The archive.

A machine’s productivity may explain its rental income—but why does its purchase price not absorb all its expected future earnings? This distinction anchors Murray N. Rothbard’s 1977 introduction to Frank A. Fetter’s collected essays, Capital, Interest, and Rent. Rothbard presents Fetter as a neglected American contributor to Austrian economics whose account separates payments for productive services from the discounting that determines asset values. His rehabilitation is not unqualified: he defends distinctions between land and produced capital goods that Fetter’s emphasis on capital value tends to obscure. Readers can discover why, in Rothbard’s account, extending rent beyond land and explaining interest through time preference changes the questions distribution theory must answer—and why productivity alone cannot settle them.

Can a party retain the name ‘Liberal’ while keeping a socialist government in power? In this brief letter to The Times of March 31, 1977, republished here in 2022, Hayek answers with an unequivocal no. Responding to the Lib–Lab Pact, he invokes his lifelong study of liberalism to distinguish fidelity to its principles from loyalty to a party label. He does not weigh the policy influence the Liberals gained through the agreement: parliamentary support itself is enough, in his judgement, to disqualify them. The letter offers a sharply compressed example of Hayek turning an ideological distinction into electoral advice—and leaves exposed the tension between political principle and tactical compromise.

Certainly, no liberal can in future vote ‘Liberal’.

Family kinship gave Hayek access to Wittgenstein without making him an intellectual confidant. In this autobiographical essay, first published in 1977 and here reprinted in its 2013 version, railway conversations, Cambridge visits, and practical correspondence reveal the tension between personal warmth and an exacting hostility to pretence. Hayek sees his cousin’s demand for truthfulness as a demand to live truth, not merely to speak it, and places that severity within their Viennese upbringing. Yet he repeatedly acknowledges what he cannot explain or remember. Food parcels and travel arrangements disclose a combination of meticulousness and impracticality; an interrupted final conversation leaves intimacy unresolved. The result is a portrait of integrity’s interpersonal costs, grounded in intermittent acquaintance rather than philosophical discipleship.

It meant much more than truth in speech. One had to 'live' truth and not tolerate any pretence in oneself or others.

Can a protection agency acquire the authority to suppress its competitors without violating the rights it exists to defend? In this 1977 article, Murray N. Rothbard challenges Robert Nozick’s derivation of the minimal state from voluntary exchanges. His anarcho-capitalist perspective makes the decisive issue not an agency’s size or success, but its claimed right to prohibit independent enforcement. Combining rights theory with subjective-value economics, Rothbard argues that fear of unreliable procedures cannot justify coercive monopoly, and that compulsory protection cannot simply be counted as compensation for lost freedom. The dispute sharpens a distinction easily blurred in debates over government: agreement on legal standards need not imply a single institution entitled to enforce them. Readers encounter a libertarian challenge to state authority conducted on the terrain of individual rights that Nozick himself defends.

Trade theory has been weakened, this Nobel Symposium survey argues, by a set of artificial oppositions: Ricardo against Heckscher-Ohlin, theory against empirics, factor proportions against technology. Read properly, Haberler insists, the tradition running from Ricardo through Mill and Marshall to Ohlin and Samuelson is continuous and plural, for Ricardo belongs not to the labour theory of value but to opportunity cost within a general price system. He faults the textbook shrinking of Heckscher-Ohlin into a two-factor capital-labour model, restores natural resources and their heterogeneity to theoretical importance, and reads the modern literature on skills, R&D, technological gaps, and product cycles as, in his phrase, pure Schumpeter. What emerges is not a single predictive law but a disciplined mosaic of overlapping models, with general equilibrium preserved as an indispensable ideal type.

No sophisticated theory is required to explain why Kuwait exports oil, Bolivia tin, Brazil coffee and Portugal wine.

By the time the IMF's Interim Committee met at Kingston in 1976, floating exchange rates were already the reality; Jamaica and the Manila assembly merely legalized and disciplined them while easing the Fund away from gold-centered convertibility toward surveillance of national policy. Haberler reads the collapse of Bretton Woods not as a descent into disorder but as the predictable end of an adjustable peg undone by inflation differentials and one-way speculative bets. Against Manila's critics he denies that floating causes inflation - it merely exposes domestic monetary excess sooner - and he sharply distinguishes legitimate smoothing of disorderly markets from "dirty floating," the split rates and multiple-currency schemes that mimic controls. Skeptical of reference rates and target zones, and of pressure on Germany and Japan to inflate away their surpluses, he defends managed but disciplined floating.

The conclusion is that widespread floating is here to stay.

Can appeals for restraint curb union power if the conduct at issue is protected by law? In this 1977 letter to The Times, republished here in 2022, Friedrich August von Hayek targets the immunities granted by Britain’s Trade Disputes Act of 1906. Drawing on earlier legal criticism, he frames union privilege as an exception to equal legal responsibility and attributes Britain’s economic decline chiefly to it. His prescription is not better negotiation but an electoral mandate for repeal. The letter offers a compact, sharply partisan example of Hayek’s insistence that economic power must be examined through the legal rules sustaining it. Accompanying editorial notes correct his quotations and place his demand alongside Britain’s contested experiments in industrial-relations reform.

Obeying a law binding on everyone is not the same as submitting to state dictates: this distinction drives Hayek’s brief 1977 letter to The Times, republished here in 2022. Replying to Arthur Palmer, he argues that British trade unions claim exemptions incompatible with equality before the law, and attributes Britain’s economic decline chiefly to their conduct. His proposed test is concrete: Parliament should hear from business leaders operating comparable enterprises in Britain and continental Europe, including Henry Ford II. The letter offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s understanding of liberty—and with the gap between his forceful causal claim and the comparative business testimony he proposes to substantiate it.

For Hayek, the crucial boundary in trade-union law lies between acting collectively and compelling others to do so. In this short letter to The Times, published in 1977 and reproduced here in the 2022 version, he answers Peter Wallington’s defence of union immunities by distinguishing voluntary membership and striking from compulsory membership and enforced participation. Drawing on his experience in England and his residence in a country where the closed shop is constitutionally inadmissible, Hayek makes a sweeping claim: removing special union privileges would restore British prosperity. The letter offers a concentrated encounter with his anti-coercion perspective—and with the distance between a precise distinction about freedom and a national economic diagnosis asserted without supporting data.

What is at issue is not union membership but compulsory union membership and not the right to strike but the right to compel others to strike.

An apparently harmless compliment provokes Hayek’s protest in this brief 1977 letter to the Times Literary Supplement, republished here in 2022. Calling a book ‘well-researched’, he argues, confuses the activity that produced it with the achievement embodied in it. His grammatical objection becomes a defence of scholarly dignity: would the phrase adequately describe Newton’s Principia or Einstein’s general theory of relativity? The letter offers a pointed occasion to consider what reviewers actually praise when they praise research—and why Hayek hears an insult where others might hear approval.

What exactly counts as money? Rothbard's answer refuses the Chicago school's habit of choosing a monetary aggregate because it correlates with national income—statistical fit, he argues, evades the prior question of what money is. Returning to Mises's definition of money as the generally accepted medium of exchange, he counts demand deposits and other claims the public treats as redeemable at par in standard money, while excluding stocks, bonds, and real estate that are merely liquid and must first be sold. The functional test yields his aggregate Ma: cash plus fixed-rate redeemable claims. A second measure, Mb, isolates newly created bank money entering business credit—the channel that, in Austrian cycle theory, distorts the structure of production toward higher-order capital goods, distinct from deficit finance or consumer lending.

Furthermore, the approach overlooks the fact that statistical correlation cannot establish causal connections; this can only be done by a genuine theory that works with definable and defined concepts.

The instruments to stop inflation exist; the will does not, and that gap is Hayek's diagnosis in this 1978 lecture. Central banks command the base of the credit pyramid, but democratic commitments to full employment, coupled with unions that push money wages above market-clearing levels, make expansion the path of least resistance. Drawing on Mises, Hume, and Cantillon, he shows that new money enters at particular points and spreads as a price gradient rather than a uniform rise, misleading entrepreneurs and corrupting accounting so that spurious profits are taxed as though real. Because the stimulus works only by surprise, inflation must accelerate to keep its effect, and stop-go policy grows ever more unstable. Durable stability, he concludes, requires restoring flexible wage determination before any international reform can hold.

My main aim tonight is to bring out clearly why we must stop inflation if we are to preserve a viable society of free men.