The archive.

Keynes was, at bottom, an inflationist, and this compact essay works to convert that charge from insult into mechanism. Keynesian stimulus, Hazlitt argues, cannot rest on spending financed by taxation, since taxes cancel the purchasing power the spending was meant to add; what matters is the deficit. Once government spends beyond its revenue, the gap must be closed either by borrowing, which merely postpones contraction, or by creating new money, which means inflation. Every downturn thus becomes an argument for another dose of the same expedient, making Keynesianism less a theory of demand than a political technology for normalizing permanent fiscal imbalance. Reaching back to Roman debasement and John Law's paper schemes, Hazlitt warns that no inflation on record produced sound expansion, only depreciation, arbitrary redistribution and economic demoralization.

The lessons of inflation are soon forgotten.

Divisions of knowledge are neither timeless truths nor mere administrative convenience: they are historical settlements, shaped by intellectual expansion, cultural purpose, and institutional power. Tracing the ordering of learning from Aristotle's theoretical-practical-productive triad and Porphyry's tree through Bacon's division into History, Poesy, and Philosophy, Dewey's decimal notation, and the four-faculty structure of the medieval and modern university, Machlup shows how branches split, fuse, vanish, and reappear as erudition grows. He restores science to its broad continental sense against the narrow Anglo-American restriction to natural science, and defends intellectual knowledge pursued for understanding, culture, or delight rather than utility. The second volume of his Knowledge project makes the map of learning itself the object of study, insisting that every classification is provisional and that no partition should be mistaken for the essence of what it orders.

But knowing for fun is a respectable human activity; and having fun need not be judged useless.

Not administrative regulation, not Coasean bargaining, not judicial balancing of 'social' costs—only a strict law of property, Rothbard argues, should govern air pollution. Reconstructing environmental tort law from libertarian first principles, he holds that coercion is justified solely against an overt physical invasion of another's person or justly held property: smoke, odor, dust, or excessive noise crossing a boundary, proven by strict causation beyond a reasonable doubt. His most distinctive move ties pollution to homesteading—a factory or airport that first emitted over unused land may acquire a prescriptive easement, leaving later arrivals to 'come to the nuisance.' From this follow his rejections of a general right to clean air, the ad coelum doctrine, statutory clean-air rules, vicarious 'deep pocket' liability, and binding class actions, and his proposal to collapse criminal law into a tort law prosecuted only by victims, heirs, or assigns.

In sum, no one has a right to clean air, but one does have a right to not have his air invaded by pollutants generated by an aggressor.

Not refutation but neglect scattered the Austrian economics that Mises and Hayek had led around 1930; exile, the Anschluss, and the rise of Keynesian thought did the rest. Ludwig Lachmann treats the later revival as a rescue: because the earlier concepts were forgotten or linguistically transformed, they must now be actively retrieved. He reopens Hans Mayer's causal-genetic account of how real market prices actually form, Hayek's problem of knowledge at once dispersed and diffusable, and the Knight-Austrian capital controversy, arguing that capital theory must be rebuilt from individual decision-making rather than from social aggregates that presuppose one evaluating mind. Offered as a birthday tribute to Terence Hutchison, the essay makes technical knowledge itself a weapon in competition.

Where the storage of ideas failed we must at least make an attempt at their salvage.

The fratricidal European war of 1914 ended a liberal international order of free trade, gold, open migration, and passport-free travel, and, in this survey prepared for the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize, becomes the starting point for sixty years of upheaval in the world economy, macroeconomic theory, and policy. Haberler reads the interwar catastrophe as the product of monetary destruction, delayed devaluations, and protectionism rather than any inherent flaw of capitalism; the postwar great surprise of prosperity he credits to sound finance, GATT liberalization, and Marshall Plan aid. Tracing the Keynesian revolution and the monetarist counterrevolution, he arrives at the stagflation of the 1970s, arguing that inflation is no permanent cure for unemployment and that monetary restraint must be joined to fiscal discipline and competitive, deregulated markets.

We now know that money had a lot to do with the Great Depression.

The American "money question" runs from Civil War greenbacks and Bryan's Cross of Gold to the Federal Reserve, and Reed's 1982 essay revives it with a radical claim: money must be divorced from politics and returned to the market. He builds on Carl Menger's account of money as an emergent product of exchange rather than a state invention, arising as traders seek a widely marketable medium to escape the limits of barter. Precious metals prevailed through durability, divisibility, and stability; paper began as a redeemable substitute before political privilege turned it into unbacked fiat. Against reforms that leave the state monopoly intact, Reed insists the framework of thought must change first, likening faith in managed money to obsolete superstition and modest fixes to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Monetary history records no instance of a people voluntarily choosing in the marketplace to use unbacked fiat paper as their money!

From Thomas Aquinas to Keynes, this posthumously published synthesis argues that the deepest disputes in economics never turned on economics alone but on rival patterns of Western reasoning—nominalist, universalist, organismic, and dialectic. Schooled in Viennese marginalism and hardened by his quarrel with the German historical school, Pribram traces economic doctrine as it emerges from Thomistic moral theology through mercantilism, Cartesian Physiocracy, and Ricardian mechanics into the marginalist, Marxian, and institutionalist controversies of the nineteenth century, and onward to fascist, Bolshevist, and Keynesian economics. Incompatible doctrines coexisted in the same universities, he contends, because their roots lay outside the discipline, in broader habits of thought. The labour of nearly half a century, it reads the history of economic analysis as a chapter in the history of thought.

The Ricardian economists had centered their analysis on problems of distribution; in the theories of their successors, problems connected with the allocation of resources occupied a primary rank.

'Autonomous' and 'induced' name positions in a causal story, not fixed labels stamped on the current account, the capital account, or official reserves. Against the habit of reading causation straight off the balance-of-payments table, Machlup insists that double-entry identities guarantee offsetting balances but explain nothing: a trade surplus is itself a capital export, and a current-account deficit is the logical correlative of a capital-account surplus rather than its cause. Using an oil-price shock to show that an importing country may cut consumption, raise exports, borrow, or draw down reserves, he weighs five rival doctrines of autonomy and ties each to a specific exchange-rate regime. His verdict is disciplinary: which flow dominates an episode must be established by historical and theoretical argument, never inferred from account headings alone.

Economists are prone to consider assumptions as almost perfect substitutes for knowledge, or perfect antidotes for ignorance.

Hayek's title is itself the thesis: reason is overestimated whenever it is credited as the source of civilization rather than its late and partial product. Inherited instincts were shaped for small face-to-face bands, and the extended society of strangers became possible only through culturally transmitted rules, property, honesty, promise-keeping, that suppressed or redirected those instincts and spread because the groups adopting them multiplied. Between instinct and reason he inserts a third term, custom and tradition, holding that people learned to behave before they understood why and that morality evolved through group selection, not design. Ranging through Hume, Ferguson, Smith, and Menger, he rejects Hegelian and Marxian laws of development and, in an oral supplement, defends religion's guardianship of property and family while dismissing Malthusian panic with Julian Simon's population data.

Die erste Alternative zu Instinkt ist nicht Vernunft, sondern Brauch und Tradition, die nicht Menschenwerk sind, sondern ein Erbe und das Ergebnis der Entwicklung.

English translation: “The first alternative to instinct is not reason, but custom and tradition, which are not the work of man but an inheritance and the outcome of evolution.”

Grant a single ruler complete command of monetary and fiscal policy, insulated from parliaments and pressure groups: what would a credible cure for stagflation actually require? Haberler's benevolent and enlightened dictator is a methodological fiction, benevolent in respecting consumer sovereignty, enlightened in trusting competition and private property over the central planning of Lange and Dickinson. The prescription that follows binds monetary restraint, with money growth cut to potential real GNP growth, to fiscal discipline, tax reform against bracket creep and phantom profits, and above all the withdrawal of the privileges that keep wages and prices rigid: farm supports, the Davis-Bacon Act, minimum-wage laws, closed shops. Freer trade, he argues, is the most powerful discipline on domestic monopoly, and inflation the fons et origo of the whole malaise.

A 2 per cent reduction in real GNP is a shock, but it is not a crushing burden.

Property, family, and religion endured, Hayek argues, not because anyone grasped their function but because the groups that observed them could sustain larger and more complex cooperation, the thread of this 1983 Zurich lecture, a compressed prospectus for what would become The Fatal Conceit. He shifts moral philosophy from justification to genealogy, asking how our morality arose and what it has done for us, and inserts inherited tradition as a third source between instinct and deliberate reason. Religion, on this view, carried 'symbolic truths' that guarded rules whose social utility stayed opaque. Rejecting Hegelian and Marxian laws of development and Malthusian alarm alike, he closes by returning to the market as a knowledge system that sets dispersed facts to work through prices no planner could ever compute.

Die Entwicklung der Moral ist ein Anpassungsprozeß und nicht, wie die rationalistischen Theoretiker glauben, ein Ergebnis bewußter menschlicher Entscheidung.

English translation: “The development of morality is a process of adaptation and not, as rationalist theorists believe, the result of conscious human decision.”

Why did a regime that boasted of scientific planning keep buying grain from the capitalist countries it denounced? From that puzzle of chronic Soviet crop failures, Hazlitt reconstructs the socialist calculation argument in miniature. In a market the farmer need grasp none of the whole; profit and loss and a shifting structure of prices condense dispersed knowledge of scarcity, demand, weather, and transport into signals he can act on locally. Planners command rather than discover, and where they lean on foreign quotations or black-market indications they parasitically borrow the very mechanism they reject — otherwise they work in the dark, issuing quotas that harden into compulsory error. The core is explicitly Misesian: without genuine prices formed by the exchange of privately held resources, rational allocation is impossible. Marx's labor theory, he adds, survives on resentment, not analysis.

Without a set of previous real and recent market prices, without informed expectations, the bureaucracy would have to make 64 trillion blind guesses.