The archive.

Scarcity sets the members of a species at odds, yet human beings escape that antagonism through the division of labor and peaceful exchange, so that the market becomes the standard form of interhuman relations. Against both anarchism and socialism, this 1968 essay argues that the market cannot defend itself and therefore needs the state—'a grim apparatus of coercion'—to restrain those who break the peace. But no middle sphere exists: talk of a friendly 'public sector' cannot fuse the two opposed principles of voluntary agreement and command. Planning does not merely administer production differently; it transfers the individual's power of choice to a central authority, demanding obedience from cradle to coffin. Mises ends categorically—the market economy is the only order tending toward the cheapest provisioning of consumers.

There is no conciliation between constraint and spontaneity.

What one person can do against the drift toward socialism is the easy question; the harder one is what defenders of liberty must do together. Hazlitt reframes the problem strategically: interventionism survives not through bad arguments alone but through entrenched institutions—agencies, beneficiaries, pressure groups, and paid experts, some 2,133 federal bureaus by the Hoover Commission's 1954 count—each defending its own program with specialized authority. His remedy is a division of intellectual labor: general principles cannot substitute for detailed mastery of farm policy, labor law, monetary policy, and taxation. He distrusts business as a reliable ally, invokes Bastiat on the state as the fiction by which everyone lives at everyone else's expense, and settles on honest money as the single front where every libertarian can concentrate.

The war must be fought on a thousand fronts, and the true libertarians are grossly outnumbered on practically all these fronts.

Robbins refuses the grand definitions: development, for these expanded 1966 Chichele Lectures, means neither national grandeur nor moral progress but change in real income per head and the productive capacity behind it. He traces how that question passed through economic thought—posed energetically by mercantilist pamphleteers yet rarely theorized, made central by the Physiocrats though wrongly confined to agriculture, given classical structure by Smith's division of labour and capital accumulation. The causal conditions of growth follow: population, saving, the growth of usable knowledge, monetary institutions, and a Smithian natural liberty that is legal order rather than anarchy. The marginal revolution, he argues, narrowed economics toward allocation, while Marshall and Schumpeter kept a developmental imagination alive. A final lecture weighs whether growth should be desired, setting it beside liberty, education, and amenity.

Why do socialist economies, for all their proclaimed internationalism, trade so little and so cautiously? Haberler's answer, offered as candid speculations of a theorist, is that comparative cost identifies gains from trade but never realizes them; someone must go looking. Marginal analysis and shadow pricing can aid socialist calculation, yet they cannot supply the entrepreneurial discovery that foreign markets demand: unfamiliar demand, currency risk, contractual hazard, the real possibility of loss. Private merchants chase profit across borders; plan-bound managers, rewarded for fulfilment and punished for failure, stay inward-looking and nationalistic. The predicted result is trade aversion and undertrading, volumes far below the comparative-cost optimum, together with bilateralism, barter, and imports confined to unavoidable necessities. It is comparative advantage recast from a static doctrine into an institutional argument.

Nationalism has proved to be an extremely hardy plant.

Can an economy sustain balanced growth while maintaining activities that lose money? Oskar Morgenstern and Gerald L. Thompson address this question by opening the generalized von Neumann growth model to trade at externally fixed prices. Their distinctive move is to combine those trading opportunities with domestic bounds on production, allowing profitable industries to finance loss-making services rather than excluding them from equilibrium. Under the model’s assumptions, these controls permit a continuous range of expansion rates where the closed model offered only finitely many. Linear-programming proofs and numerical examples show how trade prices and production requirements shape feasible growth—and how openness can raise it. The article also makes a useful distinction: establishing what specified controls make possible is not the same as deciding which controls an economy should choose.

Postwar West Germany posed a puzzle: aggregate output and employment climbed almost without interruption, yet the economy plainly alternated between vigor and sluggishness. Mintz resolves it by abandoning the classical cycle, which demands absolute declines, for the growth cycle, alternating periods of above- and below-average growth that she neutrally terms speedups and slowdowns. Applying two dating methods to twenty-one indicators, deviation cycles measured against a moving-average trend and step cycles built from growth rates, and consolidating the individual turns through diffusion indexes, she fixes a monthly chronology of three and a half cycles between 1951 and 1967. Classical analysis, she shows, would register no German recession at all before 1966-67. The turning points, she insists, are genuine economic phenomena, not figments of statistical procedure.

Periods regarded as downswings by business and policy makers in Europe and Japan have not usually been characterized by declines in aggregate output, income or employment.

Recession, downturn, slowdown, sidewise movement—the euphemisms come first, and Rothbard treats them as more than style: they shield the reigning assumption that capitalism is inherently unstable and needs expert management. Against the Keynesian physician, this pamphlet builds the Austrian case that booms and busts originate not in the free market but in monetary intervention. Any adequate depression theory, he argues, must explain three things at once—the sudden cluster of entrepreneurial errors, their recurrence, and the outsized volatility of capital-goods industries. The Mises-Hayek answer is the interest rate: central-bank-fed credit expansion pushes it below the level set by time preference and real saving, luring entrepreneurs into unsustainable roundabout projects. The cure is deliberately anti-Keynesian—stop the inflation, refuse bailouts, and let liquidation return production to consumer preferences.

It is the preceding inflation that makes the depression phase necessary.

Education and income rise together, but which drives which? Machlup's compact study, expanded from a 1969 lecture, insists the causation runs both ways and on different clocks: schooling may raise productivity only after long lags, while prosperity quickly raises the demand for education — and, crucially, its cost. He is skeptical of residual-growth accounting that credits education with large unexplained gains, warns that in poor agrarian societies schooling can breed aversion to manual work and urban frustration, and separates the long payoff of formal schooling from the faster returns of on-the-job training. His most durable point is structural: because teaching is labor-intensive and resists productivity gains, education grows dearer as wages climb in the sectors that do, the logic later christened Baumol's cost disease.

Educational efforts may be regarded as consumption, investment, waste, or drag.

Rereading Herbert Spencer's The Man Versus the State from the vantage of 1969, Hazlitt recovers a thinker usually dismissed as a laissez-faire relic and finds instead an uncanny prophet of the welfare state. Two surprises drive the essay: how precisely Spencer foresaw coming state encroachments, and how many supposedly modern interventions, from compulsory insurance and nationalized railways to rent control and state education, had already begun by 1884. The engine of decline Spencer named is political momentum, in which each intervention becomes precedent for the next and every failure is read not as a verdict against coercion but as a reason to expand it. Following Spencer, Hazlitt argues that redistribution rests on the hidden premise that earnings are held only by the community's permission. Spencer's coming slavery finds its completed form, he suggests, in Orwell's 1984.

Failure does not destroy faith in the agencies employed, but merely suggests more stringent use of such agencies or wider ramifications of them.

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.

A word that means one thing in Vienna and nearly its opposite in Washington cannot anchor a coherent politics — and liberalism, Machlup argues, has drifted until an American liberal would count as an anti-liberal in Europe. Originating as a Hayek lecture, the essay traces that drift from Lockean individualism through the reinterpretation of freedom as effective power, and dissects two governing confusions: being free to act versus being free from want, and what one may do versus what one can do. Against the slogan that freedom is indivisible he sets a catalogue of some two dozen distinct liberties — economic, political, intellectual, moral — that routinely collide. The genuine liberal, he concludes, ranks freedoms and restricts one only to secure another, and refuses to let welfare be relabeled as liberty.

Food is not liberty, and liberty is not food. Medical care is not liberty, and liberty is not medical care.

Once general-equilibrium theory made real markets look deficient, measuring them against a fictitious world of perfect competition, simultaneous equations, and Pareto-optimality, the old alliance between economic theory and the market collapsed. Lachmann's reconstruction, written for a Hayek volume, defends capitalism not as a static allocation mechanism but as a process of plans, expectations, disappointments, and capital revaluations under uncertainty. Methodological individualism, he argues, is the demand that no explanation of social phenomena satisfy us until it leads back to a human plan; Hayek's compositive method works forward from plans to their compatibility, while Verstehen works backward. Indifference curves smuggle in given tastes and evade how plans are actually made and revised. The Stock Exchange, pricing divergent expectations over existing assets, becomes the institution in which this vision is most visible.

In fact it is hardly an exaggeration to say that without a Stock Exchange there can be no market economy.