3,187 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Two kinds of foreign money confront each other in this 1970 pamphlet: private investment that works through ownership, prices, and profit-and-loss discipline, and government aid allocated by political fiat. Hazlitt defends the first as an intensified form of trade—capital arrives with management, technical skill, and the market test of possible loss, and it answers the "taking money out" complaint by first creating the wages, purchases, and productive capacity that make any profit possible. Aid embodies the opposite principle. He treats the Marshall Plan as an emergency wrongly made permanent and Point Four as the globalization of that error, crediting West Germany's recovery to Erhard's currency reform rather than to grants. Financed by taxes, borrowing, or inflation, aid diverts capital, empowers planners, and pauperizes the recipients who come to depend on it.
We cannot grow rich by giving our goods or our dollars away. We can only grow poorer.
A uniform tax on all imports plus an equal subsidy on all exports is, for commodity trade, identical to a currency devaluation, an equivalence Haberler accepts as an analytical benchmark and then spends the chapter refusing as policy. The device breaks the moment it meets institutions: it omits services and tourism, invites exemptions, and never stays uniform, sliding toward commodity-by-commodity and country-by-country discrimination and, eventually, exchange control. On the microeconomic side he wields Ricardo to reject the GATT distinction between border-adjustable indirect taxes and non-adjustable direct ones; what matters is whether a tax alters relative costs, not whether it is nominally shifted. Tracing the idea from Keynes's 1931 tariff-and-bounty proposal through Hicks, Triffin, and European VAT practice, he concludes that a valid model equivalence is no sound recommendation.
I conclude that the border tax on imports and tax refund on exports is an inferior, messy, wasteful, and inefficient substitute for exchange-rate adjustments.
Liberal Catholicism was not the work of one man; it arose from the confluence of many springs. Engel-Janosi's essay reconstructs that current as a transnational Catholic response to the collapse of throne-and-altar certainties between the Enlightenment, Napoleon, 1848, and the Syllabus of 1864. He tracks its national forms—Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert seeking liberty of press and conscience under the banner "Dieu et la liberté"; Gioberti and the neo-Guelphs imagining the pope as leader of a federated Italy; Döllinger and Acton in Germany turning historical scholarship itself into a discipline of conscience, where popes and councils stand under the same moral law as everyone else. The hopes briefly raised by Pius IX's election died with 1848, and Quanta cura and the Syllabus turned condemnation into lasting rupture.
Das Mark aller Kulturgeschichte ist ethisch und nicht metaphysisch.
English translation: “The marrow of all cultural history is ethical and not metaphysical.”
Even the laissez-faire economist, Rothbard charges, harbors a contradiction: he defends market liberty yet keeps a tax-funded monopoly over police and courts, though the state can supply protection only by violating the very property it claims to guard. Concluding the treatise—here as the German translation of Power and Market (1970)—this volume sketches competing defense agencies and private courts, then anatomizes intervention itself. Following Oppenheimer, Rothbard divides the economic means from the political means and classifies every intrusion as autistic, binary, or triangular—price controls that breed shortages and black markets, licensing and tariffs as monopoly privilege, patents that curtail rather than defend property, and a taxation that, whatever its form, can never be made neutral.
Die einzigen Menschenrechte sind, kurz gesagt, die Eigentumsrechte.
English translation: “The only human rights, in short, are property rights.”
Strip a share of its metaphysics and nothing intrinsic remains—only a valuation sustained transaction by transaction. From that deflationary premise Granger and Morgenstern mount an empirical assault on market folklore, insisting first that 'prediction' be defined before it is tested. Deploying spectral analysis across daily, weekly, and monthly series, they find price changes broadly following a random walk—not because the future is unknowable, but because past prices yield no usable linear forecast. The book's discipline lies in its distinctions: absolute price versus relative movement, direction versus magnitude. Volume, they show, says nothing about whether a stock will rise or fall, yet tracks the size of its swings. Optimal-allocation claims, seasonal cycles, and profitable filter rules fall in turn.
The value of a stock is only what someone else will pay for it — in cash, in another stock or whatever it may be.
A privately owned railroad cannot enrich its owner unless it carries the public and their goods, and that homely fact carries Hazlitt's thesis that property used in market production already serves a public purpose more faithfully than state ownership. Grounding the argument in Adam Smith and illustrating it with Henry Ford's reinvested profits, he shows that income saved and put to work in tractors, furnaces and housing benefits society as fully as any nationalization. From property he turns to saving, mounting a sustained attack on Keynes's 'cake' analogy: saving is not permanent nonconsumption but the precondition of capital formation, and a world where thrift was sin would grow steadily poorer. His austere conclusion is that the rich do most good not through extravagance or expropriation but by living simply and investing productively.
What the advocates of all expropriation schemes fail to realize is that property in private hands used for the production of goods and services for the market is already for all practical purposes public wealth.
"It is high time," Rothbard announces, that someone blew the whistle on Women's Liberation. His 1970 polemic answers Betty Friedan and NOW with Austrian economics rather than sympathy: women's lower average wages, he contends, reflect interrupted careers, childrearing, turnover costs, and marginal productivity, not irrational discrimination—which a competitive market would punish anyway, since a biased employer forfeits profit and labor to rivals. He dismisses the feminist "brainwashing" thesis as unfalsifiable, recasts domesticity as a freely chosen division of labor, and reinterprets marriage as a contract binding men to support women and children. Turning from Friedanite liberalism to the anti-family "New Feminism" of Valerie Solanis and Robin Morgan, he treats objections to women as "sex objects" as an assault on heterosexual attraction itself. The result is a combative fusion of libertarian theory and cultural backlash.
Woman as “sex objects”? Of course they are sex objects and, praise the Lord, they always will be.
Record American deficits piled up through the late 1960s, yet confidence in the dollar held—a puzzle Haberler and Willett resolve by arguing that the world had drifted onto a de facto dollar standard in which the currency was inconvertible into gold for large official sums, and that the very gap between the gold stock and dollar liabilities made mass conversion unthinkable. From this they draw the case for what they call benign neglect: because the United States cannot unilaterally devalue a currency everyone else pegs to, it should pursue domestic stability and curb inflation while leaving adjustment to surplus countries, which may accumulate dollars, appreciate, expand, or lower trade barriers. Written just before the August 1971 suspension of convertibility, the essay presses for modest exchange-rate flexibility—crawling pegs, wider bands, floating—over the distortions of capital and trade controls.
whenever a serious dilemma or conflict between the requirements of external and internal equilibrium arises, domestic policy objectives should take precedence over balance-of-payments considerations
Can a predictable monetary rule prevent instability if credit expansion itself distorts investment? In this essay, Hans Sennholz welcomes Milton Friedman’s challenge to Keynesian economics, but argues that monetarism retains key premises of the approach it challenges: reliance on economic aggregates and government monetary management. Against Friedman’s proposed steady growth of the money supply, Sennholz argues that even modest expansion can depress interest rates below levels warranted by saving and encourage unsustainable investments. The contrast brings a concrete disagreement into focus: stable prices need not mean coordinated production. Readers can discover why an Austrian defence of markets may reject monetarist policy, and how Sennholz’s case for gold and freedom of monetary contract shifts the debate from choosing better management rules to questioning monetary authority itself.
Before poverty can be relieved it must be defined, and this 1971 essay argues that loose, relative definitions turn a real but bounded problem into an endlessly expanding political claim. To call the bottom fifth or third 'poor' confuses inequality with poverty and guarantees the problem can never be solved, since some group is always comparatively worse off. Hazlitt dissects the Johnson-era war on poverty's shifting thresholds, leaning on Rose D. Friedman's recalculation that, adjusting for family size and food-spending patterns, roughly halved the official poverty rate. Applied backward to 1929 or outward to India, today's American thresholds redescribe historic abundance as mass want. Poverty, he concludes, should be pegged to subsistence sufficient for health and strength, not to median income, lest relief outrun what work can earn and dependency become rational.
It is obvious, however, that all merely relative definitions of poverty make the problem insoluble.
Education, in Rothbard's account, is the whole lifelong forming of a person's reason, values, and knowledge, and schooling only a narrow slice of it — one that compulsion perverts into an instrument of rule. Because children differ radically in ability, pace, and temperament, he holds that individualized parental or tutorial instruction outperforms the classroom, which must impose a single curriculum on unlike minds. The historical chapters trace mandatory schooling from Luther and Calvin, who wielded it to enforce religious uniformity, to Prussia, where a militarized bureaucracy standardized language and manufactured obedient subjects. America, in his telling, is only a softer republican version of the same transfer of authority from family to state — a compulsory public press for the child's mind, breeding dependence where it claims to build citizens.
The key issue in the entire discussion is simply this: shall the parent or the State be the overseer of the child?
Growth and development economics, for all its bulk, conceals a yawning gap: it has mislaid the entrepreneur. Kirzner sets out to recover him, distinguishing the routine economizing that allocates given means to given ends from the entrepreneurial element proper, alertness to opportunities, ends, and means not yet noticed. Against Schumpeter, whose innovator disrupts a placid circular flow, he casts the entrepreneur as an equilibrating force, one who perceives the gaps between input costs and output values that only disequilibrium and imperfect knowledge create. Development, on this reading, is not an external shock but the discovery and seizing of profit opportunities already waiting; the market's distinctive virtue is that its profit signals prompt that discovery, where nonmarket systems supply no equivalent mechanism.
The theory of the market explores the extent to which economizing decisions of many independent market participants can be carried out simultaneously.