The archive.

The demand that produced the Federal Reserve was for a 'more flexible currency,' but Sennholz reads flexibility as legalized discretion rather than market responsiveness. Tracing the system to the panic of 1907 and to European models—the Bank of England's lender-of-last-resort doctrine, the Reichsbank's elastic note issue—he dissects its three instruments of credit control: rediscounting, open-market operations, and reserve requirements. Each, he argues, lets appointed governors manufacture money by administrative decision, while member banks' nominal ownership of the Reserve Banks masks decisive political control. The charge is that a body advertised as neutral monetary technique is in fact the governing board of a socialized monetary industry—the engine of dollar depreciation, boom and bust, and deficit finance. Written for American Opinion in 1958, the essay ends not in reform but abolition.

For in payment for securities the Federal Reserve merely draws, on itself, a check which constitutes newly created money.

Neither instant copying nor a permanent monopoly serves an economy: some delay rewards the innovator who bore the sunk costs, but prompt competitive imitation is what turns one firm's advance into a general rise in productivity. From that premise Machlup builds a spare model of quasi-rents discounted over an expected imitation lag, and uses it to doubt that patents earn their keep. Long fixed terms, he argues, are a blunt instrument, too generous for cheap innovations, too weak for costly ones, and undercut anyway by circum-invention, substitutes, and discounting. The strongest case for a patent system, he suggests, is that it fosters a socially useful illusion of protection; the true optimum lag lies far closer to an innovator's natural head start than to sixteen years of statutory delay. The essay honors Fredrik Zeuthen.

To buy innovation by paying with unnecessarily long delays of imitation is a poor bargain for society to make.

Can smaller firms automate without surrendering their independence? In this 1958 article on West Germany, Hans Bayer connects the practical limits of new machinery with the economics of scale, credit, and cooperation. Continuous chemical production and variable timber processing present different technical possibilities; access to equipment does not by itself make either investment viable. For smaller enterprises, specialization, modular machinery, and shared computing services offer alternatives to dependence on large customers—but financing and subcontracting can also erode autonomy. Bayer argues that successful adaptation requires coordinated production and standardization, not merely loans. His account lets readers examine automation as an organizational problem: who can achieve sufficient output, who directs cooperation, and what independence costs when competitive survival demands modernization.

The sprawling ambition here is a synthesis: to show that economics cannot be severed from philosophy, sociology, history, and value, and to read the modern economy through recurring tensions rather than static equilibrium. Bayer sorts a vast empirical field, from consumer sovereignty undone by advertising through class stratification, social security, nationalization in Austria and Britain, European integration, and the rival plans of China, India, and Russia, into four fundamental tensions: absolute versus relative values, production versus consumption, money versus goods, and individual versus totality. The immoderation he ascribes to so-called capitalism follows, he argues, from absolutizing what are merely relative values. His remedy is Wirtschaftsgestaltung, economic design built from below through firms, cooperatives, municipal economy, and codetermination, with only residual tasks reserved for the top.

Der Mensch ist mittelbar und unmittelbar Gestalter und Ziel der Wirtschaft.

English translation: “Man is, both indirectly and directly, the shaper and the goal of the economy.”

Across every front of postwar economic policy—money, cartels, rents, agriculture, public finance—Amonn diagnoses the same disorder: isolated, "pointillist" interventions that each summon the next until a market order slides toward central planning. Invoking Eucken's interdependence of orders, he shows how cheap money invites credit expansion, inflation, and then price controls. He reads the 1957 Law Against Restraints of Competition as a prohibition so laced with exceptions that it becomes abuse-control by another name, defends rent decontrol against entrenched tenant privilege, attacks cost-covering agricultural prices, and rejects Keynesian deficit finance and redistributive taxation alike. His guiding maxim, aligned with Erhard's "prosperity for all," is in dubio pro libertate—when in doubt, decide for freedom.

Will man den einkommenschwachen Schichten, die es nötig haben, helfen, so kann dies — und soll dies — durch sozialpolitische Maßnahmen geschehen, wie es bis anhin als Regel gegolten hat. Das ist etwas wesentlich anderes als die Umverteilung der Einkommen.

English translation: “If one wishes to help the low-income strata who are in need, this can — and should — be done through social-policy measures, as has hitherto been the rule. That is something essentially different from the redistribution of incomes.”

Combining economic models cannot produce a unified economics if those models distort the social relations they seek to explain. In this 1958 article, Hans Bayer makes synthesis depend on a more contentious requirement: knowledge of what economic activity is for. Against the exclusion of ultimate ends from scientific inquiry, he argues that consumer sovereignty and production maximization already conceal value judgments. His alternative treats material provision as a means to personal development, not an end in itself. Advertising sharpens the distinction: profitable demand creation need not answer human needs. The article offers a concrete encounter with Bayer’s attempt to join explanation and normative criticism—and with its demanding philosophical premise that economic purposes can be objectively known, though they cannot by themselves dictate policy.

Praising a colleague whose ideas have become inseparable from his own, Hayek offers a personal account of what distinguished Wilhelm Röpke: not only economic expertise, but the judgment to bring abstract principles to bear on public problems. This 2013 English translation of his 1959 congratulatory address, originally contributed to an edited collection, connects their shared beginnings in monetary theory with Röpke’s broader vocation as a social philosopher. Its sharpest test of intellectual independence is the willingness to disappoint one’s own admirers. Through recollections of theoretical enthusiasm, exile, and principled dissent, readers encounter Hayek’s view of political economy as a field requiring both rigorous knowledge and moral courage.

But Röpke realised at an early stage, perhaps earlier than most of his contemporaries, that an economist who is nothing but an economist cannot be a good economist.

Can phenomenology clarify our experience of others without deriving their existence from the transcendental ego? In this response to the Royaumont discussion, presented in the German original printed in 1971, Alfred Schütz separates his criticism of Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity from any rejection of phenomenology itself. His exchange with Eugen Fink gives the problem concrete form: speaker and listener share an unfolding present, while another person’s death ends a worldly relationship in a way one’s own death cannot be experienced. These cases test what transcendental explanation can establish. The response offers a concise view of Schütz’s methodological redirection: taking the social world as given, then investigating how its meaning becomes intelligible—a distinction with direct consequences for the philosophical foundations of social science.

How could monetary expansion remain an implausible explanation of the mark’s depreciation to economists witnessing it? In this 1959 essay, Mises locates the roots of Germany’s 1923 currency catastrophe in an intellectual culture that made ethical intentions, national loyalty, and confidence in state authority tests of economic truth. His distinctive evidence is a surviving 1914 memorandum of objections raised against Böhm-Bawerk and himself: interest theory became a defence of unearned income, while monetary institutions were judged by their usefulness for war. Explicit about the limits of his recollections and missing notes, Mises offers a participant’s account of how rival explanations were excluded from debate. The essay’s particular interest lies in this connection between scholarly judgement and policy: arguments could lose a hearing not because they had been refuted, but because their presumed purposes were condemned.

Die Ideen, die die Politik der Völker leiten, fallen nicht vom Himmel.

English translation: “The ideas which guide the policies of nations do not fall from heaven.”

Every political conflict of the age, Mises insists, is at bottom economic, which makes economic theory a civic necessity rather than a specialist's luxury. This short review-essay uses the new complete English translation of Bohm-Bawerk's Capital and Interest to redefine the general reader as a citizen whose political judgment depends on theoretical literacy: whoever debates inflation, unions, taxation, or socialism without grasping economic fundamentals merely parrots what he has picked up from others no better informed. Mises supplies a reading order, beginning with the second volume on saving, capital, value, and price, then the critical history of interest theories in the first, and singles out the refutation of Marx's labor theory of value as the politically decisive chapter. Abstract theory, he argues, is the West's sharpest weapon against Soviet destructionism.

There is no doubt that Böhm-Bawerk's book is the most eminent contribution to modern economic theory.

Coal piled up in 1958, yet Hans Bayer argued that the industry still needed long-term investment. This apparent contradiction anchors his 1959 article on what enterprises can—and cannot—do about economic change. A firm may cut costs, adopt new technology, or dismiss workers rationally while worsening instability beyond its own accounts. Applying this distinction to the German coal crisis, Bayer weighs oil competition and immediate oversupply against the immense costs and long lead times of modern mines. His answer is coordinated energy policy, with cooperation extending beyond management to workers’ participation. The article makes concrete the gap between corporate resilience and economic stability, while reserving the choice between cheap energy and secure supply for political judgement rather than economic science.

When household budgets grow, does consumption expand in quantity, shift towards dearer varieties, or move into different goods altogether? Gerhard Tintner examines these alternatives through Austria’s 1954/55 urban consumption survey, distinguishing expenditure responses from changes in quantities and average prices paid. His estimates show why a simple contrast between necessities and luxuries is insufficient: rent protection and social insurance can weaken the connection between spending and household resources, while a food’s classification as “inferior” may depend on the social group examined. The report’s distinctive interest lies in its scrutiny of what such estimates warrant. Statistical uncertainty qualifies apparent differences, and forecasts depend on assumptions linking comparisons between households to changes over time. Readers can discover both concrete patterns of Austrian consumption and the limits of using household budgets to anticipate demand.