The archive.

Long read as the skeptic who woke Kant from dogmatic slumber, David Hume reappears here as something else entirely: the most coherent theorist of liberty under law. Hayek strips away the myth of a single Enlightenment, setting French constructivist rationalism against a British-Scottish line running through Mandeville, Smith, Ferguson, and Burke, in which durable institutions grow rather than get invented. Justice, property, and promise-keeping, on Hume's account, precede government and arise from convention among partial, ignorant, and scarcity-pressed beings; law must therefore be general and inflexible, never a case-by-case reckoning of merit or utility. The closing pages set Hume against Rousseau, whose democratic enthusiasm displaced this sober Whig liberalism and fed later doctrines of popular sovereignty.

Er wußte, daß die größten politischen Werte, Frieden, Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit, ihrem Wesen nach negativ sind, eher ein Schutz gegen Unrecht als positive Gegebenheiten.

English translation: “He knew that the greatest political values—peace, liberty, and justice—are by their very nature negative, rather a protection against injustice than positive givens.”

A smooth growth curve says little about the uncertainty surrounding it. In this 1963 article, Gerhard Tintner and Jati K. Sengupta construct a generalized birth-and-death process in which expected income follows a logistic path while income itself can rise, fall, or remain unchanged. Their distinctive economic premise is that the scarcest productive factors constrain output, motivating a probability distribution through the statistics of minimum values. Applied to German per-capita national income for 1851–1939, the model links a proposed long-run ceiling to a tractable estimation procedure. Readers can examine how economic assumptions become probability laws—and how historical data calibrate such a construction without independently proving its assumed ceiling or distribution of fluctuations.

To ask why taxes exist, this textbook contends, is really to ask why the state exists — every tax system is at bottom a theory of the state. Kerschagl's teaching text moves from the history of the tax state through Adam Smith's four canons, tax justice, universality, and the interdependence of prices, wages, and shifting that dissolves the tidy line between direct and indirect taxes, to a claim central to the welfare age: even the fully socialized Soviet economy cannot replace taxation with enterprise profit, leaning instead on a turnover tax that works as a consumption tax. A long comparative part then dissects the fiscal constitutions of the United States, the USSR, Italy, France, both Germanys, Benelux, Scandinavia, England, and Austria, exposing how divergent tax systems threaten EEC and EFTA integration.

Der Wohlfahrtsstaat des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts ist eben ein riesiger Ausgleichsmechanismus, durch den etwa die Hälfte aller originären Einkommen einem Prozeß der Neuverteilung unterzogen wird.

English translation: “The welfare state of the twentieth century is nothing other than a gigantic equalization mechanism, through which roughly half of all originary incomes is subjected to a process of redistribution.”

Are there limits to the use of mathematics in economics? The question, this essay answers, is wrongly posed: the obstacle lies not in the subject but in whether economists understand what mathematics is and formulate their problems well. Morgenstern dismisses the usual objections — psychology, non-quantitative data, expectations, unmeasurable utility — by noting that mathematics is not merely quantitative, that no deep gulf separates a simple addition from an integration. Economics erred not by too much formalism but by shallow model-building, borrowing equilibrium from mechanics and casting agents as solitary maximizers under fixed conditions. Game theory marks the conceptual break, supplying a mathematics fitted to strategic interdependence; expected utility, axiomatized, replaces cumbersome indifference curves. Since natural science once remade mathematics, he expects social science to do the same, leaving no fixed boundary that can honestly be drawn.

Nichts ist leichter, als die eigene Beschränktheit für die der Methode oder des untersuchten Gegenstandes zu halten.

English translation: “Nothing is easier than to mistake one's own limitations for those of the method or of the subject under investigation.”

Can an economically successful community lose the political confidence needed to sustain it? Writing after the breakdown of British accession negotiations in 1963, Hans Bayer distinguishes the European Economic Community’s continuing commercial gains from its growing vulnerability to mistrust. His concern is not simply whether the Six can prosper, but whether their integration connects Europe to the wider world or hardens into an exclusive bloc. Agricultural bargaining and disagreements over planning expose the limits of shared prosperity; cross-border investment and the weakening effectiveness of national monetary policy reveal pressures for further cooperation. Bayer’s distinctive caution is that these economic pressures offer possibilities, not guarantees. This article shows why political commitment remains necessary even when businesses and markets are already crossing the boundaries governments struggle to overcome.

Die gefährlichste Auswirkung im Inneren der EWG ist das schwindende Vertrauen.

English translation: “The most dangerous effect within the EEC is dwindling trust.”

A demonic invention that preserves appearances while destroying realities—so Rueff, reaching for Goethe's Faust, casts inflation, the hidden and unjust tax that rewards debtors and quick-adjusting incomes while ruining savers and fixed claims. Ranging from Poincaré's stabilization to West Germany's 1948 monetary reform, the lectures indict the gold-exchange standard born at Genoa in 1922, which let reserve-currency countries run perpetual deficits and, by duplicating credit, organized the boom that broke in 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. Against national accounting and the modern faith in 'conscious organization,' Rueff defends the gold standard as an enlightened monarch that disciplines through incentives rather than commands, insisting that sound money is the precondition of European unity and of liberty itself.

L'Europe se fera par la monnaie, ou ne se fera pas.

English translation: “Europe will be made through money, or it will not be made at all.”

When an economic model fails, has mathematics reached its limit—or has the economist posed the wrong problem? In this 1963 research memorandum, Oskar Morgenstern defends mathematical economics while challenging the substitution of formal elegance for economic understanding. Drawing on his work with von Neumann, he argues that uncertainty and strategic interaction demand more than techniques borrowed from mechanics: they may require new concepts and new mathematics. His examples make the distinction concrete. Counting equations does not prove that an equilibrium exists; treating agents as isolated maximizers can miss their dependence on one another’s choices. Readers encounter a defence of rigorous reasoning that grants no automatic prestige to symbols or axioms, and insists that historical, experimental, and statistical inquiry remain indispensable.

Money is one side of every exchange in an advanced economy, and whoever controls its supply, quality, or use, Rothbard argues, has taken a major step toward controlling the whole system. The essay pairs Austrian monetary theory with revisionist history. Money arises on the market as a demanded commodity—gold or silver—so that income stays tied to production; the state breaks that discipline through inflation, which Rothbard treats as legalized counterfeiting and hidden taxation, with central banking as the institutional form of modern mercantilism. Five American case studies press the point: the Massachusetts Land Bank of 1740, Nicholas Biddle's national bank, Stephen Colwell's protectionism, and Paul Warburg's promotion of bankers' acceptances reveal inflationism driven not by poor debtors but by merchants, bankers, and manufacturers seeking privilege through state-managed money.

Money is the nerve center of any economy above the most primitive level.

An investment allocation can maximize projected income yet leave productive capacity idle, consumption sacrificed, or investment exposed to greater uncertainty. In this article, Jati K. Sengupta and Gerhard Tintner examine that tension through Dutch long-term planning and India’s Mahalanobis model. Their concern is not simply to calculate an optimum, but to ask which assumptions make it feasible and desirable: whether saving keeps pace with investment, whether production techniques can change, and whether planners value output or consumption. A numerical exercise using Indian Third Five-Year Plan constraints makes the stakes concrete, showing how a preference for lower investment risk can alter the income-maximizing allocation. Readers can discover how seemingly technical choices about coefficients and objectives shape the economic priorities embedded in a development plan.

Can economists understand one another when a word like wealth, consumption, or competition shifts meaning from writer to writer? This slender essay answers that careful definition, though never a substitute for empirical research, is the precondition of coherent debate. Machlup traces a lineage of terminological housekeeping through Malthus, Nassau Senior, Richard Whately, and the quantitative pioneer Henry Moore, showing how each labored to strip ambiguity from the vocabulary of political economy. He endorses Senior's insistence that everyday terms be defined to match their ordinary educated use, while resisting Senior's extreme anti-empiricism. The result is a compact defense of semantic clarification as necessary but never sufficient: a discipline of language that clears the ground for knowledge without pretending to be knowledge itself.

Some people regard exercises in semantics as a waste of time. I consider them useful, if not indispensable, if we care to understand one another.

At the centenary of the Dortmund Chamber of Industry and Commerce, Hayek turns economic freedom into a constitutional question. His diagnosis is terse: the modern Rechtsstaat has decayed into a mere Gesetzesstaat, no longer able to tell Recht, binding rules of just conduct, from Gesetz, whatever a competent legislature happens to enact. General, abstract, prospective rules that bind rulers and ruled alike can accommodate factory and health regulation; what destroys liberty is discretionary intervention, price fixing, licensing, quotas, that lets officials treat like persons unlike. Reading Article 19 of the Bonn Basic Law rigorously, he argues that such controls should be unconstitutional, and proposes a bicameral remedy separating the making of rules from the direction of government, echoing Oakeshott's contrast between nomocratic and telocratic order.

In Form solcher Gesetze läßt sich jeder Befehl kleiden.

English translation: “In the form of such statutes any command can be clothed.”

Can protection preserve farmers’ independence, or does it make them dependent on political direction? This tension gives economic substance to Mises’s biographical portrait of Siegfried von Strakosch, a textile and sugar industrialist whose botanical research and travels informed his agricultural writings. Mises presents scientific cultivation and commercial judgment as alternatives to permanent tariff support: European farming’s disadvantages were, in this account, remediable rather than inevitable. His sympathy for competitive enterprise shapes the portrait, especially where assistance to producers burdens consumers or leaves nominally private farms subject to state control. The essay offers a concrete encounter with the links between experimental science, business practice, and economic advocacy through a figure who also helped explain Austria’s need for fiscal and monetary stabilization after the First World War.