The archive.

Open the issue of money to private enterprise, and let the public, not the state, decide which currencies it will hold: this is the proposal Hayek develops here, extending the argument of The Denationalization of Money. A government monopoly on issue, he contends, has blocked the kind of evolutionary experimentation long seen in law, language, and morals, leaving society ignorant of what the best money would even be. Competing private issuers, disciplined by the threat of depreciation and lost custom, would supply currencies of stable purchasing power, perhaps a unit he calls the Solid, redeemable against a weighted basket of widely traded raw materials. He argues that Gresham's law binds only under fixed exchange rates, doubts the gold standard can be restored, and urges that money be removed from political control and returned to the market's self-steering order.

It is really extraordinary that, as long as the discussion on money has been going on, everyone has accepted the right of government to provide us with money on an exclusive basis.

Assembled as the world economy emerged from the severest recession of the postwar period, this edited symposium gathers Haberler as framer and contributor alongside Michael Bruno, Robert Mundell, and others to debate what made the early-1980s slump so deep and how recovery might proceed. Haberler supplies the anti-catastrophic baseline: this was disinflation after the runaway 1970s, not a second Great Depression, since deposit insurance and central-bank activism made a wholesale monetary collapse unthinkable. Bruno presses the oil shocks and real-wage resistance; Mundell and other reformers warn of an unstable dollar and the absence of professional consensus. Against calls for coordinated intervention and fixed rates, Haberler defends floating as an imperfect but durable second-best in a world of divergent national policies.

The world economy is sinking, yet the profession is unable to reach any consensus on what should be done.

Medieval apocalyptic prophets, modern futurologists, and chart-wielding investment gurus share one trick, Rothbard argues: the fudge factor that lets a failed prediction be reinterpreted rather than admitted. From that sociology of forecasting he turns on the Kondratieff long cycle, the supposed 54-year rhythm he calls the flimsiest alleged cycle of all. Its evidence survives only after Kondratieff detrended his data, divided by population, and smoothed it with nine-year moving averages, erasing the very industrial growth that disproved it. Falling nineteenth-century prices, Rothbard insists, marked productivity and abundance, not depression, and the alleged long booms were merely short wartime inflations. Against this statistical mysticism he sets the Austrian account of booms and busts as products of central-bank credit expansion, comparing hidden multiple cycles to Ptolemaic epicycles.

The cause of the boom-bust cycle is not some mystical periodic Force to which man must bend his will; the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

As old as government itself, the hidden economy springs, in this 1984 pamphlet, from human nature choosing among the alternatives that taxation and regulation leave open. Sennholz's first move is to separate the underground producer from the criminal underworld: the latter preys on persons and property, the former supplies wanted goods and services outside official permission, reporting, or taxation. Minimum wages, overtime mandates, building codes, licensing, union privileges, taxi medallions, and Social Security earnings limits all price willing workers out of lawful jobs, so informal work becomes a labor market for people whom law has excluded, students, retirees, moonlighting teachers, gypsy cabs, barter networks, undocumented field hands. Even the unemployment rate, he shows, dissolves once hidden workers misreport themselves idle. The verdict is libertarian: the underground is no anomaly but the shadow cast by intervention itself.

There is no doubt that the underground economy is essentially an employment phenomenon. Where government causes disemployment the underground offers ample opportunities for employment. It offers jobs to the officially unemployable.

Ordinary businessmen may choose free markets or state privilege, but bankers, on Rothbard's account, are structurally driven toward statism, and that inclination threads through a century of American foreign policy. This compressed revisionist essay follows the rivalry and collusion of Morgan and Rockefeller interests from Jay Cooke's Civil War debt monopoly through the 1890s turn to imperial expansion, Wilson's entry into World War I, the founding of the Federal Reserve, and the Cold War machinery of the Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission. Naming cabinets, coups, and interlocking directorates from the Spanish-American War to Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, Rothbard argues that a permanent government of finance rules regardless of which party wins office.

The great turning point of American foreign policy came in the early 1890s, during the second Cleveland administration.

When flight delays snarled American airports in 1984, the press told a tidy story of wise government-business cooperation reining in airlines that had over-scheduled peak hours. Rothbard reverses the causation. The congestion, he argues, was not a failure of deregulation but the reappearance of cartel policy: after the Civil Aeronautics Board was abolished, the FAA picked up its restrictive function, imposing flight ceilings in the name of scarce controllers left short by the PATCO firings. That incumbents like Eastern Airlines, facing People's Express at Newark, welcomed the quotas gives the piece its public-choice edge. A persistent shortage, Rothbard reminds the reader, signals a price held below the market-clearing level, here because airports are government-owned. His remedy is market-clearing slot fees, privatized airports, and privatized air-traffic control.

Whenever economists see a shortage, they are trained to look immediately for the maximum price control below the free-market price.

A bank run, in this compact polemic, is no irrational panic but a market test that exposes fractional-reserve banking for what it is: a system holding a fraction of the cash it has promised depositors on demand. Taking the Ohio and Maryland runs of the 1980s as his occasion, Rothbard asks why federal deposit insurance inspires confidence where private and state insurers failed, and answers that the FDIC and FSLIC are credible only because the Federal Reserve can print legal tender without limit. Insurance can cover calculable risks; it cannot make a structurally insolvent industry solvent. What passes for banking soundness, he argues, is a confidence trick that would be prosecuted as fraud in any other business. His remedy is abolition: end the Fed, the FDIC, and the FSLIC.

Fractional reserve banks, being inherently insolvent, are uninsurable.

The plain-paper copier grew so familiar that its maker's name nearly became a verb, yet the Xerox 914 began, Rothbard reminds us, as a long-shot gamble no giant would take. Eastman Kodak, IBM, and government laboratories all passed on Chester Carlson's process; the lone patent attorney ran his first experiments in an apartment kitchen in 1938, and it was Haloid, a firm with under seven million dollars in sales, that spent twenty million over twelve years to bring the machine to market. Rothbard refuses a heroic tale, though: the challenger becomes the giant, then the pressured incumbent as Japanese rivals erode its share, before its Marathon copiers claw back ground. Competition, on this telling, is a process no firm ever escapes.

Small business can outcompete, and outinnovate, the giants.

Call a tax deduction a subsidy and you have already conceded that the government owns your income; that buried premise is what Rothbard drags into the light in this brief attack on the Reagan administration's plan to end the deductibility of state and local taxes from federal returns. A subsidy, he insists on its plain meaning, is Peter taxed to fund Paul; allowing a taxpayer to surrender less of his own earnings is nothing of the kind. Behind the tax-expenditure vocabulary and the talk of fair shares he sees a device that turns taxpayers against one another, policing each other's alleged privileges instead of uniting against extraction itself. The real objective, he argues, is not revenue-neutral symmetry but lowering the coerced burden for everyone.

How can allowing you to keep more of your own money be called a “subsidy?”

The 'arrogance of reason', the conceit that prosperity and civilization were consciously designed rather than inherited, gives this lecture its title and its target. Hayek denies that morality is a rational construction: like reason itself, it emerged through an evolutionary process, and the groups that adopted private property and the family could sustain denser populations and a deeper division of labour, displacing rivals who did not. Capitalism and socialism, on this account, are not positions within a shared morality but a clash between rival moral traditions, and he singles out Jacques Monod's claim that science has dissolved inherited ethics, along with Keynes's hostility to saving, as symptoms of a scientistic overreach. Science cannot invent a replacement ethics, he concludes, because a complex order draws on more knowledge than any planner, and he links Adam Smith's invisible hand to cybernetics and biology.

Die klassische moralische Tradition hat eine freie Gesellschaft geschaffen, indem sie den Menschen überredet hat, gewisse primitive Instinkte zu unterdrücken.

English translation: “The classical moral tradition created a free society by persuading men to suppress certain primitive instincts.”

Capitalism appears here not as a machine for allocating known resources but as an open-ended process in which entrepreneurs notice what no one had seen before. Across seven essays Kirzner binds Mises's entrepreneurial market, Hayek's dispersed knowledge, and his own concept of alertness into a single account of the economy as coordinated learning through profit-seeking. He traces how the entrepreneur vanished from neoclassical theory as disequilibrium noise, recasts uncertainty and discovery as two faces of one phenomenon, and turns the argument on policy: taxing pure profit may suppress discoveries that never become visible, and regulation is perilous less because it distorts equilibrium than because it stifles the discovery process and breeds a wholly superfluous ingenuity of evasion. The Lange-Dickinson response to Mises and Hayek, he insists, mistook administered prices for the entrepreneurial function they can never replicate.

The process of creative discovery is never completed, nor is it ever arrested.

A 1984-85 high-school debate resolution proposing federal employment for every employable poor citizen gives Sennholz his foil, and his answer inverts its premise: government is not the cure for unemployment but a leading cause. He first contests the category of American poverty, arguing that an income-threshold definition confuses relative inequality with destitution and points to homeownership, savings, appliances, and cars among households counted poor. Employment, he then insists, is a price-and-cost phenomenon: taxes, mandates, union privileges, minimum wages, and Federal Reserve boom-bust cycles raise the cost of hiring until workers whose output cannot cover it are priced out. Business, not the state, is the genuine source of jobs, since government has no productive fund of its own and must finance make-work through taxation, borrowing, or inflation. To hand that state the role of employer of last resort, he warns, only expands dependency while eroding the production that funds it.

To make government their employer of last resort is to put the culprit in charge and urge him to continue his transgressions.