The archive.

Can a predictable monetary rule prevent instability if credit expansion itself distorts investment? In this essay, Hans Sennholz welcomes Milton Friedman’s challenge to Keynesian economics, but argues that monetarism retains key premises of the approach it challenges: reliance on economic aggregates and government monetary management. Against Friedman’s proposed steady growth of the money supply, Sennholz argues that even modest expansion can depress interest rates below levels warranted by saving and encourage unsustainable investments. The contrast brings a concrete disagreement into focus: stable prices need not mean coordinated production. Readers can discover why an Austrian defence of markets may reject monetarist policy, and how Sennholz’s case for gold and freedom of monetary contract shifts the debate from choosing better management rules to questioning monetary authority itself.

Before poverty can be relieved it must be defined, and this 1971 essay argues that loose, relative definitions turn a real but bounded problem into an endlessly expanding political claim. To call the bottom fifth or third 'poor' confuses inequality with poverty and guarantees the problem can never be solved, since some group is always comparatively worse off. Hazlitt dissects the Johnson-era war on poverty's shifting thresholds, leaning on Rose D. Friedman's recalculation that, adjusting for family size and food-spending patterns, roughly halved the official poverty rate. Applied backward to 1929 or outward to India, today's American thresholds redescribe historic abundance as mass want. Poverty, he concludes, should be pegged to subsistence sufficient for health and strength, not to median income, lest relief outrun what work can earn and dependency become rational.

It is obvious, however, that all merely relative definitions of poverty make the problem insoluble.

Education, in Rothbard's account, is the whole lifelong forming of a person's reason, values, and knowledge, and schooling only a narrow slice of it — one that compulsion perverts into an instrument of rule. Because children differ radically in ability, pace, and temperament, he holds that individualized parental or tutorial instruction outperforms the classroom, which must impose a single curriculum on unlike minds. The historical chapters trace mandatory schooling from Luther and Calvin, who wielded it to enforce religious uniformity, to Prussia, where a militarized bureaucracy standardized language and manufactured obedient subjects. America, in his telling, is only a softer republican version of the same transfer of authority from family to state — a compulsory public press for the child's mind, breeding dependence where it claims to build citizens.

The key issue in the entire discussion is simply this: shall the parent or the State be the overseer of the child?

Growth and development economics, for all its bulk, conceals a yawning gap: it has mislaid the entrepreneur. Kirzner sets out to recover him, distinguishing the routine economizing that allocates given means to given ends from the entrepreneurial element proper, alertness to opportunities, ends, and means not yet noticed. Against Schumpeter, whose innovator disrupts a placid circular flow, he casts the entrepreneur as an equilibrating force, one who perceives the gaps between input costs and output values that only disequilibrium and imperfect knowledge create. Development, on this reading, is not an external shock but the discovery and seizing of profit opportunities already waiting; the market's distinctive virtue is that its profit signals prompt that discovery, where nonmarket systems supply no equivalent mechanism.

The theory of the market explores the extent to which economizing decisions of many independent market participants can be carried out simultaneously.

Sincere reformers and demagogues alike have reached for the same lever—state action—to abolish poverty, and in Hazlitt's telling they have mostly made it worse. This 1971 Freeman polemic dismantles a catalogue of political remedies: redistribution and the guaranteed income, union privilege and featherbedding, minimum-wage laws, welfare finance, price and wage controls, and finally socialism itself. His method is to look past the visible transfer to the hidden cost—who pays, whose incentives collapse, what output is never produced. A statutory wage floor, he insists, cannot conjure the productivity it names; it only prices the least-skilled out of work. Socialism's deeper failure is the calculation problem: without genuine prices for capital goods, planners cannot rank alternatives except by imitating the market they reject. Durable relief, he concludes, rests on productivity, not command.

We cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him less.

Freedom, inequality, and the division of labor are not separable social accidents but mutually supporting conditions of civilization, so runs the thesis of an essay first delivered to a 1970 symposium and reissued in 1991 with a combative new introduction. Because each person is a unique, non-interchangeable individual, Rothbard argues, liberty is the precondition of human development; and only a developed division of labor, rooted in the natural diversity Mises made central, gives individuality the scope to flourish. Egalitarianism, Marxist, Romantic, primitivist, he treats as a single anti-differentiating impulse, from Marx's fantasy of hunting, fishing, and criticizing at will to the lookism and quotas of what the new introduction calls political correctness. Equality taken literally means sameness; against it he defends the older liberal equality of liberty, and natural aristocracies that rise through voluntary excellence rather than force.

He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human.

Ninety days of frozen wages and prices gave Nixon's New Economic Policy of August 1971 its drama, but Haberler asks the harder question of what happens once the freeze is lifted. A freeze, he warns, suspends visible price changes without touching demand, wage bargaining, or credibility; hold it too long and it breeds evasion, bureaucracy, and corruption. The essay's hinge is a distinction between two incomes policies: guideposts and controls that substitute official judgment for the market, and reforms that restore competition by curbing union privileges, revising Davis-Bacon and minimum-wage rules, ending strike subsidies, and opening the door to imports. Sustained inflation, he holds, is always monetary, yet monopoly unions can still force authorities to choose between validating wage push and accepting unemployment. Business monopoly, by contrast, produces mostly one-shot effects and matters far less to a continuing spiral.

Industrial monopolies or oligopolies are not much of a problem as far as inflation is concerned.

Oskar Lange had been Mises's most formidable socialist antagonist; his final, posthumous treatise, Rothbard argues, quietly retreated toward the praxeology it once opposed. Reading Lange's late Political Economy, Rothbard tracks the concessions: that monetary calculation and profit-seeking made rational conduct explicit, that economic laws can be deduced from broad axioms of rational action, that Austrian utility theory is ordinal preference rather than hedonistic psychology. Each admission carries a threat Lange cannot face—if economics simply is praxeology, Marxism forfeits its claim to be the foundational science of historical economic forms. So Lange widens praxeology to swallow cybernetics, programming, and input-output analysis, grafting institutional categories onto the logic of choice. Rothbard reads the maneuver as evasion, and draws the larger point: the calculation debate was always also a contest over the foundations of economics.

In this way, Lange accepts the essential deductive Misesian methodology for economic theory: beginning with broadly general praxeological principles as axioms and from these elaborating necessary laws by logical deduction.

Lachmann casts Mises as the economist who decisively rejected equilibrium as the master concept of economics and put the market process in its place. Contemporary neoclassical theory he indicts as 'late classical formalism,' mathematically elegant yet mute on real problems like permanent inflation, because it abstracts from choice, alternatives, and uncertainty. The newer models of steady growth—Cassel, Harrod, Domar, Solow—fare no better, since continuous coordination would demand perfect foresight and the instantaneous rearrangement of heterogeneous capital. Because knowledge is unevenly held and interpreted, expectations diverge and plans must fail. What survives is individual equilibrium, never the system-wide kind; the market is millions of people seeking their own equilibria within an order that never reaches a general one.

But in doing so they have taken the shadow of the formal apparatus for the substance of the real subject matter.

Borrowing Thomas Kuhn's account of scientific revolutions while refusing its relativism, this essay diagnoses modern economics as a discipline capable of forgetting its own discoveries. Lacking laboratory tests and saturated with ideology, it entrenched a false paradigm through mathematics, positivist testing, and professional prestige — burying the Austrian School in the process. Rothbard reads the eclipse of Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Mises not as refutation but as collective amnesia, sharpened by late translations and Mises's denial of a prestigious American post. Yet criticism alone topples no paradigm; it must be replaced. Mises supplies the replacement through praxeology, the deductive science of human action, from which follow the critique of cumulative interventionism, commodity money as a check on inflationary credit, and the calculation argument that an economy without private ownership has no real prices to reason with.

But the work of Ludwig von Mises furnishes that “something”; it furnishes an economics grounded not on the aping of physical science, but on the very nature of man and of individual choice.

Can a market-oriented reform make government more powerful rather than less? In this essay, first published in 1971 and reprinted here in 2011, Murray N. Rothbard turns that question against Milton Friedman’s reputation as a champion of economic liberty. Tax withholding, guaranteed income, and a fixed monetary-growth rule become tests of the difference between limiting coercion and improving its administration. Writing from an Austrian and libertarian perspective, Rothbard argues that freedom in individual markets cannot be insulated from state control over taxation and money. His polemic exposes a fault line within free-market thought: whether predictable rules and competitive provision suffice, or whether compulsory financing and monetary monopoly compromise the project itself. Readers can discover why proposals defended as market-friendly attract resistance from within the libertarian camp.

A child can acquire a parent’s skills without inheriting them genetically—or understanding how they work. This distinction anchors Hayek’s 1971 review of C. D. Darlington’s The Evolution of Man and Society. Welcoming Darlington’s attention to innate differences, Hayek challenges his tendency to equate unconscious conduct with genetic determination. Imitation and upbringing, he argues, transmit practical knowledge that neither teacher nor learner can necessarily articulate. The review offers a precise way to question claims about inherited abilities: what evidence distinguishes biological descent from the cultural transmission accompanying it? Hayek’s alternative also carries a warning. Skills accumulated across generations can disappear when the practices sustaining them are broken, making cultural achievement more vulnerable than genetic endowment.

But we must not confuse the inherited capacity to learn a great variety of modes of conduct with an heredity of particular modes of conduct.