The archive.

Can a growing economy outrun its supply of gold? The objection sounds practical, but Sennholz treats it as a conceptual confusion useful to governments seeking elastic finance. His reply separates money from wealth: people who demand more money usually mean more goods and capital, and multiplying units creates neither—any quantity of gold can serve as a medium of exchange, since fewer units simply gain purchasing power and more units lose it. The belief in the monetary needs of business, he argues, already concedes that some authority should manage money, a dogma Keynesians and monetarists share while quarreling only over method. Turning to the charge that mining gold is wasteful, he makes the law of costs a monetary virtue: gold's expensive production guards its value, whereas paper's negligible cost exposes fiat money to depreciation, redistribution, and the political incentives that keep the presses running.

There is no shortage of gold today and there has been no such shortage in the past.

Classical philology, in Wolf's old definition, is the study of human nature as it became manifest in the Greeks, a formula Voegelin finds has grown strange, because specialization and Western 'deculturation' have made the study of man's nature itself suspect. Against the modern faith in limitless historical transformation he restores the Greek movement from doxa to episteme, the metaleptic tension of existence toward the divine ground, and education as Platonic peri-agoge, a turning-around, over against a schooling that merely adjusts students to the reigning climate of opinion. Opinion does not stay harmless, he warns: it becomes the murderous reality of the gas chambers. The Greek differentiation of reason, he concludes, fixed standards for the exploration of consciousness behind which no one is permitted to fall back.

There is a nature of man, a definite structure of existence that puts limits on perfectibility.

Written as a memorial tribute to Ludwig von Mises, this short essay distills what Kirzner takes to be his teacher's single most consequential idea: that the market must be perceived exclusively in process terms. Against the twentieth-century habit of treating market theory as the derivation of an equilibrium already latent in the data—the market imagined as a computer grinding out solutions to simultaneous equations—Kirzner recovers Mises's picture of prices as emerging through the interplay of participants acting on limited, piecemeal knowledge. The stakes are political as well as technical: if the market is only a mechanism, a planner might simulate it, and the socialist calculation argument loses its force. Mises's answer, on this reading, lies in restless entrepreneurial alertness and the ceaseless, impartial court of active competition.

For Mises the market is not a computer grinding out equilibrium solutions to sets of simultaneous equations.

Economics went astray when it took physics for its model and positivism for its badge of legitimacy—chasing controlled experiments where no variable stays fixed and where predictions alter the conditions they forecast. Rothbard's alternative is praxeology, the science that begins from the axiom that human beings act purposively toward chosen ends and deduces qualitative, if-then laws rather than numerical constants. He recovers a neglected lineage running through Jean-Baptiste Say, Cairnes, Senior, and the Austrians, and anchors it in methodological individualism: collectives such as 'society' and 'the state' are but shorthand for patterns of individual action. Forecasting, he insists, is an interpretive art akin to history rather than laboratory prediction, and econometrics a misplaced search for constants in human affairs.

Only an individual has a mind; only an individual can feel, see, sense, and perceive; only an individual can adopt values or make choices; only an individual can act.

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.”