The archive.

Neither in its causes nor in its effects is inflation a purely monetary affair, this wide-ranging treatise maintains: it springs from the plain fact that too many people want everything at once. Kerschagl treats it as a fraud against savers, pensioners, and creditors and as the greatest economic revolution imaginable — expropriating money-holders, rewarding debtors including the state, and dissolving the accounting on which capitalist calculation rests. Across coin debasement in Rome, John Law's Banque Royale, the assignats, and the German, English, French, and American inflations of the twentieth century, he weighs quantity theory against Schumpeter and Keynes, dismisses gold as no reliable safeguard, and denies that full employment can ever be bought with fiduciary credit. Stable money, he concludes, is the precondition of democracy, welfare, and freedom alike.

Gold ist kein Heilmittel, auch nicht gegen Inflation.

English translation: “Gold is no remedy, not even against inflation.”

Did the alchemists ever truly make gold? Kerschagl's concise history answers no — not a single controlled specimen survives — while insisting that the quest was never mainly about gold at all: most adepts were physicians and apothecaries chasing elixirs, panaceas, and remedies. From Mesopotamian metallurgy and Alexandrian experiment through Arab transmission, Paracelsus's turn from speculation toward empirical medicine, and the frauds of Cagliostro, Casanova, and the gold-makers at Rudolf II's Prague court, the book separates genuine discovery — mercury, phosphorus, porcelain, mineral acids — from delusion and swindle. It closes with Franz Joseph's skeptical assay trials and the twentieth century's nuclear transmutation of mercury into gold, scientifically real yet economically pointless. Alchemy's failed quest, the verdict runs, nonetheless vastly enlarged human knowledge.

Nur ein kleiner Teil der Arbeit der Alchimisten war in Wirklichkeit der Suche nach dem künstlichen Gold gewidmet.

English translation: “Only a small part of the alchemists' work was in reality devoted to the search for artificial gold.”

Thirty years after The Road to Serfdom, Hayek returns to its warning from the vantage of the inflationary 1970s, insisting he never claimed that limited intervention must automatically breed tyranny, only that bad principles corrode the market order on which political freedom rests. His diagnosis is constitutional: representative democracy has been wrongly fused with unlimited parliamentary sovereignty, so that parties bidding for majorities must buy support by granting favours to organized interests. Recovering the classical distinction between law as general rules of just conduct and command aimed at particular groups, he exposes social justice as continual coercive adjustment and sketches a deliberately utopian remedy, two assemblies, one governing and administering, the other confined to general law by long non-renewable terms, with a constitutional court policing the boundary between them.

Although the threat to free institutions now comes from a source different from that with which I was concerned 30 years ago, it has become even more acute than it was then.

Conservatives, Rothbard charges, have long ceded the moral high ground to the Left, objecting to egalitarian programs only as impractical—a fatal concession, since ideals move the status quo. His 1973 essay therefore attacks the ideal itself. Equality, he argues, is intelligible only with respect to a specific attribute; taken literally it collapses into identity, and identity would demand coercive leveling of beauty, intelligence, and strength—the dystopias of Hartley's Facial Justice and Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron." Grounding human difference in biology as well as culture, he assails egalitarian readings of sex roles, youth quotas, and intelligence, then widens the charge from anthropology to ontology: utopian socialism from Fourier to Lenin becomes a revolt against the very structure of nature. Egalitarianism, he concludes, is not a humane ideal impeded by circumstance but something anti-human at its root.

The egalitarian world would necessarily be a world of horror fiction—a world of faceless and identical creatures, devoid of all individuality, variety, or special creativity.

Everything follows from a single axiom: no one may initiate physical violence against another person or their property. From that nonaggression principle Rothbard builds an uncompromising system that asks not for smaller government but for none at all, with privatized courts and police, homesteaded property, and the abolition of conscription, welfare, and the central bank. He grounds self-ownership in natural law rather than utilitarian calculation, derives civil liberties from control of material resources rather than treating them as a separate class of human rights, and reads the State as an organized criminal band living by taxation and war. Ranging across schooling, inflation, ecology, victimless crime, foreign policy, and stateless medieval Ireland, this manifesto casts libertarianism as the true heir of America's revolutionary radicalism.

In fact, there are no human rights that are separable from property rights.

Beneath the questions of money, banking, and policy technique lies a deeper subject—human action itself. Framing Percy L. Greaves's Buenos Aires lectures on the dollar crisis, Mises grounds monetary economics in a broader anthropology of purposeful conduct, dividing the world into events action can influence and those beyond its reach, and rejecting alike fatalism and the fantasy of technocratic omnipotence. Growing knowledge enlarges human power, he insists, without ever making man omniscient. The section on gold treats it not as an arbitrary convention but as the historically evolved medium whose supply is fixed by nature rather than political discretion—a standing check on the interested parties who would manipulate purchasing power. Neither inflation nor deflation, on this account, can serve as a lasting policy; the dollar crisis is the wage of abandoning that discipline.

The gold standard made the marvelous evolution of modern capitalism technically possible.

After Nixon closed the gold window and Bretton Woods came apart, Sennholz set out the Austrian case in its starkest constitutional form: inflation is not high prices but the authorities' creation of new money, and rising prices merely its later, uneven effects. The true target is political power over money, which lets governments tax, borrow, and redistribute without open consent—financing a welfare state whose social programs are too popular to oppose while credit expansion breeds the boom-bust cycle and hidden transfers from savers to debtors. Against this he defends the gold-coin standard as the monetary constitution of a free society, distinguishing it from gold-bullion and gold-exchange arrangements that keep gold's name while centralizing reserves and inviting suspension. His reform is liberal, not technocratic: legal gold ownership, enforceable gold clauses, private minting, and competing monies rather than a parity decreed by the same state that destroyed convertibility.

It is not money, as is sometimes said, but the depreciation of money — the cruel and crafty destruction of money — that is the root of many evils.

When Washington suspended the dollar's convertibility into gold in August 1971, it exposed how deeply American inflation had become the world's problem, the theme of this 1973 essay, collected in Haberler's volume on inflation and business cycles. Because the dollar served as reserve and intervention currency, U.S. price rises under Vietnam and Great Society financing were transmitted abroad in amplified form, forcing Germany, Switzerland, and Austria to resist inflation they had not created. Haberler distinguishes a pure dollar crisis from a mark or yen crisis, locates the fundamental defect in the adjustable peg, and defends greater exchange-rate flexibility through managed floating. Only domestic monetary restraint, he insists, can end inflation itself, but floating spares the system disruptive one-way speculation.

But let me repeat, the compulsion to submit to imported inflation arises only under a regime of fixed exchanges and convertibility.

Behind the fashionable slogan of “international liquidity,” Machlup finds a cluster of distinct problems the phrase conveniently blurs: reserve adequacy, exchange-rate adjustment, the status of gold, and the institutional meaning of Special Drawing Rights. Replying to Teschner in a tightly timed conference intervention, he refuses any single-cause story of the Bretton Woods collapse — rapid reserve growth let countries postpone adjustment, but shrinking American gold cover mattered too. He defends the original SDR as an unbacked reserve asset distributed gratis, warns against schemes that would smuggle back the notion of “coverage,” and turns his “Mrs. Machlup’s wardrobe” parable against simplistic reserve-demand estimates. The lecture’s force lies in dismantling the pseudo-precision of monetary reform and asking what its concepts actually measure.

Die Währungsbehörden sind in der Regel optimistisch und glauben immer, daß der gegenwärtige Kurs auch der richtige ist.

English translation: “The monetary authorities are as a rule optimistic and always believe that the prevailing rate is also the correct one.”

Between the grown order that no one designed and the made order that serves a chosen purpose lies the whole of Hayek's mature legal and political theory. Across three volumes gathered here in the one-volume form he originally intended, he distinguishes cosmos from taxis, the judge-discovered law of liberty (nomos) from legislative command (thesis), and the market's spontaneous catallaxy from the deliberate economy. The middle volume mounts a sustained assault on 'social justice,' which he calls an empty, quasi-religious incantation, since a spontaneous process assigns rewards to no one's design and so can be neither just nor unjust. Behind these arguments stands a warning that unlimited democracy, captured by organized interests, drifts toward the very totalitarian power classical constitutionalism was built to restrain, a danger he answers with proposals for constitutional redesign.

The tragic illusion was that the adoption of democratic procedures made it possible to dispense with all other limitations on governmental power.

Forecasting the future balance of power tempts planners to mistake projection for knowledge, and this collaborative study sets out to discipline the temptation. Morgenstern, Knorr, and Heiss treat power as a composite of economic capacity, technological change, military organization, and political will, elements that resist extrapolation to very different degrees. Engineering development can be projected within wide error bounds; decisive scientific breakthroughs cannot. They dissect the methods of the day, from the Delphi technique and Wilhelm Fucks's physics-styled power indices to Kahn and Wiener's scenarios and the Limits to Growth simulation, faulting each for suppressing the historical turning points that dominate real outcomes. Energy dependence emerges as their one firm warning, leaving Japan and Western Europe strategically exposed, while China's trajectory hinges on unpredictable political persistence. Armed force, they insist, becomes power only through the will to use it.

Our work has impressed us with the inherent difficulties of forecasting although we realize that objects of forecasting vary greatly in their conjecturability.

Cambridge neo-Ricardians and neo-classical formalists conducted a 'grand debate' over capital and growth while sharing, Lachmann charges, the same fatal habit: treating aggregates like income, output, and capital as autonomous magnitudes whose composition can be ignored. This Hobart Paper diagnoses that habit as macro-economic formalism and insists that what most needs explaining—heterogeneous capital, divergent expectations, failed plans, entrepreneurial revision—vanishes into the totals. Profit is his sharpest case: not a Ricardian uniform rate nor Solow's social rate of return, but a shifting spread of price-cost discrepancies that competition never levels. Steady-state growth is impossible because the capital stock never assumes its equilibrium composition, and technical change becomes progress only after markets test it through loss and abandonment. Incomes policy, growth targets, and indicative planning follow as misguided attempts to command what only discovery reveals.

An equilibrium rate of profit is thus a contradiction in terms.