The archive.

Economics grew out of philosophy and never fully left it, and Amonn sets out to reconnect the two. A sweeping historical survey runs from Plato and Aristotle through Aquinas, Locke, Hume, Quesnay, and Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, tracing how thinkers treated wealth, the just price, and usury under ethical norms before economics became an autonomous, quasi-natural science. From there he builds toward the socialist calculation problem—collectivist planning, lacking freely formed scarcity prices, has no reliable Knappheitsanzeiger—and toward the discipline's foundations in psychology, ethics, and the Methodenstreit over induction and deduction. The closing chapters weigh justice against expediency across property, inheritance, monopoly, taxation, and interest, which he defends through time-preference against the old Aristotelian and canon-law charge that money is barren.

Der Eigennutz im Wirtschaftsverkehr ist also keineswegs ein ethisch verwerfliches Prinzip.

English translation: “Self-interest in economic intercourse is thus by no means an ethically reprehensible principle.”

Equality before the law is one thing; equality of natural endowment quite another—and Mises devotes this seven-part essay to keeping the two from being confused. Human capacities are demonstrably unequal; the question is what a social order does with that fact. Status societies of lords, serfs, and slaves let the abler dominate, whereas capitalism compels them to serve, channeling superior talent into satisfying mass consumers who remain, in the market, always right. Representative government he reads as the political counterpart of consumer sovereignty, and socialism as its reversal—a subjection of the many to the few dressed in democratic language. Along the way he punctures the paternalism of the advertising critics, the faith that mass schooling can erase inborn difference, and the progressive businessman who imagines a secure post under the planners, closing not in fatalism but in warning.

It proclaimed that all men are born equal in rights and that this equality cannot be abrogated by any man-made law, that it is inalienable or, more precisely, imprescriptible.

A low-interest development loan may be expensive; a rigorously supervised one may be impossible to repay. In this 1961 article, Richard Kerschagl compares Eastern and Western financing by looking beyond stated credit terms to equipment prices, commodity deliveries, export markets, and political leverage. He argues that Soviet-bloc credits can conceal costs in tied transactions, while Western lenders too often demand hard-currency repayment without securing borrowers’ opportunities to earn it. His distinctive concern is the connection between financial obligations and actual flows of goods. That perspective also unsettles the equation of development with industrialization: agricultural improvements or transport may serve a country better than prestigious factories. Readers gain concrete criteria for judging aid by its effective costs, local suitability, and repayment prospects rather than its advertised generosity.

For nearly three millennia silver was the money metal of antiquity and the Middle Ages, beside which gold played a modest part; this volume in the series Die metallischen Rohstoffe follows its descent from coinage into the smelter. Kerschagl moves from the chalcophile geology of galena and the Comstock Lode through amalgamation, cupellation, and cyanide leaching to the monetary drama: shifting gold-silver ratios, the Latin Monetary Union's retreat from true bimetallism, and the doomed remonetization schemes of the interwar years. He argues that no one can fix an objective silver price, that most output now comes as a by-product of lead, zinc, and copper mining, and that only twentieth-century industrial demand, not monetary nostalgia, at last stabilized the metal.

Das Silber ist vorläufig in geordnete industrielle Bahnen hinübergelenkt worden und seine monetäre Wiederverwendung weder ein echtes noch auch nur ein sinnvolles Problem mehr.

English translation: “Silver has for the time being been diverted into orderly industrial channels, and its monetary reuse is no longer a genuine or even a meaningful problem.”

Animosity against business runs through the policies of every not-quite-socialist nation, and this 1961 Mont Pelerin Society paper sets out to expose it as intellectually confused. Firms grow large, Mises argues, not by decree but by serving mass demand better than rivals under the discipline of profit and loss; the moral center of the market is therefore consumer sovereignty, not the entrepreneur's dignity. He punctures the sentimental war between plucky small business and predatory bigness—small firms are typically interwoven with large-scale production—and warns that measures to shield small producers and family farms turn their beneficiaries into wards of the administration. Tracing nationalization's retreat into planning, from wartime Zwangswirtschaft to the soziale Marktwirtschaft, he closes on a democratic paradox: as consumers people build great enterprises, yet as voters they punish them.

The "common man" enjoys in the capitalistic countries amenities of which the richest people of ages gone by did not even dream.

The same corporate structures that cushion economic shocks may concentrate power beyond effective public control. In this 1961 article, Hans Bayer examines that tension through the practical organization of large enterprises rather than through abstract arguments about monopoly. BASF’s willingness to sustain years of losses on indigo and Metallgesellschaft’s need to reconcile competing tariff interests show how long-term planning and diversification can foster resilience. Bayer argues that such coordination can contribute to wider economic stability, while refusing to equate a company’s security with that of the economy. His closing concern sharpens the stakes: neither legislation nor public opinion necessarily provides an adequate check on concentrated power. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish the economic capacities of large enterprises from the social and political dangers they create.

What would governments lose if they stopped collecting economic statistics? In this short 1961 essay, supplied in its 2011 republication, Murray N. Rothbard answers from a libertarian perspective: not merely information, but a principal means of intervention. His target is both the reporting burden imposed on businesses—especially small firms—and the aggregate knowledge that makes industries and populations available for regulation. He contrasts officials’ reliance on statistics with the practical knowledge consumers and entrepreneurs acquire through prices, contacts, and experience. The essay’s provocation lies in its proposed remedy: abolishing government statistics to obstruct economic planning. It gives readers a concrete argument to test about the boundary between information as a useful public resource and information as an instrument of power.

Statistics are the eyes and ears of the bureaucrat, the politician, the socialistic reformer.

A game can treat every player alike without requiring equal payoffs—or even fully symmetric solution sets. In this RAND paper, published in 1961 from a 1946 manuscript, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern investigate a cooperative game in which a coalition wins only if it contains all but at most one player. They impose symmetry on the first n−1 players while leaving the last player outside that requirement. This deliberate asymmetry makes a precise question accessible: how low can the remaining player’s minimum payoff be, and how large can gaps in that player’s possible payoffs become? By redistributing payoffs and testing domination, the authors derive bounds rather than a complete classification. The paper offers a concrete encounter with how symmetry can constrain stable solutions without determining them outright.

A generation of development economists held that primary-product exporters face an inexorable secular decline in their terms of trade, and thus a standing case for protection and industrialization. Haberler subjects that thesis to sustained scrutiny and finds it wanting: the historical evidence is thin, neglects quality improvements, new manufactured goods, and freight costs, and confuses a fall in commodity prices with a fall in welfare. Distinguishing commodity from single factorial terms of trade, he shows that cheaper exports need not mean loss where export productivity has risen, and he treats the cyclical instability of raw-material prices as real but exaggerated by the freak experience of the 1930s. His remedy is not buffer stocks and commodity agreements but financial discipline—reserves accumulated in booms and drawn down in slumps.

It is well known that the hypothesis under consideration is based entirely on the annual index of the United Kingdom's commodity terms of trade.

Planning becomes meaningful only when it openly ranks competing ends: growth against present consumption, employment against future surplus, equality against efficiency. Rosenstein-Rodan reads India's Five Year Plans less as a statistical exercise than as a theory of democratic development under scarcity, in which a poor society must decide how much the present generation may be asked to forgo for the sake of the future. He treats unemployment and the rural-urban divide as central inequalities rather than side effects, defends general education as social overhead capital whose returns are delayed but transformative, and argues that industrial concentration, often unavoidable where capital and markets are thin, must be restrained by taxation and public investment rather than by price controls. A socialist pattern, on his account, cannot mean redistribution alone, nor can development mean growth alone.

A series of choices between eating ('somewhat' or 'much') less today for the sake of eating ('somewhat' or 'much') more tomorrow has to be made.

National-income statistics fold government spending into "national product" as if a dollar taxed and spent were a dollar of output that consumers had chosen—and that sleight of hand is Rothbard's target. Market productivity, he argues, is validated only by voluntary purchase under scarcity; a million unwanted buggies are not "product" in the sense that chosen automobiles are. Government, funded by coercive confiscation and measured merely by its expenditures, cannot be run like a business and feeds parasitically on the private economy. He proposes subtracting state outlays from national product rather than adding them, answers Galbraith's complaint that public wants are starved by noting that the failing schools and streets cited already lie under government control, and rejects external-benefit defenses of public provision.

But in the public sector, the government's "productivity" is measured—mirabile dictu—by how much it spends!

Into a market order that has abolished legal caste, Marx's class-conflict doctrine smuggles the antagonisms of a vanished status society—and exposing that sleight of hand is Mises's aim in this 1961 essay. Caste conflict is intelligible, he grants: one estate's privilege is another's burden. But where citizens stand equal before the law, membership in a 'class' is a fluctuating market outcome, revised continually by consumer choice rather than fixed by inherited rank. Mises then turns textual critic, noting that Marx never defined 'class' and left the chapter bearing that title in Das Kapital unfinished—less an accident of death, he suggests, than a sign the doctrine had collapsed. The ideology doctrine, which dismisses critics by their social origins, he shows to condemn the bourgeois-born Marx by its own rule.

The essential dogma of the Marxian philosophy, the class conflict doctrine which he and his friend Engels had propagated for many decades, was unmasked as a flop.