The archive.

Can a market-oriented reform make government more powerful rather than less? In this essay, first published in 1971 and reprinted here in 2011, Murray N. Rothbard turns that question against Milton Friedman’s reputation as a champion of economic liberty. Tax withholding, guaranteed income, and a fixed monetary-growth rule become tests of the difference between limiting coercion and improving its administration. Writing from an Austrian and libertarian perspective, Rothbard argues that freedom in individual markets cannot be insulated from state control over taxation and money. His polemic exposes a fault line within free-market thought: whether predictable rules and competitive provision suffice, or whether compulsory financing and monetary monopoly compromise the project itself. Readers can discover why proposals defended as market-friendly attract resistance from within the libertarian camp.

Reviewing C. D. Darlington's sweeping The Evolution of Man and Society, Hayek grants the geneticist his historical range while resisting a single overreach: the habit of treating whatever is not consciously rational as therefore innate. Between biological instinct and deliberate reason he inserts a neglected third category, pre-rational learning, above all the imitation of early childhood, through which durable dispositions pass without passing through the genes. This is his theory of tacit knowledge-how applied to inheritance: humans are biologically fitted to learn and absorb traditions, but the particular practices they acquire are culturally transmitted, and unlike genetic endowment such culture can pass on acquired characters. Culture thus evolves on a pattern parallel to biology, yet faster and more fragile. Citing Ryle, Dobzhansky, and Gavin de Beer, he concludes the old controversy should be allowed to die.

But we must not confuse the inherited capacity to learn a great variety of modes of conduct with an heredity of particular modes of conduct.

Everyday life depends on knowing enough to proceed—not on understanding everything we encounter. In this essay, Alfred Schütz examines what makes familiar routines break down into problems, and what allows inquiry to stop. His distinctive approach connects phenomenological accounts of attention and experience with the socially inherited knowledge embodied in language, tools, customs, and practical recipes. What matters in a situation, he argues, depends on an actor’s projects and biography; even the types through which we recognize objects and people bear traces of earlier problems. Readers can discover why familiarity is uneven, why the same situation calls for different interpretations, and how communication relies on overlapping structures of relevance rather than identical knowledge.

When Washington stopped buying and selling gold in August 1971, the official thirty-five dollars an ounce ceased to be a price and became a mere bookkeeping entry — and most of the ensuing debate, Machlup contends, mistook that accounting figure for an operative economic force. Devaluing the dollar in gold would change nothing real: trade, employment, and competitiveness turn on exchange rates set in the market, not on how governments label their gold stocks. He dismisses the talk of burden sharing as claptrap, separates genuine transfer burdens from the mercantilist pseudo-burden of forgone reserves, and warns that raising gold's book value would keep alive the illusion of restored gold convertibility. What matters instead is purchasing power: no asset serves as a reserve unless its holder knows what he can get for it.

Where there are no sales, no purchases, and no exchanges of gold against dollars, there can be neither a price nor an exchange value of gold in dollars.

Aid to poor countries is laudable; producing it by attaching international reserve creation to development finance is not. That is the disciplined case Haberler mounts against the "Link" between IMF special drawing rights and assistance to less developed countries. Reserve allocation answers to payments, trade variability, and liquidity, he argues, while aid answers to income, wealth, and welfare; fusing the two would rationalize neither and turn every SDR decision into a distributive struggle. The Link is inherently inflationary, since reserves allocated for development are designed to be spent, and even the subtler non-inflationary version proposed by Karlik and Scitovsky would yield little. Aid should instead be voted openly through the budget, its burden made explicit rather than scattered by IMF quotas and balance-of-payments accidents - a tax lottery in place of a tax system.

This argument again mixes reserves and aid.

Two charges anchor the socialist case against capitalism: that it produces too little and distributes what it makes unjustly. Answering both, Hazlitt insists that nominal-dollar comparisons mislead, deflating U.S. output from 1939 to 1969 to show real income climbing across every quintile, with electricity, plumbing, automobiles and telephones passing from luxuries into ordinary working-class possessions. Against the exploitation thesis he shows payrolls dwarfing after-tax profits and argues that wages and profits rise and fall together rather than warring over a fixed fund. His sharpest move is linguistic: the very phrase 'distribution of income' falsely implies that goods are first produced and then parceled out, when in a market they are owned throughout continuous production and exchange. The cure for poverty, he concludes, is greater earning power, not redistribution.

When profits are large, it does not mean that they are at the expense of the workers. The opposite is more likely to be true.

The claim that Black Americans had been shut out of postwar prosperity is met here with income statistics arguing the reverse. Measured in constant dollars, Hazlitt shows, median Black family income rose sharply between 1949 and 1969 while the share of families under $3,000 fell steeply—gains at least fully proportional to those of white families. He concedes the persistent relative gap, Black median income climbing only from 51 to 63 percent of white, and warns against treating either group as homogeneous across region, age, and class. Rising Black teenage unemployment he blames chiefly on minimum-wage laws that price the low-skilled out of jobs, holding the free market, not regulation, to be the strongest counterforce to discrimination. The engine of advance, he concludes in this 1971 essay, is integration into an expanding capitalist economy, not a separate "black economy."

What chiefly counts is the productivity of the whole economy; what counts is the maximization of the incentives to that productivity.

A young governess at a country house, forbidden ever to appeal to her absent employer, resolves to master the good and evil around her by her own will, and this, in Voegelin's reading of Henry James's novella, is the drama of a demonically closed soul. Employer, governess, and housekeeper stand for God, soul, and earthly common sense; the intercepted letters and the apparitions of Quint mark a theology of non-communication in which salvation becomes self-salvation without grace. The title names not heroic discipline but the escalation of willful virtue into destruction, a 'Black Salvation' that kills the boy it means to save. A 1970 postscript, printed with the 1947 letter, refuses to translate James's symbols into philosophy and instead reads Bly as one more modern Eden, a genteel English garden of closed existence.

Henry James could be fascinated by Edenic existence, but he knew that it was the hell of living death.

The road from chaos to catastrophe is not one the Vatican itself traveled, but the path of Europe seen from the Holy See. That distinction governs this monograph, which reconstructs the interwar Vatican's political mentality through the Austrian diplomatic reporting of Ludwig von Pastor and Rudolf Kohlruss. Engel-Janosi is frank that he pursues judgments and assumptions rather than a chronicle of events: the Paris peace treaties register as a disorder that multiplied grievances while weakening every transnational restraint. From that diagnosis the book descends through the Lateran reconciliation, the condemnation of Action française, the doomed Reichskonkordat and Mit brennender Sorge, to Pius XI's mounting horror of Nazi Germany and the Anschluss he grieved as Europe's ruin. Throughout, moral authority proves unable, by itself, to arrest the slide toward war.

Diese Einstellung entsprach seiner Natur, aber der unmittelbaren, der zündenden Wirkung seiner Worte war sie abträglich.

English translation: “This disposition corresponded to his nature, but it was detrimental to the immediate, kindling effect of his words.”

A petrol station can have fuel to sell and still fail to serve motorists who never notice it. This gap between availability and awareness anchors Israel M. Kirzner’s defence of advertising as part of entrepreneurial production, rather than an expense added to a finished good. In this essay, republished in the supplied 2016 edition, he asks why even honest advertising must do more than state facts: it must compete for attention. Against accounts that treat selling costs as waste or product differentiation as monopoly, Kirzner understands competition as discovering and communicating opportunities. His argument gives readers a precise distinction with which to assess advertising’s noisy presence: making information accessible is not the same as making an opportunity noticed. That distinction establishes a legitimate economic function without vindicating deceptive advertisements.

Where the archive falls silent, historians have long reconstructed missing origins by other means — analogy, probability, and assumptions about a constant human nature. Engel-Janosi anatomizes this Enlightenment procedure, which Dugald Stewart christened conjectural history, tracing it from Schiller's teleological selection of a usable past through Rousseau's state of nature and Hobbes's social contract, both treated as legitimating fictions rather than documented events. Vico supplies the sharpest counterpoint: against those who project modern motives backward, he makes the strangeness of early consciousness the very principle of understanding. The essay admires conjecture as indispensable while warning that it hardens gaps in knowledge into necessity, purpose, or myth — turning plurality into sequence and, in Ferguson and Kant, ignorance into apparent law.

So und nicht anders ist und mußte die „Universalgeschichte“ verlaufen.

English translation: “Thus and not otherwise "universal history" runs — and had to run.”

An economy can keep expanding and still undergo a consequential slowdown. Ilse Mintz’s empirical chapter asks how such episodes should be dated—and what recession-only chronologies leave unseen. Working across American indicators of production, employment, income and other activities, she compares departures from trend with alternating phases of higher and lower growth. Her aim is to supplement, not displace, classical business-cycle dating. The payoff is concrete: leading-indicator warnings that look false against recession dates may correspond to genuine growth slowdowns. Readers can discover how choices about measurement change assessments of postwar stability, while following Mintz’s careful distinction between identifying a low-growth phase and recommending expansionary policy. Computerized procedures make the chronology more reproducible without removing judgment from its construction.