The archive.

There are, quite simply, too many laws, and for Hazlitt their sheer number is itself the harm, regardless of whether any single statute is wise. Defining law operationally as command rather than sentimental reform, he separates the rare rules that coordinate conduct, like traffic regulations, from the flood of prohibitions and compulsions that direct private choice. He reaches back to Herbert Spencer's 1854 attack on 'overlegislation' to show that even laissez-faire England groaned under statutes, then buries the reader in an inventory: state legislatures passing thousands of laws, agencies generating regulations that dwarf formal statutes, compliance costs Gene Taylor puts above sixty billion dollars a year. Citing Gustav Cassel's warning about cumulative control, he treats the torrent not as inconvenience but as a slide toward comprehensive direction of citizens by the state.

Every unnecessary law is itself bound to be pernicious.

Never again, Hayek predicts in this 1977 lecture, will reliable money come from government; it must be issued competitively by private enterprises kept honest by the threat of losing customers. He demystifies gold along the way, its value under the gold standard flowing not from the metal but from redeemability, which forced control of quantity. Three episodes carry the point: Austria after Menger's 1879 counsel to end free coinage of depreciating silver, British India's parallel suspension, and Sweden's wartime halt to free gold coinage in 1916, each showing that a currency can hold value above its metallic content through quantity control alone. Competition among distinctly named private currencies, converging on stable purchasing power, is his alternative to a monopoly that breeds either accelerating inflation or price controls and planning.

The gold standard is the only method we have yet found to place a discipline on the government, and government will behave reasonably only if it is forced to do so.

From a Buenos Aires lecture hall in 1958, weeks after Peron's fall, Mises spoke without a manuscript to Argentine students; the six talks, transcribed and given here in the German translation of the 1979 Economic Policy, treat capitalism, socialism, interventionism, inflation, foreign investment, and political ideas as one connected argument. Capitalism, he explains, is mass production for the masses, and rising wages flow from capital per worker, not decrees. Socialism collapses on the calculation problem, since without prices for the means of production planners cannot tell the rational project from the merely possible one. Interventionism, illustrated by a price ceiling on milk that breeds shortages and further controls, is no stable middle way. Civilizations, he closes, are not felled like plants but undone by false ideas and renewed by better ones.

Freiheit bedeutet auch die Freiheit, Fehler zu machen.

English translation: “Freedom also means the freedom to make mistakes.”

For the Walter Eucken Institut's twenty-fifth anniversary, Hayek defends political economy as a science of institutional consequences: socialism may be morally motivated, yet whether its means can reach its professed ends is an empirical and theoretical question. Civilization, he argues, depends not on the small-group instincts of solidarity and altruism but on learned abstract rules, property, contract, competition, and price-guided exchange, that once violated tribal morality yet made the extended order possible. Prices are prospective signals in a catallactic order, not the retrospective rewards that labor theories from Mill to Marx suppose, and no authority can consciously reproduce their knowledge-coordinating work. He reads socialism, finally, as an atavistic revival of primitive solidarity, and indicts the word 'sozial' as a weasel word that hollows out market economy, rule of law, justice, and democracy.

Ich glaube, das Wiesel-Wort par excellence ist das Wort »sozial«.

English translation: “I believe the weasel-word par excellence is the word "social".”

Britain's economic decline, in Hayek's diagnosis, begins with a price structure rendered impotent, above all in the labour market, where trade union privileges block the adjustment of relative wages that would send workers to where they are most valued. Across five parts of this IEA Hobart Paper, he treats the market as a telecommunications system whose competitive prices carry dispersed knowledge no planner could hold, and he charges Keynesian demand management with shifting the blame for unemployment from rigid wages onto government money. The closed shop, demarcation rules, and intimidatory picketing raise insiders' wages only by excluding outsiders; monetary expansion merely postpones a worse reckoning. Charles Hanson's postscript traces the union immunities back to the 1906 Trade Disputes Act and forward through the Thatcher-era reforms that began, incompletely, to revoke them.

The market is thereby deprived of the function of guiding labour to where it can be sold.

Can monetary restraint succeed while governments remain politically compelled to expand the money supply? In this 1980 letter to The Times, reprinted in 2022, Friedrich August von Hayek defends a monetary explanation of inflation but disputes the sufficiency of monetary policy alone. He argues that removing trade unions’ legal privileges must precede stabilization, and that governments need a way to finance the transition to a balanced budget without printing money. His proposed bridge is borrowing in “solids,” an indexed unit tied to a basket of internationally traded raw materials. This brief intervention exposes a pointed tension within his anti-inflation programme: monetary expansion should stop promptly, even though fiscal adjustment takes time.

The vitality of Mises's private seminar, set against Wieser's dull lectures, opens this interview's return to interwar Vienna, where Machlup wrote his dissertation and argued monetary theory, business cycles, and method with Kaufmann, Schutz, and Feigl. Looking back from 1980, he redescribes Mises's a priori economics as a domain of construction—powerful for the pure logic of choice, useless for predicting a concrete steel price—and holds that economics is most fertile in negative predictions and least trustworthy in regression and macro-forecasting. He names methodological individualism and subjectivism as the enduring core of Austrian economics once marginalism became universal, concedes that liquidationist advice failed politically in 1933, and turns Hayek's account of the stable 1920s price level and unsustainable investment against Friedman's neglect of relative prices and costs.

I would say methodological individualism and subjectivism are the most important of the whole lot. Marginalism is internationally accepted. No one is an Austrian just because he is a marginalist.

Can protecting international rules justify endangering the people those rules are meant to protect? In this January 1980 letter to The Times, republished in 2022, Friedrich August von Hayek challenges American restraint during the Tehran hostage crisis. He proposes an ultimatum backed by escalating bombardment and argues that the captives’ lives cannot outweigh the future security of relations between nations. His comparisons with piracy and blackmail make the letter’s stark priorities explicit: coercive punishment, he contends, may preserve peace where international organisations lack enforcement power. This brief intervention offers a concrete encounter with Hayek’s reasoning about state force—and with the unresolved tension between immediate human safety and his asserted long-term benefits of punishment.

Stopping inflation, Hayek argues, means accepting a crisis rather than trying to stretch it into a gentler adjustment. In this 1980 newspaper article, republished here in 2022, he parts company with Milton Friedman over both monetary measurement and the speed of stabilization. Money is heterogeneous, demand for it varies, and inflation distorts relative prices—not merely their average level. Yet Hayek insists that restricting central-bank money is the only remedy. His case for immediate action rests on a pointed claim: inflation supports otherwise unprofitable businesses only while prices rise faster than expected. The article exposes the tension between that uncompromising prescription and his closing admission that government borrowing has made continued inflation difficult to escape.

Before the knowledge economy could be measured, someone had to decide what counts as knowledge-producing activity—otherwise the category would swell to include everything or shrink to nothing. Machlup's foundational answer distinguishes the stock of knowledge held at a moment from the flow disseminated over time, and locates economic significance not in private discovery but in costly circulation: teaching, publication, research, professional service. He separates knowledge industries, defined by their output, from knowledge occupations, defined by the work performed in any industry whatsoever, and ranges across the types and qualities of knowing—practical, intellectual, pastime, spiritual, even unwanted. Opening an eight-volume expansion of his 1962 study, this first volume assembles the conceptual architecture—stock versus flow, generation versus dissemination, industry versus occupation—on which later analyses of human capital and information services would rest.

Generation of knowledge without dissemination is socially worthless as well as unascertainable.

Schumpeter’s later enthusiasm for macroeconomics and econometrics makes his early defence of methodological individualism an unexpected encounter. In this brief preface, first published in 1980 and reprinted here in 2013, Hayek introduces an English translation of a chapter from Schumpeter’s 1908 book. He reads it as a distinctly Austrian contribution that its author subsequently abandoned, and cautiously suggests that Schumpeter’s changed convictions explain his reluctance to have the first book translated. Hayek’s interest is not simply in claiming Schumpeter for a school: it is in preserving the value of an argument despite its author’s later departure. The preface offers a compact corrective to reading an economist’s early work through the lens of his mature reputation.

Agreement that inflation has monetary causes need not imply agreement about its cure. In this 1980 letter to The Times, republished here with editorial notes, Friedrich August von Hayek defends the quantity theory of money while rejecting Milton Friedman’s fixed money-growth rule and the gradual reduction of inflation. His sharpest claim concerns the cost of delay: because inflation sustains unprofitable businesses only while accelerating, he argues, slowing it must bring failures and unemployment, and gradualism merely prolongs the suffering. The letter exposes a concrete division among advocates of monetary restraint over rules, timing and political endurance. The later editorial notes add a revealing counterpoint: Thatcher’s government pursued gradual disinflation and retained power, contrary to Hayek’s prediction that prolonged adjustment would prove politically unsustainable.