The archive.

Optimization tells us how to choose when the relevant variables are under our control. What does it explain when outcomes depend on other people’s choices? This distinction drives Oskar Morgenstern’s thirteen criticisms of economic theory, first published in 1972 and reprinted here in 1976. From a game-theoretic perspective, he challenges models that remove bargaining, strategic uncertainty and political decisions from the interactions they purport to explain. His concrete objections give familiar abstractions new friction: a durable-goods purchase need not reveal a stable preference ranking, and the effects of new money depend on where it enters the economy. Readers can discover why, for Morgenstern, greater formal precision and closer empirical scrutiny belong together—and why optimizing a decision is not the same as explaining an economic relationship.

Wartime regulation is often pictured as government imposing discipline on business. In this essay, Murray N. Rothbard reverses that picture: industrial leaders helped design and administer controls that, he argues, protected profits and curtailed competition. Steel price agreements, food licensing, and railroad guarantees make his case concrete, exposing the coercive powers behind ostensibly voluntary cooperation. His central concern is what survived demobilization—not simply agencies, but personnel, techniques, and an ideal of government-backed industrial coordination. Tracing these connections into Hoover’s associationism and the New Deal, Rothbard challenges the distinction between public planning and private privilege. The essay offers readers a pointed account of how emergency economic arrangements can become models for peacetime policy, and why businesses might welcome rather than resist federal intervention.

Sold in 1935 as the programs that would finally end emergency relief, Social Security and unemployment compensation instead became permanent additions to it—the governing irony of this libertarian survey of American welfare through 1971. Hazlitt reads caseloads, expenditure tables, and press reports as proof of an institutional tendency to expand: national welfare rolls, he tallies, climbed from about six million in 1950 to over fourteen million by 1971. The mechanism he isolates is fiscal federalism—when a city pays only a small share of each relief dollar, it dispenses political favors cheaply and polices fraud loosely. Beneath the accounting lies a philosophical claim: once the poor are granted a right to others' income, no logical stopping place exists short of equalized incomes. The rest is a jungle of overlapping programs whose true cost no taxpayer can see.

Both Social Security and unemployment compensation were proposed in large part on the argument of Franklin D. Roosevelt and others in 1935 that they would enable the government to "quit this business of relief."

Mass poverty, Hazlitt reminds his readers, was the normal human condition until roughly the mid-eighteenth century, when capital accumulation and a run of inventions launched the Industrial Revolution and largely abolished it in advanced economies. What remains are pockets and cases of individual poverty, and here he resists every single-cause story, endorsing neither the conservative's shiftless poor nor the reformer's pure victims but a tangle of conduct, health, skill, family and luck that defeats clean moral accounting. He weighs A. G. Warner's nineteenth-century tables of 'misconduct' and 'misfortune', Edward Banfield's account of present-oriented class cultures, and modern federal correlations of poverty with age and education. The governing test for any relief, he argues, is its effect on incentives, because poverty is finally a problem of production rather than distribution.

The lower-class individual lives from moment to moment. If he has any awareness of a future, it is of something fixed, fated, beyond his control: things happen to him, he does not make them happen.

Hostility to capitalism recurs, Hazlitt insists, not because its defenders have argued badly but because it springs from durable human impulses. Written for The Freeman in 1973, this polemic anatomizes five of them—compassion for hardship, impatience for cures, envy, short-run thinking, and the habit of measuring real institutions against imagined ideals—and traces each to a familiar intervention: envy sustains graduated taxation, impatience breeds minimum wages and relief. At the argument's core stands the coordinating work of prices, which signal scarcity and demand, and the calculation problem that leaves socialist planners unable to know what they produce at a profit and what at a loss. Because error is politically attractive and endlessly renewed, Hazlitt concludes, the case for economic freedom must be remade in every generation.

Nine-tenths of what is written today on economic questions is either an implied or explicit attack on capitalism.

Grant, for the sake of argument, that pollution is grave: the real question, Sennholz proposes, is whether its cause is private enterprise or political control. Answering the charge that pollution proves the failure of capitalism, he reverses the accusation—the state itself is the chief polluter, through public dumps, incinerators, sewer authorities, and navigable waters treated as common property, with Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River as exhibits. Urban smog he traces not to the automobile, which he defends as a genuine gain of enterprise, but to zoning, subsidized roads priced as free goods, and transit strangled by regulation. His deeper move recasts pollution as a failure of property-right enforcement rather than of property itself: where law exempts owners from the costs they impose, harm follows. The remedy is not a new bureaucracy but tort liability, damages, and injunctions—an early manifesto of free-market environmentalism.

As government is the prime polluter of our environment we must call on government to cease and desist.

Neither in its causes nor in its effects is inflation a purely monetary affair, this wide-ranging treatise maintains: it springs from the plain fact that too many people want everything at once. Kerschagl treats it as a fraud against savers, pensioners, and creditors and as the greatest economic revolution imaginable — expropriating money-holders, rewarding debtors including the state, and dissolving the accounting on which capitalist calculation rests. Across coin debasement in Rome, John Law's Banque Royale, the assignats, and the German, English, French, and American inflations of the twentieth century, he weighs quantity theory against Schumpeter and Keynes, dismisses gold as no reliable safeguard, and denies that full employment can ever be bought with fiduciary credit. Stable money, he concludes, is the precondition of democracy, welfare, and freedom alike.

Gold ist kein Heilmittel, auch nicht gegen Inflation.

English translation: “Gold is no remedy, not even against inflation.”

Did the alchemists ever truly make gold? Kerschagl's concise history answers no — not a single controlled specimen survives — while insisting that the quest was never mainly about gold at all: most adepts were physicians and apothecaries chasing elixirs, panaceas, and remedies. From Mesopotamian metallurgy and Alexandrian experiment through Arab transmission, Paracelsus's turn from speculation toward empirical medicine, and the frauds of Cagliostro, Casanova, and the gold-makers at Rudolf II's Prague court, the book separates genuine discovery — mercury, phosphorus, porcelain, mineral acids — from delusion and swindle. It closes with Franz Joseph's skeptical assay trials and the twentieth century's nuclear transmutation of mercury into gold, scientifically real yet economically pointless. Alchemy's failed quest, the verdict runs, nonetheless vastly enlarged human knowledge.

Nur ein kleiner Teil der Arbeit der Alchimisten war in Wirklichkeit der Suche nach dem künstlichen Gold gewidmet.

English translation: “Only a small part of the alchemists' work was in reality devoted to the search for artificial gold.”

Thirty years after The Road to Serfdom, Hayek returns to its warning from the vantage of the inflationary 1970s, insisting he never claimed that limited intervention must automatically breed tyranny, only that bad principles corrode the market order on which political freedom rests. His diagnosis is constitutional: representative democracy has been wrongly fused with unlimited parliamentary sovereignty, so that parties bidding for majorities must buy support by granting favours to organized interests. Recovering the classical distinction between law as general rules of just conduct and command aimed at particular groups, he exposes social justice as continual coercive adjustment and sketches a deliberately utopian remedy, two assemblies, one governing and administering, the other confined to general law by long non-renewable terms, with a constitutional court policing the boundary between them.

Although the threat to free institutions now comes from a source different from that with which I was concerned 30 years ago, it has become even more acute than it was then.

Conservatives, Rothbard charges, have long ceded the moral high ground to the Left, objecting to egalitarian programs only as impractical—a fatal concession, since ideals move the status quo. His 1973 essay therefore attacks the ideal itself. Equality, he argues, is intelligible only with respect to a specific attribute; taken literally it collapses into identity, and identity would demand coercive leveling of beauty, intelligence, and strength—the dystopias of Hartley's Facial Justice and Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron." Grounding human difference in biology as well as culture, he assails egalitarian readings of sex roles, youth quotas, and intelligence, then widens the charge from anthropology to ontology: utopian socialism from Fourier to Lenin becomes a revolt against the very structure of nature. Egalitarianism, he concludes, is not a humane ideal impeded by circumstance but something anti-human at its root.

The egalitarian world would necessarily be a world of horror fiction—a world of faceless and identical creatures, devoid of all individuality, variety, or special creativity.

Everything follows from a single axiom: no one may initiate physical violence against another person or their property. From that nonaggression principle Rothbard builds an uncompromising system that asks not for smaller government but for none at all, with privatized courts and police, homesteaded property, and the abolition of conscription, welfare, and the central bank. He grounds self-ownership in natural law rather than utilitarian calculation, derives civil liberties from control of material resources rather than treating them as a separate class of human rights, and reads the State as an organized criminal band living by taxation and war. Ranging across schooling, inflation, ecology, victimless crime, foreign policy, and stateless medieval Ireland, this manifesto casts libertarianism as the true heir of America's revolutionary radicalism.

In fact, there are no human rights that are separable from property rights.

Beneath the questions of money, banking, and policy technique lies a deeper subject—human action itself. Framing Percy L. Greaves's Buenos Aires lectures on the dollar crisis, Mises grounds monetary economics in a broader anthropology of purposeful conduct, dividing the world into events action can influence and those beyond its reach, and rejecting alike fatalism and the fantasy of technocratic omnipotence. Growing knowledge enlarges human power, he insists, without ever making man omniscient. The section on gold treats it not as an arbitrary convention but as the historically evolved medium whose supply is fixed by nature rather than political discretion—a standing check on the interested parties who would manipulate purchasing power. Neither inflation nor deflation, on this account, can serve as a lasting policy; the dollar crisis is the wage of abandoning that discipline.

The gold standard made the marvelous evolution of modern capitalism technically possible.