The archive.

Conceived as an introduction to The Free Man's Library, this 1956 essay pairs a bibliography of individualist and classical-liberal writing with a warning about how easily its lessons are forgotten. Hazlitt's target is the modern progressive who champions freedom of thought and speech while dismantling economic liberty, not seeing that the two cannot be separated. He reclaims the word liberal for Adam Smith, Bastiat, Cobden, and Herbert Spencer, sets historic liberalism's Rule of Law against the drift toward planning and bureaucracy, and quotes Hamilton to the effect that power over a man's subsistence is power over his will. The essay's provocation is its final inversion: the intelligent conservative, defending inherited liberties against expanding state power, has become the truer heir of the liberal tradition.

Liberty is a whole, and to deny economic liberty is finally to destroy all liberty. Socialism is irreconcilable with freedom.

Even sympathetic critics concede that market allocation may be efficient while inherited wealth renders its results unjust—unless the state periodically redistributes. That concession is the target here. The mistake, Lachmann argues, lies in treating the distribution of wealth as a fixed datum rather than a continuously revised outcome of the market process. He separates the two senses of 'datum'—something merely observed at an instant, and an independent determinant in equilibrium theory—and denies wealth the second role. Because capital goods are heterogeneous and their value hangs on complementarities discovered only under change, the market itself redistributes through capital gains and losses, passing wealth to those quicker to read new scarcities. The result is Pareto's circulation of elites: a leveling process, a game of skill rather than chance, in which no class of owners—shareholder or bondholder—escapes revaluation.

The owners of wealth, we might say with Schumpeter, are like the guests at a hotel or the passengers in a train: They are always there but are never for long the same people.

To ask an economist for the date a boom will break is to ask for the one thing economics cannot deliver—yet businessmen, knowing an artificial boom must end, press for exactly that. The monetary theory of the cycle is 'irrefutable,' Mises grants in this 1956 essay: forcing interest rates below their market level through bank credit distorts production and guarantees an eventual depression. But economics is qualitative, not quantitative; it can say the boom will not last, never precisely when it will break, for human action offers none of the constant relations natural science exploits. Statistics only describe the past. And a correct public forecast would annul itself—if everyone believed it, they would sell at once and bring the crash forward on the spot.

At the very instant this forecast was uttered and accepted as correct, the crisis would already be consummated.

Only actual choice reveals preference, and only at the instant it is made — this principle of 'demonstrated preference' is the lever with which Rothbard rebuilds utility and welfare economics. Utility is ordinal, never measurable; he rejects both Samuelson's revealed preference, which smuggles in stable orderings across time, and the indifference curves of Hicks and Allen, since indifference is never enacted in action. Turning to welfare, he grants that economics can make no interpersonal utility comparisons, then shows that voluntary exchange itself demonstrates mutual gain: each party acts to benefit, so the free market raises social utility without measurement. Coercion reverses the verdict. Because the state rests on taxation, which injures some against their demonstrated consent, no government act can be shown to raise social utility — a conclusion he presses against democratic consent, public goods, and the free-rider argument.

Individual valuation is the keystone of economic theory.

Stable money requires coordination—but how much coordination can coexist with economic freedom and central-bank independence? In this 1956 article, Richard Kerschagl rejects both a simple return to gold-standard automaticity and confidence in monetary technique alone. His distinctive emphasis falls on what credit finances, how quickly investment yields output, and whether private saving and capital formation can sustain productive capacity. Interest-rate changes and open-market operations thus appear as instruments whose effectiveness depends on institutions they cannot themselves create. His comparison of Soviet and American arrangements sharpens the tension between controlling purchasing power and preserving freedom in the use of money. Readers can discover why, for Kerschagl, currency stability demands cooperation across economic policy while also requiring protection from government financing needs.

Automation can lower production costs without lowering prices—and make factories more efficient while leaving them more dependent on manufactured demand. In this 1956 article, Hans Bayer examines that tension through the capital requirements and rigidity of automated production. He connects the need for assured sales to industrial concentration, advertising, and products designed for premature replacement. His distinctive measure of economic progress is neither profitability nor technical sophistication, but the durable material basis for personal development. From this perspective, disputes over wages, ownership, and shorter working hours become questions about who receives automation’s benefits and who controls its purposes. The article shows why, for Bayer, greater productive capacity cannot by itself resolve the conflicts between production and consumption, economic power and individual freedom.

Land cannot be manufactured, but does its fixed supply make ownership economically passive? In this reply to Georgist critics, first distributed in 1957 and reprinted here in 2011, Murray N. Rothbard uses an unexpected comparison—land and Rembrandt paintings—to challenge the case for taxing away land rent. Both assets are scarce; neither, he argues, allocates itself to users without owners’ judgment and incentives. His Austrian account of capitalization and entrepreneurial foresight gives the dispute a concrete focus: what happens to site allocation, assessment, and long-term improvements when owners lose their returns? The ethical defence is more qualified than a blanket endorsement of existing titles: Rothbard defends first use and subsequent transfer, not conquest. The reply exposes the distinct economic and moral premises on which his opposition to Georgism rests.

A public works project may be useful yet poorly suited to fighting a recession: it can take too long to begin and prove difficult to stop. In this 1957 contribution to congressional papers on federal expenditure policy, Walter Froehlich supports countercyclical spending while challenging the apparent precision of budget totals and multiplier estimates. He follows expenditure beyond the accounts, distinguishing authorization from production and payment, and asking when government action stimulates—or displaces—private investment. His skepticism also reaches the measure of success: recording public services at cost does not, he argues, establish an equivalent gain in welfare. The paper offers a concrete way to assess stabilization programs through their timing, reversibility, and effects on employment, rather than through the size of the appropriation alone.

Employee shares can give workers a stake in their firm without making productive wealth more widely accessible. In this 1957 journal article, Hans Bayer examines that gap by asking where the money for ownership comes from—and whose interests the resulting arrangements serve. His distinction between entrepreneurial profit and monopoly rent sharpens the problem: sharing a privileged firm’s gains with its workforce need not benefit society at large. Against schemes financed from already inadequate wages, he considers participation in wealth growth across enterprises, while warning that investment earmarks can suppress necessary consumption. The article offers a concrete way to assess ownership reform beyond the number of shareholders: by its financing, its distribution of benefits, and its compatibility with secure employment and sustained economic activity.

A pointing gesture can communicate only within a world already shared: for Alfred Schütz, this poses a precise difficulty for Husserl’s attempt to ground intersubjectivity in the transcendental ego. In this 1957 essay, Schütz tests that project against the experiences it seeks to explain—encountering another person, inhabiting one’s own body, and understanding signs. His critique works from within phenomenology: my body as lived through movement is not given in the same way as another body perceived from outside. Can analogy between them bear the weight Husserl places on it? Schütz proposes that intersubjectivity belongs to the life-world before reflection begins. The essay clarifies what social inquiry can retain from phenomenological analysis of meaning without accepting a derivation of the shared world from solitary subjectivity.

Science cannot supply political ends — but it can discipline the pursuit of them. That Weberian conviction anchors Morgenstern's 1956 lecture to the Nordrhein-Westfalen research society, which argues that no policy problem is even defined until one names the permitted means: unemployment looks wholly different if wage cuts, public works, or inflation are allowed. He welcomes mathematics, statistics, and electronic computation — linear programming, input-output analysis, a manganese-supply example — as ways to force objectives, quantities, and timing into the open. Yet formalization is not wisdom. Where the state truly commands its variables, quantitative methods improve decisions; where unions, cartels, and rival states react strategically, there is no single optimum, only game-theoretic solution sets and imputations. Calculation can rank feasible actions, he insists, but it cannot choose values or dissolve political conflict.

Die Theorie zeigt, daß es in diesen Fällen kein „Optimum“ gibt, keine „beste“ Lösung, sondern es gibt unendlich viele Verteilungsschemata oder „Zurechnungen“ für das Ergebnis, von denen jedoch nur einige zusammen als „Lösung“ angesehen werden können.

English translation: “The theory shows that in these cases there is no 'optimum,' no 'best' solution, but rather there are infinitely many distribution schemes or 'imputations' for the outcome, of which, however, only some together can be regarded as a 'solution.'”

Austria’s 1957 sale of shares in two nationalized banks promised to turn collective wealth into personal property—but how much ownership could it confer without a voice in management? Richard Kerschagl welcomes the experiment as a redistribution of capital rather than a means of raising it, while examining the compromises that preserved state and party control. Small investors could pay in installments and receive a minimum dividend, yet the publicly offered preference shares carried no voting rights. His assessment connects the heavily oversubscribed offering with investors’ desire for security backed by real assets, not simply income. The article makes a concrete distinction between distributing financial claims and fostering a sense of co-ownership: for Kerschagl, even limited participation would have strengthened the scheme’s promise of personal independence.