The archive.

What made Adam Smith great, Hayek maintains in this 1976 essay, was not technical originality about value, distribution, or money, much of which had been anticipated before him, but his grasp of how complex cooperation becomes possible without anyone directing it. Recast in modern terms, Smith's division of labour becomes a theory of dispersed knowledge: the individual, guided by prices toward the likely gain of receipts over outlay rather than toward visible wants, serves a great society he cannot survey. Hayek corrects the old libel that Smith preached selfishness, insisting the argument is institutional, not ethical. And he enlists Smith's man of system, who would arrange people like pieces on a chessboard, against the constructivism behind modern demands for social justice and centrally assigned shares.

The great society indeed became possible by the individual directing his own efforts not towards visible wants but towards what the signals of the market represented as the likely gain of receipts over outlay.

Prosperity, in this compact Austrian essay, is nothing but accumulated productive capital — tools, machinery, inventories, and the savings that sustain them — and a nation can enlarge its consumption while quietly devouring the base on which future wages depend. Sennholz traces that hidden erosion through progressive taxation, deficit spending, inflation, regulation, and union privilege, each converting productive capital into present consumption. Estate taxes confiscate working businesses rather than luxury; inflation lets firms mistake nominal profits for real gains and pay their taxes out of capital; artificially cheap credit seeds the malinvestment a bust later writes off for good. His warning is as political as economic: once citizens grow accustomed to benefits, a shrinking base provokes louder demands rather than reform. The remedy is austere — sound money, lower taxes, market pricing, and restored thrift.

Government spending seems to be an all-purpose remedy for economic and social ills, the key to important political ends.

Governments will reach for inflation again and again, this 1976 lecture argues, because they answer to voters and organized interests, unless some mechanism restrains them. Hayek's remedy is radical in its simplicity: strip the state of its monopoly over money and legal tender, and let people contract, keep accounts, and hold balances in whatever currency they trust. He traces the disease to the Keynesian faith that expanding aggregate expenditure secures lasting prosperity, and contends that under free exchange rates good money would drive out bad, inverting Gresham's Law. Delivered for the Institute of Economic Affairs and reprinted here with commentaries from Ivor Pearce, Harold Rose, Douglas Jay, and Sir Keith Joseph, it closes with a historical appendix running from the French assignats to the German rentenmark.

Our only hope for a stable money is indeed now to find a way to protect money from politics.

Marx and Engels demanded the abolition of inheritance, and in John W. Robbins's framing that demand hovers over America's federal estate and gift taxes—the subject Sennholz dissects as a central symptom of the fiscal state. His argument is chiefly economic: death duties consume capital, not luxury hoards, since large fortunes are mostly farms, factories, inventories, and business organizations that serve consumers. Tracing the levy from temporary wartime measures to the permanent 1916 estate tax and its climb toward seventy-seven percent, he reads its survival as moralized resentment rather than fiscal necessity, nourished by Henry George, institutionalism, and progressive reform. Both predecessor and successor bear it—the one altering saving, risk, and succession in anticipation, the other forced to liquidate productive assets, with widows, family firms, and farms as casualties. Inflation silently compounds the damage, and progressive death taxation, he concludes, breeds class rigidity rather than equality.

Inflation and tax progression are pushing all estates towards the top rate of taxation.

Falling prices can signal greater abundance, not merely economic distress. In this 1976 contribution, republished in 2016, Murray N. Rothbard challenges both inflationary policy and the ideal of a stable price level, distinguishing productivity gains from increased demand for money and contraction of credit. Cheaper televisions and calculators make his initial case concrete: consumers can gain purchasing power without receiving higher money incomes. The sharper tension emerges when this defense of lower prices becomes an argument for liquidating unsound investments and withdrawing protections for banks and wages. Readers can examine where Rothbard’s account of consumer gains ends and his Austrian program of institutional reform begins—and why accepting one need not settle the other.

The textbook supply-and-demand cross, Kirzner charges, cannot actually explain how a market reaches equilibrium: Walrasian stories assume a single price already exists, Marshallian ones assume participants know the relevant demand and supply prices, when disequilibrium is by definition a condition of imperfect knowledge. Presented at the 1974 Austrian economics conference, the essay supplies the missing element—not another curve but a theory of learning. Its hinge is the contrast between Robbinsian allocation, which optimizes among known means and ends, and Misesian action, which adds alertness to opportunities no one has yet noticed. From this Kirzner reframes competition as discovery, treats advertising as part of the process by which consumers come to see what is available, and dissolves Chamberlin's line between production and selling costs, since producers always make in anticipation of selling.

The real economic problems in any society arise from the phenomenon of unperceived opportunities.

Generations of textbooks credit Barone, Lange, and Lerner with solving Mises's challenge to socialist planning; Rothbard denies they ever touched it. Their demonstrations that a planning board could solve equations of prices and production presuppose a static world of perfect knowledge—precisely the conditions under which calculation would pose no problem. Real production, for Mises and Hayek, unfolds amid uncertainty, dispersed knowledge, heterogeneous capital, and entrepreneurial judgment, and demands genuine markets in the factors of production. Lange-Lerner 'market socialism' only mimics competitive pricing while abolishing the capital markets that generate prices; Soviet planning survived parasitically, on external capitalist prices. Developing a subjectivist theory of cost as forward-looking and unmeasurable, Rothbard extends the argument beyond socialism to any 'One Big Firm' that would swallow the very markets it depends on.

The fact that in a changeless world of perfect knowledge and general equilibrium a socialist planning board could “solve” equations of prices and production was for Mises a worse than useless demonstration.

Though capital and interest sit at the center of the Misesian system, Mises himself published little on either before 1940, leaving his theory scattered across Socialism, Human Action, and seminar remarks. Reconstructing it, Kirzner presents a radicalized Mengerian subjectivism that severs capital from capital goods: capital is not a physical stock but an accounting concept made possible by money prices and entrepreneurial calculation, while interest expresses the universal preference for present over future satisfaction rather than any productivity of machines or roundabout methods. This purifies Boehm-Bawerk of his residual objectivism, the average period of production and the productivity concessions, and rejects the Clark-Knight vision of capital as a self-perpetuating fund yielding automatic income. In real markets, Kirzner concludes, capitalist, entrepreneur, and factor owner are one, and observed returns blend originary interest with entrepreneurial gain or loss.

Knight correctly characterized Mises as taking an extreme Austrian position on interest by refusing to attribute any explanatory role to the objective, or physical, conditions governing production in a capital-using world.

When John von Neumann published his expanding-economy model in 1937, he gave economics one of its rare transformative events. Morgenstern and Thompson build on it here, synthesizing two decades of work into the KMT model, which removes von Neumann's restrictive assumption that every good figures in every process and admits multiple expansion rates, subeconomies, and game-theoretic solution methods. Across fourteen chapters they extend the framework to open economies that import and export at world prices, to consumption and savings, to trading blocks and a world model bound by a common expansion rate, and, pointedly, to contraction and compression, since resource limits make endless growth no longer self-evidently desirable. Throughout, they insist the models apply to any economy regardless of political organization, deliberately omit money and stochastic elements, and treat expansion, stationarity, and collapse as problems of structure, optimization, and computable linear programming.

Long before Menger, the ideas that would define Austrian economics—subjective value, scarcity, market price as common estimation—had been worked out by Aristotle, the medieval Schoolmen, and the theologians of Salamanca. Marshalling the revisionist scholarship of Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, Raymond de Roover, and Emil Kauder, Rothbard overturns the familiar story that Adam Smith and Ricardo founded the science; in his telling they shunted it onto a wrong track, displacing a Continental subjectivism with labor and cost theories. He follows the thread from Buridan, Aquinas, and Covarrubias through Grotius, Turgot, and Say, contending that Menger revived a buried tradition rather than inventing one. The result is polemical historiography—a redrawn genealogy meant to restore forgotten predecessors and prove that marginal utility had roots centuries deep.

The just price is found not by counting the cost but by the common estimation.

Did OPEC's quadrupling of crude prices really cause the stagflation of the mid-1970s? Haberler's answer, developed as the lead paper of this symposium, is a firm no: the oil shock was costly but not the master cause. Dearer oil imposes a terms-of-trade loss that a flexible economy would absorb through a once-for-all fall in real income; only downward-rigid money wages convert it into unemployment or inflation. The shock, he argues, struck an economy already destabilized by an unsustainable boom. On the international side he deflates fears of the 'petrodollar,' since OPEC surpluses must return as purchases or investment and the Euro-dollar market had already recycled them. Rejecting official schemes that quarantine oil deficits from the rest, he insists each country confront its overall balance of payments through floating, IMF borrowing, or domestic monetary and fiscal measures.

The oil price rise was not a major factor in bringing on inflation and recession.

An economist who recommends a policy in the name of his science, Rothbard argues, has almost always cheated. Drawing a hard line between ethics—the study of which ends men ought to pursue—and value-free praxeology, he shows that appeals to majority preference, social consensus, or the merits of progressive taxation cannot turn a moral stance into a scientific finding. Demonstrated preference licenses only a narrow claim: voluntary exchange benefits its participants, while state coercion imposes at least one loser. That alone cannot prove laissez-faire. His closing target is Mises, whose utilitarian liberalism assumes men prefer peace and prosperity yet cannot answer those who knowingly choose equality, power, or nationalism. Liberty's defense, he concludes, requires an objective ethics that lies beyond economics.

That leaves him with the first choice: to make crystal clear that he is speaking not as an economist but as a private citizen who is making his own confessedly arbitrary and ad hoc value pronouncements.