The archive.

Housing needed for armament workers and housing stimulated by rising wartime incomes pose different policy problems. In this December 1941 article, Karl Pribram argues for supporting the first while restraining the second—not only to conserve scarce materials, but to preserve demand that could sustain employment when defense spending declines. His perspective joins the timing of durable-goods production to the risks of mortgage and building cycles. The practical difficulty is distributional: tighter credit can exclude poorer households, while limits on construction can raise tenants’ rents. By weighing mortgage restrictions against building-permit limits and accompanying tenant protection, Pribram shows why restraining a boom requires more than reducing construction totals: it requires deciding which needs to meet now and which purchases can safely wait.

Defending an institution because it exists is not the same as defending it because it is just. In this 1957 comment on Samuel P. Huntington’s account of conservatism, Murray N. Rothbard presses that distinction against the proposal that American liberals set aside ideological argument to resist communism. If attachment to established institutions is sufficient, he asks, why should it not also vindicate defenders of Soviet rule? Rothbard argues instead for answering rival principles with reasoned principles—and changing institutions where liberal commitments require it. His treatment of the New Conservatives sharpens the point: their shared opposition conceals incompatible political ideals. This brief polemic offers a concrete test of political labels by separating what movements resist from what they believe deserves preservation.

The proper answer to the radical challenge of a new ideology is to adopt not conservatism but a contrasting radicalism, to oppose reason with reason.

Could Switzerland honour its international railway commitments without binding its entire network to perpetual foreign privileges? In this 1911 article, Siegmund Feilbogen defends rejection of the proposed Saint-Gothard convention while resisting both financial retaliation and disruption of European transit. His distinction is precise: material concessions may be negotiable, but permanent limits on political independence are not. Reading the earlier treaties against demands for repayment of foreign subsidies, he argues that state acquisition need not extinguish existing guarantees—or enlarge them into rights over all Swiss railways. The article offers a concrete encounter with treaty interpretation under unequal diplomatic pressure, showing how an ambiguous provision about railway mergers could, in Feilbogen’s view, turn a limited infrastructure obligation into an indefinite constraint on national autonomy.

Industrial growth need not eclipse agriculture, nor commercial expansion displace concern for national independence: these are the balances Siegmund Feilbogen values in his short review of A. de Navay de Földeak’s study of Hungary’s economic role. He praises the author’s statistical precision and restraint, drawing on Levasseur’s preface to place industrial gains alongside the country’s continuing dependence on the land. His strongest endorsement, however, goes to the connection between material development and the preservation of national rights. Five French-backed industrial enterprises give concrete support to his approval of Földeak’s appeal to French merchants. The review shows how Feilbogen’s judgement of an economic survey joins measured assessment of development to sympathy for Hungarian autonomy and Franco-Hungarian trade.

Written from New York in November 1961 to thank Alfred Müller-Armack for birthday wishes, this short letter turns quickly to a correction Mises wanted on record: he had been misunderstood as rejecting all political compromise. Theory and program, he insists, must be built consistently and without contradiction, yet the politician who cannot move the majority to adopt them must settle for whatever the given circumstances make attainable. The concession costs him nothing doctrinally—he restates his standing verdict that middle-of-the-road interventionism, in every variety, necessarily ends in full socialism. Writing as a European rather than American liberal, he closes by praising Müller-Armack and Ludwig Erhard for the postwar German recovery, a liberal achievement he can admire without endorsing its every interventionist remnant.

In der praktischen Politik kann man nur selten das Vollkommene erreichen. Man muss sich in der Regel damit begnügen, das kleinere Übel zu wählen.

English translation: “In practical politics one can only rarely attain the perfect. As a rule one must be content to choose the lesser evil.”

Ranking satisfactions is not the same as measuring them. This distinction drives Alfred Amonn’s critique of the first volume of Robert Liefmann’s Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, which promises to rebuild economics on psychological foundations. Amonn tests that promise against definitions of utility and cost and numerical examples of choice: can subjective feelings legitimately be added, subtracted, or expressed as ratios? His defence of marginal-utility theory is qualified by a willingness to challenge its practitioners when they use the same questionable arithmetic. He also develops a concrete alternative to treating cost as pain: cost is the benefit forgone when resources are used elsewhere. The review offers a focused encounter with the limits of numerical representations of preference—and with the distinction between a genuinely new explanation and a change of theoretical vocabulary.

A tax assessed on yesterday’s prosperity may fall due in a year of hardship. Such practical difficulties give substance to Siegmund Feilbogen’s portrait of Robert Meyer, the Austrian finance administrator and scholar commemorated in this July 1914 obituary, introduced by Yves Guyot. Feilbogen connects Meyer’s conceptual precision with his concern for fair treatment of taxpayers, while acknowledging his inability to overcome privileges enjoyed by great landowners. Particularly striking is Meyer’s argument, as presented here, that progressive taxation rests primarily on fiscal productivity rather than justice. The tribute offers a compact encounter with the uncertain boundaries of taxable income—and with Feilbogen’s understanding of conscientious public service, where sound definitions matter but political constraints remain.

Equal legal capacity offers little to a worker who lacks the means to acquire property: this is the problem Friedrich von Wieser foregrounds in his dictionary portrait of Anton Menger. Wieser credits the jurist with exposing how the draft German Civil Code misunderstood the circumstances of the propertyless, even where reform need not challenge private ownership. Wage contracts and family law become concrete tests of whose circumstances legal rules accommodate. Yet admiration has a boundary: Wieser praises Menger’s knowledge of socialist literature while finding his economic theory inadequate. This brief entry lets readers examine that distinction between legal insight and economic explanation, and encounter a socialist criticism of law that could work within existing property institutions as well as challenge their foundations.

Market reporting, rather than withdrawal from practical affairs, supplies the origin of abstract value theory in Friedrich von Wieser’s dictionary portrait of Carl Menger. Wieser traces Menger’s attention to human needs to pricing practices that prevailing economics failed to explain, then connects his discoveries to his defence of theory against the German historical school. This is also a founder’s account of how intellectual credit should be divided: Wieser defends Menger’s independence from Gossen while assigning much of the theory’s subsequent development to Böhm-Bawerk and himself. The brief entry offers both a concrete account of the relation between market observation and subjective value and a participant’s revealing distinction between founding a school and extending its work.

When technical improvements lower prices, does the increased purchasing power of existing cash balances count as saving—and does it justify credit expansion to keep prices stable? In this 1935 comment, reprinted in 1993, Karl Bode and Gottfried Haberler challenge Harrod’s affirmative case by separating deliberate cash accumulation from the appreciation of money already held. Their objection is not to monetary expansion in all circumstances, but to deriving a policy requirement from inconsistent definitions of saving and investment. They also question whether anticipated income growth necessarily induces people to hold more cash rather than spend more freely. This tightly focused dispute offers a concrete lesson in monetary reasoning: an accounting relationship cannot establish how people will behave, and revalued wealth cannot be compared uncritically with expenditure on new capital.

Marginal utility becomes a farewell-party joke in Felix Kaufmann’s song for Stonier and Sweezy, presented here in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation. Sweezy plans to convert Harvard to the ideas he has encountered in Vienna, only to stumble over the difficulty of deciding what things are worth; Stonier voices his suspicions but promises to return for more argument. Kaufmann affectionately teases both intellectual conversion and resistance, setting theoretical vocabulary to a folk melody. The pleasure of this small occasional work lies in its tone: disagreement, uncertainty, and ambitious claims become reasons for laughter and a shared toast rather than obstacles to friendship.

A machine’s future services and the labour committed to making it describe capital from opposite directions. In this 1934 article, Hayek asks how these perspectives—discounted output and investment through time—can be joined without losing what each explains. His distinction between goods still in production and durable goods already yielding services makes timing central to valuation: neither physical quantities nor a single average production period can adequately measure capital. The interest rate is largely taken as given, allowing the analysis to focus on how it connects commitments with returns. Readers can discover why inherited equipment constrains new investment without dictating its form, and why maintaining output requires attention to when existing services expire and replacements become available.