The archive.

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.

A strategy is not merely a permissible move: someone must have the resources to carry it out. In this short theoretical article, reprinted in 1976, Oskar Morgenstern asks what happens when resource allocation determines which strategies exist at all. Unlike chess, economic and political “power” games can change their own conditions: winnings may finance new strategic capacities, while coalition partners’ resources may reinforce or obstruct one another. His “integral game” extends this problem to the overlapping activities of earning, buying, and investing, where the same people may be opponents in one encounter and partners in another. The result is a research programme rather than a finished model, showing why, for Morgenstern, allocation cannot be understood through isolated optimization when other players help determine what resources can accomplish.

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.

Nairobi settled nothing, and for Haberler that was no calamity. The Committee of Twenty still chased a negotiated return to stable-but-adjustable par values, yet the working system was already one of floating currencies, and world trade had gone on growing beneath the improvisation. His argument hinges on a distinction officials blurred: asset convertibility, turning official balances into gold or SDRs, matters far less to commerce than ordinary market convertibility among currencies, which floating preserved. Restoring dollar convertibility, he insists, would not supply the discipline its advocates want, since the real obstacle is that governments refuse deflation for the sake of external balance. Against Giscard d'Estaing's charge that floating neither halts inflation nor yields true market rates, Haberler answers that flexible rates are a necessary shield for any country determined to stay out of the world's inflation.

If any country wishes to stay out of the world inflation, floating is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

Only ninety-five years separated Menger's Grundsatze of 1871 from the Wealth of Nations, and a mere twenty-three from Mill's great restatement of classical doctrine, a chronology Hayek uses to argue that Menger arrived not after an intellectual vacuum but in the thick of a still-dominant orthodoxy. His achievement, on this account, was not the bare idea of diminishing marginal utility but the systematic extension of subjective value to higher-order goods, complementarity, opportunity cost, and price formation. Setting Menger against Mill's incomplete value theory, the historical school, Jevons, Walras, and Marshall, Hayek stresses methodological individualism and process over mathematical equilibrium, and traces the Grundsatze's delayed influence through Bohm-Bawerk and Wieser, its absorption into neoclassical economics, its Keynesian eclipse, and a coming Austrian revival that would restore causal explanation and market process to the center.

Their scientific work seems to me to have sprung entirely from their awareness of the inadequateness of the prevailing body of theory in explaining how the market order in fact operated.

A physician may prescribe because he and his patient share a premise—that health and life are good; the policy economist, by contrast, stands on no such common moral ground. Economics may remain a value-free causal science, Rothbard concedes, but the moment it enters policy it smuggles in ethics under neutral-sounding terms. He turns this charge on Pareto optimality, the unanimity and compensation principles, Coase-Demsetz property analysis, externality internalization, price-level stabilization, and national-income accounting, showing each to rest on unstated moral premises. Because utility is subjective and ordinal, no one can scientifically weigh one person's gain against another's loss; a stolen-watch sale, or the question of compensating slaveholders or slaves, turns on justice, not technique. Economists must defend their value judgments openly or quit policy altogether.

But “utility” is a purely subjective and unmeasurable concept, and being purely psychic, it cannot be measured, either conceptually or in practice.

On the first day of April 1939, crossing into Switzerland before dawn, Engel-Janosi called himself a beggar and was told he was a proud beggar — he reached Zurich with six and a half francs. His memoir traces the long road there: a childhood in liberal Jewish bourgeois Vienna among Mahler, Bruno Walter, and the Freud circle; artillery service on the Isonzo and Piave; the collapse of the Lombard bank; two decades running a parquet factory while writing diplomatic history in the archives; and the Mises Seminar and Hayek's Geistkreis as intellectual homes. Exile carried him through wartime Cambridge to Johns Hopkins, Catholic University, and visits to the confined Ezra Pound, before the 1949 return to a poorer, younger Vienna. Belonging to the Central European lost generation, it composes a life from what fate and inheritance gave.

Was ich in den folgenden Blättern versuchen wollte: wahrhaftig zu sein über mich und über Menschen, denen ich begegnet bin — in verschiedenen Gegenden, in verschiedenen Situationen, während eines nicht kurzen Lebens.

English translation: “What I sought to attempt in the following pages: to be truthful about myself and about the people I have met—in various regions, in various situations, over the course of a not-short life.”

Two opposed criticisms of capitalism meet a single answer in this Hillsdale College lecture: that capital requirements shield incumbents from entry, and that a competitive order could retain its virtues with the state as sole supplier of capital. Kirzner's wedge is the Misesian separation of entrepreneur from capitalist—pure entrepreneurial profit is arbitrage across markets and time, earned by perceiving opportunity, never by ownership as such. Entry is blocked, he argues, only where the needed resources are monopolistically withheld, not merely because a newcomer lacks funds; the cost of proving one's competence to lenders is a real social cost, not an imperfection. Against the Berle-Galbraith thesis, the corporation emerges as an unplanned device joining entrepreneurial talent to large capital without requiring managers to own it.

We conclude, then, not only that private ownership of capital is not inconsistent with the competitive market process, but that it is in fact essential to the efficiency of the competitive market process.

Drafted in August 1973 for the German Council of Economic Experts and printed unchanged as a Kiel lecture, this expert memorandum asks whether the dollar was truly undervalued against the floating currencies, above all the D-Mark. Machlup turns a policy question into a methodological one: once rates are set by markets, expectations, capital flows, and official intervention, terms like “undervaluation” and “equilibrium exchange rate” lose any firm meaning, and calling a free-market rate wrong is merely a forecast of future correction. He rejects purchasing-power parity for small index movements, denies any clean statistical split between short- and long-term capital, and names capital flows the strongest of all forces on the exchange market. No durable, correct external value of the dollar, he concludes, can be computed at all.

Die Behauptung, der Dollar sei über- oder unterbewertet, drückt immer ein Mißtrauensvotum aus.

English translation: “The assertion that the dollar is over- or undervalued always expresses a vote of no confidence.”

Against the postwar faith in fiscal fine-tuning, Haberler binds together three things usually treated separately: economic growth, monetary stability, and personal freedom. Growth matters, he argues, because it widens the practical range of human choice, but the institutions that generate it demand discipline rather than activist management. Severe depressions, he judges, have become largely avoidable, so the live danger is now creeping inflation, and here his reassessment of the Phillips curve does the analytical work. Phillips's own mechanism, he notes, was demand-pull, not cost-push; any apparent trade-off between inflation and unemployment holds only while rising prices go unanticipated, and dissolves once expectations catch up. Set within a classical-liberal frame that reaches from the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth to wage-push unionism, the book narrows what stabilization policy can honestly promise: no durable bargain between jobs and inflation exists.

It is probably no exaggeration to say that severe depressions are a thing of the past.

What if inflation does not merely accompany unemployment but helps create it? In these two 1974 newspaper articles, combined in this republication, Hayek challenges employment policies that treat higher spending as a sufficient remedy for joblessness. His focus is the kind of work monetary expansion sustains: jobs that, he argues, become dependent on continuing or accelerating inflation. Ending that expansion then exposes a mismatch between available workers and viable activities. Yet Hayek distinguishes necessary adjustment from a destructive collapse in demand, calling for help with new employment rather than preservation of every existing job. The articles offer a concise route into his disagreement with Keynesian policy—and his qualified disagreement with Milton Friedman—over how monetary stability, wage flexibility, and political promises of full employment fit together.