesis), and the market's spontaneous catallaxy from the deliberate economy. The middle volume mounts a sustained assault on 'social justice,' which he calls an empty, quasi-religious incantation, since a spontaneous process assigns rewards to no one's design and so can be neither just nor unjust. Behind these arguments stands a warning that unlimited democracy, captured by organized interests, drifts toward the very totalitarian power classical constitutionalism was built to restrain, a danger he answers with proposals for constitutional redesign.

The tragic illusion was that the adoption of democratic procedures made it possible to dispense with all other limitations on governmental power.

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.

Mises developed the foundations of his social thought while economic research remained a spare-time occupation alongside his duties at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. In this memorial essay, first published in 1973 and reprinted here with editorial annotations, Hayek considers the tension between that intellectual achievement and Mises’s limited academic recognition. His admiring portrait also acknowledges the stubbornness that made Mises enemies, while showing how an informal seminar sustained his influence beyond the university. At its conceptual centre is a precise distinction: Mises’s criticism concerned socialism’s inability to allocate resources efficiently, not its literal impossibility. Readers encounter Hayek’s account of how economic calculation, political conviction, and institutional isolation shaped a scholarly life—along with the judgments of a participant in the same intellectual tradition.

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.

Economics went astray when it took physics for its model and positivism for its badge of legitimacy—chasing controlled experiments where no variable stays fixed and where predictions alter the conditions they forecast. Rothbard's alternative is praxeology, the science that begins from the axiom that human beings act purposively toward chosen ends and deduces qualitative, if-then laws rather than numerical constants. He recovers a neglected lineage running through Jean-Baptiste Say, Cairnes, Senior, and the Austrians, and anchors it in methodological individualism: collectives such as 'society' and 'the state' are but shorthand for patterns of individual action. Forecasting, he insists, is an interpretive art akin to history rather than laboratory prediction, and econometrics a misplaced search for constants in human affairs.

Only an individual has a mind; only an individual can feel, see, sense, and perceive; only an individual can adopt values or make choices; only an individual can act.