The archive.

The so-called right to strike, Mises argues, is nothing of the kind: it is a state-granted license for striking workers to use violence against those who would take their place, a suspension of the equal legal protection every other citizen enjoys. From this legal-political indictment the essay, reprinted from Christian Economics, builds its economic case. Governments accept abroad, in foreign aid, the classical truth they deny at home—that wages rise only as capital accumulates faster than population. Fix wages above the market-clearing rate by decree or union compulsion, and marginal workers are priced out: firms either raise prices and lose sales or absorb losses and close. Since the working masses are themselves the main consumers of what capitalism produces, no coercive wage can lift the class as a whole; only saving and new capital can.

What is today euphemistically called the right to strike is in fact the right of striking workers, by recourse to violence, to prevent people who want to work from working.

A research project can matter to a government objective without addressing it directly: its results may enable another discovery, instrument, or experiment along a chain of influence. In this 1965 technical report, Oskar Morgenstern, R. W. Shephard, and H. Grabowski make those indirect effects central to the allocation of research support. Their directed graphs and transfer matrices offer a way to trace scientific interdependence without confusing an agency’s existing portfolio with the full range of relevant knowledge. Yet the authors distinguish mathematical possibility from managerial reliability: coefficients must be estimated, objectives specified, and the model tested against actual research. The report lets readers examine both the promise of network-based funding decisions and the measurement difficulties that keep calculation dependent on scientific judgment.

The test for relevance is whether there exist connected paths between the given research activity and the particular government problem studied.

Value is not lodged in goods, in labor, or in cost—it is the significance of a marginal satisfaction within an ordered plan of wants. That claim anchors Kauder's sweeping history, first published in 1965, which recovers marginal utility as a long and uneven effort rather than a sudden revolution of the 1870s. Its prehistory runs from Aristotle's value-in-use through the scholastics, Galiani, Turgot, and Condillac, past Bernoulli's mathematics of risk to Gossen's neglected system of diminishing and equalized utility. Menger, Jevons, and Walras succeed less by class interest than by the internal breakdown of classical value theory—and Menger sharpens the doctrine into its purest causal form. The later Austrians—Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser, Mayer, Mises, Morgenstern—then extend it to cost, imputation, complementarity, and uncertainty, exposing as much as they resolve.

The architects of marginal utility took their building stones from philosophy, psychology, religion, mathematics, and morals.

A distance between population means and a regression fitted to error-bearing observations may seem to answer different questions. In this four-page contribution, Gerhard Tintner connects them through the same inverse-covariance weighting: discrepancies matter relative to the variability and dependence of the errors. His focus is on estimating linear relations among underlying systematic components when several observed variables contain error, rather than treating explanatory variables as error-free. The connection yields a generalized eigenvalue problem whose smallest roots identify candidate relations, with approximate sequential tests used to estimate their number. Readers can discover how the geometry of Mahalanobis distance becomes an estimation criterion—and why distinguishing error covariance from observed covariance matters to that procedure.

How much economic detail can a planning model responsibly promise when national statistics are scarce and unreliable? Gerhard Tintner and Oswaldo Dávila address this problem through a deliberately compact, five-equation Keynesian model of Ecuador, estimated from 1950–1961 data. They defend aggregation as a safeguard against false precision while arguing that coherent development policy requires explicit econometric relationships. The article’s concrete interest lies in its comparison of policy effects: within the model, investment and government consumption plus net exports can produce similar gains in output yet opposite movements in employment and wages. Readers can examine how limited evidence becomes a tool for distinguishing policy choices—and where that tool needs caution, particularly when reported numerical interpretations do not consistently match the equations.

Could a failed businessman and writer serving successive political masters nevertheless be a consistent reformer? Richard Kerschagl’s 1965 article defends Daniel Defoe by separating commercial fortunes and political employment from enduring commitments, especially religious toleration. Its strongest evidence lies in concrete institutional proposals: bankruptcy laws that preserve a debtor’s ability to repay, contributory pensions, and education open to women. Kerschagl reads these projects sympathetically as anticipations of later reforms, while attending to the financial and political obstacles to their adoption. The result shifts attention from the familiar novelist to a pamphleteer concerned with how institutions might reduce suffering—and gives readers grounds to reconsider whether apparent utopianism belongs to a proposal itself or to the circumstances in which it first appears.

No identifiable majority, Hayek contends, ever wanted many of the results modern democratic politics produces, which is precisely why blaming the majority misses the disease. The trouble is that representative assemblies now perform two incompatible tasks at once: laying down general rules of justice and directing the concrete business of government. Once every parliamentary resolution counts as law merely because a legislature passed it, the older ideal of law as an impartial, universal norm dissolves, and party coalitions trade privileges among organized interests. Popular sovereignty he calls a rationalist superstition, the assumption that some unlimited power must exist somewhere. His remedy is a bicameral order with one chamber elected on long, staggered, nonrenewable terms and confined solely to general rules, insulated from the bargaining that governs administration.

Sie ist die Grundlage, die ein friedliches Zusammenleben der Menschen in der Gesellschaft und einen friedlichen Wechsel der Personen, die organisierte Gewalt ausüben, möglich macht.

English translation: “It is the foundation that makes possible a peaceful coexistence of people in society and a peaceful change of the persons who exercise organized force.”

Had the World War been brought to an end in 1917, Engel-Janosi observes, not only European but world history would have run a different course. This 1965 Academy lecture reconstructs one fragile chance at that ending: the secret 1917–18 Freiburg conversations between Count Nikolaus Revertera and the French intelligence officer Abel Armand, mediated by a Swiss physician. Reading the Austrian and French records against each other rather than harmonizing them, the essay turns on a crucial distinction—Armand's written demands over Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine were a maximum programme he privately conceded was negotiable. The channel failed when Berlin refused and Czernin sent no clear reply; its collapse fed the disastrous speech that provoked Clemenceau's denial and the publication of the Sixtus letters. Whether Armand ever held real authority, the author cautions, remains unproven.

An Czernins Rede ist so ziemlich alles verwunderlich, beginnend mit dem Forum, dem Wiener Gemeinderat, das er sich für sie wählte.

English translation: “About Czernin's speech, virtually everything is astonishing, beginning with the forum he chose for it—the Vienna Municipal Council.”

When Machlup rose to lecture at the University of Kiel's three-hundredth anniversary, he chose to turn the tools of economic calculation on higher education itself, in the German original preserved here. He confronts head-on the charge that pricing culture is materialistic, replying that the economist does not judge the intrinsic worth of universities but only makes explicit the valuations already buried in public budgets and private choices. Separating research, teaching, and learning, he shows that students bear the heaviest learning costs through fees and forgone earnings, cites Becker's estimates of private returns near ten to twelve percent, and then adds the external benefits to families, employers, and future generations. The social return on university capital, he calculates from American data, may reach twenty-four percent—roughly double the yield on industrial capital.

Ob die mit einer Million bezahlten Leistungen kulturelle oder materielle Werte darstellen, ist vom Gesichtspunkt der Rationalität gleichgültig.

English translation: “Whether the services paid for with a million represent cultural or material values is, from the standpoint of rationality, immaterial.”

A sole seller cannot necessarily profit by restricting supply. That distinction anchors Ludwig von Mises’s short essay on monopoly prices and sharpens its political challenge: governments may sustain the very pricing practices they profess to oppose. Mises acknowledges that monopoly pricing can arise without state assistance, but directs attention to import barriers and the difficulty cartel members face in agreeing on sales quotas. Agricultural controls and the international coffee agreement illustrate his contention that public authority often supplies what voluntary coordination cannot. The essay offers a compact way to distinguish exclusive ownership from profitable output restriction—and to test antimonopoly policy against the protections it grants producers, rather than its declared intentions.

Behind Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, Sennholz sees no new social vision but New Deal liberalism rebranded—an 'Everything Deal' that promises education, medicine, poverty relief, housing, and clean cities while enlarging federal paternalism and eroding the market's disciplines. Nearly cost-free college, he warns, damages the moral fiber of the young; Medicare inserts bureaucracy between doctor and patient; the War on Poverty misreads unemployment, which he calls a cost phenomenon, pricing marginal workers out of jobs through minimum wages and union privileges. Urban renewal clears neighborhoods like bombed-out districts. Widening from domestic policy to Vietnam and a looming dollar crisis of gold outflows and balance-of-payments deficits, this 1965 American Opinion essay treats welfare expansion, no-win war, and monetary fragility as one interlocking symptom of national blindness.

Indeed, the "Great Society" is a Calamity Deal on the eve of the greatest debacles in our history.

The word 'communism,' Sennholz argues, once named a policy program rather than a foreign allegiance—and by that older Marx-Engels meaning, much of it now sits lodged in American institutions. Liberals may cherish civil rights and representative government yet still adopt collectivism's instruments; his distinction is between motive and mechanism. He traces a shared 'ontological materialism' running from Marx through W. W. Rostow's stages of growth and Alvin Hanson's verdict that the market no longer works, then assembles his documentary case: the 1964 Socialist Party platform laid beside Johnson's Great Society, with Norman Thomas boasting that the New Deal had already stripped socialist demands of their taint. Radicalism, in this 1965 American Opinion essay, is not an outside infection but the logical offspring of compromised anti-capitalism.

Even in this land of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, most of the Communist Manifesto has been realized during the last third of a century, and the remaining points are now scheduled on the agenda of President Johnson’s Great Society.