The archive.

Two charges anchor the socialist case against capitalism: that it produces too little and distributes what it makes unjustly. Answering both, Hazlitt insists that nominal-dollar comparisons mislead, deflating U.S. output from 1939 to 1969 to show real income climbing across every quintile, with electricity, plumbing, automobiles and telephones passing from luxuries into ordinary working-class possessions. Against the exploitation thesis he shows payrolls dwarfing after-tax profits and argues that wages and profits rise and fall together rather than warring over a fixed fund. His sharpest move is linguistic: the very phrase 'distribution of income' falsely implies that goods are first produced and then parceled out, when in a market they are owned throughout continuous production and exchange. The cure for poverty, he concludes, is greater earning power, not redistribution.

When profits are large, it does not mean that they are at the expense of the workers. The opposite is more likely to be true.

The claim that Black Americans had been shut out of postwar prosperity is met here with income statistics arguing the reverse. Measured in constant dollars, Hazlitt shows, median Black family income rose sharply between 1949 and 1969 while the share of families under $3,000 fell steeply—gains at least fully proportional to those of white families. He concedes the persistent relative gap, Black median income climbing only from 51 to 63 percent of white, and warns against treating either group as homogeneous across region, age, and class. Rising Black teenage unemployment he blames chiefly on minimum-wage laws that price the low-skilled out of jobs, holding the free market, not regulation, to be the strongest counterforce to discrimination. The engine of advance, he concludes in this 1971 essay, is integration into an expanding capitalist economy, not a separate "black economy."

What chiefly counts is the productivity of the whole economy; what counts is the maximization of the incentives to that productivity.

A young governess at a country house, forbidden ever to appeal to her absent employer, resolves to master the good and evil around her by her own will, and this, in Voegelin's reading of Henry James's novella, is the drama of a demonically closed soul. Employer, governess, and housekeeper stand for God, soul, and earthly common sense; the intercepted letters and the apparitions of Quint mark a theology of non-communication in which salvation becomes self-salvation without grace. The title names not heroic discipline but the escalation of willful virtue into destruction, a 'Black Salvation' that kills the boy it means to save. A 1970 postscript, printed with the 1947 letter, refuses to translate James's symbols into philosophy and instead reads Bly as one more modern Eden, a genteel English garden of closed existence.

Henry James could be fascinated by Edenic existence, but he knew that it was the hell of living death.

The road from chaos to catastrophe is not one the Vatican itself traveled, but the path of Europe seen from the Holy See. That distinction governs this monograph, which reconstructs the interwar Vatican's political mentality through the Austrian diplomatic reporting of Ludwig von Pastor and Rudolf Kohlruss. Engel-Janosi is frank that he pursues judgments and assumptions rather than a chronicle of events: the Paris peace treaties register as a disorder that multiplied grievances while weakening every transnational restraint. From that diagnosis the book descends through the Lateran reconciliation, the condemnation of Action française, the doomed Reichskonkordat and Mit brennender Sorge, to Pius XI's mounting horror of Nazi Germany and the Anschluss he grieved as Europe's ruin. Throughout, moral authority proves unable, by itself, to arrest the slide toward war.

Diese Einstellung entsprach seiner Natur, aber der unmittelbaren, der zündenden Wirkung seiner Worte war sie abträglich.

English translation: “This disposition corresponded to his nature, but it was detrimental to the immediate, kindling effect of his words.”

When does a growth model describe a genuinely open economy, rather than a closed economy with trade variables attached? In this corrective note, Oskar Morgenstern and Gerald L. Thompson sharpen the answer by replacing import prices with export prices in a key positivity assumption. They acknowledge criticism of their earlier formulation and explain why the revised condition repairs an existence proof without changing the theorem statements. The economic distinction is concrete: trade must involve goods of positive value, not merely exchanges of free goods. Readers can follow how a small mathematical correction changes the interpretation of production constraints, while seeing the authors distinguish properties of basic solutions from conditions that would require additional assumptions.

A petrol station can have fuel to sell and still fail to serve motorists who never notice it. This gap between availability and awareness anchors Israel M. Kirzner’s defence of advertising as part of entrepreneurial production, rather than an expense added to a finished good. In this essay, republished in the supplied 2016 edition, he asks why even honest advertising must do more than state facts: it must compete for attention. Against accounts that treat selling costs as waste or product differentiation as monopoly, Kirzner understands competition as discovering and communicating opportunities. His argument gives readers a precise distinction with which to assess advertising’s noisy presence: making information accessible is not the same as making an opportunity noticed. That distinction establishes a legitimate economic function without vindicating deceptive advertisements.

Where the archive falls silent, historians have long reconstructed missing origins by other means — analogy, probability, and assumptions about a constant human nature. Engel-Janosi anatomizes this Enlightenment procedure, which Dugald Stewart christened conjectural history, tracing it from Schiller's teleological selection of a usable past through Rousseau's state of nature and Hobbes's social contract, both treated as legitimating fictions rather than documented events. Vico supplies the sharpest counterpoint: against those who project modern motives backward, he makes the strangeness of early consciousness the very principle of understanding. The essay admires conjecture as indispensable while warning that it hardens gaps in knowledge into necessity, purpose, or myth — turning plurality into sequence and, in Ferguson and Kant, ignorance into apparent law.

So und nicht anders ist und mußte die „Universalgeschichte“ verlaufen.

English translation: “Thus and not otherwise "universal history" runs — and had to run.”

Defending capitalism need not mean defending powerful businesses. In this chapter, originally published in 1972 and reprinted in 2011, Murray N. Rothbard makes the method of acquiring wealth decisive: voluntary production and exchange belong to the market; government-backed expropriation and privilege belong to statism. This distinction lets him attack corporate subsidies, cartelization, and militarism without rejecting industrial civilization. It also places him at odds with both liberals who seek expanded public provision and radicals who identify technology itself with domination. Readers can follow how his opposition to business privilege leads to a more demanding claim: that money, policing, and courts should also become voluntary institutions. The chapter exposes the distance between Rothbard’s libertarianism and a defense of the existing economic order.

An economy can keep expanding and still undergo a consequential slowdown. Ilse Mintz’s empirical chapter asks how such episodes should be dated—and what recession-only chronologies leave unseen. Working across American indicators of production, employment, income and other activities, she compares departures from trend with alternating phases of higher and lower growth. Her aim is to supplement, not displace, classical business-cycle dating. The payoff is concrete: leading-indicator warnings that look false against recession dates may correspond to genuine growth slowdowns. Readers can discover how choices about measurement change assessments of postwar stability, while following Mintz’s careful distinction between identifying a low-growth phase and recommending expansionary policy. Computerized procedures make the chronology more reproducible without removing judgment from its construction.

Economic theories address people who can learn those theories and change their behavior accordingly. This feedback is central to Oskar Morgenstern’s examination of what economics can describe, predict, and prescribe. In this article, reprinted in 1976 from its 1972 publication, he brings the perspective of game theory and axiomatic utility to bear on the limits of both aggregate measurement and predictive success. Stock-market regularities that disappear when exploited and mixed strategies that remain effective when understood sharpen the question: which economic propositions survive their own application? Morgenstern’s commitment to formal rigor accompanies a concern for expectations, institutions, and historical change. Readers can discover why a successful forecast need not validate a theory—and how theory can guide action without choosing the ends that action should serve.

Lower launch costs alone do not make the economic case for the Space Shuttle in this 1972 NASA contractor report. Directed by Klaus P. Heiss and Oskar Morgenstern, Mathematica’s study treats reusable transportation as an investment in an entire future space program: its justification depends on mission demand, payload reuse and refurbishment, development budgets, and risk. The tension is concrete: substantial expenditure must precede savings from missions whose scale and composition remain unsettled. Across the executive summary and three volumes, readers can examine how engineering alternatives become competing uses of public resources—and why changing a flight forecast, discount rate, or payload assumption can change the preferred system. The report’s conditional recommendation also draws a useful boundary between reducing the cost of space activity and establishing that activity’s social value.

When does economic expertise become a claim to govern other people’s purposes? In this review, originally published in 1972 and reprinted in 2011, Murray N. Rothbard challenges the programme of “Political Economics” discussed in Robert L. Heilbroner’s edited collection. His Austrian perspective turns the dispute on two concrete distinctions: technical feasibility is not economic calculation, and explaining consequences is not forecasting human choices. Rothbard argues that prices reveal opportunity costs that engineering alone cannot assess, while attempts to make conduct predictable threaten the freedom planners reserve for themselves. Equally pointed is his demand that economists defend the ethical premises of their policy recommendations. The review offers a sharp encounter with the boundary between economic knowledge and political authority, rather than a neutral appraisal of the symposium.