3,187 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
When anticapitalism gave up Marx's prophecy of ever-deepening proletarian misery, it fell back on a newer charge: that free competition inevitably breeds cartels that fleece the masses. Mises answers by prising monopoly apart from monopoly price, since mere exclusivity, whether a patent or a unique resource, yields no profit unless demand permits it, and then locating the real source of durable monopoly pricing in state action, in the tariffs that wall off national markets, the subsidies, and the enforced production quotas. His central exhibit is American farm policy, a public cartel for food and cotton that still founders on the question of quotas, while antitrust law becomes a covert substitute for general price control. The international coffee agreement, he argues, is conspiracy renamed diplomacy once governments assign the shares.
Die angeblich unaufhaltsame Tendenz zur Verdrängung der Wettbewerbspreise des freien Marktes durch Monopolpreise gibt es nicht.
English translation: “The supposedly irresistible tendency for monopoly prices to supplant the competitive prices of the free market does not exist.”
More exact calculation need not make economic decisions less personal—or markets less subject to private power. In this 1965 article, Hans Bayer examines how electronic data processing enables firms not merely to adapt to competition but to shape its conditions. His distinctive concern is organizational: better coordination can extend the manageable size of enterprises, while the costs of computing and specialist personnel favor firms already large enough to afford them. Yet Bayer also sees shared optimization as an opportunity for smaller businesses. Cooperation among them, he argues, may preserve economic freedom more effectively than isolated rivalry. The article offers a concrete account of how computational capacity can redistribute economic agency, without mistaking improved forecasts for certainty or calculated alternatives for decisions that no longer require judgment.
Two words—adjustment and financing—have been used in so many senses that the confusion hides genuine disagreement over what governments facing a payments imbalance should actually do. Machlup imposes order by carving out a third category. Real adjustment is narrowed to the classical mechanism of relative costs, prices, incomes, and resource allocation; financing is confined to short-term funds that tide over an imbalance; and between them sits what he names compensatory corrections—measures such as tariffs, subsidies, and lasting capital-flow shifts that reduce the need for adjustment without being either. The taxonomy carries a policy sting: because real adjustment is painful and financing a mere stopgap, authorities reach for corrective measures that so often fail through retaliation, offsetting trade effects, and induced import demand.
Rationing a scarce supply of foreign exchange under direct controls does not reduce the demand, but merely leaves part of it unsatisfied.
Strip away the civic pieties and the State stands revealed, in this 1965 essay, as something other than society organized for the common good. Rothbard opposes the comfortable equation of government with "we the people," insisting that taxation, conscription, and imprisonment are impositions by one organized group upon another. Borrowing Franz Oppenheimer's distinction between the "economic means" of production and exchange and the "political means" of seizure, he casts the State as the institutionalized political means—born of conquest and tribute, not social contract. Because rulers are always a minority, they enlist intellectuals to manufacture legitimacy; because constitutions are interpreted by the very power they would bind, limits become licenses. War, feared alongside revolution, is the great engine of expansion. History itself becomes a race between social power and State power, cooperation against predation.
It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale.
For Hayek, the Austrian school’s achievement was not simply discovering marginal utility, but explaining value through the choices people make among competing uses of scarce resources. This 2013 collection chapter, incorporating revised encyclopedia material, asks why that insight proved transformative—and why its success could make a distinct school disappear. Writing as both historian and participant, Hayek presents Menger’s legacy as a shared approach rather than a fixed doctrine: Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser developed it in markedly different directions. Readers can discover why subjective valuation is not yet an explanation of prices, and how intellectual disagreement helped shape a tradition whose principles, Hayek argues, became part of general economic theory.
A school has its greatest success when it ceases as such to exist because its leading ideals have become a part of the general dominant teaching.
Recall the old "cloakroom theory" of banking, in which a bank merely stores money and hands it back like a coat checked at the door—a fiction long since exploded for commercial banks, which plainly manufacture deposits by lending. Machlup's essay asks why the same superstition still binds international institutions, keeping the IMF a warehouse of member currencies rather than a creator of reserve money. He recounts how the United States rejected Keynes's Clearing Union at Bretton Woods for fear that international money creation would siphon real resources from creditor nations to overspenders, then presses the question reserve creation cannot escape: whoever spends newly created money first commands real goods at others' expense. Costless reserve deposits, unlike gold mined at great cost, could hand that saving to developing countries—if the world will decide who ought to benefit.
In the opinion of an increasing number of experts, the required reform or necessary evolution will take the form of extending the functions of the IMF and, especially, of allowing its liabilities to become reserve assets for national monetary authorities.
Three days after de Gaulle's February 1965 press conference demanded that international payments rest once more on gold, Fred Hirsch put the objections to Jacques Rueff, and this Princeton interview records the exchange. Rueff denies being the General's scriptwriter but presses his long-standing argument that the gold-exchange standard is structurally absurd: dollars paid to creditor central banks flow straight back to New York, so the United States never feels its deficit and no corrective discipline bites. He defends a one-time rise in the gold price—modeled on Roosevelt's 1934 revaluation—not as an end but as the means to liquidate accumulated dollar balances without deflation, while Hirsch challenges him on arbitrariness, gold supply, international credit institutions, the CRU proposal, and British policy.
And the main consequence is that there is no reason whatever for the deficit to disappear, because it does not appear.
Rothbard's method here is selective inheritance: keep Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker's stateless politics, discard their economics. He honors the pair for carrying individualist anarchism from anti-state protest into a positive model of voluntary society—Spooner's likening of taxation to a highwayman's threat crystallizes the shared premise—yet parts from them on two political points and one economic core. Ad hoc jury-made law, he insists, must yield to an objective libertarian legal code; occupancy-and-use land tenure must yield to Lockean acquisition and free transfer. The heart of the critique is monetary: their mutualism, inheriting the labor theory of value, wrongly treats rent, interest, and profit as exploitation. Drawing on time preference, Rothbard argues that interest would persist even in barter, and that genuine free banking would yield harder money rather than endless credit.
The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: “Your money or your life.”
Ludwig von Mises appears here as both systematic economist and uncompromising defender of liberty, surveyed book by book in a 1965 American Opinion cover profile. Sennholz moves from Human Action—which Rose Wilder Lane ranked beside The Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital—through Socialism and its proof that planners lacking the guidance of prices cannot allocate resources or reckon profit and loss, to The Theory of Money and Credit, where sound money and the gold standard become restraints on political power. Theory and History, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, and The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science extend the case from calculation to epistemology, grounding economics in purposeful human action against positivism. Each volume adds a layer to one thesis: that Mises's economics cannot be severed from his defense of freedom.
Without the common denominator for economic calculation, which is the market price, a socialist society cannot rationally allocate its labor, capital, land and other resources, and fairly distribute the yields of production.
Before one can say what is right by nature, a prior question must be answered: what is nature at all? Pursuing it as a digression from his study of natural right, Voegelin argues that Aristotle still preserves a broad sense of nature as the order and movement of being, only to watch Greek metaphysics narrow it into nature as form. The form-matter schema of Metaphysics Delta collapses when applied to the polis, where every revolution would make a new city, and to the soul, whose conversion, rebirth, and transformation by grace elude any stable form. Tracing the Ionian dissociation of a god-filled cosmos into a de-divinized order of things and an obscure divine, he locates the narrowing in the demiurgic experience of God as craftsman, and recovers human nature as noetic openness, a questioning knowledge of the ground of being.
Die Gottesbeweise können diesem Erfahrungskomplex nichts hinzufügen.
English translation: “The proofs of God's existence can add nothing to this complex of experience.”
An oven can embody a manufacturer’s failed expectations yet become a profitable purchase for a baker. Such divergent outcomes illuminate Israel M. Kirzner’s central concern in An Essay on Capital: how inherited equipment acquires economic meaning within plans that can succeed, conflict, or change. Rather than treating capital as a homogeneous fund automatically producing income, Kirzner approaches it through unfinished projects and the choices required to complete or revise them. His distinctive emphasis on prospective decisions makes past expenditure no guarantee of present usefulness, and continued income an achievement requiring action. Readers can discover why adding up asset values may conceal incompatible expectations—and why explaining capital requires attention not only to what resources exist, but to what their owners intend to do with them.
An oversized house in Döbling's Hofzeile, with its garden statues and imperial loyalties, becomes the whole vanished world of the Viennese bourgeoisie in this memoir-essay. Engel-Janosi reads his family's home as a miniature Austria—grand, eccentric, faithful, and quietly unstable—where the recurring dread of rotting ceiling beams, the Dippelbäume, stands for a class that sensed structural weakness without grasping its political danger. His father, a respected manufacturer whose heart belonged to scholarship and Ibsen, held a loyalty so absolute he would don black-and-yellow trousers if a decree required it, yet foreign affairs never entered the salon of Mahler and Bruno Walter. War arrived as an undefined great experience, the brother died at Koniuchy, the fortune vanished with inflation, and the beams held on until the bombed house was finally razed in 1963.
„Von einem kannst du überzeugt sein: ein Wien wird und muß es immer geben.“
English translation: “Of one thing you may be certain: a Vienna there will always be, and must always be.”