The archive.

Can society claim the rental value of natural sites while protecting ownership of everything people build upon them? In this 1957 essay, republished in 2011, Murray N. Rothbard challenges Henry George’s single tax at precisely that boundary. He argues that separating site value from accumulated improvements requires arbitrary assessment, and that landowners perform a service even when they postpone development: they allocate scarce locations across uses and time. His economic objections lead into a moral dispute over whether gains arising from social development justify confiscation. The essay offers a compact encounter between two defenses of property that diverge over land, revealing how Rothbard connects market valuation, entrepreneurial foresight, and original appropriation—and why he regards taxing away land rent as a threat to those connections.

One adjective, Hayek contends, has done more to muddle political thought than any other. 'Social'—as in 'social market economy' or 'social Rechtsstaat'—lends moral prestige while quietly voiding the words it modifies of definite meaning, until almost nothing in life is not 'social' in some sense and the term becomes, for all practical purposes, empty. Presented here in a revised English translation of his 1957 German essay, the argument recovers an older sense of society as spontaneous order—language, custom, law, evolved without central design—and sets it against the modern demand that individuals and governments pursue concrete collective aims they cannot fully know. That demand, he warns, corrodes the inherited rules of conduct on which it rests, and much that parades as social proves, in the deeper sense, thoroughly anti-social.

To be “social” is not the same as being good or “righteous in the eyes of the Lord”.

How much mathematics should an introduction to economic modelling teach, and which tools can it afford to leave out? In this 1958 review of E. F. Beach’s Economic Models—An Exposition, Gerhard Tintner judges accessibility against technical coverage. He values Beach’s use of economic examples to make mathematical and statistical methods intelligible to readers with substantial economic knowledge but limited mathematical training. Yet he finds the explanations compressed and challenges the omission of matrices, determinants, input-output models and linear programming: these, he argues, are no harder than topics already included. This brief assessment offers a concrete view of Tintner’s pedagogical priorities, showing why an example-rich introduction can succeed while still leaving readers without useful analytical tools.

How much can a small sample tell agricultural administrators before a full census is available? In this brief 1958 review of Heinrich Strecker’s Moderne Methoden in der Agrarstatistik, Gerhard Tintner singles out a striking result: a sample covering 2% of West German agricultural enterprises produced preliminary census figures, nine-tenths of whose deviations from complete enumeration were below 10%. Tintner’s interest lies in the practical performance of statistical methods, rather than a separate examination of their theory. His favorable assessment connects this example with ongoing surveys of farm labor and agricultural production, while noting Strecker’s command of international research. The review offers a compact account of the concrete evidence on which Tintner based his confidence in agricultural sampling.

When does a statistical distribution become an economically interpretable model? In this concise 1958 review of J. Aitchison and J. A. C. Brown’s The Lognormal Distribution, Gerhard Tintner singles out the connections between income dispersion, inequality measures, and consumer demand. He values the authors’ use of Lorenz diagrams to relate lognormal variance to income concentration, and finds particular novelty in their derivation of Engel curves linking purchases to income. His assessment shows what an econometrician looks for beyond statistical fit: meaningful parameters and a model that can accommodate aggregation, prices, and household composition. Strong praise for the monograph’s methods and multilingual bibliography is tempered by a specific historical correction—the omission of H. T. Davis’s earlier work on income distribution.

Calling an economic assumption a fiction does not settle whether it helps or distorts explanation. This distinction drives Karl Pribram’s 1958 review of Paul K. Crosser’s Economic Fictions, an attack on subjectivist economics in the name of Smith and Ricardo. Pribram counters that the classical economists themselves used fictitious standards, including units of labor costs: the relevant question is what such constructions do, not merely whether they depart from observation. His defense remains conditional, leaving open whether particular fictions produce erroneous interpretations. In a few pages, the review exposes a dispute between reasoning through constructed representations and grounding economics in supposedly stable essences—and shows why criticism of abstraction requires more than identifying its unreality.

Can measures designed to protect tenants and farmers undermine the welfare they promise? In this 1958 review of Alfred Amonn’s Wirtschaftspolitik auf Irrwegen, Richard Kerschagl sympathetically examines a market-oriented answer, emphasizing policy disputes relevant to Austria. His treatment of agricultural protection brings the stakes into focus: Amonn’s case for cheaper food and more productive farming entails accepting the closure or absorption of marginal farms. Kerschagl praises the book’s accessible economic reasoning while questioning some of its chosen authorities. The review offers a compact encounter with his evaluative priorities: protection must be judged by its costs to consumers and taxpayers, and individual interventions by their possible cumulative direction—a concern that leads him to endorse Amonn’s warning about collectivism.

Grant an inventor exclusive rights over a new process, and you plant a monopoly in an economy that otherwise prizes competition, the tension Machlup was asked to weigh when the Senate patent subcommittee commissioned this study. He traces the institution from Venice's 1474 law and England's Statute of Monopolies through the free-trade antipatent movement of 1850 to 1873, when the Netherlands actually repealed its patent law, and dissects the four classic defenses: natural property in ideas, monopoly as just reward, monopoly profit as incentive, and disclosure traded for temporary exclusivity. His conclusion is a famous refusal to conclude, that on present knowledge economics can pronounce the system neither a clear gain nor a clear loss to society.

To confuse an important invention with the patent that excludes people from using it is like confusing an important bridge with the tollgates that close it to many who might want to use it.

Can labour explain capital formation without treating saving as its original cause? In this critical essay, Alfred Amonn examines Alexander Kokkalis’s attempt to rebuild economic theory around human productive powers. Kokkalis locates productive advance in invention, organization, and education rather than abstention from consumption; even the maintenance of workers becomes part of production, not merely its endpoint. Amonn takes these connections seriously while testing the distinctions that sustain them: between natural conditions and controllable means, and between directive intellectual labour and executive bodily labour. The essay’s interest lies in this combination of sympathetic reconstruction and conceptual scrutiny. It allows readers to see how redefining labour changes the explanation of capital, income, and wages—and where that explanation depends on contestable premises.

An automated rolling mill can raise output without spreading prosperity. In this 1958 article, Hans Bayer examines that gap through Austria’s uneven adoption of automation, from VÖEST’s industrial installations to the difficulties facing smaller firms short of capital and secure markets. His central distinction is between profitability for an enterprise and welfare for the economy: lower costs need not produce lower prices, and displaced workers need not find new jobs. Bayer treats credit coordination, retraining, shorter working hours, and equal educational opportunities as conditions for sharing technical gains, not incidental remedies. The article offers a concrete encounter with an economist who welcomes industrial modernization while asking how its growing productive power can serve personal development rather than strengthen economic concentration.

What should a social academy offer working adults beyond skills for economic competition? In this 1958 article, Hans Bayer argues that vocational learning must cultivate independent judgment and social responsibility, not merely occupational competence. His distinctive concern is the connection between personal formation and democratic counterpower: unions and cooperatives need educated members, not just capable leaders, if they are to resist concentrated economic power and commercial manipulation. Bayer makes this educational ideal concrete through unequal access to further study, neglected working-class talent, and the possibilities of leisure beyond consumption. The article lets readers examine both the institutional promise of adult education and the demanding ethical conception of Bildung on which Bayer bases it—a conception that refuses to count knowledge or prestigious schooling alone as genuine education.

Beryllium production expanded even as its price fell: this apparent paradox gives Richard Kerschagl’s 1958 survey its economic focus. A metal valued in aircraft, nuclear technology, and copper alloys was acquiring new sources of supply, notably in India and the Belgian Congo. Yet Kerschagl refuses to equate rising reported tonnage with increased extraction alone: better statistical coverage and improved metal recovery complicate the figures. His account distinguishes geographically dispersed mining from concentrated American and British processing, and connects cheaper supplies with a wider range of economically viable uses. Readers can discover both the changing supply geography of a strategic metal and the care required to interpret production statistics whose units, coverage, and relationship to usable metal vary.