The archive.

Scarcity, valuation, time, uncertainty: Rothbard derives them all from a single axiom—that individuals act consciously toward chosen goals—unfolding an entire economics by verbal deduction rather than equations. Mathematical economics, positivist falsifiability, and econometrics he treats as misreadings of what human choice actually is. The essay's signature move is a friendly break with Mises: where Mises called the action axiom Kantian and a priori, Rothbard grounds it in Aristotelian-Thomist realism, self-evident yet empirical in a sense deeper than post-Humean empiricism allows. He marks praxeology off from psychology, ethics, technology, and history, defends methodological individualism, and denies that heterogeneous historical events can ever test an economic law—though theory remains indispensable for interpreting them.

In short, praxeological economics is the structure of logical implications of the fact that individuals act.

For all its scientific pretensions, socialism's real defence is to place its doctrine beyond criticism by treating every objection as a mere conflict of values. Hayek refuses the manoeuvre, insisting that socialism makes testable claims about means, effects, and institutional compatibility, and that they fail. Once any shared value is admitted, one may ask whether collectivist institutions actually preserve it. He distinguishes the hot socialism of nationalization from the cold socialism of taxation and benefits, restates the calculation debate against Marx, Lange, and planning in natura, and grounds the knowledge function of prices in marginal utility and changing rates of substitution no board can compute. Socialism, he concludes, fails morally, politically, and materially, while an omnipotent democracy that treats every grievance as an entitlement renders society ungovernable.

A society in which everyone is organised as a member of some group to force government to help him get what he wants is self-destructive.

What does an anomalous choice refute: a mathematical construction, its empirical reach, or the experiment used to test it? In this essay, Oskar Morgenstern defends the expected utility theory he developed with John von Neumann while acknowledging experiences its axioms may not capture. His objections to tests involving minute probabilities and imaginary fortunes turn on whether respondents can meaningfully assess the choices offered. Yet his defence leaves room for the pleasure of gambling, the effects of time, and preferences that resist a complete ordering. Writing as a co-architect rather than a detached commentator, Morgenstern exposes a productive tension between confidence in formal proof and uncertainty about human preference. Readers can discover why preserving an axiomatic achievement need not mean treating it as a finished account of decision-making.

A phrase can win moral authority precisely by escaping analysis, and social justice is Hayek's example. Read as a synonym for distributive justice, it presupposes a distributor, yet market incomes are assigned by no collective will, emerging instead from countless lawful actions whose combined result no one intends or foresees. Justice attaches to individual conduct, he argues, not to the aggregate pattern that many just actions produce. The demand for it he traces to atavism: moral instincts formed in the small face-to-face hunting band, admirable among intimates but maladapted to the extended order of strangers that property, contract, and catallaxy make possible. To impose a just distribution is to falsify the price signals that coordinate dispersed knowledge, revert to tribal sharing, and license coercion in the name of an undefined ideal.

The needs of this ancient primitive kind of society determined much of the moral feelings which still govern us, and which we approve in others.

Money re-enters general economic theory through individual action, marginal utility, and market exchange unfolding in time; that is the thread Rothbard follows in reconstructing Mises's monetary theory, which he traces to the 1912 Theory of Money and Credit. The demand for money becomes the demand to hold cash balances, and its purchasing power a heterogeneous array of exchange ratios rather than the inverse of some measurable price level. At the theoretical center stands Mises's regression theorem, which dissolves the apparent circularity of money's value by tracing it back through time to a commodity once valued for direct use. Along the way Rothbard turns the analysis against index-number thinking, Walrasian equilibrium, and government credit expansion, defending commodity money as the one check on political creation of purchasing power.

Every good and service will have an almost infinite array of prices in terms of every other good and service.

Behind Theory of Games and Economic Behavior lay a convergence of two unfinished programs. In this memoir, Morgenstern retraces the path from his 1928 work on economic forecasting, where the distinction between "dead" and "live" variables already anticipated strategic interaction and the Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty chase exposed the paradoxes of perfect foresight, to a Princeton encounter he describes as an instantaneous meeting of minds. What began as a short explanatory article grew, through walks and longhand collaboration, into a book that axiomatized expected utility, deployed minimax reasoning, and turned to convexity after his discovery of Jean Ville's proof. He recounts the Vienna Circle background, von Neumann's expanding-economy model, wartime printing by Princeton University Press, and the reviews and translations that followed, an origin story of game theory that doubles as a memorial to a friendship.

We did an enormous amount of work in a very short time, but it was unceasing pleasure and never a time of drudgery.

A 1970s American campaign for 'national economic planning,' fronted by Wassily Leontief and the Initiative Committee, revived a confusion Hayek believed the socialist calculation debate had already settled: it treated planning as though the question were whether anyone should think ahead, rather than who should direct resources and by what means. Distinguishing liberal planning of general rules from collectivist command, he answers the modernizing claim that complexity now demands central direction by reversing it, for the more intricate the web of interlocking activities, the less any board can survey it and the more indispensable the price mechanism becomes as a discovery procedure for dispersed knowledge. He dissects input-output tables, 'indicative planning,' and the Humphrey-Javits bill as machinery built without stated purpose, and warns that the pursuit of 'social justice' conceals a totalitarian assignment of tasks.

In fact, of course, the very complexity which the structure of modern economic systems has assumed provides the strongest argument against central planning.

Stagflation, rapid inflation coexisting with substantial unemployment over a considerable period, was not supposed to happen, and the 1974-75 recession, the first worldwide postwar slump, made the anomaly impossible to ignore. Haberler treats it not as a natural feature of competitive markets but as the symptom of institutional obstruction: downward wage rigidity, union bargaining, indexation, farm supports, and regulation prevent relative prices from adjusting. Special factors like the oil and food shocks, he calculates, explain perhaps a fourth of the two-digit inflation; the rest is real-wage resistance by organized groups. His prescription is structural reform to enlarge competition, dismantling marketing orders, Davis-Bacon rules, the Buy American Act, and minimum-wage laws that price out the young, rather than incomes policy or election-year stimulus, which would only reignite inflation and invite the wage-price controls that lead toward rationing and planning.

The policy dilemma of stagflation is this: If macroeconomic monetary and fiscal policies try to counteract inflation, they increase unemployment; if they try to reduce unemployment they intensify inflation.

Between the wars, the restored gold standard was never the specie standard of 1914 but a fragile gold-exchange construction, hobbled by an overvalued pound, an undervalued franc, reparations, and the sterilization of gold in Paris and Washington. Tracing its restoration after 1923 and its collapse across the United States, Britain, Germany, France, and Japan, Haberler—here in the English translation of his 1976 German essay—argues that the Great Depression was no ordinary cyclical downswing but the product of banking failures, timid central banks, and the adjustable peg that turned devaluation into competitive depreciation. He weighs Hayek and Robbins's Austrian theory of credit-induced malinvestment against Hansen's secular stagnation and the structural-maladjustment school, and closes by contrasting the deflationary 1930s with the inflationary crisis of the 1970s.

If a death certificate for the gold standard is required, September 21, 1931 would be a reasonable date to put on it.

Friedman's proposal for a legislated rule fixing steady annual growth in the money stock is the target here, though Hazlitt takes care to salute the free-market economist behind it. Monetarists are right that money matters, he grants, but wrong to lean on a mechanical quantity theory: the value of money, like any good, is set by supply, demand, and subjective valuation, not by the arithmetic of MV = PT. He walks through the three stages of inflation, argues that a currency's quality and its holders' expectations move prices as surely as its quantity, and exposes 'velocity' as an after-the-fact excuse. The fatal defect, though, is political, hand the money supply to legislators and every recession becomes an argument for printing more.

So far as quantity is concerned, it is the expected future quantity of money, rather than the immediately existing quantity, that determines the exchange value of the monetary unit.

Democracy earns its worth, on Hayek's account, as nothing grander than a peaceful convention for removing a government without bloodshed, not as a guarantee against tyranny and certainly not as a warrant for whatever a temporary majority can assemble. The trouble is 'unlimited democracy,' in which the fusion of legislation and government in one sovereign assembly dissolves the Rule of Law and lets any parliamentary command pass for law. Delivered in Sydney in 1976, the lecture argues that omnipotent assemblies do not express a genuine will of the people but manufacture majorities through bargaining, an institutionalised blackmail and corruption dressed up as social justice. His remedy is constitutional: separate a true legislative assembly, empowered only to enact general rules, from a governmental one, with a court policing the boundary and legislators elected for a single long term.

The secret of decent government is precisely that the supreme power must be limited power — a power that can lay down rules limiting all other power — and which thus can restrain but not command the private citizen.

To write the history of an idea, Machlup insists, is not the same as writing the history of the word attached to it — and “economic integration” is a young term for an ancient problem. Growing from his 1974 presidential address to the International Economic Association in Budapest, the book defines complete integration not by treaties or common markets but by the actual use of every potential opportunity for efficient division of labour. From that yardstick it ranges across customs-union theory, factor-price equalisation, optimum currency areas, and the Zollverein, deploying Viner’s distinction between trade creation and trade diversion to show that integration is not automatically beneficial. Its third part becomes an annotated genealogy of contributors, from Hamilton and List to Meade and Mundell.

In this interrelatedness and interdependence among all economic activities I see the essence of general economic integration.