The archive.

Historically exhausted, bound up with class conflict, taxation, debt, and monetary debasement, the welfare state may linger a while, Sennholz declares, but not for long. Written after the 1996 federal welfare act, this essay reads that law's devolution to the states, work requirements, and time limits as a partial retreat rather than a genuine reform. Its central move is to shift attention from recipients' incentives to the labor market's legal architecture: even without benefits that discourage work, statutory barriers would still keep the unskilled from being hired. Chief among them is the minimum wage compounded by mandated employment costs, alongside the Davis-Bacon Act, ERISA, and EEOC liability. The result is a self-defeating contradiction, reformers ordering people into jobs while maintaining the laws that price them out. True reform, he concludes, must first dismantle the state's own barriers to work.

The welfare reformers are laboring to roll the welfare stone up the mountain to the barriers they themselves erected.

After aggregate wealth, interpersonal utility sums, and the fiction of a single social maximizer had lost their authority, could economics still say anything objective about good and bad policy? Kirzner's answer is coordination — a value-free property of social interaction that independent moral reasoning may then judge desirable. Borrowing Whately's analogy between studying wealth and studying disease, he defines a fully coordinated state as one in which each person's action correctly accounts for what others do and might do. The criterion is bounded by property rights and turned against Pigouvian and Paretian welfare economics; it recasts Mises's socialist-calculation argument as a coordination comparison and defends entrepreneurial creative destruction as coordinative rather than destructive, since the earlier calm merely masked discoordination no one had yet discovered.

That calm was a facade expressing the presence of as yet undiscovered (but very real) discoordinatedness; dynamic competition shattered that calm, replacing the earlier uncoordinated sets of activities by a better-coordinated set.

Far from being a neutral stabilizer, the International Monetary Fund is portrayed here as an internationalized extension of the very monetary interventionism that produces crises in the first place. Written in October 1998 amid the Asian financial collapse, the essay traces business cycles to political control over money and reads Bretton Woods less as a remedy than as institutionalized error. Sennholz stresses the asymmetry of a Fund supplied by a few hard-currency states and drawn upon by weak-currency debtors, and identifies its power with the United States and the dollar system. Bailouts, he argues, reward profligate governments and export welfare-statist fiscal assumptions—his Guatemala and Indonesia cases supply the evidence—while teaching borrowers and lenders to expect rescue. Against them he sets lower taxes, balanced budgets, freely adjusting interest rates, and the refusal to save failed financial managers.

In other words, only unstable high-risk debtors may apply.

Between the unhampered market and comprehensive socialism, interventionism claims to be a stable third system - and this analysis, drawn from an unpublished German manuscript of 1940 and here in English translation, sets out to show that it is not. Isolated commands laid on owners and entrepreneurs, Mises argues, never reach their announced ends: maximum prices breed shortages, minimum wages breed unemployment, and cheap credit breeds the boom whose collapse it cannot outrun. Each measure calls forth the next, until the market is either freed again or swallowed whole by planning. He works through price control, confiscation, subsidies, corporativism, syndicalism, and the war economy in turn, and reads Hitler's rise as an ideological victory won because his opponents already shared his anti-capitalist premises. What is left is not a system but a slow unravelling.

A third alternative, an interventionist compromise, is not feasible.

An exclusive supplier is not necessarily able to profit by withholding goods: buyers may turn elsewhere, and rivals may expand production. In this paper, revised in 1944 and first published in 1998, Ludwig von Mises makes that distinction the basis of his account of monopoly prices. He separates gains from restricting supply from profits earned by anticipating consumers’ demands, challenging the use of firm size, product uniqueness, or unused capacity as evidence of monopoly. Yet his defence of competition does not excuse profitable restraint: he argues that it weakens consumers’ direction of production. The resulting tension gives the work its focus—how to identify genuine monopoly pricing without mistaking competitive success for it, and why, in Mises’s view, governments often sustain the restrictions they publicly condemn.

April 15 turns depreciation schedules and deduction forms into a moral test. Sennholz's 1998 essay asks how a reflective citizen should act when private honesty is demanded by institutions he judges coercive—whether to correct an accountant's favorable error, and whether resentment at an arbitrary IRS can ever license dishonesty. His answer refuses both easy exits: two wrongs make no right, yet legality does not make plunder moral, and redistribution by majority vote remains continuous with theft. Between Kantian truth-telling and consequentialist calculation he seeks a hierarchy of duties in which truth is basic but not absolute, property essential but no idol above life. Lawful avoidance—tax-exempt investment, charitable foundations, even emigration—becomes the mediating practice. Private and civic morality, he concludes, stand or fall together.

Stealing is not defensible morally even if it is done by majority vote.

Does capital accumulation simply enlarge production, or does it reorganize the time between investment and consumption? In this review of Klaus Hennings’s study of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Roger W. Garrison makes that distinction the basis of a pointed disagreement. He welcomes Hennings’s critical reconstruction but argues that its emphasis on formal limitations overlooks Böhm-Bawerk’s account of entrepreneurs redirecting resources among stages of production. The concentric-ring diagram becomes a way to examine structural change, not merely a static arrangement of capital goods. Readers can discover why Garrison sees this analysis as approaching the later Austrian distinction between saving-supported growth and credit-induced instability, while carefully distinguishing that development from Böhm-Bawerk’s own reluctance to venture into monetary theory.

Britain’s return to gold in 1925 promised monetary restoration—but what, exactly, had been restored? In this 1998 chapter, Rothbard argues that the gold-exchange standard preserved gold’s prestige while weakening the redemption constraints that gave it disciplinary force. His account connects sterling’s return to its prewar parity with restricted access to gold, foreign central banks’ accumulation of sterling reserves, and American credit support. Writing from an Austrian perspective, he interprets Anglo-American central-bank cooperation not as a stabilizing achievement but as an attempt to postpone adjustment. The concrete distinction between holding gold and holding another country’s promise to pay gold gives readers a way to examine his disputed explanation of the system’s collapse in 1931—and to distinguish monetary institutions often grouped under the same name.

Can an economist passionately oppose a policy without turning scientific instruction into advocacy? In this lecture, Israel M. Kirzner takes Ludwig von Mises’s commitment to value-free inquiry as the starting point for distinguishing the educator’s moral purpose from the content of economic knowledge. A simple meal purchase shows what such education demands: looking beyond money and objects to the differing expectations that make both parties anticipate a gain. Kirzner brings that subjective perspective to policy advice, arguing that economists can expose measures that frustrate policymakers’ own goals without prescribing those goals. His defense of the Foundation for Economic Education’s mission thus sets a demanding boundary: concern about economic ignorance must motivate teaching, not license libertarian public relations.

April 1999: the dollar is slipping against the yen and the euro, and Sennholz reads that weakness as a symptom of a credit disease hidden beneath the era's celebrated low consumer-price inflation. Subdued CPI figures, he insists, prove nothing when the real action lies in asset prices, credit aggregates, and the world dollar standard. He widens the meaning of inflation from narrowly measured money to the expansion of credit and claims, securitization multiplying leverage outside conventional statistics, Long Term Capital Management, asset-backed paper approaching four trillion dollars, a Wall Street bubble fed by the very institutions the Fed oversees. Real saving meanwhile collapses as borrowing accelerates, and foreign capital and mercantilist central banks prop up the whole edifice. The Fed, he concludes, is trapped: cut rates and the dollar flees, raise them and the bubble bursts into deflationary recession.

Unfortunately, the popular faith in sophisticated computer systems and speculation models is no substitute for basic economic knowledge.

Over the twentieth century the economics profession loaded competition with a static meaning — the perfectly competitive equilibrium — and then, unevenly, began to unload it. Kirzner tracks that arc as a sequence of doctrinal milestones, from the pre-1930 rise of the model through revisionist histories by Machovec and Loasby to its late-century retreat. Hayek's 1946 'Meaning of Competition' is the pivot, exposing an equilibrium model incapable of explaining how equilibrium is ever approached — an insight Mises grasped at once and most of the profession ignored for decades. The recovery, when it came, was plural rather than sectarian: Demsetz on natural monopoly, Brozen and Sylos-Labini on entry, the contestable-markets theory of Baumol, Panzar and Willig, the industrial-organization 'new learning.' What returns, on Kirzner's telling, is competition understood as rivalry, entry, and entrepreneurial discovery rather than a structure real markets merely approximate.

Paradoxically, therefore, it was the very effort to dislodge the PC model (in favor of the equally static, but less unrealistic model of monopolistic competition) which thrust that PC model into the analytical limelight.

Two portraits of the entrepreneur — Schumpeter's creative destroyer, who breaks routine and drives capitalist development, and Kirzner's alert discoverer, who notices overlooked price discrepancies and nudges markets toward equilibrium — have competed for a generation. Rather than collapse them, this reconsideration clarifies the level at which each holds. Schumpeter, Kirzner concedes, captures the psychology and historical force of real entrepreneurship; his own alertness theory captures the analytical market-process function, which remains at bottom Misesian arbitrage between present input prices and future output prices. Boldness, imagination, and leadership are how alertness expresses itself under multi-period uncertainty, not a substitute for discovery. The automobile displacing the horse-drawn carriage, he argues, only exposed a misallocation already present — coordination, not mere disruption.

This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.