The archive.

Entrepreneurs must advance wages and materials long before sales proceeds return, and when banks restrict credit, hoard cash, and slow velocity, consumers' purchasing power falls short of producers' costs—so money income and real market product drift apart. Correcting that drift is the task Mahr sets monetary policy in this 1964 study, defending stable purchasing power against 'neutral,' cost-oriented money that would merely finance the creeping inflation of monopoly wages and prices. His central move is to show that technological profit under stable money is non-inflationary, since it springs from falling costs rather than redistribution. Linking the multiplier to circuit velocity through the 'allocation period,' and rereading the New Deal's deficits as real but self-defeating, he shifts the modern danger from deflationary collapse to creeping inflation driven by pressure-group politics.

A policy of stable money creates profits of a non-inflationary character, if we define inflation as an increase of monetary national income beyond real net market product.

What counts as a fair objection to a theory that deliberately leaves things out? In this 1964 address, Oskar Morgenstern defends game theory without claiming that it can encompass every decision or resolve the problem of war. His sharpest distinction concerns rationality: strategic analysis, he argues, does not merely assume rational conduct but seeks to define it when each actor’s prospects depend on others’ choices. He acknowledges unresolved mathematical problems while challenging critics to explain how appeals to intuition or judgment handle complexities that formal models omit. Readers can discover why multiple solutions might reflect social relations rather than theoretical failure—and why acknowledging a model’s limits need not mean abandoning its discipline.

A gift can leave everyone else’s possessions untouched yet give its recipient power over them. This possibility anchors Oskar Morgenstern’s challenge to the apparent simplicity of Pareto improvement: who can establish that nobody is worse off when additional resources change what people can do? In this 1964 research memorandum, he treats bargaining, strategic testimony, and shifts in economic power as central to welfare analysis rather than inconvenient exceptions. His examples range from money sufficient to establish a firm to adaptive computers entrusted with decisions whose consequences their designers cannot fully anticipate. The resulting critique shows how judgments about resource distributions depend on assumptions about knowledge, cooperation, and future action. Morgenstern points toward game-theoretic standards of behavior, while acknowledging that the required reconstruction remains unfinished.

Keynesianism as doctrine may be dead, but its slogans still cloud economic understanding—so runs the argument of this 1964 Freeman review of W. H. Hutt's Keynesianism—Retrospect and Prospect. The General Theory succeeded, in Mises's reading, not by advancing theory but by lending scientific respectability to policies governments already wanted: deficit finance, currency devaluation, price intervention, and the coercive privileges of labor unions, the whole machinery of the New Deal. Hutt's value lies in clearing the air, restating the elementary price theory that Keynesian vocabulary had buried. For Mises the decisive charge is that Keynes and his followers simply do not grasp what prices are or how they arise; treating them as administrative quantities to be set by authority replaces voluntary coordination with force and conceals the resulting dislocations beneath a fog of terminology.

The main failure of Keynes and all his disciples and admirers is to be seen in the fact that they simply do not know what prices are, how they originate, and what they bring about.

Paul Samuelson had argued that a theory resting on empirically false assumptions must be discarded; this short polemic answers that the rule would abolish theory as such, since every empirical test yokes a model to assumed occurrences. The sharpest thrust is turned against Samuelson himself. His celebrated factor-price equalization theorem, Machlup notes, derives illuminating conclusions from wildly unrealistic premises about countries, commodities, factors, and technology—precisely the abstract method Samuelson elsewhere condemns. Far from an embarrassment, that theorem exemplifies how strong simple cases point toward truths buried in complex situations. The essay thus enlists a leading formalist's finest work as evidence for the indispensability of unrealistic assumptions in economic reasoning.

What Samuelson does here is to reject all theory.

Looking back from his seventieth birthday in 1964, Hazlitt counts himself a fortunate man, luckiest, he says, in his friends. The address moves from memoir into intellectual genealogy: a poverty-forced start at The Wall Street Journal, the discovery through Philip Wicksteed that economics is a rigorous science of human action, and the decisive debt to Benjamin Anderson, H. L. Mencken, and above all Ludwig von Mises. Yet the mood darkens into civilizational diagnosis. Separating genuine scientific and material progress from what he sees as decadence in art, morals, and politics, he reclaims the word 'liberal' for the defenders of limited government and free markets, then turns the reproach on his own side. Invoking Orwell's Winston Smith, he insists the duty to say two plus two equals four cannot be retired.

But the hard thing must be said that, collectively, we just haven't been good enough.

Strip away the metaphysics, and a right is a legally protected sphere of action that imposes a matching duty on everyone else — this reciprocity is the spine of Hazlitt's 1964 essay in legal and political philosophy. From it he dissolves the fashionable quarrel between 'property rights' and 'human rights,' since both are claims of persons against persons, and rereads natural rights not as self-evident heavenly gifts but as ideal legal rights a just order ought to secure. His sharpest fire falls on 'pseudo-rights': Roosevelt's freedom from want and fear, or the United Nations' rights to paid holidays, which name desirable goods without saying who is obliged to supply them. Rights are inviolable, he concludes, not by mystical descent but because durable social peace depends on principled adherence to them.

Law and Right are correlative terms.

No inquiry begins from bare fact: without a prior sense of what to look for, even patient observation of raw data yields nothing intelligible. From this premise Hayek builds a defence of pattern prediction. He separates simple phenomena, where a few variables permit exact forecasts, from complex phenomena—life, mind, society—where the relevant elements multiply beyond any hope of ascertaining them, so that theory can predict only classes of patterns rather than particular events. Darwinian natural selection becomes his model case: rigorous and falsifiable, yet unable to specify which species will arise. Statistics cannot rescue us, he warns, since it suppresses the very structural relations that make complex wholes what they are. Scientific maturity lies in recognising the boundaries of prediction rather than imitating the methods of simpler domains.

But there seems to exist a fairly easy and adequate way to measure the degree of complexity of different kinds of abstract patterns.

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.

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.

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.